With marketing budgets under pressure, all expenditure has to work hard and produce demonstrable returns in the form of prospects – leads which, with appropriate follow-up and nurturing, can be successfully converted into sales.
What constitutes a lead will vary depending on the aims of the advertiser. The methods used to generate leads will also vary, depending on the advertiser’s budget and the audience to which they are promoting. The quality of leads will also need to be balanced against their quantity, again dependent on the type of product or service being promoted.
Why lead generation?
Savvy marketing professionals are always looking for activities that provide measurable returns. As an advertiser you want to interact with consumers or business decision makers that are potentially interested in your products and services. Lead generation is an effective way to get in front of these people.
Lead generation takes an advertiser a step closer to a converted customer than many traditional forms of marketing, such as display advertising. Consequently, online lead generation is growing in popularity.
According to a report by Econsutlancy and Clash Media, 38 per cent of 500-plus companies that responded to the survey are now spending at least £100,000 annually on online lead generation, up from 21 per cent in 2009. The proportion of companies generating leads online with the intention of converting them offline increased from 70 per cent in 2009 to 81 per cent in 2010.
Lead generation makes the marketing budget work harder than conventional expenditure and feeds the sales funnel. Approaches to lead generation campaigns can be flexibly configured with a menu of available deliverables to fit different marketing aims and budgets.
Effectiveness requires careful thought as to target audience and what approach will appeal to them and tracking is essential to show ROI.
Lead nurturing is the next vital stage of any lead generation campaign, but has the potential to deliver long-term valuable relationships between vendors and their prospective customers.
