What are Leads?
- The contact details of a potential customer who might become a paying customer of your business sooner or later.
- Contact details of random people are not leads.
- Leads will have some relevance to your business and your products. Even if your product is made for everyone, just the contact details cannot be leads.
- Contact details are usually Name, Email ID and Phone number.
- Leads can have more information. More the information, better it is for communicating with the leads, nurturing them and converting them into paying customers.
- Leads can have just the email or the phone number as well. Names are not mandatory.
- Leads can be categorized into cold leads, warm leads and hot leads.
What are not Leads?
- Social media followers are NOT Leads.
- If you have social media followers in any platform, try to convert them into a database of Name and Email IDs using lead magnets and advertising.
- You can ask your leads to follow you on social media but it is not always necessary.
- Create your own tribe and social media platform. Engage your leads via email, webinars, private groups and if possible, offline meet-ups.
- Do not invest money in growing social media followers. Instead invest money in generating leads directly from social media platforms. Paid advertising is the best social media strategy.
- Boost social media activity using your email list from time to time to get new users on your social media platforms. Run contests, polls, surveys, and giveaways.
B2B and B2C Lead Generation
- Your lead generation strategy will depend on your target market.
- If your product is a high-end B2B product, lead generation is important, difficult and more direct (research and prospecting).
- If your product is a high-end B2C product, you need marketing to generate leads and sales to close the leads. With B2C products, the suspects are not obvious and hence marketing has to generate the leads.
- With low-end B2C products you need marketing to generate the leads and automation to nurture the leads and close the leads. With low-end B2C products, you cannot afford to have a sales team to follow up with all the leads.
B2B and B2C Lead Generation
High-end B2B Product Examples:-
IT Services for a Bank. Commercial computers and servers for a large company. Manufacturing equipments for a factory.
High-end B2C Product Examples:-
Home, Car, Interior Design Services, Vacation Time-share packages, Security System for Home.
Low-end B2B Product Examples:-
SaaS products such as email marketing tool, CRM tools, Help-desk Software, Office Stationery.
Low-end B2C Product Examples
Apparel, Electronics, Watches, Cosmetics.
The Ethics of Lead Generation
- Once you learn lead generation, you have a lot of power in your hands.
- If you implement the methods in the right way, you will be able to generate 1000s of leads.
- With great power comes great responsibility.
- Never get emails IDs from a source and start sending bulk emails without consent.
- For B2B Leads, send only prospecting emails via your own email account. Do not use an email marketing service.
- For B2C Leads, always generate leads through advertising.
- Do not scarp emails from sources. Do not download or buy database of emails.
- Do not send emails to leads once they have opted-out from your emails
- Keep your email sending reputation high. Your domain name and email ID is sacred.
Coin Toss Results in Large Numbers
Predicting the Future and Growing Fast
- Lead Cost will average out with large numbers. Aim for 1,000 leads from a source to check the cost.
- Leads to customers ratio will become predictable with 1,000 conversions.
- If you have 1,000 leads and 20 convert into paying customers, it is a 2% conversion ratio. You can expect 1.8% to 2.2% conversion with the next 1,000 leads.
- If you have the budget and scale, you can also aim for 10,000 conversions.
- Do not get emotional with lead generation. Do not do emotional estimation. Be logical(like a wealthy stock investor.) Wait for the results and then scale up.
- Real growth will come from 1000s of leads and marketing automation nurturing the leads on automation.
B2B Lead Generation
- B2B Lead Generation is Prospecting and Outreach.
- In the initial stages, business leads can be gained via manual work.
- When a B2B Business grows, principles of B2C lead generation will apply to B2B as well as you will be generating B2B leads at scale.
- During the initial stages until the product-market fit is established, B2B lead generation techniques can also be applied to B2C. You can invest money in marketing only after getting your numbers right to some level of predictability.
- If the value of your product/ service is high you can engage B2B leads manually and close the sale directly without much need for lead nurturing and marketing automation.
Tools and Methods for B2B Lead Generation
- The first step is to identify the prospects based on educated guess and research. The second step is to find out their contact details so that they can be reached out to directly, to request a meeting.
- Contact us pages on blogs and websites, Twitters, Linkedin and other platforms are good ways to contact people, however, the success rate can be low.
- Snov.io
broswer extension will help you find out the email IDs of a website domain name.
- GetProspect.io
extensions will help you find out the email ID of people on LinkedIn and you can also verify the email ID to see if it is valid.
- FindThatLead.com
and Lusha.co
extensions are lead generation tools you can check out as well.
- Once you have the email ID's you can reach out to them via email.
- You can semi-automate the email-sending process using tools like mailShake or GMass
How B2C Lead Generation is Different from B2B
- Low-cost products and commodities do not require lead generation because it is not worth spending the time on sales. Most of the times people do not need to contact someone to buy. (Ex: a purchase on Daraz).
- For High-end B2B products the leads can be identified and engaged manually.
- When B2B and B2C products fall somewhere in the middle- where the cost is not high enough to do only manual engagement and the cost is not low enough to just run ads - the concept of the funnel comes in.
- Advertising will bring in the leads, marketing automation will convert the leads and then based on the lead scores, high quality leads can be engaged manually to buy (via meetings, sales calls, webinars or customised sales pages).
- If the funnel is setup properly, leads can be scaled via automation to large numbers
CATT Framework
1. Content (Lead Magnet)
- You need to create content first to attract people to you. People pay attention to content. So content comes first.
- Your content should be having an upgrade (a lead magnet - premium content) so that people can optin (give their contact details), in return for the lead mag
- Having free content helps you to get traction on search engines and social media.
- A lead magnet is usually delivered via a popup on a website (when attracting traffic via content). People will enter their name and email ID (and may be their phone) in return for the link to the lead magnet.
- When running paid advertising and viral campaigns, the lead magnet is usually delivered via a landing page. A landing page has only one call-to-action. Get them to enter their contact details.
Lead Magnet Ideas
- Content given as a lead magnet can take different shapes and forms.
- The most used ones are ebooks, whitepapers, mini-courses and webinars.
- Membership into a group or a club can also be a lead magnet.
- Application forms, Tools, calculators and free reports can attract high quality leads with much more information than just names and email IDs.
- HubSpot generated more than 2 million leads via grader.com
- a tool for checking your website's performance. People also enter website URL and it makes the lead data richer.
- Leads can be generated via free mobile apps as well. Most apps require the user to register using an email ID before you can use the app. This becomes a lead.
Landing Pages & Pop-Up
- A good converting landing page an asset that can be used for a long time. Good design, visual representation of the lead magnet, testimonials from existing customers and a clear message helps a lot.
- The better the match between the ad copy and the landing page, the better will be the conversion ratio on the landing page.
- Higher the number of lead magnets, more the leads you can generate from different sources. You can also engage the same leads on different lead magnets.
- Lesser the details required on the landing page, higher the conversion rate will be. Usually most landing pages just ask for the name and email ID. Adding phone field can reduce the conversions a bit more additional details can be captured later.
Landing Page Tools
2. Attention: Driving Traffic to Content
- Once your content (lead magnet) is ready, it will not become popular by itself.
- You need to drive attention to your lead magnets using organic and paid methods.
- Organic methods include content publishing on the blog and driving traffic via SEO. You can also publish content on social media channels and drive traffic back to your blog.
- Paid methods include driving traffic via Ads, Google and Facebook Ads are the best sources of traffic for lead magnets. You can also consider Quora and LinkedIn ads.
- Publishing books, apps, guest posts, and press releases can also get a lot of traffic. But drive the traffic to your blog. Your specific landing pages can be hosted inside your blog. Your blog home page should also be a landing page for a generic lead magnet.
Overview of Attraction Methods
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- SEO
- Guest Posts
- Apps
- Events
- Social Media with Posts on Lead Magnets
- Social Media Groups
- Viral Campaigns
3. Trust - Nurturing Your Leads
- When you generate the leads, the leads will be cold.
- You need to convert the cold leads into warm leads before they are ready to buy something from you.
- Middle of the funnel content can help in lead nurturing and developing trust with your leads.
- The best way to engage your leads and build trust with them is via automation.
- A drip marketing sequence with follow up messages on a consistent basis is the best way to engage your leads.
- Trust is developed over a series of conversations and getting to know someone for a long time.
Marketing Automation - Advanced Drip Marketing
- When you want to take drip marketing to the next level, you need to do marketing automation.
- To do marketing automation effectively, you need to get more details from the leads. As many details as possible apart from contact details. It is called lead profiling.
- Marketing automation involves following up with specific targeted ads as well after your leads enter the funnel.
- Marketing automation is a vast topic and beyond the scope of this video. It will be covered in a separate video. It is called “Drip Marketing" as it can send customised and personal messages to your leads at scale. The customised messages help in building affinity and trust.
Drip Marketing and Automation Tools
- Convertkit
- Active Campaign
- GetResponse
- Aweber
- MailChimp
- MailerLite
- SendInBlue
- EmailOctopus
- SendFox
4. Transaction - Enabling the Sales
- A good sales pitch with a good conversion is not just about the sales pitch.
- Lead quality and warmness of the leads is a huge factor when it comes to conversions.
- Sales can be made via meetings, sales calls, webinars or sales pages (with videos).
- Sales cannot happen without lead nurturing. Lead nurturing cannot happen without leads.
- Leads cannot be generated without lead magnets (content) and traffic driven to the content (attention).
- The CATT framework is the most important framework for you to remember.
