Summary: ‘Lead generation’ is a popular marketing term and rightly so, as it helps to create enormous traffic to your business, which can ultimately translate to more customers. Lead generation is the process of attracting a prospect, making them interested in your product, nurturing their trust so that they become customers and eventually fostering a long-lasting relationship with the customer.  GlobalLinker member Phanindra Bhimavarapu explains how to generate leads for your business.

What is a lead?
A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape or form. Lead generation is the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business. It describes the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline. It is therefore the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into leads.

Leads can be created in the following ways.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a way of attracting customers to your product or service through content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation and branding. Through inbound marketing you can get customers' information by developing a trust between the organisation and the customer through blogs and posts on social media platforms.

• Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation

Content Marketing can be leveraged to create a good number of leads. It is a fuel for marketing campaigns through emails and social media platforms. Your content should be attractive, crisp and informative. Engaging and impactful content develops trust in the mind of customer and draws them to your website. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results, often referred to as natural, organic or earned results. For search engines, content with value is most important. This helps to boost your website ranking on search engines. Engaging, high value content with good visual impact will help increase SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

• Website

A well designed and well-presented website is very important. It makes your content and images look creative and attractive. The colour of your web page, proper font size, font type and font colour, use of titles and headings, use of bullets and numberings, use of proper alignment, website speed and website hosting etc. add to the appeal of your website. This encourages people to sign up through a form or newsletter for a demo and by getting the customer’s information, it directly helps to create leads.

• Blog

A blog is the best place to build a bridge of trust with customers. You need to make sure that your blog is search engine optimised. In your blog, highlight the Calls-to-Action that request the reader to subscribe to the blog and to follow your social pages. Well curated and regularly updated content keeps the readers interested and hooked to your content.

• Social Media

Social media is the best way for generating leads as people spend a lot of time on social media and it is a good way to connect with people. Businesses use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and GlobalLinker for creating awareness of their products and services.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a traditional method of marketing seeking to gain attention of potential customers. It includes activities like TV/radio advertisements, trade shows, seminar series, direct mail and cold calling. This is a relatively more expensive way of marketing, but it can have a profound impact on buyers, often more than what is created by inbound marketing.

Combining inbound and outbound marketing can multiply the number of views you generate and therefore create more leads for your business.

Do share your tried and tested lead generation practices for your products/ services.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, official policy or position of GlobalLinker.