Lead Generation Services

Lead generation is the process of identifying prospective customers who show interest in your products and services. Since leads go through a broad lifecycle from visitor to customer, effective lead generation requires a wide range of strategies for it to be effective.

How Lead Generation Works?

Leads are prospective customers who show interest in your products or services in any way or form. They can show interest through various ways, such as signing up for your newsletters and sharing their contact information with you. Lead generation is the process of identifying these leads, and it’s vital to understand that not all leads are the same.

You see, leads go through a broad lifecycle from visitor to buying customer, so different leads on different stages of the buying cycle are qualified differently. You may have heard that lead generation is about cold calling and sending out tons of emails, but there is so much more involved in the process. For it to be effective, you need to apply a wide range of strategies.

A lead is where it all starts, and the million-dollar question is, how do you generate quality leads that will turn to sales and generate revenue for your business? In this short guide, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about lead generation, from start to finish. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Lead generation services are an essential part of running your business, especially when you’re a smaller company in need of sales. But you shouldn’t go making deals with the first option you find.

Every agency specializes in and offers different services, so you need to consider what best suits your business model. 

Here are some of the best lead generation services you should keep an eye out for when you’re shopping around.

Why Is Lead Generation So Important?

Now that you know how lead generation works, why is it so important? Lead generation is one of those vital aspects of marketing and sales because it helps obtain new leads, and more importantly, helps generate quality leads that end in purchases.

Lead generation is about gaining customers organically, which is a more natural and effective method compared to purchasing leads. It falls within the second stage of inbound marketing, and it’s a vital process in the buyer’s journey as you’ll get delighted customers. There are several types of leads, which are:

Marketing Qualified Leads

These are prospects who’ve already engaged with your marketing team and are promising but not quite ready to take the dive. These are the prospects that have already shown interest and initiated contact, but the amount of data you have is still insufficient to determine how interested they are. The marketing team has to nurture them, provide relevant information, and score the best leads based on the response received. 

Sales Qualified Leads

These are the leads whose interest levels you have already determined and are ready to make purchases with just a little nudge. At this stage, you analyze each lead to determine where they are on the buyer’s journey and how you should approach them. 

Product Qualified Leads

These are prospects who’ve already used your products and indicate the interest to become paying customers. These are for businesses that offer product trials with options to upgrade to premium products or services. 

Service Qualified Leads

These leads are potential customers that have indicated they’re interested in becoming paying customers. These are customers who’ve already talked to your customer services and feigned their interest in upgrading their subscriptions.

What’s the Lead Generation Process Like?

The lead generation process is quite straightforward, and it starts with prospects discovering your business through various marketing channels, social media pages, website, or blog. Upon discovering your business, they click the Call-to-Action button you have provided, which leads them to your landing page. The landing page is the page on your website dedicated to capturing leads in exchange for offers, which could be anything from eBooks, templates, or courses. 

The offer needs to be valuable enough for prospects to feel inclined to offer tier contact information in exchange. On the landing page, prospects will fill in their personal information, and once they submit, you’ll have a lead. This is how lead generation works, but you have to think and rethink strategies for it to work continually.

Lead Generation Marketing

There are several promotional marketing channels you can use to promote your landing page and acquire leads. Some of the most common ones are emails, social media, and blogs. Let’s look deeper into this.

Email

Emails are some of the best avenues for reaching out to potential customers who already know your brand, products, and services. When prospects have already taken action and subscribed to your emails, it becomes easier to get them to take action. The email marketing trick here is to use eye-catching designs and compelling CTAs to grab their attention and convince them.

Content

Content is also an incredible way to lead prospects to your landing page. You need to create valuable, useful, and informative content for your target market then include CTAs so they can head over to your landing page when impressed. The more impressed they are with what they read, the more inclined they’ll be to click on the CTA and start their buyer’s journey.

Retargeting and Ads

The only purpose of using ads is to get people to take action. Your landing page and offers must match what you promise on the ad if you want prospects to take action and convert.

Social Media

Social media may just be one of the easiest places to capture leads, and with over four billion people using social media, you can’t go wrong with this. Use links on your Facebook bio or swipe-up options on your Instagram stories for your prospects to follow. 

Product Trials

Most consumers appreciate product trials because it reinforces the company’s confidence in what they’re offering. Once they start using your products, you get in and start enticing them with resources or additional offers, and eventually encourage them to make purchases. 

Understanding Lead Generation

These are the basics of how lead generation works. This is the process you’ll have to go through to gain organic leads, but it’s just the beginning. You need to create more CTAs, better offers, and landing pages then promote them on various channels to get more organic leads.

Are you looking for a professional company to help you with lead generation and other digital marketing services? Please contact us today. Schedule a consultation at no cost and tell us what we can do for you!

Digital Marketing Services

  • Brand Strategy
  • Social Media Brand Management
  • Social Media Listening ( Real Time brand Monitoring)
  • Social Media Identity Workshop
  • Corporate Identity / Branding
  • Marketing & Sales Automation
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Leads Nurturing

Best Lead Generation Services Explained

Improving your SEO can help you generate more leads, have more relevant content, and zero-in on your target market. Most importantly, it can help you gain a "leg up" on the competition.

Lead generation services are an essential part of running your business, especially when you’re a smaller company in need of sales. But you shouldn’t go making deals with the first option you find.

Every agency specializes in and offers different services, so you need to consider what best suits your business model. 

Here are 7 of the best lead generation services you should keep an eye out for when you’re shopping around.

What Are Lead Generation Services

Lead generation refers to the marketing process of capturing interest in a product or service. For example, a lead could be another business looking to buy your supplies, or a university in need of computers and other electronics.

Leads could also take the form of a manager’s email address or phone number, as long as they’re a potential future client.

1. PPC for Lead Generation

Pay-per-click, or PPC, refers to advertising with a search engine to get more leads for your business. The most common partnership is usually with Google Ads, due to Google’s size and scope. 

With PPC advertising, advertisers pay a fee every time their ads are clicked. You can instantly appear on the first page of someone’s search and hook people who are looking for exactly what you offer.

Similar to this, you can also get listed on Google Maps so people can find your physical business location when they search for something related.

As a result of your partnership with the search engine, you also gain analytics data, such as what people are searching for. You also learn more about your leads and their behavior.

2. Paid Social Media Advertising

Social media holds a wealth of advertising possibilities now that everyone and their grandmother uses them. Your business can partner with some to advertise smart and effectively at varying price ranges and for different objectives. 

As of 2018, 1.6 billion people worldwide have connected with a small business on Facebook alone. That number grows exponentially when you consider the likes of Instagram, Tiktok, and Tumblr.

With paid social media advertising, you can select your audience, decide where the ad gets run, and set your budget. Monitor what works and what doesn’t, and adjust it as you go.

3. SEO for Lead Generation

One of the most important parts of any lead generation service is helping with SEO optimization. 

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers to making sure your website and your content get free traffic from search engines. This happens by simply having words on your pages that match the keywords that people search for. 

For example, if you own an auto repair chain and want to sell more tires, you might use the term “affordable tires” somewhere on your website or blog.

Your lead generation agency should perform keyword research, understand your competition, and assist in optimizing your website and promotional material. 

4. Database Marketing

Any lead generation agency worth your money will have previously established databases to take advantage of. This database of information allows generation vendors the means to target specific audiences and personalize marketing campaigns. 

Without this wealth of statistics, you’ll be hard-pressed to make ads that will generate the leads you want and need.

Traditional generation programs gather information and opportunities using lead nurturing and various marketing techniques. A more advanced lead generation agency will be able to skip that step and identify leads from the start.

5. B2B Telemarketing

The first word you think of when you hear the word telemarketing is probably annoying or ineffective. For the most part, you’d be right.

The Direct Marketing Association received almost 4,000 telemarketing complaints every month, and the Federal Trade Commission receives about 18,000 complaints a year. Needless to say, B2C, or business to consumer, telemarketing doesn’t work.

B2B, or business to business, telemarketing is a whole other matter.

While consumer telemarketing calls people at home and is based on regional and demographic data, B2B telemarketing uses firmographic data. 

It’s all about perspective.

At work, people expect to field sales calls and develop partnerships with other businesses if it means more revenue. After work, people expect to be able to do whatever they need to do without distractions. 

The goal of these campaigns can vary, but most important is setting appointments for conversations with your sales team so they can do what they do best. 

6. Content Syndication

You’ve acquired leads through various channels but now comes the difficult part. How do you convert these leads into something that will help your business grow?

When looking for a lead generation agency, try to find one that offers content syndication services. It’s all well and good for them to help you garner attention, but it’s no use if you also need help figuring out how to keep that attention. 

Content syndication refers to pushing your content to other channels to raise brand awareness and drive traffic to your website and business.

Lead generation marketing services will help facilitate partnerships with other websites so your content sees a larger readership, as well as use email to advertise to their substantial network. 

7. Lead Nurturing

Once you’ve generated a list of leads, you now have to nurture them along the way until they make the purchase. Not only will it help with your sales opportunities, but your brand awareness will benefit due to customer feedback.

A proper lead nurturing campaign will include email drip campaigns, personalized emails, newsletters, social media marketing, and blog posts. Once you’ve established a relationship with your lead, they’ll be less enticed to go with another provider in the future. 

Lead nurturing is essential because most sales don’t happen on a lead’s first interaction, and it should be one of the many lead generation services offered by an agency.

How to Take the Lead?

There are many more lead generation services offered by different agencies, but these are some of the most important to keep an eye out for. 

In fact, if you need any help with digital marketing, look no further. Reach out to us today to schedule a 15-minute free consultation so we can help you work out your next project. 

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How to Generate Leads: Strategies That Work

Local SEO is a specialized type of search engine optimization. It helps you focus on getting target customers that are local, rather than trying to predominantly attract anyone in the world that fits your criteria.

Knowing how to generate leads is critical to surviving in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The more leads you have, the higher the chances of conversion, which can lead to a dramatic increase in your profits. 

If you’re wondering how to generate leads in sales and boost your turnover, you’ve come to the rate place. In this comprehensive guide, we tell you all you need to know about lead generation so you can start to make informed decisions.

Lead on to learn more. 

What Is a Lead?

A lead refers to a person who has demonstrated an interest in your products, services, or brand in some way. A lead can reach you through a variety of sources, including through your website, a phone call, referral, and so on.

Think of any person who gives you their contact details as a lead. They may sign up for a newsletter, express a desire to attend your webinar, or check out the products or services you offer. Once they’ve engaged your business and allowed you to contact them, they’re now part of your sales funnel.

Quick Recap: What is Lead Gen?

Lead Generation refers to the process of adding people to your sales funnel. Typically, the people you add to your sales funnel are already interested in what you offer.

Whatever gets people to permit you to remarket to them or remarket is a lead generation technique. 

For instance, if you offer lawn care services, you can create a downloadable guide on lawn maintenance. People interested in the guide will submit their contact details to download it. That contact information is essential when it comes to lead generation.

How To Generate Leads for Your Business

Now that you know what lead generation, it’s time to shift focus to how you can start to generate more leads for your business. Here are six sure strategies.

1. Identify Your Target Customers

The first and most important step of lead generation is to identify who you want to sell to. It’s impossible to successfully reach your ideal customers if you have no idea who they are. 

You want to research your target audience thoroughly. Who are they, and where do they live? How much do they make, and what is their lifestyle? 

Once you have this information, you can create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

2. Develop a Sales Funnel

Now that you know who your target audience is and how to reach them, it’s time to collect their contact information. Find the best way to go about this, so people don’t feel pressured to give information. 

The initial part of creating a sales funnel will involve funneling all prospective customers to a standard landing page or form. Once they’re there, encourage them to share contact information in return for a value-added incentive, such as a free sample, coupon, or gift.

The next part involves keeping track of protection clients through your customer relationship management (CRM) database.

3. Optimize Web Pages for Conversions

The assumption here is that you already have a company website to tap into the lucrative online market. Through good search engine optimization (SEO), you can help generate a lot of traffic to your website.  

But it’s not enough that you attract visitors to your site. If these visitors leave your site without taking any action, it does nothing to boost your sales. 

One of the most important tips on how to generate leads online is to persuade visitors to your site to take the desired action. In most cases, this action is providing their contact information or other information that aids your selling process. 

4. Build Relationships Using an Email Newsletter

Now that you have your prospects’ contact information, you want to start cultivating those relationships. The aim is to take your prospects from the lead stage through to a sale and possibly repeat sales. A proven way of creating and maintaining consistent communication with prospects is by using an email newsletter.

As you plan your email newsletter marketing plan, adhere to the set regulations set forth in the CAN-SPAM Act.

5. Leverage the Power of Social Media 

Social media is one of the most powerful tools for connecting and engaging with your prospects. Knowing how to do Facebook lead generation can also help you generate new leads. Of course, you want to create pages and profiles on other social media platforms as well, including Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. 

If you already have leads in your database, reach out to them on social media to find out more about them. Learn what they want using these platforms. Remember, the more touchpoints your prospects have with your brand over time, the higher the likelihood of them trusting you and eventually buying from you.

6. Deploy Inbound Marketing

While outbound marketing has been shown to be much more effective than inbound marketing, you shouldn’t neglect the latter. Instead, deploy both to generate even more leads for your business.

One way to make use of inbound marketing is to personalize email communication to prospects. Participate in relevant online communities by sharing engaging and informative content. Look for opportunities to solve common client problems.

The idea is to establish good relationships with potential customers and generate more leads. 

Start Generating More Leads for Your Business

Any business can boost their sales performance and keep thriving, no matter how competitive the marketplace is. The secret is to know how to generate leads and help those leads convert. The tips we’ve shared in this guide should help you get started.

Are you ready to start generating more leads for your business? Please contact us today to learn how. 

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Reasons to Work With a Lead Generation Agency

Are you ready to generate leads for your business? The best method is to hire a reliable lead generation agency. Here's why it works and how to choose one.

Do you know what a lead generation agency is? If not, your marketing efforts can benefit from one. With only 10% of qualified leads converting for marketers, you can benefit from working with experts.

Lead generation primarily relies on marketing, but many agencies are experts in marketing KPIs (e.g., engagement, ad impressions, clicks). Although these performance benchmarks are helpful, they don’t focus on quality leads. We’ll tell you how a B2B lead generation agency nurtures business growth

1. Targeting (and Retargeting) Your Market

Accurately targeting your ideal client should be easy. But it is not always the case. Think of the last time you evaluated your ideal client profile.

Your current targeting strategies may be off simply because of an outdated profile. Top lead generation agencies understand the necessity of updating ideal clients routinely. With the right agency, you’ll get an expert review of your current profile and what needs revamping.

With current data on consumers, you’ll generate leads more consistently. These will be more qualified leads with higher conversion rates, too.

A good B2B lead generation agency understands the value of data for marketing and sales. Recent data helps with targeting and retargeting to nurture weaker leads. Retargeted advertising benefits a company in several ways.

  • Resell, upsell, and cross-sell
  • Reduce cart abandonment
  • Word-of-mouth and referrals

The above are just a few benefits and possibilities of working with a lead generation agency. Better data boost your lead generation in other ways, too. 

2. Brand Recognition

What’s the ideal way for conversions to organically convert? Recognition. The right amount of brand recognition nurtures leads better than you might think.

For example, when consumers perceive a brand as more authentic or trustworthy, you’re 81% more likely to gain a sale. Consumers buy from companies they trust. And trust is built on recognition.

The best lead generation agency can help you identify gaps in your digital recognition. They’ll help you find important details for your brand voice and identity. A brand strategy will take your lead generation efforts further than before.

With cutting edge data, you can pick the right logo and other branding elements to stand out. You can optimize your content with SEO and backlink strategies to maintain brand consistency. In turn, you build your domain authority and attract more site visitors.

3. Actual ROI With Paid Ad Strategy

If you’re anxious about paid ads and search traffic, don’t be. A strong lead generation agency factors these into any strategy. They understand the importance of things like page loading time, search rank, backlink portfolios, and more.

Your ROI does not have to be a giant, scary investment to work. A targeted approach with real-time data on your market makes it worthwhile. The best way to see ROI as beneficial is understanding that it takes time.

Just as lead conversion rarely happens overnight, the same goes for ROI. PPC strategies trickle in qualified leads versus large numbers of poorer quality leads. With the right placement and design (based on agency expertise), you actually gain from your investment.

How to Choose a Lead Generation Agency

There are even more benefits to working with a qualified agency. To gain them, you need to pick the right agency. Choosing the best lead generation agency for you is pretty simple.

You only need to consider a few basic questions to ensure your work with a reliable, qualified agency. These questions are about process, strategy, lead qualification, and experience.

What Type of Lead Generation Agency Are You?

You know what your business needs, and so should whoever you work with. Make sure the lead generation agency can accommodate major accounts or small sale leads. These both have very different focuses, from longer sales cycles to significant purchase caps.

Make sure the agency clarifies whether they are an inbound or outbound service provider. These are opposite strategies, and depending on your preferred marketing techniques. Make sure they understand your preferences.

How Will You Help Me Meet My Goals?

You deserve an agency that works towards your performance goals. Determine if they can tailor their services to these goals. Ask if they offer full or stand-alone service.

 

If you prefer dependence or independence, make sure you are supported as needed. Some agencies provide fully-managed or partially self-directed service.

Depending on an agency’s flexibility, they may tailor service based on your custom needs or package tiers. Be sure to inquire about additional services like lead management and nurturing. These are critical for conversion.

Finally, be sure to ask what parts of the sales funnel they cover. And ensure their lead generation aligns with your parts strategy for customer acquisition. This can guide you both through the next steps to optimize conversions.

How Do You Source and Manage Leads?

Flexibility is as important as lead qualification and management. The top lead generation agencies should include these as part of their offering. If not, look elsewhere.

Lead sourcing should be from data-driven customer profiles and buyer personas. This makes it easier to qualify leads accurately. Lead qualification differentiates between market, sales, and product-qualified leads.

The best agencies use lead scoring models and list segmentation to score and manage any lead type. This simplifies funneling leads to the right conversions for sales or marketing.

Find a Reliable Lead Generation Agency With SMDigital Partners

With your understanding of the advantages of working with a lead generation agency, it’s time to find the right one for you. We’ve given you tips for finding the right agency, too. And if you want passion for performance, look no further than us.

SMDigital is all about marketing expertise for qualified leads. We perform with your end goals in mind. Contact us today to boost your next project and generate leads like never before.

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