How to Generate Leads in Digital Marketing

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation refers to the process of attracting and converting new customers and prospects to have an interest in your company or your products or services. It’s how we identify these potential customers through the use of various digital channels, such as the web, social media or others.

Lead generation often involves key steps, which could include:

Attracting attention and drawing potential clients to your digital channels

Engaging users by offering them valuable and relevant content or experiences to encourage engagement. This may be through Blogs, ebooks, webinars and other forms of content marketing.

Collecting information by encouraging users to provide their contact details. The better the data collected, the more personalised the experience will be, transforming them from anonymous visitors into identifiable leads.

Nurturing leads by using digital tools such as email marketing, targeted content, and other digital strategies to deepen relationships with these leads and guide them along the customer journey towards purchasing.

So, how do we start generating leads in digital marketing? Well, it largely revolves around what outcomes your business is looking for, either more sales, introducing a new product or services, or maybe something as simple as brand recognition.

The Customer Buying Cycle

While considering lead generation, we do recommend understanding the ‘Buying cycle’, which you may have already heard of – it has three stages which are:

The Awareness stage

Where potential clients become aware of a problem or need. Lead generation uses educational content or raises awareness of XYZ. Leads are attracted by SEO, social media, or the web.

The Consideration stage

Where a potential client will research possible solutions for their problem or need. Lead regeneration here should use more in-depth information, case studies or free trials. Capturing data through forms or sign-ups is highly recommended at this stage.

Decision stage

Potential clients are ready to make a purchase. During this stage, lead generation focuses on offering specific products/service details along with enabling buyer trust via testimonials and strong call to actions. Personalised content and targeted offers are often effective at this stage.

Strategies to Generate Leads in Digital Marketing

Developing strategies to generate leads in digital marketing is crucial for implementation and success. These may include:

Content Marketing includes blog posts (like this), case studies of a particular project, webinars for questions, answers, insights and many more. These can be either broad or specific in approach.

SEO or SEM is where content is more specific and targeted. These are based around queries and searches potential clients put through search engines. This normally includes pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to increase awareness for your business and drive traffic.

Social Media has been growing at a rate of knots in the use of lead generation for digital marketing. Social channels are great for engagement and building customer relationships. Social media platforms allow for a diverse offering of content which can be targeted. It does pay to note which platform is better for each part of the lead generation cycle; for example, Instagram is great for brand building, and TikTok is great as a selling platform. And let’s not forget:

Email Marketing which is still a great way to generate leads. Again, this can be quite broad in approach, but personalised, tailored emails are a tried and tested method to gain interaction, which can improve lead generation. Often, businesses will put lots of time and energy into acquiring new customers and can forget that marketing is also about engaging and building long-term loyalty with existing customers – email marketing is great for this.

Should I use a Single or Multi-Channel Approach for my Lead Generation?

Your approach to lead generation in digital marketing largely depends on your offering and where your target market hangs out. By researching your current client persona/behaviours, you can identify initial trends that you can develop on.

Each channel is designed for a specific reason. While a multi-channel approach is recommended for successful lead generation, it is key to ensure the messaging and outcome is suited for each channel and the target audience.

Advancements in technology play a role in lead generation. Digital tools have revolutionised the lead generation process, allowing for cost-effectiveness – especially when utilising personalisation so the sales journey has a more individualised experience.

Measuring Lead Generation in Digital Marketing

The beauty of digital marketing is that all these mentioned strategies have the benefit of being measurable with live data, where you can adapt and revise to maximise performance. We refer to this as Conversion Tracking.

Remember to Analyse and refine strategies: How? There are many great digital tools to assist businesses in understanding the performance of the strategy. At Bubble, we use and explore many. Below are insights into just a few:

Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager: A powerful mix of tools to identify website traffic, user behaviours and various conversion metrics. Google platforms are great as they allow you to understand how visitors use and interact with your website and where the leads are coming from. As a basis, we highly recommend implementing all three of these into your website.

Google My Business is also an essential tool for managing your online presence and provides insights into how customers find and interact with your business. Google Ads (PPC) are another way to increase lead generation performance.

Marketing platforms such as Zoho and Hubspot, to name a few offerings, tools for content marketing, social media, etc and, importantly, analytics and lead generation management.

Hootsuite and Mailchimp, with the former being great for managing and analysing social media campaigns with Mailchimp, are used for email marketing to help you build and manage email campaigns, contributing to lead generation efforts.

We have only briefly covered these tools, and there are many more available. We recommend researching and choosing the tools best suited to your business needs.