What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the collaborative process of tempting strangers to your site, warming them up as potential customers, and getting them to spend on your products or services to boost conversion rates.
Why Do You Need Lead Generation?
To make sales and take your business off the ground, you need to have a line-up of sales-ready and high-quality leads.
This is where lead generation strategies come to your rescue.
It helps you establish the interest in your target market in the products or services you’re offering. Lead generation is spreading awareness about your brand, persuading interested customers and making sales.
But different buyers have different levels of interest, and their interest levels may widely vary from non-existent to sales-ready.
So, how will you tap the wide-ranging interest of your prospective buyers? The answer is simple! You’ll need to segregate your prospects based on their interest level and then devise mature lead generation strategies to capture their attention and interest in what you’re offering.
A study by Marketo reveals that businesses with strategic lead generation practices achieve 133% greater sales revenue.
In addition, sales reps at companies that practice mature lead generation strategies spend 73% of their time selling as against companies without mature lead generation strategies, where sales reps spend only 57% of their time selling.
What Is A Lead Funnel?
“A lead funnel is a system that focuses on capturing a large amount of prospects and push them down from the top of the funnel to the bottom end of the funnel turning these prospects into actual buying customers.” – TruConversion.com
Understanding the mechanics of the lead funnel is important as it will help you optimize your marketing activities and advertising campaigns to ensure that your prospects come out at the end of the funnel as actual, paying customers.
Lead Funnel takes the typical AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) to the next level, defining the stages of buyers’ journey from landing on a website to the point of sale.
For buyers, the funnel is segmented into four different stages. The stages that lead passes through on the journey through the funnel are a little complex for marketers.
Mapping Lead Generation to Your Funnel
Now that you understand what a lead funnel is, the next step is to define your lead generation process and map your lead funnel to understand where your prospect exactly is in their buying journey so that you can devise an appropriate strategy to lure them into making a purchase.
Mapping your lead funnel is extremely important as it helps you devise your strategies, create campaigns, build messages and measure your performance.
A typical lead funnel is divided into three parts – Top of the Funnel (TOFU), Middle of the Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU).
As a marketer, you devise a different set of strategies for each stage of your lead funnel to effectively push your prospects from the top of the funnel, qualifying them as sales-ready leads at the middle of the funnel, to finally turning those leads into buying customers at the bottom of the funnel.
Here’s what the three stages of the lead funnel look like.
Need help setting up your lead funnel? Give us a call today at (949) 449-4441 to speak with one of our marketing strategists.
