Lead generation for marketing
Lead generation is usually the ultimate goal of businesses' marketing efforts, but attracting the right leads has become a costly effort and a constant challenge due to increased noise and choices. Learn how you can leverage Zoho Marketing Plus to generate a high volume of hot, sales-ready leads with a high likelihood of doing business with your brand—while reducing the cost and resources required to acquire them.
Get StartedWhat is lead generation?
Lead generation involves publishing marketing content through webpages, landing pages, blog posts, search engine ads, email campaigns, social media posts, webinars, events, and even cold calls—basically, anything that helps you attract prospects and get them to share their contact information or express interest in your products, services, or business.
Generally, the best practice for generating high-quality leads is through inbound marketing, which is when your audience shows interest in your content or information and approaches your brand on their own. Different businesses need different methods of lead generation to fill their marketing and sales pipelines.
What are the different types of leads?
Leads can be categorized in several ways based on your requirements. Some common classifications are:
- Sales-qualified leads (SQLs): Leads that are ideal prospects for your business; they're ready to talk to your sales team and explore your solutions.
- Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs): Leads that fit your ideal target audience and meet your marketing criteria, but may not have an immediate need for your solution.
- Hot leads: These are SQLs who are in immediate need of your solution and have a high chance of converting.
- Warm leads: These are mostly SQLs, but ones who aren't in any immediate need of your solution; they're still exploring alternatives and comparing options.
- Cold leads: These leads may interact with you, but don't have any real intent to do business with you; they may or may not be relevant to your business.
How to generate high-quality leads
To generate leads, you need to create marketing assets that captivate your target audience, encourage them to engage with your content, and motivate them to share their information so they can explore your solution.
Here's a fictitious example of how a health insurance company that sells policies online can generate high-quality leads.
Website: Your website is the primary marketing touchpoint whereby visitors discover your business for the first time. It may include different types of digital assets, such as text content, infographics, and videos.
For example, your company might publish blog posts on topics like "The importance of buying insurance at a young age" or "How to calculate your premiums." You can also feature videos of happy customers who have benefited from your service.
Include a contact form or show a pop-up that encourages visitors to share their details for further engagement.
If they don't share their contact information, you can still reach them later through search engine ads—provided you obtain their consent via your website's cookies.
Search engine ads: Search engine ads are an effective way to target and collect leads who are either your ideal customers or people who visited your website but didn't convert.
There are two common ways of generating leads through search ads:
Targeting website visitors: You can track visitors who accepted your website's cookies but didn't share their contact details. Search engines will then display your ads on the websites these visitors browse next.
Targeting ideal customers: Sometimes your ideal customer may not have heard of you yet. Your health insurance company can define a target audience based on demographics, income, and geography—and show ads to people who have a higher chance of conversion.
Social media posts: People today spend a lot of time every day on social media to find information, entertainment, and community connections. Posting relevant content tailored to each platform, engaging with your followers regularly, and responding to their questions can actually convert them into leads. For example, you can create an Instagram Reel on "How to manage your healthcare expenses" and share useful tips with your followers. Encourage them to comment if they want a one-pager explaining how health insurance can reduce healthcare costs. You can also include a strong call to action that prompts them to share their contact information.
Webinars: Webinars can be an effective lead-generation tool that attracts high-quality leads. Users with a strong buying intent are often willing to dedicate time to learning about a solution. Webinars give you the opportunity to engage with leads in real time; you can talk to them, understand their pain points, and provide proof of how your solution can help.
Using the same example as above, you could run a webinar on "Managing healthcare expenses." For instance, if you recommend a monthly saving plan, you can show a spreadsheet, crunch the numbers during the webinar, and explain how attendees can implement similar plans for themselves. This can create a trust in your solution and encourage attendees to explore it.
Events: Events are similar to webinars, but involve meeting your leads in person, which means you can build stronger human connections and have more meaningful interactions. By delivering a personalized experience to the right audience, you can convert them into high-quality leads. These are just a few examples of channels you can use to generate leads. There are many others, such as referrals, cold calls, and outreach. Using a combination of multiple channels can help fill your pipeline with better-quality leads.
Regardless, it's important to store your leads in a sales or marketing solution, as it can enable you to manage your customer and business information securely so that you can use it effectively to run marketing campaigns. It also provides the necessary attribution to run your marketing.
Zoho Marketing Plus is an example of such a solution. You can store all your leads, segment them into groups with shared attributes or interests, run targeted campaigns, analyze leads' behaviors, and much more.
But generating high-quality leads is only half the journey; you also need a strong nurturing process and a clear method of converting those leads into paying customers.
How to nurture your leads
Once you've gathered leads and have identified your preferred communication channel, you can nurture your leads in several ways.
Based on leads' interests and content preferences, you can nurture them with newsletters or follow-up emails—at a weekly cadence or any other frequency leads opt in for. This helps keep your leads engaged and increases brand recall.
For example, you can send educational emails about health insurance regularly. When your audience is ready to purchase, your brand will be their first choice because they've already seen the value in your content and benefited from it.
If a lead has provided consent to receive calls or meet in person, this can be one of the most effective ways to engage them and move closer to a purchase. This is where your sales team plays a crucial role.
During calls or meetings, you can
- Explain your solution in detail.
- Share testimonials or case studies.
- Discuss budget and pricing options.
Messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, or Arratai can serve as effective one-to-one lead nurturing touchpoints. You can chat directly with your leads, share collateral such as presentations or videos, conduct calls, and ensure your messages reach them at the right times.
Lead nurturing is a complex process that involves multiple channels and interactions, all arranged in a well-planned sequence to maximize engagement and conversion
Managing your leads with Zoho Marketing Plus
Zoho Marketing Plus is a unified marketing platform that lets you manage your marketing team while capturing and managing leads in a robust system. You can create and execute campaigns across multiple channels, including email, social media, webinars, surveys, events, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more—all from a single platform. Here's how you can capture and nurture your leads with Zoho Marketing Plus.
Top of the funnel with Zoho Marketing Plus:
The top of the marketing funnel consists of the initial touchpoints where you capture leads.
Landing pages:
With Zoho Marketing Plus, you can create landing pages using easy-to-use templates and drag-and-drop builders. Publish them on your own domain, display pop-ups and forms, and capture audience information directly in your system.
Webpage analytics:
Zoho Marketing Plus provides detailed insights into how visitors interact with your webpages. Tools like heatmaps and analytics help you understand where leads spend the most time, what causes them to leave, and how to optimize their experiences for better conversion.
Omnichannel campaigns:
Zoho Marketing Plus enables you to run campaigns across multiple channels, from creation to execution to measurement. You can create assets, use them to run campaigns, capture leads, and store them—all from one unified platform.
The middle of the funnel represents a mix of lead generation and lead nurturing. It involves managing your leads, understanding their preferences, segmenting them, and communicating according to those preferences.
Data management:
Zoho Marketing Plus enables you to store your leads securely, manage and visualize them, and comply with all applicable laws and regulations. You can organize your leads in a way that suits your marketing strategy.
Segmentation:
Segment your leads based on common factors such as geography, demographics, behavioral patterns, or content preferences. This ensures that your communications are relevant and personalized.
Journey builder with automation:
With Zoho Marketing Plus's marketing automation, you can create automated journeys that send targeted communications based on specific triggers, such as form submissions on your website. Nurture leads with personalized content across email, SMS, webinars, WhatsApp, and more.
The bottom of the funnel is where leads are most likely to convert into customers. This stage is primarily driven by the sales team, though marketing plays a supportive role.
Unified analytics:
Visualize how leads have interacted with your marketing touchpoints, the time they took to progress, their current stage in the journey, campaign spending, acquisition costs, and optimize strategies to achieve better conversions.
CRM integrations:
Zoho Marketing Plus integrates with popular CRMs like Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and HubSpot. When marketing and sales platforms are connected, you can visualize the end-to-end lead journey and ensure that marketing and sales teams collaborate effectively to close deals.
With Zoho Marketing Plus, you can capture leads effectively, nurture them, automate the process end-to-end, and scale as you grow. Try Zoho Marketing Plus for free and expand your lead pipeline today.
