Lead is one of those Americanized terms that was embraced by Brazilian culture because of Digital Marketing and that doesn’t make much sense when translated literally (“protagonist”, in this case).
But one way to understand what “lead” means is through an equivalent term in Portuguese: potential customer!
When a stranger (visitor or follower, for example) decides to interact with your brand beyond the content available on your website, blog or social networks, they become a lead: someone who, if handled correctly, can become a buyer!
This is why, when we talk about Digital Marketing strategies, lead generation is one of the most important — after all, without potential buyers, there are no sales!
In this text, you will learn:
Ready to sell more and better on the Internet?
What are Leads?
Leads are nothing more than contacts of potential consumers who have provided their personal or professional details (such as name, email or telephone number) in exchange for some reward offered by your company.
This reward could be a free webinar, an e-book full of knowledge or even an exclusive discount that makes the lead feel like the most important person for your brand!
But for the transition from curious to customer to happen (and to be used in your brand’s strategies), it is necessary not only to collect personal or professional data, but also to communicate directly with each lead.
Just like in dating, in exchange for a partner’s attention, trust and loyalty, you need to court him a little!
Based on the data that the lead shows willingness to share, you can start a relationship and insert it into the sales funnel to guide them through the entire purchasing journey until the moment they swipe the card and close the deal!
Is there a greater opportunity to increase sales than this?
In fact, it does! Are two:
- Management of existing leads (so they don’t get frustrated with their commitment to your brand);
- And the generation of more qualified leads (which is better not to make analogies to what this would mean within a dating relationship)!
I will explain both below.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of transforming strangers (who are interested in the context of your company) into acquaintances through the production of content so that they choose to provide their data spontaneously, starting a relationship in which there is a simultaneous exchange of value.
I particularly like this definition because, besides being simple, at the end of the day, it is what it is!
Leads and the Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is a strategic model used to classify the different types of leads within their purchasing journey — and the likelihood of them purchasing what your company sells.
You can view the sales funnel as a real funnel: an upside-down pyramid divided into stages.
The further you are at the top of the funnel, the further away a potential customer is from closing a deal with you!
Because of this, the sales funnel is used in Digital Marketing as a way to visualize the different phases that a potential customer goes through before deciding to complete a purchase — and guide them through this journey in an optimized way.
The concept of a sales funnel was first introduced in 1898 by advertiser Elias St. Elmo Lewis.
Since then, the funnel has served as a reference for selecting the best Marketing actions and providing clues on the best management of resources, in order to increase the chances of a lead reaching the bottom and purchasing!
It’s the process of going from the top, through the middle and reaching the bottom of the sales funnel — what we call ” converting ” a lead (or opportunity) to a customer when we talk about online sales!
What is the difference between Visitor, Subscriber and the different types of Leads?
Taking into account what you just read about the sales funnel, classifying each person as a visitor, subscriber or lead gives you even more assertiveness in identifying the right time to send them an offer!
The sales funnel segments the different stages of a person’s awareness or action: from the moment they come across your business until they decide whether your company is the right choice for them (a process that, in practice, is not always linear as in theory!).
That’s why the sales funnel can take different forms, like this:
Lead qualification attempts to identify each individual, regardless of where they are in the sales funnel, to guide them to the right steps (or to a different sales funnel) so they can find what they are looking for and then become qualified. to the next step that brings you closer to purchasing!
It will all make sense in an instant:
Visitor
A visitor is just that: a person unknown to you, who was searching for solutions on the Internet to satisfy a desire or solve a problem and found your website in the search results !
This is the furthest phase from the purchasing decision, and that is why creating quality content (using Content Marketing strategies for Inbound Marketing ) becomes essential to attract visitors and spark their interest in your brand!
A great example of this is Famiglia Valduga which, despite being one of the best-known companies in Brazil, was struggling to make a good impression on visitors.
Since the first impression is what remains, I gathered my Content Marketing team here at Enjoy Minder and we created a strategy to:
- Take the company’s website to the top positions in search results (for keywords for which it should be recognized as an authority);
- Attract even more curious people who are more likely to become qualified customers;
- And make the best first impression possible on these visitors!
The result was a 1783% increase in sales — an absurd success!
To convert visitors into leads and qualify them for sales the way Enjoy Minder did for Famiglia Valduga, I have 4 powerful tips:
- Ask yourself “What types of questions or desires would my ideal client look for answers to on the Internet?”;
- With a list of topics in hand, create valuable content using the same keywords that your ideal client would use when searching;
- This way, a visitor will not only have the complete answer they are looking for when they find you, but they will also be pulled to similar topics on your website, blog or social media profile;
- From then on, he becomes interested in the authority you represent (your mastery over the subject) and this nurtures the trust necessary for the relationship to develop and for him to consider the possibility of buying from you in the near future!
I’ll talk a little more about this step by step later. Until then, I think it’s important that you know how to differentiate a visitor from a subscriber!
Subscriber
A simple way to start identifying visitors, transforming them from strangers to leads, is by inviting them to receive new content first hand!
Typically, this happens through a newsletter: an email sending list that uses E-mail Marketing strategies to warm up your lead base.
And, to receive email alerts, your visitor needs to provide you with a direct form of contact: their name and email address!
This is just the first step towards lead nurturing, but this is how you will get the other data needed to identify the profile (position, company, number of employees… and so on!).
Email communication is extremely powerful because, instead of speaking in a generalized way to thousands of people (as happens with articles published on your blog, for example), you get the opportunity to speak to each subscriber on an individual level .
Talking to someone one on one, your CTAs (your “Calls to Action”, from the English acronym for “Call to Action”) have extreme impact and get the lead used to following your suggestions based on the trust generated!
This openness to offering personal data in exchange for information that only your company has prepares the visitor for the next qualification on this list: a lead!
Lead
By now you can understand that, by becoming a subscriber, the potential customer also becomes a lead — and, when that happens, you need to nurture them with even more relevant content!
To know what is relevant for each type of lead, you need to identify their level of awareness as a potential customer:
Suspect
A lead who subscribed to your newsletter, for example, but showed no interest in purchasing, is a suspect — someone suspicious, undecided.
There’s no point trying to sell to a suspect at this point, because there’s no way of knowing the chances of him accepting an offer!
It is better to qualify him little by little, taking him through the next phases of familiarization with your business that I will present below.
Qualified Lead (QL or Qualified Lead)
Using some lead nurturing tactics, it is possible to get to know the suspect a little more to the point of being able to create a first sketch of his profile.
An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) has all the characteristics that your business may consider ideal for making a sale — this is a qualified lead!
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
When a lead goes through the purchasing journey enough to recognize that they have a problem to be solved and that only your company can do this, it is the type of lead qualified by Marketing — or MQL for “Marketing Qualified Lead”.
This potential customer profile engages with your content, achieves a high lead scoring (level of engagement measured by score) and is mature enough about your services or products to accept your offers!
Therefore, an MQL has, in addition to the correct profile, the interest and maturity necessary to buy.
SAL (Sales Accepted Lead)
However, to know whether an MQL is really qualified to accept a sales offer, he needs to be evaluated by the commercial sector of your business.
This is because, often, the information filled in by leads in your database is incorrect (whether on purpose or unintentionally)!
Since a good carpenter measures twice to cut once, it is more effective (and economical) to validate the MQL to make sure he qualifies to say “yes” to your offer.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
After the MQL is validated as a SAL, it means that it was educated by the sales team through consultative selling and decided which product or service you need!
Now the SAL is an SQL: a “hot lead” and qualified for sales or, in English, a “Sales Qualified Lead”.
This is the time to throw him an offer — he’ll say “yes, yes, yes”!
Opportunity
I repeat in several contents here on the Enjoy Minder blog that the stages of the sales funnel, from the customer journey to lead qualification, depend on the context of your business!
A sales opportunity for company A can be identified at the stage where the lead is still an MQL. Company B can only see an opportunity when a lead is an SQL!
Some companies still consider the SQL and opportunity steps to be the same…
The fact is that each case is different — the ideal funnel is one that delivers results for the company and the simpler the better!
Using Enjoy Minder as an example, here we only consider a lead as an opportunity when it becomes SQL and goes through our commercial proposal.
Only then, and only for our plans and objectives as a business, do we consider the existence of a real possibility of sale!
Client
It’s when your company seizes the opportunity and converts the SQL into a customer that you actually close a sale!
This is the most coveted awareness stage among business owners, marketers and salespeople, because it indicates that a person went through all the stages of the sales funnel (relevant to what they needed to understand) and paid the amount you proposed as a solution!
But don’t think that your lead nurturing ends there!
Right after explaining the true benefit of generating leads — and how to prepare your company to attract, capture and convert them — I will talk about the value of nurturing to sell many more times (and even to the same people) !
Why is it important to generate leads?
If it hasn’t been obvious so far, generating leads is important because they are the people who end up buying what your company needs to sell to grow!
Treating the lead as a resource to be polished (instead of simply as a consumer who enters and leaves your website, without leaving any contact information, and never returns) increases not only your chances of selling to them, but also for any other lead that may be converted by your brand in the future.
Thanks to the power of Digital Marketing, every lead leaves a behavioral trail that we call “metrics”.
Lead behavior metrics allow your Marketing team to analyze and identify patterns to optimize your sales funnel and transform leads into customers as a result!
One of the most effective metrics for knowing how engaged a lead is (or how educated they are about what your business does) is called ” lead scoring “.
Lead Scoring
In lead scoring , each time a person performs an action within a scale of importance defined by what your company expects from that lead, that person receives some points.
The more points, the more ” heated ” the lead will be within this scale!
Look at the following example to understand it better:
Lead Scoring Example
Let’s say that your Digital Marketing team defined that the sum of 10 points would be enough to classify a lead as qualified for sale.
To reach these 10 points, each lead will need to complete a number of actions that will award different points to them:
- When opening an email sent by your newsletter, it will receive 2 points, for example;
- Maybe by clicking on a link you can earn 3 points;
- By completing an even more significant action in their awareness journey (such as opening a page that describes your product or service), they will earn 4 points;
- Even more significant would be for the lead to download super valuable material from your content (such as an e-book or a spreadsheet), which would add another 6 points!
By completing each action in the example above, our lead would total 15 points: 5 points above the 10 that identify a lead as “hot”!
Using lead scoring in this simple way, it is easy to categorize (usually in an automated way) who may be ready to talk to the sales team and who needs more nurturing to be converted!
Lead Scoring in practice
The entire concept of lead scoring for generating qualified leads was applied by my team to boost sales at M.Pollo — a giant clothing manufacturer.
The company understood the importance of creating valuable content to attract new customers and hired Enjoy Minder precisely because it is the largest Inbound Marketing agency in Brazil!
Compared to the same sales period at M.Pollo before the agency participated here, my team and I:
- We increased revenue by 23%;
- We reduced investments by 40%;
- We increased the number of deals closed with new tenants by 45%;
- And we reduced the time the sales sector needed to close deals!
André Ribeiro, M.Pollo’s National Sales Manager, left a message for us highlighting the power of leads that helped the company grow!
How to prepare the company for Leads?
A simple way to prepare your company to attract and manage leads is to use each stage of the sales funnel as a reference to understand:
- What keywords do your ideal customers search for online that lead them to your business?
- When they come to you, what awareness phases do they go through before purchasing from your brand?
- After someone makes a purchase, what questions do they have about your service or product?
Using the sales funnel as a reference (and remembering to adapt it to the phases that your customer goes through specifically in your company), you can define:
- What content to produce using the keywords that attract new visitors;
- What content (and what Digital Marketing strategies ) are needed to guide the visitor through the rest of the funnel;
- And what materials will need to be created to make sure that the lead, after becoming a customer, uses your service or product satisfactorily and comes back to buy more!
By identifying the phases that your ideal customer goes through in your sales funnel, you can save time and resources by implementing only those strategies that really lead a stranger to do business with you!
Remember that the path a person takes through your sales funnel is not always linear!
To ensure that you invest resources and pay attention to the correct steps that prepare the sales funnel to receive new leads — and nurture them efficiently —, it is worth prioritizing your creation moment into two phases:
- Attracting leads;
- And lead generation.
I will explain better below.
How to Attract Leads?
Content creation is a key part of attracting and driving leads through the sales funnel .
Instead of producing content left and right, starting by directing your company’s resources to the priority of attracting new leads helps bring order to the chaos.
At this stage, you will follow some tips I presented in the visitors section, but you will go further!
First ask yourself who you will be creating the content for .
Try to imagine all the tastes, problems and even the routine of the person who will stop everything they are doing to search for answers on the Internet.
In addition to the topics and keywords she will use in searches, try to think about:
- What is the average age of this person?
- Are you single? Married? Have children?
- Where she lives?
- What dreams does she have?
- What is her biggest problem?
- How can your company solve this problem or help you achieve this dream?
I know it’s strange, but asking these questions helps you imagine a realistic profile of the type of person who has the greatest potential to find and engage with your business.
This creation of a fictional character, but based on real probabilities of your ideal customer, is what we call a “persona” in Digital Marketing.
Creating one or more personas is an efficient method because it directs the creation of your content not only to the stages of people’s awareness of your brand, but also to the type of people this content serves!
This way, you basically attract the persona you invent — so create your ideal persona before creating content that aims to attract new leads!
When Gramado Summit needed help understanding what type of client it needed to achieve faster results (and wasting fewer resources shooting everywhere), it turned to Enjoy Minder.
How to Generate Leads?
Once you’ve prioritized creating personas and content aimed at attracting new leads, the next priority will be to create “bait” to make your visitors move forward to each next stage of your sales funnel!
What I called “bait” is actually content so valuable and intriguing that it will make it impossible for a curious person not to want to know more about it:
- Your brand’s culture;
- The authority she exercises;
- The other content she publishes;
- And the services or products it offers!
The same importance scale used in lead scoring can be interpreted in lead generation: the more valuable the content is, the more information a visitor will need to offer to receive it.
While articles on the blog are public for anyone to find them (serving to attract new leads), materials such as e-books, webinars and spreadsheet models can only be accessible after visitors provide a contact form or specific data to the your strategy!
Speaking of strategy, the creation of content for these different priorities of attracting and managing leads are part of Inbound Marketing: the methodology in which Enjoy Minder specializes!
You can access the Inbound Marketing Manual for free here at the agency to learn other tricks on attracting, generating, qualifying and nurturing your leads until you convert them into customers!
How to manage Leads?
Did you see that just as important as attracting and generating leads is the way you take them from the top to the bottom of the funnel — until they close a deal?
An effective way to achieve this result is by educating leads:
- About the problems they face;
- About how they can solve them;
- And about how your brand can facilitate this process through services or products that only you have!
But be careful: trying to sell to the lead when they are not ready to buy could make you lose them!
To guarantee opportunities for success, it is worth:
- Spend a little time getting to know leads through personas and Digital Marketing metrics;
- Educating leads through quality content that reflects their purchasing journey;
- And qualify them, step by step, in an automated way.
Hiring a Digital Marketing automation tool is a great solution because it allows you to:
- The construction of automatic lead scoring, based on lead behaviors;
- Email Marketing sending is also automated, sending the right message to each type of lead at the ideal time in their journey;
- And a reduction in CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).
This reduction in CAC happens because, with Digital Marketing automation, your team wastes less time micromanaging the perfect moment to send proposals or nutrition that will reflect positive results.
After all, if a lead is automatically directed to the sales team only when it is ready to buy, the commercial sector will waste less time approaching people who are not interested in what your business has to offer!
Step by step for Lead Management
Summarizing what it takes for perfect lead management:
- First, you attract new leads through content with the right keywords to be found on the Internet through SEO and social networks, and only by people with the greatest potential to become customers;
- Then you collect data about these people curious about your content with the intention of understanding and qualifying them automatically using a method such as lead scoring;
- By identifying the level of awareness of your potential customers, you will start nurturing them with even more personalized content that will deepen their relationship with your brand;
- When you educate leads enough, you evaluate them to see if they are qualified to receive an offer and become a customer. Otherwise, it will be better to nourish them a little longer;
- After the lead becomes a customer and purchases from you, you need to measure the results that led to that sale to optimize the stages of the sales funnel, redirect your resources, improve the purchasing journey of the next customers and ensure that your consumers return to you. buy from you!
This entire step-by-step process is based on quality nutrition, as this is what will awaken confidence and desire in your leads to buy from you!
That’s what we’ll talk about in the next section.
What is Lead Nurturing and what are its benefits?
Nurturing a lead means nurturing and guiding a potential customer through their entire purchasing journey using:
- Valuable content;
- And communication tactics that deepen his relationship with your business!
As I showed in the previous sections, the moment a lead is captured (when a person stops being a stranger and gives you the chance to communicate directly with them), it is possible to measure qualification to know how long it takes for that lead to close a purchase.
With qualification measured, each new piece of content he finds in the sales funnel will need to educate him so he can advance through the next steps of the journey.
This education happens when the lead understands more:
- About the problem you face;
- About the desire you feel;
- And about the options that your business offers to help you in this saga!
Using a restaurant as an analogy, nutrition fills the lead’s belly until they raise their hand and say: “I’m satisfied, you can bring the check!”.
Let’s get to know the main functions of this nutrition?
Educate the Lead
Educating the lead is essential because the more they know about the desires or problems they face, the more they will feel in control of their own destiny.
When the lead feels in control of their own destiny, they recognize their own responsibility to solve the problem or satisfy that desire.
But why solve a problem alone if he has already found a ready-made solution in your company? That’s where authority comes in!
Build Authority
When you are the one who gives the lead the understanding and control they need to make their lives easier, part of the responsibility they take on themselves is shared with your brand.
He trusts your business, recognizes your authority, and if he is ready to delegate the resolution of the problem or the facilitation of the desire he has identified with your help, he will pay whatever price it takes to buy them from you!
Cultivate Relationships
When you become an authority capable of solving problems in a lead’s life, you become an integral element in their quality of life.
And there’s no way we can talk about quality of life without talking about relationships !
When you build authority, you build the trust potential customers need to know that your company keeps their interests first!
Isn’t this the basis of all healthy marriages, friendships and families? In Digital Marketing, it couldn’t be any different!
Lead Nutrition and Qualification
Would you buy from a company that you don’t trust or that you doubt the effectiveness of the service or product? Of course not!
In short, the nurturing and qualification of leads needs to follow a series of rules to avoid distrust and bring certainty to the purchase. They are:
- You need to invest in Content Marketing (or directly in Inbound Marketing), building a blog for your company and an E-mail Marketing list. Without these tools, you cannot nurture leads or qualify them for the next stages of the sales funnel;
- It is essential that the content is relevant to the stage of the purchasing journey in which your lead is. Offering too many (or uninteresting) messages to a stranger, or losing relevance due to lack of periodic contact with the hottest leads, are two scenarios that you should avoid;
- Qualifying leads doesn’t happen overnight: it takes time to build trust with someone, as in any relationship. The paradox is that losing trust can happen in the blink of an eye if you mess up and tarnish your authority by trying to sell to someone who is not prepared to receive an offer. Create a Digital Marketing strategy and trust the process!
- Focus on generating lead engagement! Engagement is when the topics you share are so interesting that the lead feels like they will miss a unique chance if they don’t follow your suggestions! Send personalized emails, try to discover what moves your potential customers and use your common sense to take advantage of the opening they give!
Lead Generation and Nurturing at each stage of the Sales Funnel
I’m going to share some content ideas for you to implement in your Digital Marketing strategy to qualify leads at the right times! Check it out:
Top of the Funnel
Remember that, at the top of the funnel, leads are looking for information about a problem or desire?
Since they aren’t exactly looking for something to buy, you can attract strangers and convert them into leads by dividing:
- Blog articles;
- Cool infographics;
- Explanatory videos;
- Informative e-books;
- And even samples of your services or products!
Middle of the Funnel
In the middle of the funnel, leads already understand what problem or desire they are dealing with.
This opens the door for your company to nurture them (building your authority) and guide them through the sales funnel using:
- Webinars;
- Detailed case studies (with solid data and references);
- Honest comparison guides;
- And interactive tools to help them make informed decisions!
Bottom of the Funnel
At the bottom of the funnel, you will be closer to turning a lead into a buyer!
As they are close to the decision of whether or not to buy what you offer, your nutrition content should consolidate the trust built so far and encourage action through:
- Free trials;
- Product demonstrations;
- And testimonials from customers who were successful with your help and which the lead can identify with!
After-sales and Customer Loyalty
The sales funnel doesn’t end after a lead is converted into a customer! After the sale, it is important:
- Continue engaging with customers;
- Offer support to them;
- Solve problems that arise;
- And observe (or create) opportunities for additional sales and loyalty!
How to automate and personalize Lead Nurturing?
Just imagine doing the lead scoring manually and all the segmentation of qualified leads one by one: unfeasible!
Digital Marketing automation plays a fundamental role in lead nurturing because it allows:
- Automatically send (based on leads’ actions) relevant content to each person on the list;
- Display lead information in your database with intuitive graphics;
- And make comparisons using different periods, the pages that most convert visitors into leads and even which parts of your content have the most engagement!
Platforms like HubSpot, RD Station, Marketo and Pardot do this automation for you and filter leads based on specific criteria to extract the best results!
This way you ensure that each lead receives the most impactful content at the right time in their individual journey!
Lead Generation Case Studies
You deserve a gift for making it this far!
You’ve gone through your own learning funnel and now you know everything you need to attract new leads and nurture them to generate more sales!
Before delivering your reward, I think it’s extremely important that you see in practice how this content can be applied in real life to generate more quality leads.
Starting with the extraordinary case of a 1783% increase in sales in the Famiglia Valduga online store!
The entire step-by-step guide with graphics and legitimate data is transparent in this study so you can understand how creating assertive content can change the game of a company, like yours, in Digital Marketing!
In this case study, you will learn in practice:
- How to identify the problem in your lead generation;
- How to structure a project and propose solutions;
- And how to interpret the results to continue optimizing your sales strategy!
The second case is how my team and I drank our own water and put Enjoy Minder in the first results on Google!
I find our case inspiring because it affirms that, with attention, intention and theoretical understanding, you too can become a search leader in your sector!
In this case study, you will learn:
- How to optimize your content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization);
- How to identify the difficulty of your project in relation to your competitors;
- How to evaluate the costs of an initiative like this;
- And how your own journey to the top of Internet searches influences your authority among your ideal clients!
Don’t waste time: the sooner you understand lead generation in practice, the sooner you will dominate the market!
Finishing with a Gift!
Phew! I know you’ve worked up a sweat, but I’m sure you no longer have any questions about:
- What are leads;
- What is lead generation;
- What is a sales funnel;
- The different qualifications of leads;
- How to prepare your company for leads;
- What is lead nurturing;
- And how to automate their nutrition!
Now I can give you your gift: a huge list of content here from our Digital Marketing agency for you to plan your sales strategy immediately and increase your success through lead generation and management!
It was a pleasure to share with you everything I learned in my more than 20 years of practice and I can’t wait to find you at the top of Google!
A hug!
