The benefits of lead generation go beyond finding new customers. Remember, generating leads results from various strategies. Each strategy provides advantages you might not realize.
Inbound lead generation on social media builds brand awareness. Content marketing strategies focused on case studies improve authority. Great SEO reduces acquisition costs.
By the end of this article, you’ll learn the benefits of lead generation, know which strategy fits you best, and how to boost the ROI of each campaign. First, we must understand the following:
- What is lead generation?
- How lead generation affects your sales process
- Unconsidered needs addressed by holistic generation strategies
- Fundamental benefits businesses get from lead generation
- Lead generation best practices you need to implement ASAP
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation or acquisition is how you get potential customers for a business. Marketers use two strategies to gain leads—inbound and outbound lead generation.
Inbound lead generation leverages content, media, and authority to attract leads. Outbound strategies, like cold email, engage leads who need to learn about your brand.
Both strategies are more effective when marketers utilize lead generation software to manage leads and act on data-driven insight, ultimately streamlining your entire sales process.
How Does Lead Generation Benefit The Sales Process
The typical sales process includes researching the best lead sources for your business, deciding how to best acquire or engage with leads, and how to qualify them.
Sales reps can then begin nurturing qualified leads further down the sales pipeline. With the right lead generation strategy, sales teams can streamline the sales process. Here’s how.
Pre-Qualifying Leads
Focusing on unqualified leads costs your business precious time and resources. You can use qualification methods like BANT or MEDDICC to address this issue.
But with the right lead generation strategy, businesses can pre-qualify leads, further streamlining the process. The first step to pre-qualification is finding a source with verified and quality leads.
That’s where Instantly B2B Lead Finder comes in. Users gain access to over 160 million verified B2B leads. Plus, you don’t need third-party CRMs and sales engagement tools.
After creating an email list, you can immediately run cold email campaigns with Instantly. If your sales process isn’t too complex, Instantly also has Dealflow CRM for lead management.
Addressing Objections Early
Objections are a natural occurrence in sales. But if you can address these objections earlier, your sales closing techniques will become much more effective.
Lead generation strategies, like content marketing, help brands address objections. For example, two of the most prominent objections in B2B are budget and competition.
With content marketing, you can create infographics and articles about price comparisons, highlight your product's advantages over the competition, and build trust and credibility.
Lead generation software can also track and analyze prospect behavior, giving insight into the content that best resonates with your leads’ needs and interests.
Tailoring Content for Bottom-of-Funnel Prospects
Aspects of lead generation, such as analyzing lead behavior, help curate content that can speak directly to the needs of your button-of-funnel prospects, improving the likelihood of conversions.
For example, if a prospect keeps returning to a technical guide you made on setting up integrations, you could schedule a demo that focuses on that.
Tailoring content shifts your role from salesperson to advisor. You get to understand your leads’ interests, customize proposals, and anticipate future needs.
Sales enablement plays a big role here. Your sales representatives need the right tools and a content library to streamline curation for bottom-of-funnel prospects.
Unconsidered Needs Addressed by Holistic Lead Generation Strategies
Businesses highlight their unique selling proposition to differentiate themselves. This becomes more difficult in competitive markets with products and services being too similar.
A business often lowers prices or gives discounts to offer differentiated value. But a better, more customer-focused approach is discovering your prospect’s unconsidered needs.
Holistic lead generation helps you with just that through segmentation, qualification, and nurturing strategies. Let’s say you are selling supply chain management software (SCM).
You can target CEOs in the retail industry with businesses earning less than $100k annually (segmentation and qualification). Then, through nurturing, you can determine the challenges prospects face that prevent them from breaking through their revenue plateaus.
Understanding your prospect’s needs helps you identify unmet ones. For example, prospects could spend too much time dealing with logistical woes that cause unnecessary overhead.
From there, you can position your product as the ultimate solution and reap the benefits of holistic lead generation strategies.
12 Fundamental Business Benefits of Lead Generation
Whether you’re in B2B, SaaS, or a marketing agency looking for new clients, investing in an improved lead generation strategy can provide your business with the following benefits:
Expanded Market Reach
Lead generation strategies, like influencer marketing, podcasts, and collaborations, help discover untapped markets. Meanwhile, email searching tools for outbound campaigns can take your business front and center to a new audience.
Expanding your market means fully understanding your brand, product, and audience through data-driven insights from sales tracking software. Analyzing lead data can then help your marketing team curate content for that new segment to grow your brand’s following.
Omnichannel Growth
Thanks to evolving technology, customers now have a deeper understanding of their pain points and the solutions required to solve them. That’s why content marketing has become an integral element in every lead generation strategy.
The goal is to create tailored content for each lead segment. But you can’t just spam the same infographic or article across all your platforms. Content marketing helps your business understand what type of content fits best in what platform, resulting in omnichannel growth.
Highlighting Social Proof
Social proof, like user-generated content or reviews/testimonials, is among the highest-converting marketing strategies. That’s because customers trust their peers more than any other marketing advertisement.
Lead generation strategies, such as cold email marketing, best utilize social proof. You can also highlight reviews and testimonials on key landing pages, social media marketing, and drip campaigns.
Boost Your Revenue
Lead generation aims to bring sustainable revenue to your business by filling lead pipelines with qualified prospects. When done correctly, lead generation can be scaled up, leading to more revenue.
One of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to scale up your lead generation and outreach campaigns is through automated email marketing. Tools like Instantly can automate cold email outreach, sales follow-ups, and trigger-based email campaigns.
Generate Business Opportunities
Collaborating with businesses in adjacent industries presents a win-win situation for all parties. For example, HVAC contractors can collaborate with local appliance stores and give discounts. Then, they can recommend their clients to the store for their home appliance needs.
Just remember to create a mutually beneficial strategy. Collaborations with adjacent businesses expand your market, getting you front and center to a new audience.
Improve Lead Quality
Lead generation is a numbers game. The more leads you have, the higher the chances of finding new customers. However, you still need to account for lead quality. Qualified leads are those most likely to convert.
You can get qualified leads by catering your content to the leads you’re looking for, using lead finder tools with advanced filtering options, and optimizing landing pages for conversions.
Build Visibility and Awareness
You must improve brand visibility and awareness to find and attract new customers. Lead generation directly affects how your brand is perceived through its messages to the public.
This carries over to all content marketing-focused lead generation, how brands position themselves during outbound campaigns, and every marketing collateral at your disposal.
Businesses that keep brand building in mind during lead generation campaigns help position themselves as an authority and thought leader in their industry.
Automate Lead Management
Growing your business means expanding your customer base at scale. The best way to do so is through automated lead management. Businesses need three fundamental automation tools for this—one for lead generation, another for lead tracking, and finally, one for outreach and engagement.
For example, the sales process starts with creating an email list using tools like Apollo or its alternatives. Then, you’d need to validate your list using validation tools like Neverbounce. Next, outreach tools are needed to conduct email campaigns. Afterward, you need to manage leads using a CRM.
That’s a lot of switching back and forth to automate lead management. You don’t have this issue when you’re using Instantly. Users can easily find leads that fit their buyer personas and ICPs, engage with them, and track activity—all in one tool, streamlining and automating lead management.
Improved Lead Targeting
Most lead generation campaigns fail due to poor lead targeting. That’s a lot of marketing money down the drain. Lead generation fundamentals teach us strategies for segmentation, qualification, and better targeting.
Businesses that identify the right audience can see significant revenue boosts. Most start lead targeting by creating buyer personas, building ideal customer profiles, and using data from successful campaigns to pinpoint demographics that fit best with your brand.
Improving lead targeting also benefits key aspects of your overall marketing strategy, from the content you post on social media platforms to the copy used in cold email outreach campaigns.
Streamlined Sales Process
The sales process can be as simple or complex as it needs to be. For example, the sales process of an eCommerce business should be simpler than that of businesses selling software to enterprise-level companies.
But just because a sales process is complex doesn’t mean it has to be difficult to execute. Lead generation simplifies or streamlines the sales process by removing unnecessary or redundant steps, improving the customer journey, and reducing the time it takes to convert leads into customers.
Better Customer Relationships
Holistic lead generation strategies positively impact the customer journey, resulting in better relationships with your prospects. A great example is brands engaging with their audience during content marketing campaigns.
Engaging with your audience builds trust and loyalty, responds to their needs, and utilizes social proof in your next lead generation or outreach. Remember, customers with a positive purchasing journey are more likely to recommend your business to peers.
Think of it as a positive feedback loop starting at the top of the sales funnel where lead generation is conducted, all the way to the bottom when you’re nurturing sales-ready prospects and beyond the customer journey.
Increased Market Insights
Lead generation campaigns perform better when they're backed by valuable market insights. Data from lead management tools, analytics, or CRMs provide just that. Businesses can use this data to understand their audience, their competition, and the market better.
For example, a lead generation campaign can start with lead segmentation, followed by competitor analysis. This helps businesses refine their offerings and tailor their core messages in inbound and outbound lead generation campaigns.
Segmentation helps you focus on generating leads from qualified demographics. Then, doing competitor analysis can help differentiate your products.
Lead Generation Best Practices
Following lead generation best practices ensures that your business can make the most out of every campaign. Here are seven best practices you need to apply to your next campaign ASAP!
- Optimize your landing and lead capture pages for conversions.
- Create quality content that provides immediate value to your audience.
- Utilize automation tools to streamline and scale lead generation campaigns.
- Leverage inbound lead generation strategies to get qualified prospects.
- Segment leads and personalize your messaging based on each segment.
- A/B test different lead generation strategies and iterate on the best-performing ones.
- Use insights from lead or intent data to strengthen your overall sales process.
Key Takeaways
Lead generation is essential for generating sustainable and predictable revenue. With the right tools and strategies, it becomes the best tool businesses can use to scale. But the benefits don’t stop there. Here’s a quick recap of the core benefits lead generation can offer:
- Streamlined sales process
- Improved brand visibility and awareness
- Expanded market reach
- Automated lead management at scale
- Boost in revenue and business growth
Generating new leads for your business is one of the first and most important steps of the overall sales process. There’s still lead engagement, nurturing, and tracking. When it comes to all three, Instantly has you covered! Start for free today!