Today’s business scenario is strife with new competition, shrinking budgets and marketing and sales teams stretched to do more with less. Further, maintaining a pipeline of qualified leads has become vitally important for the challenging business climate. With the internet paving way for the growth of e-commerce, the business-to-consumer market has grown equally large along with the business-to-business market. Thus it has become imperative and important for every enterprise to have a consistent lead generation for its survival.
The marketing departments have realized that their role today has shifted from one facilitating a buying process with the use of marketing automation rather than attempting to push a sales process. This has paved way for a fundamental shift in the process of lead generation, lead nurturing and cultivation to make every lead ready for sales. Further the growth of the social media, networking websites, educational webinars and search engines, the lead generation process today starts much earlier than the earlier days.
Lead generation as defined by Wikipedia “is a marketing term used, often in Internet marketing, to describe the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business”. Leads are generated for a variety of purposes including winning customers. There are a number of tactical methods for generating leads which includes advertising, search engine results or referrals from existing customers. However; lead generation has changed from its earlier form with the development of a number of marketing automation software. The lead generation software developed by the leaders in marketing automation helps enterprises focus on managing the entire lead lifecycle, from initial engagement, through lead nurturing, to lead scoring and sales. Nevertheless, business strives to generate quality leads that will lead to purchases.
Though a number of lead generation techniques are available today, the two main techniques used by enterprises for generating leads are inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Outbound marketing, process finds marketers forcing themselves on prospective customers to generate leads. Also known as interruption marketing this includes cold calling, direct mails and emails advertisements. Inbound marketing on the other hand, does not interrupt prospects and uses tactics like blogs, e-books, white papers, SEO, SEM, webinars, social media, viral marketing, videos and podcasts, to draw customer attention.
With a myriad of methods to generate leads and nurture them, the enterprises today need to choose and implement the most effective techniques in accordance with their objectives, target audience and expected profit margin. The effective lead generation strategies include understanding that different lead generation techniques when implemented properly can produce positive results. Further, every technique has its pros and cons and enterprises need to monitor and evaluate the success of every technique.
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