Gen­er­at­ing and nur­tur­ing leads is a vital part of any dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Undoubt­ed­ly, both process­es unlock mas­sive growth poten­tial for a busi­ness. Get­ting them to work like a well-oiled machine should be the goal of any com­pa­ny look­ing to increase prof­its and remain com­pet­i­tive long-term.

With most busi­ness­es cit­ing lead gen­er­a­tion and lead nur­tur­ing as their most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges, where should you direct your efforts and resources for max­i­mum impact? Bet­ter still, what are the key things to con­sid­er when cre­at­ing effec­tive lead gen­er­a­tion and nur­tur­ing campaigns?

To answer these ques­tions, we’ll explore the dif­fer­ences between lead gen­er­a­tion and lead nur­tur­ing, their impor­tance, and how to opti­mise them to meet your mar­ket­ing and busi­ness goals. Let’s dive in.

What Is Lead Generation?

Put sim­ply, lead gen­er­a­tion is the process of turn­ing prospects into leads. This can be done through lead mag­nets, free tri­als, or any­thing else a prospect deems valu­able or inter­est­ing enough to exchange their details for.

(A prospect is a poten­tial cus­tomer in the mar­ket for your offer­ing and has the resources to buy it. A lead is a prospect who has expressed inter­est in your offer­ing and giv­en you their email address.)

How Do You Generate Leads?

New leads can be gen­er­at­ed through inbound and out­bound mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Out­bound lead gen­er­a­tion involves get­ting prospects through cold call­ing, direct mar­ket­ing, TV, radio, or print.

Inbound mar­ket­ing involves gain­ing prospec­tive cus­tomers’ atten­tion, inter­est, and con­tact details. It’s about get­ting cus­tomers to come to you by high­light­ing your val­ue propo­si­tion and offer­ing them val­ue through var­i­ous dig­i­tal chan­nels, such as:

• Lead mag­nets
• Blogging/content mar­ket­ing
• Social media
• Refer­rals
• Search engine marketing
• Prod­uct trials
• Ads and retargeting

Sol­id inbound and out­bound lead gen­er­a­tion strate­gies allow you to cast a wider net and attract more leads. But what else can they offer your business?

The Importance of Lead Generation

Effec­tive lead gen­er­a­tion is vital because it does the following:

Increases your customer base

Lead gen­er­a­tion allows you to increase your cus­tomer base. The more leads you gen­er­ate, the more prospects you can con­vert into pay­ing customers.

Builds brand awareness

Lead gen­er­a­tion increas­es your reach, engages cus­tomers, and tells them about your prod­ucts and ser­vices. With high­er lev­els of brand aware­ness come greater lev­els of trust and the will­ing­ness to buy your products.

Maximises resources

Lead gen­er­a­tion helps you iden­ti­fy and focus on the right audi­ence. Tar­get­ing your efforts in this man­ner allows you to use your resources more effi­cient­ly and reach prospects who are more like­ly to pur­chase your prod­ucts — and become repeat customers.

Captures customer details

Lead gen­er­a­tion allows you to col­lect prospec­tive cus­tomers’ details so you can fol­low up with them and per­son­alise your efforts to their needs.

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Leads don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly become cus­tomers — they need more infor­ma­tion; they also need to trust you and warm up to the idea of doing busi­ness with you. No mat­ter how great your prod­uct is, you won’t gain much trac­tion with­out doing these two things.

This is where lead nur­tur­ing comes in: lead nur­tur­ing turns prospects into cus­tomers by mov­ing them through each stage of the buy­er jour­ney until they’re ready to make a pur­chase. Lead nur­tur­ing also rein­forces and lever­ages rela­tion­ships to encour­age repeat sales and refer­rals from loy­al customers.

How Do You Nurture Leads?

No mat­ter what chan­nel or tac­tic you use, nur­tur­ing cus­tomers is about con­sis­tent com­mu­ni­ca­tion and engage­ment. Some of the best ways to nur­ture leads include:

• Social media
• Per­son­alised com­mu­ni­ca­tion (emails, push noti­fi­ca­tions, text messages)
• Con­tent mar­ket­ing (blog­ging, guides, eBooks)
• Incen­tives, dis­counts, and free trials

The Importance of Lead Nurturing

Effec­tive lead nur­tur­ing is impor­tant because it pro­vides the following:

A competitive edge

With only 29% of busi­ness­es actu­al­ly nur­tur­ing exist­ing cus­tomers past the first pur­chase, focus­ing on nur­tur­ing leads can give you a com­pet­i­tive edge.

Actionable insights

Effec­tive lead nur­tur­ing allows you to iden­ti­fy how to improve your sales fun­nels and main­tain bet­ter rela­tion­ships with your customers.

Greater returns

Nur­tur­ing leads does­n’t just guar­an­tee more sales; it also guar­an­tees pur­chas­es up to 47% high­er in val­ue. This means more rev­enue and greater returns on your investments.

Referrals and new leads

When leads become sat­is­fied cus­tomers, they’re more like­ly to rec­om­mend you to their friends. This is anoth­er excel­lent way to gen­er­ate qual­i­ty leads. In fact, 92% of con­sumers pur­chase some­thing because of a refer­ral.

Lead Generation vs Lead Nurturing: Which Is More Important?

Lead gen­er­a­tion involves find­ing cus­tomers who have a need for your prod­uct and ser­vices, while lead nur­tur­ing involves focus­ing on cus­tomers who have expressed gen­uine inter­est in your busi­ness and your prod­ucts. Lead gen­er­a­tion is the first stage in the cus­tomer jour­ney, while lead nur­tur­ing is every­thing else after that.

Con­sid­er­ing that it’s cheap­er to retain than acquire new cus­tomers, one might argue that lead nur­tur­ing is more impor­tant. How­ev­er, if new leads don’t keep com­ing in, a busi­ness won’t expe­ri­ence much growth.

The fact is, both process­es are essen­tial — no busi­ness can gen­er­ate prof­it or expe­ri­ence growth with­out them. When lead gen­er­a­tion and lead nur­tur­ing are opti­mised, they work togeth­er to help a com­pa­ny achieve its mar­ket­ing and busi­ness goals.

5 Steps to Creating an Effective Lead Generation Campaign

65% of busi­ness­es say that gen­er­at­ing traf­fic and leads is their biggest mar­ket­ing chal­lenge. This is because cre­at­ing an effec­tive lead gen­er­a­tion cam­paign is not only about get­ting more leads; it’s about get­ting qual­i­ty leads.

To acquire qual­i­ty leads who are more like­ly to con­vert, do these five things:

1. Identify your ideal customers

When it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads and mak­ing sales, under­stand­ing your ide­al prospect is every­thing. What are their pain points, and how best can you address them? If you have his­tor­i­cal sales data, use that to iden­ti­fy what char­ac­ter­is­tics your cus­tomers have in com­mon. Then, use this infor­ma­tion to cre­ate buy­er personas.

2. Create high-value lead magnets

Lead mag­nets are offers or con­tent that a prospect real­ly wants. Ide­al­ly, lead mag­nets should offer immense val­ue and be some­thing that a prospect would pay for. Keep­ing your lead mag­nets close­ly relat­ed to your val­ue propo­si­tion allows you to seam­less­ly offer leads more val­ue in the form of a paid product.

3. Craft converting landing pages

A land­ing page sells your lead mag­net, so it should be craft­ed for max­i­mum con­ver­sions. The most essen­tial ele­ments to focus on are the head­line, copy, and call-to-action (CTA). A head­line should hook the prospect and high­light the key ben­e­fit of your lead mag­net. Your copy should be engag­ing and pro­vide more ben­e­fits. Last­ly, the CTA should be clear.

Remem­ber, if a poten­tial cus­tomer can visu­alise how your offer­ing solves their prob­lem, they’re more like­ly to convert.

4. Drive traffic to your landing pages

Once you’ve put all these ele­ments togeth­er, you can dri­ve traf­fic to your land­ing pages and get leads to nur­ture into loy­al, pay­ing cus­tomers. Dri­ving traf­fic involves cre­at­ing aware­ness, inter­est, and engage­ment through var­i­ous chan­nels, such as search engines, con­tent mar­ket­ing, paid ads and social media.

5. Analyse, measure, and repeat

To grow your busi­ness, you’ll need to keep gen­er­at­ing qual­i­ty leads and find­ing ways to do so more effi­cient­ly. There­fore, track the results of your lead gen­er­a­tion efforts and make improve­ments where necessary.

Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid

To get the most out of your efforts, avoid these key lead-gen­er­a­tion mistakes:

Trying to target everyone

It isn’t real­is­tic to tar­get every­one. In fact, doing so is a waste of resources and is like­ly to lead to poor-qual­i­ty leads. When it comes to lead gen­er­a­tion, focus on qual­i­ty, too and not just the numbers.

Buying leads

It might be tempt­ing to buy leads, but these aren’t qual­i­ty leads. Leads acquired this way haven’t expressed inter­est in your prod­ucts or signed up to receive any­thing from you, so you’re spam­ming them. To avoid being flagged and black­list­ed, always gen­er­ate leads organically.

6 Steps to Creating an Effective Lead Nurturing Campaign

80% of new leads acquired in the lead gen­er­a­tion stage don’t result in sales. Addi­tion­al­ly, it takes up to five to sev­en tries to get a lead to trust you enough to con­sid­er mak­ing a pur­chase. Your goal is to grad­u­al­ly earn their trust until they are ready to make a purchase.

For a more effec­tive lead nur­tur­ing cam­paign, focus on these six things:

1. Create a lead-nurturing email sequence

Email mar­ket­ing remains one of the most effec­tive lead-nur­tur­ing tac­tics. This is because emails can be auto­mat­ed, per­son­alised and sent to sub­scribers reg­u­lar­ly to keep them engaged. When a prospect opts in to receive your emails, you can send them emails designed to increase their inter­est lev­els and adjust your emails auto­mat­i­cal­ly based on their behaviour.

Email lead nur­tur­ing best prac­tices include:

• Send­ing week­ly emails to subscribers
• Deliv­er­ing con­tent that is rel­e­vant, valu­able, and engaging.
• Build­ing trust by pro­vid­ing val­ue in every email
• Using rel­e­vant sales pitch­es in your emails to dri­ve sales

2. Focus on personalisation

Per­son­al­is­ing your lead nur­tur­ing tac­tics leads to more con­ver­sions and pro­motes cus­tomer reten­tion. Per­son­al­i­sa­tion involves cre­at­ing great offers for cus­tomers in dif­fer­ent stages of the buy­ing cycle, for exam­ple, pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion­al con­tent for those at the begin­ning of the cus­tomer jour­ney and offer­ing free tri­als or demos for those at lat­er stages.

Tai­lor­ing your CTAs to the buy­er stage is anoth­er way to increase con­ver­sions. In fact, tai­lored CTAs con­vert up to 202% more than stan­dard CTAs.

Craft­ing per­son­alised offers and CTAs for each stage might be tedious, but the rewards are worth it. By cre­at­ing valu­able con­tent that nur­tures prospects down the fun­nel, your chances of mak­ing sales and gain­ing loy­al cus­tomers increase.

3. Automate your efforts

Try­ing to nur­ture leads man­u­al­ly is too expen­sive, not to men­tion time-con­sum­ing. Mar­ket­ing automa­tion involves using soft­ware to sim­pli­fy lead nurturing.

Through automa­tion:

• Lead scor­ing and lead life­cy­cle man­age­ment can be optimised
• Per­son­al­i­sa­tion can be prioritised
• Valu­able lead ana­lyt­ics can be gen­er­at­ed to guide your efforts
• Leads can be con­tact­ed promptly

As a busi­ness, your respon­sive­ness to leads deter­mines whether they become cus­tomers or turn to your com­peti­tors. Because the abil­i­ty to deliv­er results more effi­cient­ly is a source of com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, mar­ket­ing automa­tion is close­ly linked to busi­ness success.

4. Implement lead-scoring

Lead scor­ing involves rank­ing prospects accord­ing to their engage­ment lev­els and buy­ing readi­ness. Through an auto­mat­ed sys­tem, leads are assigned points based on their inter­ac­tions with your con­tent. This helps you fig­ure out who is ready to buy and what they are inter­est­ed in buy­ing — allow­ing you to tar­get them at the right time with the right message.

5. Align sales and marketing efforts

When mar­ket­ing and sales teams work togeth­er, it’s eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy where leads are in the buy­er’s jour­ney. Fol­low­ing up and pitch­ing to leads can hap­pen seam­less­ly, lead­ing to high­er con­ver­sion and reten­tion rates.

6. Optimise your strategy

It’s cru­cial to analyse which leads are con­vert­ing into sales and what nur­tur­ing meth­ods these leads have gone through. Col­lect­ing this infor­ma­tion allows you to keep track of the most effec­tive strate­gies and tech­niques. If you know which meth­ods yield the best returns, you can invest time and effort into them.

Lead Nurturing Mistakes to Avoid

In order to max­imise your lead-nur­tur­ing efforts, avoid these crit­i­cal mistakes:

Not interacting with customers

Not being respon­sive to cus­tomer needs can be detri­men­tal to your busi­ness long-term. A cus­tomer-cen­tric approach devel­ops valu­able, life­long rela­tion­ships. So, inter­act with your cus­tomers through social media and gath­er more insights about their needs and con­cerns through sur­veys and polls.

Poorly planned sales pitches

Ulti­mate­ly, sales pitch­es will per­suade your leads to buy from you. If you aren’t pitch­ing to your leads strate­gi­cal­ly dur­ing the nur­tur­ing process, you’re miss­ing out on con­ver­sions. Sim­i­lar­ly, if your sales copy is flat and fails to con­vey val­ue, you’ll strug­gle to gen­er­ate sales. Invest in clear; com­pelling sales copy to get bet­ter returns.

Final thoughts

Your lead gen­er­a­tion and lead nur­tur­ing process­es must be opti­mised con­tin­u­ous­ly to yield returns. One process can­not exist with­out the oth­er; instead, they must work in har­mo­ny to ensure con­ver­sions and, ulti­mate­ly, busi­ness success.