Why is Online Lead Generation important?

Lead generation is important to any company that wants to show steady revenue growth and results.

Yet, most companies do not have lead generation programs in place. Instead they depend on existing customers, and word-of-mouth to “spread the word” about their businesses. Otherwise, they hire more sales personnel to increase their revenue. Is this still as effective in the current digital age?

Most customers are now looking for products/services using online search engines like Google. They probably  have confirmed the sales with another provider by the time your sales personnel reached them.

This may sound exaggerated. But companies that do not have any lead generation programs,  are synonymous to a person sitting under an apple tree, waiting for the apple to drop.

Consider this, wouldn’t it be a better idea to know which apple is going to drop, so you know where you should be standing? How can we apply this analogy to lead generation?

Extend your reach online

Instead of standing under a single tree, multiply your position to stand under as many apple trees as possible. This means companies should increase their channels for lead generation, and what better way to do this then to extend your reach online. According to 2014 Global Digital Statistics, Stats & Facts, there are approximately 2.5 billion people online. However, unless your product/service is suitable for everyone, it will be most effective to develop targeted online marketing campaigns.

Create targeted online campaigns based on customer profiles

Nowadays, most online advertising media provide some form of targeting for advertisers. Facebook, for example, provides profile selections for age, gender and profession for your target audiences. This is analogous to multiplying your positions under apple trees, but directly below a bunch of apples that are most likely to fall.

Unfortunately, these targeted campaigns also yield a list of unidentified prospects that may have shown interests on your products/services.

Build relations with prospects and nurture them to leads

Prospects that does not convert to sales right from the start doesn’t mean they will not do so in the future. In order to get more opportunities and nurture our prospects to sales leads, we need to capture their contact details.

A great way to do this is to offer incentives in the form of newsletters, ebooks, or whitepapers. This depends on resources available within companies.

Another way is to provide online form for request of more information or callback. Despite the different methods, it is more important that companies continue to engage these prospect and nurture them into leads.

To complete the picture, this is similar to identifying trees that we need to put more fertilizer, water and sunlight, or improving conditions that increases probabilities of more apples falling.

We have used a very simplistic analogy of apple trees to illustrate the complex process of lead generation online. Then again, in the current digital era, marketing has to evolve with the opportunities available online. Otherwise, we may simply lose our competitiveness within our industries.