Marketing Leads
Marketing Leads are a company’s potential customers.
How does your business get its customers? Do you have a sign? Do you give people a business card? Do you make posts on local Facebook Communities. These are all examples of Lead Generation. Lead Generation is what companies do to increase or maintain sales and can be done through many methods.
Sales Leads are generated by gathering data about potential customers and using that data to create lists. A lawn service that sends post cards to houses in zip codes that fit their potential service area is using this method of generating leads.
Digital Marketing uses the internet as a low cost way to generate and to maintain customers or leads, because one of the things that computers are really good at is maintaining a database of information. Most of the services on the internet rely on data collection and marketing. This is done through a variety of channels such as social media, web searches, forums, advertising platforms, and blogs. Leads are either Converted into sales or may, after going through a series of temperature swings, fade away.
- Hot leads are where the customer has the budget, the authority, and the need for your product or service.
- Warm leads are where your customer is interested but is missing some of the requirements needed for the lead to become hot.
- Cold leads are the ones that are missing a key component and will be for some time. These are leads that are worth keeping in contact with as they are still potential customers and may get hot any time.
Even for people that have more work than they can handle, it is still a good idea to think about how you manage leads. It is hard to know how things will go in the future and having a good understanding of who and where your customers are will go a long way in making it easier to sleep at night.
Digital Marketing is an entire world of methods and services used to generate and manage leads. It consists of several basic parts.
- SEO
- Social Media
- Digital Advertising
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating a company website that works for search engine companies with the goal of attracting relevant leads.
- Social Media are websites and applications that enable individuals and organizations to create, share content, and to participate in social networking.
- Digital Advertising platforms allow one to place a variety of advertising campaigns across multiple sites and applications.
These parts work together to create a system for creating, managing, and converting leads to sales. A good online marketing campaign will combine many systems and methods to produce relevant leads from each of these parts.