Growing your business depends on successful lead generation — that is, identifying what your potential customers look like, tailoring content to their pain points, and ultimately proving how your product or service solves their problem.
In a fast-paced world of online sales and an overabundance of content, it can be challenging to earn someone’s attention enough to turn them into a lead — and then into a potential buyer you can hand over to your sales team.
To stand out, you’ll need a successful lead-generation strategy that creates effective content in the right channels. And once you’ve crafted the right content that converts into leads, you’ll still have to qualify them before sales teams will take them seriously.
Lead generation is the marketing process through which you identify and attract potential buyers, then capture their information for the sales team to convert them into actual buyers.
Lead generation, can be complex and take several weeks or even months per lead over the course of the buyer journey. Lead generation can apply both to business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) processes, though we’ll focus this discussion on the former. Furthermore, there are considerations marketers should take when planning their lead generation for small businesses vs enterprises.
Keep in mind: Leads aren’t just anybody. They’ve got to be potential customers who have a need or problem to solve and your product or service has to offer a solution. In B2B marketing and sales, the lead must be a decision-maker at a company with real buying power, or someone who has serious sway with the budgetary decision-maker.
Types of Leads
We generally categorize leads into four categories:
1. Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are people who have indicated an interest in your product or service by taking a key action, such as:
- Downloading a white paper or coupon.
- Exchanging information for a lead magnet.
- Attending a webinar or conference.
- Filling out a contact form.
2. Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs)
While getting leads to exchange their contact info and engage with your marketing assets is a great indication they may purchase, sales teams will want more assurances. For a MQL to become a sales-qualified lead (SQL), the sales team will need to do further analysis. Often, they’ll be looking for strong matches to their buyer personas — data-driven archetypes that represent ideal buyers.
3. Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)
In some cases, you may get a product-qualified lead (PQL). This is a potential customer who has used a free download of your product.
4. Service-Qualified Leads
Similarly, service-qualified leads refer to potential customers who have gone beyond exchanging their information and instead have requested a consultation to learn more about your service offering.
Note: In the industry, SQL refers to sales-qualified leads, not service-qualified leads.
Understanding the Funnel
Lead generation requires a thorough understanding of the marketing and sales funnel. The marketing funnel is a useful way to chart the buyer’s journey from discovery of your product, through research and evaluation, to a decision point — that’s where sales can take over.
You’ll gather a lot of potential leads at the top of the funnel (TOFU), narrow it down to more serious buyers in the middle of the funnel (MOFU), but ultimately hand off the most likely buyers to sales once you reach the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
Lead generation requires that you implement the right kinds of content — via the right channels for that content — at each stage of the funnel.
Top of Funnel
The TOFU is where you cast the widest net with your content marketing strategy. You’re trying to educate potential customers about your brand and its products and services.
Common types of content for top-of-the-funnel lead gen include:
- Blogs.
- Social media.
- Videos.
- Infographics.
- Podcasts.
Here, your content should educate and create awareness. Potential leads who engage with your content should leave your content feeling curious, motivated to learn more about how your product or service can meet their needs.
Middle of Funnel
It may take several touchpoints at the top of your funnel before potential customers move to the middle of the funnel, where they are more seriously considering your solution and comparing it against alternatives.
Here is where you want to create content that dives deeper into customer pain points and how your product or service solves them. That may include:
- Webinars.
- White papers.
- eBooks.
- Newsletters.
- Interactive tools.
Bottom of Funnel
Leads enter the bottom of the funnel when they’re ready to make a decision. At this point, they’re considering any objections to your product or service and typically need content that convinces them to go with your solution over a competitor’s.
Content that does well at the bottom of the funnel includes:
- Customer testimonials.
- Reviews.
- Case studies.
- Demos and free trials.
What Is the Lead Generation Process?
The lead-generation process is complex and can span several months per customer, depending what buyer journeys look like in your industry. That said, you can break down the complicated process into bite-sized steps that help you visualize what your marketing team needs to do to succeed.
Here’s how it works:
Identify Audience
First of all, you need to determine who your actual buyers are. This will allow you to create content that targets the right audience and you won’t waste time trying to tailor content to people who are unlikely to ever convert.
Marketers typically refer to this as creating buyer personas. Depending on your products and services, you may have more than one buyer persona. These personas are crucial for success. According to HubSpot, 94% of marketers report that having personas increases sales.
Work with sales and the product team to design these personas, using:
- Data about past buyers.
- Details about the kinds of problems your solution solves.
- Web, social, and email analytics.
- Personas your competitors are targeting.
Typically, personas are given a human name, such as Joe or Lisa. This helps you differentiate among the handful of personas your company might have across a few different solutions.
So what makes up a buyer persona? A successful buyer persona is typically defined via:
- Age, gender, and education level.
- Job title, industry, and budget.
- Other demographic information, such as income level and location.
- Personal interests and tech/media preferences.
The bullets above are quantitative data points that you can gather through analytics, forms, surveys, and your customer relationship management (CRM). You may also want qualitative data to inform your persona and further humanize your potential customer. Consider the following:
- What pain points is your ideal customer trying to solve?
- Which words do they use to describe their problem and ideal solution?
- Which media do they like to use to research and evaluate?
Attract Leads
Once you know who your ideal customers are, you’ll need to figure out how to get their attention in an increasingly crowded online space. This comes down to:
- Creating the right content for each stage of the funnel and on the channels your buyer personas prefer to use.
- Using a combination of organic and paid strategies to get your content in front of your customers.
Later on, we’ll dive into these concepts in more detail.
Capture Leads
In an ideal world, you’d be able to capture your lead the first time you attract a potential buyer to your website. They’d fill out a form, and you’d pass off their info to sales — and voila, your job is done.
However, it may take a few times (and some retargeting strategies) to get your lead back on your website and ready to convert. The more optimized and efficient your landing page is, the more likely the buyer is to convert.
Some strategies to capture leads on your site include:
Gated Content (AKA Lead Magnets)
Gated content, also referred to as lead magnets, requires users to supply information, often an email address or phone number, in exchange for a valuable resource you’re offering. You may also ask for their job title or company name when offering access to gated content, but be careful: The more information you ask for, the less likely someone is to move forward. It’s a balancing act.
Of course, this data is helpful for you in marketing to your lead and qualifying them, but there’s got to be something in it for the user, too. Many people are cautious about giving out personal information, so your lead magnet has to be really juicy.
This might be:
- A white paper with survey data that demonstrates problems and solutions that are relevant to your buyer.
- An educational video with helpful tips related to your lead’s problems.
- A recorded or upcoming webinar that goes into detail about your lead’s problems and how you can solve it.
Pop-Up Ads
Pop-up ads might be a nuisance, but when they’re used strategically — and sparingly — you may be successful in getting data from your site’s visitors, including names and email addresses. Try a mixture of interstitials, exit-intents, and slide-ins, using A/B testing to understand which types of pop-ups perform, and at what frequency.
According to Wisepops’ 2024 analysis of 513 million pop-ups, the conversion rate for pop-up ads is 4.01%. That’s a healthy number, but keep in mind, you could be frustrating the 96% who don’t convert. An older study from HubSpot found that nearly three in four consumers say pop-ups are annoying.
Chatbots
As generative AI becomes more embedded in every aspect of your marketing strategy, it makes sense to enhance your current chatbots to engage with your potential leads by answering their questions and providing resources.
But your chatbot can also collect information from your lead in a different format from a traditional form, asking questions about the user’s demographics to help fine-tune responses — and feeding that data back to your marketing team to help qualify the lead.
Chatbots can even help users book consultations or sign up for webinars to learn more about your product or service.
Qualify Leads
Gathering a lead’s information does not mean you’re ready to pass them off to sales. Salespeople are just as busy as your marketing team, so they don’t want to waste their time contacting leads who aren’t likely to convert.
That’s why you need to qualify your leads before handing them over. Work with your sales team to figure out how to score leads as they come in and only pass off leads that achieve a certain score. Don’t worry; you won’t need pen and paper. Marketing automation tools can help you score leads at scale.
Later on, we’ll walk you through how to score leads in detail.
How to Attract Leads
Earlier, we established there are two core tenets to attracting leads:
- Creating good content.
- Making sure that content gets seen by the right people.
Let’s dig into these concepts in more detail.
Creating Good Content
Good content might look different for each organization. Your buyer personas should help you determine the kinds of content your ideal buyer finds most helpful and the channels where they would like to find that content.
Good content might include:
- Blogs.
- White papers.
- Case studies.
- Videos.
- Social posts.
- Webinars.
- Surveys and quizzes.
- Interactive tools.
- Coupons.
Whatever shape your content takes, it should establish you as a thought leader in your industry by demonstrating your knowledge of the challenges your customers face — and that you have the right solutions to resolve those challenges.
The channels for that content could be just as varied:
- Your blog or website.
- Social media (Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, even TikTok — meet your customers where they are).
- Email newsletters or even traditional channels such as direct mail, print ads, or TV/video ads.
Making Sure That Content Gets Seen
It’s not enough to create content; you need to make sure customers can find it. That generally requires a mix of:
- Search engine optimization (SEO).
- Organic and promoted social posts.
- Search engine marketing (SEM).
- Display, discovery, and print ads.
- Influencer marketing.
- Native advertising and sponsored content.
- Earned media.
How to Nurture Leads
Nurturing leads is all about that MOFU content. Once you’ve grabbed your potential customers’ attention, you want them to return to your site, time and again, for more content that educates them, helps them problem-solve, and ultimately convinces them you’re the right long-term solution for their ongoing business needs. This is particularly important for small business or B2B lead generation, as sales cycles are typically longer than B2C funnels.
Easier said than done, right? You’ll need the best and brightest on your team to tackle strategies such as:
- Retargeting: This means following your site visitors around the web with relevant advertisements that encourage them to come back to your site to continue their journey (and potentially convert).
- Effective landing pages: You want a well-designed email capture landing page that makes it clear what action customers should take to solve their problem. You want one single call to action on your landing page that you reinforce naturally during their time on the site, all driving them to that conversion.
- Email marketing: Just because you’ve gotten a lead’s email doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been captured. You need them to engage with your emails over time; emails should be personalized, with automations firing at each stage of the customer’s journey. Ultimately, the emails should either motivate them to reach out for a consultation or yield enough data to qualify the lead for sales to reach out.
- Omnichannel experiences: Your customers don’t exist in a single place. They may read a blog, start following you on LinkedIn, sign up for a webinar, download a white paper, join your newsletter, read some testimonials, and finally be ready to purchase. You need to ensure a seamless experience at every touchpoint, from social to email to web content to videos.
How to Qualify Leads
To qualify leads, refer back to your buyer personas. These personals represent your ideal customer — that is, those most likely to convert.
Using these personas, you can create a scorecard to rate incoming leads. For each demographic or data point a potential lead matches with your persona, they’ll earn points. It’s up to you to determine how valuable each data point is. Maybe having a certain amount of budget and working at a medium-size business are more valuable than being in a certain industry, and a specific department merits more points when a lead is a match.
The sales team will be able to help you figure out which data points are more important. Your CRM makes it easy to find trends among past customers that can inform which attributes are paramount in potential buyers. You can also check past customers’ website, email, and social analytics to track how they interacted with your brand before purchasing. Maybe there’s a magic number of times they need to visit your website before converting, or maybe there’s a key white paper they need to read before being ready to buy.
You’ll get the data for your lead scoring from a number of places, including:
- Data that the lead shares when filling out a form.
- Website, social, and email analytics.
- Public data about the lead’s company and industry.
Work with sales to set a threshold. If a lead earns X amount of points, they’re considered qualified, and you can move them onto the sales portion of the funnel.
Key Takeaways
Lead generation is a complex and lengthy process. When done well, you’ll be able to attract the right buyers, get them interested in your product, and ultimately get their contact information so you can hand them over to sales to close the deal. An effective lead-gen strategy requires everything from helpful content to well-designed landing pages to expertly managed emails, social posts, and advertisements to a sound lead-scoring program.
Now learn how to run a successful lead generation campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the best strategy for lead generation?
The best lead-generation strategy depends on your brand, your product or service, your industry, your competitors, and, most importantly, your ideal customer.
That said, an omnichannel lead-generation strategy — one that creates a consistent customer experience at every touchpoint — is typically the best approach. That means unified messaging across channels and content types, ultimately making sure your ideal customer knows they can trust you to solve their challenges.
Is generating leads hard?
Generating leads is challenging for marketers. In fact, according to a 2024 marketing report by HubSpot, 15% of marketers said that generating traffic and leads was their biggest challenge.
What is the fastest way to generate leads?
Lead generation is a process that takes time, and the bigger the sale, the longer it takes to nurture potential leads before they’re ready to convert. That said, you can expedite the process by getting referrals from current customers, increasing your ad-spend budget to promote content that’s been proven to convert, and creating time-sensitive offers (e.g., discounted pricing for a limited time).
