Lead Generation, How Does it Work?

Lead generation is matching a motivated consumer (hopefully a buyer) with a motivated sales person to talk about a product or service. In recent years this space has been dominated by financial services, real estate, and mortgage. However, more recently this fastest growing segment of online advertising has crossed over into education, debt settlement, travel, entertainment, even multi-level marketing (MLM).

Generating a Lead

The principle is simple and pretty logical evolution of the earlier online marketing models that emphasized the number of impressions or page views. The only difference is taking those motivated page views to the next step--providing a compelling offer and getting them to ask for more information. This creates a motivated customer inquiry that any sales person would love to talk to.

Lead Generation is Hard to Do

Although the concept seems easy enough getting to the point of a customer raising their hand is quite complex. Your challenge is four-fold:

1. Finding the Right Customer
2. Getting Their Attention
3. Motivating Them to Action
4. Capturing the Necessary Contact and Interest Information

There are thousands of people and websites that devote 100% of their attention to these four challenges.

Targeting a Niche (Finding the Right Customer)

Targeting an appropriate niche, finding what attracts customers, and learning how they behave is a tedious task. In the online world, that means spending hours analyzing Google, Yahoo!, and MSN to determine what people search for and how often.

Generating Traffic (Getting Their Attention)

The Internet is a big place, and expands everyday. Getting a significant number of customers to find your little corner require good search engine placement and also quality referrals from other websites your customers visit. There are lots of ways to generate traffic, but the bottom line is making a very large profile for people to find. Some common techniques include: search engine optimization, link building, paid links, article syndication, display advertising.

Contact Me! (Motivating Them to Action)

The call to action is where psychology and creativity mix in the online lead generation business. You have your perfect customers on your website, how do you get them to raise their hand. It is all emotion at this point. Your content and images need to whip them into a "need and want" buying frenzy--no easy task in this sensory overload world. The benefits need to be clear and the offer require urgent attention. If all works well they are picking up the phone or filling out the Web form.

Lead Capture (Capturing Contact and Interest)

The process of capturing the lead has to be flawless. You have done a lot of work to get the customer to this point, make sure you get the lead. Web forms, the primary means of lead capture, needs to be simple and straight-forward. Complete submission of contact information and basic product or service inquiry should be minimal. Then you need to get it quickly delivered to a sales person and close the deal.

Outsourcing Lead Generation or Buying Leads

Sound like a challenge your not willing to tackle when it is hard enough to keep your sales production growing? Well the good news is that there are a lot of lead generation experts that already have thousands of your target customer flowing into their professional websites, generating more leads than you can call. A good lead provider can provide you leads and even help you filter there constant stream of inquiries perfectly to your business objectives. The best news is most of them will sell their services to you on a pay per lead basis, only paying when they deliver someone for you to talk to.