If you don’t want to dump the productive hours of your sales team into making 8 cold calls and 5 follow-up calls for lead generation, this blog is the right fit for your business. In this comprehensive overview on the future of lead generation, we mentor you to get qualified appointments for your business.
Today, the size of the competition and the verticals of technologies, techniques, and platforms are expanding at lightning-fast speed. So simply staying glued to the vintage rulebook of lead generation and spending over 50% of the budget on it will never fetch valuable leads. Therefore, instead of investing in buying the ad space, brands should aim at investing in increasing their SERP positioning and gaining automation software support.
As per Patrick Delehanty, Marketing Manager at Marcel Digital,
“Personalization is the future of lead generation — highly relevant and targeted offers that are geared toward an individual specific needs and browsing history. A number of years ago, lead generation was about mass communication and offering one thing to a large group. Now and moving forward, lead generation becomes about the segmentation of one; leveraging data, predictive analytics, and personalization tools to tailor a truly unique browsing experience to the individual user, providing information, content, and offers that truly meet their specific needs, increasing engagement and lead generation. Personalization gives the user what they need when they need it.”
Apart from the trending lead generation technologies of 2022 (will talk about it in our next blog), there are multiple other advances in the market to streamline the lead generation moves most effectively. At ClickGlitz, our goal is to counsel our clients on all such trending market solutions, and better their sales productivity and efficiency.
So, let’s tune in to the future of lead generation in 2022 and beyond with:
1. Extensive use of buyer intent data
Buyer intent data allows the professionals to identify the behaviour of the leads and their stage in the buying cycle.
Few attributes that form part of this buyer intent data are:
- Website visitors reading the article
- Online visitors browsing a specific page of the website
- Number of site visits
- Engagement level with emails and CTA links
The source of such intent data can be classified as:
- Internal intent data / First-party data
- External intent data / Third-party data
Internal intent data can be collected and acted upon internally. One can instantly take action and execute strategies that will increase the chances of lead generation and conversion. External intent data is collected via a licensed third party. Companies make use of third-party data to counter the complexities of internal data collection.
As per Scott Fingerhut, VP Worldwide Marketing Demand Generation at Elastic
“To me, measuring intent is a requirement. It’s huge for not only identifying short-term purchase potential but matching the message to the readiness for mid-and-long term buyers. With good intent insight, you strive to make every interaction more relevant and every relationship stronger.”
Also, the benefits of using buyer intent data for lead generations can be summarized as:
- Customized prospecting
Intent data makes it easier for the sales team to identify the level of prospective leads’ involvement with their brand. As a result, the prospecting efforts are customized for an increased success rate.
Often the use of intent data also clarifies details like when, where and how the prospect started connecting with the brand. This information helps connect with leads at the early stage of the buying cycle.
These results in productive utilization of the sales team’s efforts and quick prospecting of SQLs or sales qualified leads.
- Betters the sales pitch
Simply making cold calls with no guarantee of getting good leads in return is a waste of time and money.
When salespeople make use of intent data, they can understand the exact need of their prospects. As a result, they can then customize the sales pitches with the offering that exactly match the need of their prospects. These better the chances of getting good/ valuable lead generation.
- Better the prospects of Account-Based Marketing campaigns
Account-Based Marketing Campaigns are the ones where the salespeople target a specific company or audience instead of targeting random prospects. The availability of intent data ensures that the ABM campaigns are thoroughly customized to suit the buying intent of the prospect.
This guarantees that at every touch point with the prospect, the probability of the prospect nurturing into a valuable lead is better.
- Supports content marketing
The results of the intent data give information about what the prospective leads want. Accordingly, content marketing strategists can curate content that satisfies the queries of the audience and thus boosts them to nurture valuable leads.
2. Customer-centric marketing
As the name suggests, customer-centric marketing refers to the plans and strategies curated, keeping the customer at the centre of all decisions. Under this approach, marketers don’t aim at increasing the number of targeted leads, instead, they focus on fewer but guaranteed valuable leads. Example: Account-based marketing or ABM.
As per Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader,
“Customer centricity is a strategy that aligns a company’s development and delivery of its products and services with the current and future needs of a select set of customers in order to maximize their long-term financial value.”
So what all efforts are needed to make customer-centric marketing the prime reason behind quality lead generation?
- Being omnipresent
Being omnipresent means being available on all the channels usually explored by the target audience. Brands need to shout aloud their presence, by either showcasing their brand value or by generating brand awareness or even providing insightful information on brand-specific topics.
Examples of platforms where the brands can mark their presence round the clock are Quora, Reddit, social media platforms, etc.
- Delivering initial brand value to the prospective customer
Your brand should be able to communicate the benefits the customer will experience in connecting with your brand. So once the omnipresence is established, the right first impression should be created.
Often companies make use of blog posts, mailers and other free content tools to proactively offer value to their prospective leads. There are discount codes or free subscriptions provided to the leads, in return for their loyalty or commitment to connecting.
- Repurposing the content
Repurposing the content means streamlining the online presence of your brand in a way that customer wishes to dive deeper into your brand. It’s all about streamlining their first-hand experience from the psychological point of view.
For this, the brand’s website and forums should be well structured and easy to navigate.
- Promoting social proof
People are more convinced via verdicts of the experienced customers of the brand, as compared to any other proof. Therefore, companies take support from testimonials, quotes, statistical findings, and references from actual customers to upgrade their lead generation potential.
- Making use of dynamic content
Making use of dynamic content means to personalize each stage of interaction with the lead based on their intent data, personal data, on-site engagement information, and more.
Offering a special discount to first-time site visitors, or extra offers for those who subscribed to the brand’s messages, are a few examples of this strategy.
- Provide human touch when needed
Digitalization efforts for better lead generation will always rule the future. But, one can not miss the significance of the human touch. People want to interact with other people in actuality.
For this, the brands need to be quick in answering the emails, comments, queries or calls of their prospective customers, at every point in time. Live chat support is one significant example of providing human touch when needed.
3. Video marketing
70% of marketers believe that video marketing is of immense help in lead generation. And why not? Today’s generation finds videos more relatable for understanding any product or service. Videos have visuals to connect with the sight of the prospect and audio to connect with the listening ability of the lead.
As a result, videos have quick attention-grabbing potential, which ultimately leads to lead conversion. Videos are everywhere, be it any social media platform or professional platform. So brands need to wisely select their platform according to the profiling of their prospective leads.
Some of the most popular video platforms are Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.
4. Automation
Automated lead generation strategies are the inbound and outbound marketing tactics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. An essential tool to minimize the leg work of salespeople and speed up the rate of quality lead generation.
For a detailed study on this futuristic lead generation tactic, follow our upcoming blog on the technologies used for lead generation. Over there, we will emphasize the topics like chatbots, web scraping, SEO, ROI calculator, and more.
5. Combining sales and marketing practices into a cohesive unit
Lead generation is not the sole responsibility of the marketers or salespeople. Simply making use of digital tools to support the marketing moves for lead generation will create a backlog of activities for the sales team.
Therefore, once the online presence of the brand is optimized, the focus should be on connecting in person with all the qualified leads. All of this is crucial for long-term lead retention too.
The emphasis should shift from practicing mutually exclusive lead generation practices to mutually inclusive. Businesses need to focus on the combination of strategies used to push leads through the sales funnel. Online branding and outbound efforts should work hand-in-hand for effective lead generation.
Wrapping up
So, if you genuinely aim at leveraging the benefits of trending lead generation solutions, invest in the above best practices. Not only will you experience a growth of over 500%, but the quality of leads and customer relations will also be better to a large extent. For any further information, connect with ClickGlitz – we specialize in turning your clicks into customers.
