When thinking about the marketing process as a whole, many business owners and non-marketing leaders tend to get caught up in the attraction piece—how you attract potential customers. While this is incredibly important, what follows is where the real magic happens. It’s the less-sexy part of marketing: the Lead Generation process. And that’s what ultimately leads to a sale.

The Lead Generation Process has three main parts:

1. Identifying your target audience,

2. Attracting them, and

3. Determining if they’re ready to buy.

Because many people tend to only think of the first two when they think of marketing, it has led to the term “marketing” often being confused for “advertising”. It is true, making your brand and offerings visible to your ideal customers is extremely important, but what happens once they become aware? Once they show interest? Ideally, it would automatically translate into a sale, but realistically, there are just too many roadblocks that tend to get in the way of the happening.

What Lead Generation Means For Your Business

You’ve thought of and done everything you possibly could do to attract an audience to your service, but engagement overall seems low. You may feel discouraged and frustrated. You keep rethinking your strategy, wondering if you are using the right advertising avenues, or even have your target audience right, but nothing seems to work. Or maybe, your online ads and website traffic have been performing past your expectations, but not enough of it is translating into sales.

If you’re feeling this, it may be time to reexamine what problems exist within your marketing approach as a whole, specifically the Lead Generation Process.

If you’re putting dollars into efforts to grow your visibility and awareness, it’s just as important to put the same effort into seeing that lead all the way through the process of consideration to determine if they’re likely to become a customer. Basically everything before they get to the checkout or talk to a sales person. This is especially critical if you have a complex or high-value product or service, which typically means customers take longer to make decisions (e.g. B2B).

The best way to improve your lead generation process is simple: walk them through each step of their buying process, answer their questions, and make it as easy as you can. 

While this may seem overwhelmingly obvious, the fact is that customers are looking for a clear and easy way to purchase your product or service, and unless they have extreme loyalty to your particular brand, they could be prone to choosing an alternative that is easier or more convenient.

An Effective Lead Generation Process

So let’s get into how you can improve your Lead Generation Process (or your Sales process, depending on your business):

• Direct advertising traffic to your dedicated landing page, not your home page. Think about what the specific advertisement is hinting towards, if it’s not on the homepage, don’t link it. Landing pages keep your customer focused on the task at hand. And speaking of that…

• Use a clear call-to-action: make your primary message clear and painfully obvious. Whatever action you want them to make, put it front and center.

• Be generous with sharing content (to a certain extent)—Helpful content at no cost not only naturally builds a sense of trust, but can work well to get users to come back for more, which gives you another opportunity to engage.

• Follow up on new leads via email. Avoid following up through the phone unless you’ve previously established that this is your intent. I hear some of you gasping right now. I know! This is a change! I still hear people talking about “speed-to-lead” and how it’s critical that you call someone immediately after a lead comes in, but this simply isn’t my experience…as a marketer or as a consumer. If you’re going to call, just make sure it’s obvious on your landing page or lead gen form that that’s what they’ll get from you.

• Tell users exactly what they will receive when completing any sort of form. For example, if you want customers to subscribe to your newsletter, avoid stating “stay updated on our news!”—What sort of news? What topics do you cover? What’s in it for them? Be more specific. What would they seek out in their cluttered inbox?

• Be cautious about asking for a sale too early. Just as you wouldn’t propose on the first date, be sure not to jump the gun before the customer is ready. This is why the ol’ “used car salesman” vibe is such a turn off…when you’re not ready to buy and someone keeps pushing it, it has a negative effect and you lose trust.

• Reduce the clicks. Whether it’s to reach a form, download, or contact information, the fewer buttons users have to navigate to get there, the better.

• Reach out to the engaged audience members, and ask for that sale! Audience members that have shown continued interest through subscribing, downloading PDFs/content, and viewing your videos, may already have been considering your product for some time—and may just need the final push. (Note: advanced tracking and first-party data is needed to get to this point. More simply, a tool like MailChimp will tell you who your most engaged audience members are.)

• Last but not least, make the process as frictionless as possible. Think of e-commerce: you simply want to check out the purchases in your bag, but it asks you 8 different questions you need to agree with, you need to click through upsells and countless product announcements, re-enter billing and shipping info separately, etc… gah, so frustrating! (I’m looking at you, GoDaddy. 👀) Reducing the number of steps the customer has to take to get from A to Z not only makes the customer more appreciative, but makes sales/conversions go up.

“I probably don’t want to work with that person anyway if they can’t find a simple contact form!”, you may be thinking. However true that statement may be, it is a dangerous thought process to have. Not only can it ruin your marketing pipeline, but even your brand. Your entire brand is inevitably based on the perception built by customers through their experience, not by you or your company.

The Lead Generation Process is the unsung hero of effective marketing. While attracting an audience is essential, the real magic happens when those leads are seamlessly transformed into sales.