How To Build A Lead Generation Process That Works

A lead generation process is important for any company.

Regardless of industry.

Assuming it’s set up correctly, it’s a process that builds a solid foundation for your company and ensures consistent sales over the long term.

Today we cover eight important steps to building a lead generation process that works. So you can generate more leads and convert them more reliably to customers.

Eight Steps For Your Lead Generation Process

1) Understand the lead generation funnel

The first step to creating an effective lead generation process is to understand how it actually works. The best image for that is the funnel.

While we’ve written about a lead generation funnel before, here’s a recap.

• You attract new visitors to your website.
• A certain percentage of your site visitors convert to leads. 
• A certain percentage of your leads convert to customers.

While simplified, this is an important process to keep in mind during your entire lead generation process. People at different stages of it will want different things from you as a company. For example, you shouldn’t communicate with somebody who discovered your company yesterday in the same way as a longtime reader of your blog content.

These are different people with different needs. Accordingly, they also represent different opportunities for your business.

2) Set up your website to be user friendly

Your website is the most important digital asset that your company has. It’s where your audience will spend the majority of their time and likely the “end point” of any content promotion you.

As we say in our post about user experience, your website is also super influential in crafting your audience’s image of you as a company.

For more information on the most important parts of a website, give this post a read.

3) Research your audience to see what their pain points are

While understanding your audience is helpful for the next step of making compelling content, it actually helps in every area of your business.

New ideas for product features? Better design for your landing pages? Added content to your “FAQ” section?

These are all questions that can be answered by taking the time to talk to your audience.

4) Create great “10x content”

Modern marketing, for the majority of businesses, requires some form of content.

That’s because the competition for most niches has never been as fierce as it is now. Barriers to entry are low. Costs of starting a business are (quite often) cheap.

Plus, there are likely a ton of freelancers out there that are willing to provide your exact service at a fraction of the cost.

So how do you win the trust of your audience and differentiate yourself from the crowd?

Through great content. And not just any content, but “10x content” that is better than any other page out there on that specific topic. This is the type of content that demonstrates your expertise, builds authority in your niche and warms up your audience to buying from you instead of your competitors.  

This type of content is also the key ingredient to successful long term SEO, which will gradually drive more and more traffic to your website. 

While this is admittedly a tall order, getting started with a content plan is the first and most important step.

5) Create relevant lead magnets

The last step in turning a stranger into a lead will usually come with lead magnets. These are valuable pieces of “gated or locked content”. That means that your audience can only access them by providing their email address. 

The goal here is to create something so valuable that your audience doesn’t think twice about providing their email address.

While certain lead magnets perform better than others, you are really only limited here by your imagination.

Most important is that the lead magnet actually is valuable to your audience and provides them with a solution to one of their problems. Assuming you’ve completed step 3 and adequately researched your audience, coming up with a valuable lead magnet shouldn’t be too much of a problem. 

Still, if you want some ideas, be sure to check out OptinMonster’s master list of 69 lead magnet ideas.

6) Promote your content on different platforms

Once you’ve created content that can help your audience and set up lead magnets to collect their contact information, it’s time to promote your content.

Putting it on your own website is just the first step. If you really want as much traffic as possible, this is when you need to expand to other platforms. This could be anything from your own social media pages to other websites as a guest post.

Regardless, make sure content promotion becomes just as much a habit for your company as content creation.

7) Capture email addresses and nurture your new leads

At this point you have brought traffic to your well-designed website, created and promoted content that you know to be helpful to your audience, and offered them valuable lead magnets.

It’s natural that a certain portion of your site visitors will start converting to leads.

Assuming that your goal is to convert these leads to paying customers, the process of lead nurturing is essential. This is the process of building relationships with your new leads through the value that you create, and it’s usually done with email marketing. 

By doing so, you further build trust with them and establish your business as their potential first choice for the product or service you provide.

Lead nurturing follows no set timeline. That’s because your leads are all different, and will have different lengths of time before they are willing to pay. Most important is that you continue to provide value through email (blog post alerts, case studies, updates on the projects your company is involved in, etc.) for free. 

If you do, a certain amount of email leads will eventually become happy customers.  

8) Continually improve

A true lead generation process makes room for mistakes. It accepts that false starts will happen and treats setbacks as a great way to learn.

That’s why the last (and potentially most important) step is about improvement. You won’t get it right the first time.

Perhaps your company is inconsistent with content. Maybe you make a lead magnet that nobody responds to. Or maybe your email marketing isn’t as effective as it could be.

Whatever happens, making room to learn and continually improve as a company is what will set you up for a lead generation process that is effective far into the future.

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Are you an enterprise, nonprofit or small business looking for help on your website? Give us a shout! We provide a free consultation. Email us at info@lughstudio.com or call us at (718) 855-1919!