When you start a new business or run an existing one, lead generation is the thing that will help you gain the interest of your potential customers and increase your business revenues. It is an essential part of the sales process for every business. Understanding what exactly lead generation is and how it works will help you effectively use it throughout your sales funnel.
In this guide, we are going to demonstrate the basics of lead generation and the strategies to optimize it.
What is Lead?
A lead is a prospect. It means an individual who expresses interest in your products or services but is not your customer. There are two types of leads: business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer(B2C). Business-to-business leads stand for the business leads that you can acquire as a business yourself. An example is an SEO company marketing its services to an e-commerce company. Business-to-consumer transactions take place between companies and customers. Both B2B and B2C lead generation have their own needs and challenges.
Leads are a part of the consumer lifecycle that they must follow during the transition from a visitor to a customer. Not every lead is equal to the other; some are qualified, while some are nonqualified. The type of leads you are dealing is based on their life cycle stage.
Here are the most popular types of leads in lead generation that you should know:
Marketing Qualified Leads
They are your visitors that fill out your landing page forms after receiving an offer. You can generate marketing-qualified leads by updating your marketing efforts and engaging your customers with your marketing campaigns. They are not always ready to convert into customers.
Sales Qualified Leads
They are your potential customers who have actively shown interest in your products and services. They will accept your offer regarding filling out a form to ask questions about your products and services.
Product Qualified Leads
The next stage is where the customer decides that they are ready to pay for your product or service. Reaching this stage is not always easy. However, companies that offer a product trial or free or limited version of their product can easily get product-qualified leads. For example, you offer a free trial of your anti-virus software. A qualified product lead will use the free version but then demands features only available to paid subscribers.
Service Qualified Leads
They are potential customers who hint that they are interested in becoming your paying consumers. In our above example, a service-qualified lead asks your customer service agent how to upgrade their anti-virus subscription. Your customer representative agent will redirect this customer to the appropriate sales team that will help them upgrade to the paid subscription.
What is Lead Generation?
It is the process of attracting potential customers to your business. You need to do this by nurturing their needs with the end goal of converting them into paying customers.
Offering free coupons, discounts, social media content, blog posts, events, etc., are a few activities you can do to attract customers and hint them to become paid consumers. Many times, you will have to find new ways to attract potential customers.
One of the best ways is to offer them a free trial of your product or service. This helps them naturally get attracted to your product or service.
So lead generation is about coming up with new ideas to engage and interest your potential customers so that they make a long-term relationship with your business.
What is the Importance of Lead Generation?
There was a time when the sales team used to cold call potential customers to turn them into paying customers. But gone were the days, and modern lead generation is all about collecting information about your target audience and delivering tailored products and services to meet their needs.
Here is how an appropriate generation strategy can benefit your business:
Targeting the Potential Customers
With sales lead generation, you can find the target audience that has shown interest in your products. To convert them into customers, you can make use of the collected data and apply them to your marketing campaigns.
Increases Your Brand Awareness
SLQ, or sales lead generation, helps you boost your brand awareness. Qualified leads will always show interest in your brand, and this interest of theirs allows them to know more about your brand, its values, features, and benefits.
Helps You Collect Data
You can easily collect data on how your target audience came to know about your brand or the products and services that you offer. In addition, you can have a good grasp of what marketing strategies worked, what communication strategies you employed worked to engage your target audience, the requirement and expectations of your target audience, etc.
Collecting data should always be your first priority because it's the most effective way to improve your product or service and meet customer expectations.
Helps Your Brand to Become More Trustworthy
What is the easiest way to appear trustworthy to your target audience? Generating leads in the most effective ways and then keep nurturing them as long as your business runs. Well, nurturing them is a community-building strategy that will help you go a long way.
A community is a place where every supporter of your business comes together and waits for your next product to release. Inbound, outbound, and sales marketing are some of the ways you can encourage your supporters to build a community and wait for your next move.
What Types of Marketing Can You Use for Lead Generation?
Inbound marketing, outbound marketing, and sales and marketing combo help you generate qualified leads if you merge them together. Here we are discussing how these things work:
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing involves producing content and promoting it to attract the right customers. The content can be anything, whether blog posts, videos, ebooks, infographics, etc. A blog post you produce or an infographic you design, you have only one aim in mind: to resolve the target audience’s specific problem. Pay-per-click advertisements, social media channels, Search Engine Optimization Strategy (SEO), etc., are content promotion strategies in inbound marketing.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is a marketing technique that takes place after producing content. This means you can carry out outbound marketing strategies after implementing inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is how you let your potential leads know that you have produced content and that it can resolve their particular problem. An outbound marketing strategy is sending out email newsletters to your leads. Another impactful strategy is creating advertisement campaigns that also help draw attention to your brand.
Sales and Marketing
Use the sales and marketing combination to generate more qualified leads. There are social selling, networking, outbound emailing, etc., with which you can generate more leads and nurture them to maintain long-term relationships. There are customer relationship management (CRM) tools available on the internet that help you can track and evaluate the leads before creating tailored content to meet customer expectations.
What Are the Steps of Lead Generation?
Now that you know how to use inbound, outbound, sales, and marketing to create lead generation, here at the steps that you can follow to complete the process.
Step 1: The first is to create brand awareness. Your visitor will learn about your brand from marketing channels and social media pages, blogs, and your website.
Step 2: Direct your visitor to click on your call-to-action (CTA), which may include an image, button, or any tagline or message that encourages your visitors to take action.
Step 3: CTA will redirect visitors to your landing page. A landing page is a page on your website that captures the lead information by offering content or any sort of value that satisfies your customers’ curiosity. You can also provide a free eBook, a digital course, or templates in place of blog posts or content.
Step 4: After redirecting your visitor to your landing page, they will fill out a form, such as a newsletter, to accept the free ebook, digital course, or content you offer.
To sum it up, you get a visitor to click on your CTA and redirect them to your landing page, where they decide to be your lead by signing up for your newsletter.
But these steps take time to complete. And if you don't have the time, do you have the luxury to buy the leads? Let us discuss it below.
Should You Buy Leads?
Your end goal is to create a sales funnel and move your customers to the end of it. However, the process of generating leads takes time, and buying leads will quickly resolve the problem.
But you should refrain from buying leads no matter how convenient it seems. Most importantly, the leads you buy do not know you. When they opted to become your followers, they didn't have the intention to become your customers.
Hence, you will not create brand awareness. Instead of investing money in buying leads, you can use it in your marketing campaigns and advertisements.
How to Qualify Leads?
A lead is a visitor that expresses interest in becoming your customer. Qualifying leads means taking steps to encourage someone to show their interest in your brand.
Here are the ways you can qualify for a lead so that you don't have to buy them:
Measure Their Level of Interest
An interested lead will share contact information to show you that they are interested in your products and services. The amount of information you need to qualify a lead depends on the type of product or service that you offer. For example, if you offer a free eBook, only their email address will work. But if you offer them haircut services at home, you will need their address and relevant personal information.
Scoring Leads
Scoring lead is a technique to rank and prioritize your leads based on the value they create for your brand. It helps your sales team focus their marketing efforts on the high-ranked leads with the highest potential to become your customers. Your sales team may allocate multiple values to the leads to classify them from “interested” to “ready to buy.” The higher a lead has scored, the closer they are to becoming your paid customer.
Regardless of the type and size of the business you run, lead scoring is determined by various factors, including high-quality content, relevant interactions, well-defined buyer personas, engagement from your sales team, etc. You can use a lead generation tool to help you score your leads based on their interests.
What Are the Lead Generation Strategies?
Let us now throw light on the lead generation strategies:
Facebook Lead Generation
Facebook is one of the most common and widely used social platforms companies use to generate online leads. Generating leads from Facebook falls under outbound marketing. You can use outbound links in your posts and craft a bio to attract visitors to your website. There are lead ads on Facebook that give you the option to create a call to action button at the top of your Facebook page so that you can redirect your visitors to your website.
Twitter Lead Generation
The Twitter lead generation card helps you generate leads with a tweet, and for that, the visitors can even exit Twitter and still become a lead. The name of the user, their Twitter username, their email address, etc., will be gathered into the card, and when the user clicks on the submit button, they become a lead.
LinkedIn Lead Generation
A lead generation form in LinkedIn automatically fills up with a user’s profile data when they click on your CTA. When you opt for a LinkedIn advertisement, you can use the Lead Gen Forms.
Pay-Per-Click Lead Generation
The pay-per-click lead generation ads are the ones that appear on your search engine result pages. These advertisements look as though your website has appeared on the SERP, but they are paid advertisements that encourage your visitors to click on your website.
Business-to-Bussiness Lead Generation
Business-to-business lead generations include referrals, conferences, events, etc. You can even make yourself present at trade shows and expos to increase your brand awareness and generate more leads.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs such as contests and giveaways are some of the best ways to generate more leads. Encourage your contestants to share their emails with you to win a chance to get a prize. If you give away a prize that your target audience will be interested in, they are more likely to enter your contest. You can gain a large number of leads during the short period that a contest or giveaway runs.
Cold Outreach
Sending out cold emails to your potential customers is a cold outrage lead generation strategy. Cold outreach is becoming less and less popular because there is a chance that the user will mark your email as spam. But if you follow the right cold outreach strategy, it will gain you some quality leads. Before sending out cold emails like that, research your target audience so that they will not mark your email as spam or will at least consider it before marking it as spam.
SEO
SEO has a great impact on your business’s lead generation, which works better and more effectively than paid marketing campaigns. It is effective because it is an organic lead-generation tactic that allows visitors to find you whenever they are looking for a solution to their problem, and you are the provider. SEO involves content marketing with the right keywords so that the Google search engine marks your site as relevant and makes it easier for your target audience to find you.
Paid Partnerships
Co-market your product or service to generate more qualified leads. If your business works with another partner or company, leverage your partnership to create offers that will be beneficial for both of you. Run marketing campaigns with your partner companies whose brand values and target audience are similar to yours. And then, you can use that partnership to promote your business with your ebooks, templates, reports, etc.
Perform A/B Testing
Your target audience will change over time because people and their preferences change. Trends will change, the behavior patterns of your target audience will change, their opinions will defer, and the way you handle lead generation marketing will also change. However, A/B or split testing is a good way to understand what performs best.
With A/B testing, you can test two arrangements of your CTA button, different versions of your landing page, emails, and other variables. A/B testing will help you understand which version works best or attracts more visitors. It will help you cut down your time and marketing effort by giving you the most efficient results.
Don't worry! You don't have to perform all of these tasks manually because there are different types of lead generation tools available to help you out.
Types of Lead Generation Tools You Must Use
Use the following types of tools when you generate leads for your brand:
Lead Generation
This software helps you monitor the interactions your visitors have with your brand. You can track them, collect relevant data, and use that information to create content for your social channels and website.
Visitors Analytics
Understanding the parts of your website that draw the most visitors is important. Visitor analytics tools will help you understand that perspective by highlighting how users navigate your site and the content they find most engaging.
Scraping Tools
Scraping tools will collect data from various forms on your website and create a lead-generation database. You can automate the collection process of the data of your leads from different touchpoints. It helps you scale data and ensure you are missing no leads by overlooking their presence.
Some of the best lead generation tools in 2025 are Intercom, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Hot Jar, etc.
Wrapping Up
Lead generation is essential for your sales team regardless of how new or old your business is. While creating lead generation, always keep in mind the end goal of your business. Don't forget to define your target audience, create engaging content, help them communicate with you clearly and efficiently, offer incentives, and tweak your lead gen strategies from time to time.
Use the lead generation channels that we have discussed in this guide so that you can source your leads easily. While working on different strategies, make sure to communicate with your sales team frequently to update them and yourself with the new marketing trends taking place in your industry.
Gaurav has 19+ years of experience building and managing scalable web and mobile apps end-to-end, including product design, frontend/backend development, deployment, server management, uptime, performance, and reliability.
