Five Steps to an effective lead generation in Hong Kong

What is Lead Generation?

“Lead Generation” is a technical term for attracting potential customers to your business’ product or service. This is done so by inducting your lead (or customer) into marketing software or contact management (for example, the very popular Mail chimp) premised on the assumption that in the entire duration of the buying process, your interested lead would get converted into an unwavering loyalist.

Several businesses employ various tactics to ensure

• How the leads are generated
• The leads are worth pursuing

The aforementioned tactics spawn from the company/business’ brand value and central idea. Therefore, if you own a business, you would rather want to pursue a lead that is genuinely interested in your product/ service than a casual window shopper. For this, you would be required on your part to educate your customers about the exact nature of your business’ offerings. Google Ads and YouTube advertising are extremely popular lead generation sources.

Step 1: Casting the net

Everyone hopes to catch the big fish in the sea, but only few manage to do so. To grab the big fish’s attention, you would have to go astray from the conventional fishing methods. Metaphors aside, let’s talk about how you can begin to do that.

Be extremely specific with your product’s online/offline description content. You might not want to take your chances with the dwindling attention span of today’s average internet user. Try to make your content as engaging and attractive as possible. Solicit the services of a third party content generation company if possible, unless you go over budget on that front.

Furthermore, it is always a good idea to have an internal follow-up engagement options attached to your main content portal. Genuinely interested customers would most certainly click on your follow up engagement link to access more information and that is how you can narrow down your potential leads. Examples of follow-up engagement links or a sign up form include free e-books, questionnaire, whitepaper instruction video or some other piece of information related to your product or service.

 

 

Step 2: Nourishing the pre-existing leads

Now that you have narrowed down on your customer base, it is time to nourish their interest in the hopes for catching the big fish.

All relationships take time to last. The relationship with your potential customer will be no different. To sustain your leads’ interest, motivate them to explore your company’s various offerings. You might do that by sending constant emails to your network of newly appointed lead inductees. Reward them with auto generated responses if they happen to download certain content from your website, or pose unique questions.

Deeply interested leads can be communicated with over the phone. Either the leads with the longest engagement with your product or those with consistent engagement can be talked to directly. Leads like these are the big fish. It is your job to identify and sustain leads like these. This entire process may take anywhere between a month to 12 or more. Make sure that you pursue until the very end.

Step 3: Ascertain each one’s value

Your time is important and so is your lead’s. Make sure either of you don’t waste your time in hopes of an inevitable non-occurrence. Basically, narrow down on only those leads who promise to add value to you pursuits. You can easily do that by tracking the response time of each of your leads. Genuinely interested ones will stick until the very end, while you can easily eliminate the casual one -time window shoppers.

As for the leads already interested in your products and services, it is your responsibility to keep them interested. Nurture them with additional doses of daily information relevant to your mutual interests. A better method to track their interest levels would be by tracking their response levels to each category of information that you send. Depending on that, you can segregate your lead type relevant to different offerings of your company that they are interested in.

Step 4: Convert your leads into sales

While your marketing team shall stand responsible for getting raw leads (fresh customers, retaining them, identifying their interest type, engaging with them and ascertaining their value, it will be your sales team that will actually extract your leads’ value from the cusp of the lead generation and retention funnel.

It is important that you demarcate your company’s lead retention funnel from the sales funnel. You must employ professionals competent enough to identify a healthy, genuinely interested lead into a source for sales. Certain parameters and indicators help demarcate a healthy lead. Apart from the extent and duration of engagement, data sets obtained about the lead’s behavior, their inclination towards acquiring your offer, their budget etc give a fair knowledge of their reliability in terms of sales conversion.

 

Step 5: Evaluate the entire process

To improve and enhance your lead generation process for at least a 20% performance improvement, apply the following:

• Recognize exactly when your lead drops off and try to find out the reason why. Maybe you can modulate certain content to make it more engaging for lead retention. However, this extra effort requires the involvement of the marketing team. Hence make sure your content is engaging enough since the first instance.
• Employ marketing analytics : Data analytics for marketing evaluation is one of the most important tools at your disposal. Analyzing your techniques over a sizeable customer base can help you design better generation tactics. Furthermore, professional analysts can help elucidate complex data sets into simpler graphical or pictorial formats. This would give you a fair idea about experimentation and possible flexible approaches.
• Generating leads at different stages:   Each of your leads enters the sales funnel at different points relevant to her/his interest scope. Try to segregate rational from rash buyers. By doing this, you would be able to create content more suitable to your customers’ needs. This idea is elucidated further by the “pipe analogy”:

1. The pipeline entry: Just as how a pipe’s opening is the entry point for that pipe, your content available openly attracts initial customers and buyers. Social media sites and auto generated emails are some of the best ways to start. The types of content that usually manage to attract potential customers are: blog posts, social media posts, e-books, questionnaires, informational newsletters.
2. Reaching the middle: This is the stage where the lead has shared contact details with you and it is up to you to strengthen the bond further. This is where you can fairly estimate your lead’s education regarding your organization’s offerings. During this time, you can successfully manage to gather further information from your lead and establish their retention. You can do this by creating informational videos, sending newsletters, setting auto generated responses to your lead’s queries and sending product specification information.
3. The End of the pipe: This is where a certain light of clarity starts illuminating the relationship between your marketing team and your lead.  Leads at this step are thoroughly knowledgeable about your product and on the verge of making a purchase. At this point, your content should look strong in terms of product reviews, testimonials and a sales follow-up suit.

Intrinsic organizational policy for lead generation

You must make sure that your organization already follows a lead generation policy subject to tweaks and changes as per changing customer interactions. For this, you must ensure the following in place:

• Your IT department’s competence in handling the entire lead generation process.
• A clear knowledge of specifics involving lead generation and sales conversion.
• Requisite material updated with latest product/service information to retain lead interest.
• Content creation source (whether in-house or third party commissioned). Make sure your content generation department is created before your lead generation launch phase. This team shall be the crux of your entire marketing prowess.
• Make sure you tighten the lacunae in your overall organizational budget to prevent overspending.

The Ultimate Takeaway

A good lead generation process  is just another cog in the wheel of your organization, albeit it is the most important cog. Any chink in the system and the entire system would go haywire. Make sure the various components interact synchronously and efficiently for smooth operations.

Accept ambiguity. The free market is a dynamically evolving entity, fluctuating as per the needs of the market owners and the customers. You must be ever-ready on your toes to adapt to any change whatsoever. Rigid dogmatic adherence will only lead to confusion and ultimate obsolescence. To avoid this, try to research well into market patterns to assess consumer behavior. Accordingly mold your content to satiate the tastes of the conventional customer.

You can even contact commissioned analysts as a last resort to help you design your company’s unique lead generation strategy. Having been trained in a niche field of lead generation, these analysts would be able to help you in reaching better insights about your organization’s central vision. Once you have a clear stance on what kind of leads you wish to attract by what you have on offer, you (or your marketing team) can make better decisions about your lead generation process. Get in touch with us if you want to maximise the impact of your lead generation strategy.