When we talk about traditional marketing, you may have visions of long sales pitches and pushy salesmen. But in today’s world, consumers have ready access to all sorts of information and products and they are making their own choices every day about who to listen to, where to shop and what to buy. You may think this takes the control out of the hands of marketers, but in reality…marketing just got a whole lot easier! If you set up a proper inbound marketing campaign, you can literally skip the marketing spiel on why your product is the best and simply wait for potential customers to come to you. That’s how you become a smart lead generator. Why would you want to miss such a great opportunity?

What does a Lead Generator do?

Lead generators are like the superheroes of the marketing world and ass the name implies, they are responsible for generating leads, of course. But in order to understand this, we first need to know what a lead is.

A Lead: someone who has expressed an interest in your business or product. Leads show their interest through giving you their personal information, generally through a landing page on your site, in exchange for free information about your business, such as an ebook about your product. But simply having a person’s email or name is not enough to make them a lead for your business. You then have to follow up with targeted advertising and campaigning based on what they found intriguing about your site.

How Much Information is Enough?

This is a critical question to ask yourself when creating the landing page on which your prospective clients will submit their information. Asking for too much or too detailed information can weird people out and drive them away – after all, we all know that privacy is one of the most fiercely protected rights. However, if you ask for too little information, you have nothing to work with when attempting to contact them later. Essentially, you have to ask yourself what information you absolutely need, ask for that information and nothing more. Finding that bare minimum of information is critical to effectively generate leads.

Here’s a tip: Start with the slimmest, most basic form you can imagine (name and email) and once you’ve got a good base of leads accumulated, start testing the limits of your form fields. Add a couple of non-required fields like phone number or industry. If you’re still experiencing a great conversion rate, you could even change them to required.

The balance of finding the right kinds of fields and the right number of required fields is going to be specific to your site and your visitors, so just keep testing until you’ve hit a sweet spot and really optimized your forms.

Why Inbound Leads are Amazing

Generally, the kind of leads we have been discussing so far (and the kind we are assuming that you want) are called inbound leads – these are leads that have been to a landing page on your website and have essentially self-selected themselves by volunteering their information. Inbound leads make your job of selling your product much easier since they have already been exposed to your product and have expressed an interest in it. Don’t let these leads slip through the cracks! Be sure to have an automated system in place so that your sales team knows how and when to contact these potentials for a proper follow-up. They may not be ready to buy right away, but that’s why we always recommend creating workflows for continued lead nurturing.

Being a smart lead generator means that you need to be able to do the following effectively:

• Bring traffic to your site (we discuss this more in another blog on generating traffic)
• Have a valuable offer to deliver
• Ask for the right information
• Use the information given to you in a timely, effective manner
• Commit to thorough follow up and lead nurturing