Every marketing campaign, product launch, or sales strategy aims to turn potential customers into real ones. Knowing who your potential customers are and where to find them is crucial for this process. This is why sales leads are a top priority for every sales representative or marketer.
To turn leads into customers, you need to know where to find them and how to manage them. The guide below will teach you about managing leads - from identifying them to capitalizing on them. Let’s dig in!
Image taken from Pexels
Who are Leads?
By definition, in the marketing and sales niche, a lead is a person or a business that has shown interest in what you’re selling. This doesn’t mean they’re negotiating the price with you or preparing their shopping bin. It simply means you’ve managed to catch their attention.
Therefore, leads are individuals who can potentially become customers if you:
- recognize and detect them
- segment them based on different criteria
- reach out using specific strategies that match their needs
There’s a lot of work to turn a lead into a customer, and knowing your leads' main sources is a great start.
What are Lead Sources?
Now we’ve come to the good part. Learning about the main lead sources for your business and sources you can start using in the future should be a top priority. So, what are lead sources?
Lead sources are channels that potential customers use, which leads to them discovering your business. Lead source channels include:
- social media
- blog content
- search engines
- emails
- paid advertising
- virtual and live events
- backlinks
- cold calls
All these channels can help you generate leads, bringing more people into contact with your business. However, you should not be using all of these channels at once. Instead, you need to learn about which ones work best for your potential customers and buyer persona.
Examples of How Lead Source Channels Work
Let’s take a look at some examples and try to understand how certain channels help you generate leads. Below, we’ll break down the most popular channels for lead generation.
Email marketing
You can use pop-up and subscription forms on your website to create a newsletter list. Then, once you segment your audience, you'll send them emails to greet them, offer a new product, offer a discount, or invite them to an event.
Social media
Create and distribute the type of content your target audience will enjoy. Share valuable information and links to your website, blog, or online shop, and create stories around your products and services.
You can combine different channels to paint the perfect picture for your potential customers and ensure a steady flow of new leads is coming in regularly.
Benefits of Analyzing Your Lead Sources
You may feel like analyzing what your main lead sources are is redundant. After all, does it matter where the people are coming from as long as they keep on coming? Unfortunately, we need to beg the differ.
Analyzing your lead sources will benefit your business on different levels and help you reach your business and marketing goals. Here are the benefits you can expect.
-
Raising brand awareness
By tracking all your lead sources and learning about the ones that work best for you, you’ll also learn what to focus your marketing efforts on. This way, you’ll further improve these highly efficient lead sources and raise brand awareness.
-
Prioritize Leads
Not all leads that you generate will convert into customers. That means not all leads are equally important to you. By analyzing lead sources, you’ll learn to select the most qualified ones and focus your attention on them.
-
Keep Track of Marketing Campaigns
Are your marketing efforts worth the energy and money you’ve invested? Analyze where all the leads are coming from and see if your marketing strategy needs adjustment. This will save you money and help improve future marketing campaigns.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, lead sources can be vital for the success of your entire marketing campaign. Not only do they tell you where to invest your energy and money, but they also help you reach your business goals faster and more efficiently.
We hope that the ultimate lead sources guide we’ve shared above helped you understand why you need to pay more attention to where your leads are coming from.