Customers buying products and services offered by the company decide whether the company is profitable. Running a business on the market without customers would be pointless.

In this article, we discuss what a sales lead is, why it is so important, and how to get one.

If you are interested in leads check also our review of Woodpecker. With this e-mail marketing tool, you can warm-up your leads.

Sales Lead – what is that?

Sales lead is, in a nutshell, contact to the person interested in the offer – it can be not only a private person interested in our services, but also a large company.

In online marketing, sales leads are obtained, among others, through forms in which Internet users voluntarily provide information about themselves – this is primarily about the name, surname, contact details and, optionally, the company name, company address and information about interest related to the given offer.

We divide the leads as follows: cold, warm and hot, as well as B2B and B2C. They can be obtained in many different ways. As we already know what a sales lead is, let’s move on to their division.

Cold, warm or hot? The most important types of leads

1. Cold lead is a type of lead that cannot yet be described as a potential customer of our company. Despite the fact that at the moment they are not interested in our offer, there is a chance that in the future they will become our market and will be hot or hot leads.
   You don’t have to interact with them right away. Such a person will be, for example, a customer planning to launch a restaurant, who must first perform a general renovation in a rented premises. However, he does not yet know in what style he wants to decorate the restaurant.
2. Warm Lead is a group of potential customers interested in our products, but at this time they do not want to finalize the transaction yet. To encourage them to buy, you need to take a number of marketing activities to keep in touch with them.
   In this way, a warm lead can quickly turn into a hot lead that is determined to make a purchase.
3. Hot Lead is the customers who have seen the offer of our products and services and are determined to make their purchase at this time. If we get such a customer, we must provide him with the highest level of service.
   If we forget about it, there is a risk that we will lose it. In many cases, these are leads that have themselves decided to use our offer due to the recommendation of a friend.
   For example, a hot lead is someone who is looking for winter shoes because the harsh winter has arrived.

We can also classify leads according to who fills them in. Lead B2B is a company interested in our offer (B2B – business to business), while B2C (business to customer) is a lead to a single potential consumer.

How to get leads? Several working ways

At the moment, there are many proven ways to acquire leads. One of them are campaigns in Google Ads. Google is a global tycoon, visited daily by millions of users around the world.

The presence of the company in Google is an absolute priority in the 21st century. The vast majority of consumers are looking for information on any topic in this American search engine.

Thanks to the Google Ads campaign, you can generate a large number of sales leads very quickly. Ads that appear in the search engine are above the natural results, thanks to which many users pay attention to them.

The effectiveness of campaigns in Google Ads is confirmed by many entrepreneurs who thanks to this tool have gained a wide range of dedicated clients.

Social media lead campaigns

Every company that depends on achieving success (especially among younger customers) must maintain their company profiles in social media. The absolute minimum is of course Facebook, but many entrepreneurs also decide to run a profile on Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat.

If we want to generate as many hot leads as possible, we should not limit ourselves to just one social platform.

Before you start posting in any social medium, however, you need to think carefully about what our potential customers will be.

It is necessary to specify the style of published posts and the frequency of their placement. It should be remembered, however, that if we do not use the Facebook Ads system, we will only rely on ordinary organic posts, the effectiveness of the lead acquisition activities may be initially unsatisfactory.

Email marketing for lead generation

It is for a reason that almost every e-shop or company asks us on its website to provide its e-mail address. Email marketing campaigns are still a very effective method for generating B2B and B2C leads.

Thanks to them, it is possible to acquire a wide range of new customers and convince to buy those who have once given up.

Email marketing activities can also be based on cold mailing. The cold mailing campaign is a form of contact used in communication with clients with whom we have not had any correspondence before. It is a type of email that allows us to maintain or establish business relationships and encourage them to buy the products we offer.

Cold email has one distinctive feature. The sender addresses the recipients personally, but that is not all. Each email must look as if it was dedicated to this particular customer.

Personalization of messages is one of the most important elements determining the success of email marketing.

There are many tools that can help us reach the goal. One of the best of them is Woodpecker.