What are leads and why should you work with this strategy?

If you have a company that provides services or sells a product, surely you’ve heard about “target audience”. But what are leads?

A person who is interested in any product or service and that shows that interest is called a lead.

This kind of customer is essential for your brand to grow, regardless of the niche of your business. After all, having the contact information of several people in exchange for information is a great way to figure out how to turn them into customers.

In this post, we’ll help you better understand what leads are and why you should care about them.

What are leads?

In general, a lead is someone who comes into contact with your brand looking for knowledge or more information about your product.

In order to do that, they are willing to let their personal contact information to receive a content offer, usually an informative one.

But do you know where you can ask for your customer’s contact information?

Subscription forms to receive different materials or even to subscribe to a newsletter are excellent for this. This way you can tell who is really interested in knowing more about your products.

But not everybody who follows your brand on the Internet can be considered leads. There are some fundamental differences that you need to know to be able to classify your users.

• Visitors are people who access your website in a given period of time. They are not necessarily frequent visitors, but you know they’ve been there before.

• Subscribers are those who signed up for your newsletter and follow your brand on social media. However, at first, they just want to get informative content. They still don’t know they have a problem that needs a solution. But the interesting thing is that subscribers want to learn more, that’s why they access your page. They are potential leads.
• Leads are users who are within the reach of the company. Because you already have information such as their email address or even their phone number, you can think of strategies to make them your customers. In the digital market, the email address is the information provided by a lead.

But why is it so important to have someone’s personal contact information?

The email is one of the main communication channels on the Internet. Therefore, it is a powerful tool. This type of contact is based on real people who gave permission for you to talk to them.

So, the lead is not just a person who provided her personal information to the Company. She is a qualified contact. Meaning that she is someone who has already identified a problem and knows she needs a solution.

To some marketing scholars, there is a kind of lead called qualified lead. However, this is only a denomination and it depends on your line of study.

So, for this post’s purposes, a lead is any user who already considers buying a product or hiring your service but still wants more information about your brand.

In short: a lead is a potential customer who shows interest in a particular brand, product or service.

What is lead nurturing?

To understand who the people who have a specific interest in your brand are is great for your marketing strategies.

But you need to think about interesting ways to attract and make the leads become customers.

This is what we call lead nurturing.

It is no use to have people interested in your service, who have already provided their email address, if they don’t generate a profit at some point.

You need to nurture your leads. That means going all the way through, from personal contact information to the transformation into a buyer.

This path the lead follows up to the moment she completes the sale is known as buyer’s journey or sales funnel. In other words, it’s what the person does for a company. It’s the experiences for which she goes through until she buys your product.

This journey is divided into three steps:

1. Awareness: when a person faces or expresses symptoms of a problem. At this stage, the research done by the user is more informative, she wants to understand the problem she has.
2. Consideration: the person has already established her problem and named it. She wants to understand the approaches and methods available to solve what she has found out.
3. Decision: the strategy or method to solve the problem has already been chosen. So, this is the stage when the purchase is made. The user becomes a customer.

At all the stages of the buyer’s journey, you can help your customer to better understand her problems.

And how can you do that?

By creating complete and innovative content to educate people looking for your service.

People who search for your brand and let their contact information for you to contact them are in search of something besides the sale and purchase of products. They want to be educated and directed to make a smart decision.

That’s why the focus of your content must not be based only on sales.

Provide impressive information!

Show people that they can use what you offer in the form of educational material. Thus, you empower your potential customers.

How to make a good sequence to nurture leads?

You already know what leads are and you have also understood that they need to be educated to become consumers (leads nurturing).

But do you know how to nurture them?

Before you even think about the content that you will make available, it is necessary to know exactly who your lead is:

• In which stage of the journey (sales funnel) is she?

1. Top of the funnel (awareness).
2. Middle of the funnel (consideration).
3. Bottom of the funnel (decision).

After that, it is possible to think of a good sequence of leads nurturing.

• Use email marketing with specific goals for each person. Base your emails according to the stage in the sales funnel the person is.
• Promote specific email marketing to each lead. Think of a sequence based on an event or a personal characteristic of your audience.
• Send newsletters. Send content that may educate and qualify your lead even more.
• Create a relationship with your current customers and leads.
• Set time intervals for sending emails. Do not send all the content at once in order not to fill up your leads’ Inbox.

Besides knowing what to do, it’s important to understand what should not be done. Pay attention to some mistakes you need to avoid. The most common are:

• Buying mailing lists and send content for people who haven’t provided their email on their own.
• Not mapping the content sent.
• Using the personal email and not the Company’s.
• Not creating a path to lead the person to the next stage in the sales funnel.
• Getting the proportion of content created and sent to each stage of the funnel wrong.
• Not using texts in the body of the message and only sending promotional flyers.
• Assigning separate people for each stage in the buyer’s journey. Remember that the person is the same, but she can be at different stages of awareness.
• Writing only technical texts for the bottom of the funnel.

After you send your content to the leads, you need to analyze your strategy. This is important because you’ll notice what worked and what didn’t. So, you can adjust your results not to repeat the same mistake.

Therefore, examine how your leads respond to your email. Check if your leads have opened the message, downloaded content, what subjects are the most searched. Then, you will be able to come up with an even better strategy and take more and more advantage of your mailing list of qualified leads.

Why should you work with this strategy?

To grow their customer base is a common goal for many brands. And to do that, it is necessary to get new leads. People who are interested in what you can offer are more susceptible to becoming new buyers.

So, the importance of working with the capture strategy and leads nurturing is fundamental to get contacts able to become customers.

And the more satisfied they are with your products and services, the more people promoting your brand. So, they spread information about your product to other people. Therefore, you can promote your services organically (without needing high investments).

So, working with this strategy will help increase the number of sales conversion. And the more sales you make, the greater your profit is. Not to mention that your brand will be better known. And you will be an expert in your business niche.

Therefore, It is important to always think of generating leads, educate them and make them customers and faithful ambassadors of your products.

Did you understand what leads are and why they are important for your brand? Follow Hotmart on social media to get more information about the digital market.