|| For Freelancers & Entrepreneurs |
Keeping existing customers interested while getting new ones to discover and use your products or services is a persistent target of all businesses. After all, customers constitute the major revenue source of most businesses. The more customers you have, the healthier your business. This is the reason why led generation is a critical component of any enterprise.
Simply put, lead generation refers to a marketing tool that aims to promote consumer awareness and interest about a particular product or service. Lead generation is conducted for a variety of purposes such as building an email list or a subscriber base. There are many ways of conducting lead generation campaigns, most of which use the methodologies and conventional advertising channels. There are also ways that leverage emergent systems or technologies such as online search. The following are some of the most common ways leads are generated.
1. Traditional advertising. This is the umbrella term encompassing the dissemination or broadcast of commercial advertisements over traditional channels such as television, radio, and print (broadsheets, tabloids, magazines, and other periodicals).
2. Online lead generation techniques. This is the umbrella term covering the different methodologies for promoting brands over the Internet. By far, this is a cost-efficient method compared to traditional advertising in that it can easily be targeted to specific consumer demographics and it can also be subjected to very precise metrics.
The best online lead generation techniques include 1) pay per click (PPC) advertising that can be implemented through the robust ad engines of Google or Yahoo/MSN; 2) Social media marketing that can be conducted over popular social networks and tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube; 3) Social media advertising which is now possible through services offered by Facebook and other social media sites; 4) online advertising (media acquisitions) on selected sites; and, 5) search engine optimization (SEO) that aims to raise the ranking of particle websites in search engine results pages (SERPs).
