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What Is Lead Generation?
First and foremost what is a lead? A lead is a person who expresses certain importance in a company’s product or service. As mentioned in this post, long gone are the days of a company’s initial relationship with the customer (aka cold calls, blast emails). Today, for example, a person will be browsing the web and come across a slideshow, eBook or something else they may it find interesting and useful. In exchange for that content, the person will provide the company their personal information. Through this digital transaction, the person has become the lead. This process is called lead generation. The exchange of valuable digital content for consumer information might sound very familiar.
That’s because lead generation is also a part of inbound marketing. More precisely, it falls within the second stage of inbound marketing, or the conversion of a site visitor to a lead (a lead your sales team can actually use).
Why Is It Important?
Another way to think of lead generation is to think of it like collecting very important information. Extremely valuable information. Information like a site visitor’s first and last name, email address, and company gleaned when they:
Fill out forms for downloaded content
Share contact information for a coupon
Subscribe to an RSS feed or email list
Inbound marketers collect and use this information to nurture that lead. Because the person has already showed some natural interest in a company’s product or service, this makes that person a more qualified lead than traditional, outbound leads. In fact, according to the Hinge Research Institute, 60 percent of their leads online are twice as more profitable than those producing less than 20 percent of their leads online.
Along with higher conversion rates, lead generation can also be an very cost-effective solution because it focuses on aligning both sales and marketing teams—virtually closing any communication gaps (a common pitfall of many organizations).
Read details at http://ingenexdigital.com/lead-generation-important/