Single Blog

• What is a lead?
• What is lead generation?
• Why is lead generation important?
• How can you generate leads?
• How can you measure the success of lead generation?

What is a lead?

A lead is a prospective client who contacts a company by completing a form, downloading content, or sending an inquiry.

For instance, if you own an insurance business, a visitor who wants a quote for house insurance would be asked to fill out a form with their name and email address. They become a lead as a result of this action, and the sales staff can use it to follow up with them via email or phone call.

There are four main categories of leads to take into account.

1. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) a potential customer who has engaged with your marketing campaigns but isn’t yet prepared for the sales force. Someone who downloads an ebook from your website, for instance, could be an example of this kind of lead.
2. A sales qualified lead (SQL)A lead who is prepared to be turned over to the sales team for additional nurturing and who has indicated an interest in becoming a customer. This might be someone who sent in an email, asked for more details, or wanted to speak with someone.
3. A product qualified lead (PQL) a lead who has used your service or product and might be prepared to become a customer. A user of a free trial is an example of this kind of lead.
4. A service qualified lead (SQL)is a person who has used a service and has demonstrated their desire to become a customer by taking action. This might be someone who want to upgrade their subscription, for instance.Leads are not all made equal! Depending on the lead’s lifecycle stage and the action they made, you must handle each one accordingly.

Every lead is different! It is important to adjust your strategy according on the particular action each lead has performed and where they are in the lifecycle.

What is lead generation?

The process of drawing potential consumers to your company with the intention of nurturing them and converting them into paying customers is known as lead generation.

To create leads, you can use both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Your business model and the target audience will determine the approach you use.

The goal of inbound marketing is to attract potential customers to your offering. Here, content marketing is essential, using techniques like blogs, ebooks, webinars, and social media posts that are all search engine optimised (SEO) with pertinent keywords.

Conversely, outbound marketing entails contacting possible clients directly. Cold calling, email marketing, paid advertising, and social media sites like LinkedIn can all be used for this.

The strategy you choose will affect the kind of content you create and the way you spend money. Since many companies combine inbound and outbound tactics, it’s worthwhile to think about how doing so can improve your lead generating efforts.

Why is lead generation important?

To succeed and grow, a business needs to keep producing leads even if it has a sizable and devoted clientele.

In actuality, a large number of leads will not result in sales. Some leads might never buy because they are only interested in taking advantage of an offer and have no plans to do so.

Because of this, lead generation is an expensive undertaking. The average organic cost per lead across all industries is $409.07, according to research by First Page Sage.

In order to guarantee that prospects keep going through the funnel until they convert, it is imperative to continuously produce leads. You can concentrate your efforts on leads that have the highest chance of becoming clients by categorising and segmenting them.

Moreover, by taking the initiative to generate leads, you are increasing revenue as well as brand awareness and business visibility.

How can you generate leads?

It’s time to discover how to create leads now that you know what they are and why it’s so important for your company!

80% of marketers think their lead generation efforts are only moderately successful, and 63% of marketers say that generating traffic and leads is their main difficulty, according to HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report.

This emphasises the necessity of meticulous preparation and work when creating your lead generating plans.

An excellent starting point is to review your buyer personas. These serve as the cornerstone of your lead generation initiatives and offer insightful information about your target market.

Knowing your target audience will help you provide content that appeals to their interests and wants, attracting them into the sales funnel and assisting in their conversion.

Let’s now examine several efficient strategies and platforms that can aid in lead generation.

As marketers, we are aware of the ability of content to draw in, sway, and convert prospects.

Finding content that genuinely connects with your audience is the difficult part. In order to address this, you must develop a content strategy and think about putting content pillars into place to concentrate on the subjects that your audience is most interested in.

For example, email marketing should be one of your main subjects if you sell email marketing software. A blog post titled “The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing” could be a good place to start. To delve deeper into particular topics, you can create related topic clusters from this main pillar, such “5 Ways to Manage & Grow Your Email List.”

This tactic helps you become an authority in the subject while also broadening your content offers. It also complies with Google’s E-E-A-T standards (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which evaluate the quality of content and affect rankings.

Don’t limit yourself to just one or two forms while you’re planning your material. Every form of content has a distinct function at different phases of the sales funnel. Certain content forms, such as webinars or whitepapers, can also aid in data collection by enticing participants to divulge personal information.

The table that follows lists several content formats along with the sales funnel stages at which they work best.

The secret to producing content for your audience is to concentrate on their problems and offer insightful advice, entertainment, solutions, or information.

2) Leverage SEO

Despite being a vital component of the plan, SEO is frequently undervalued in lead creation. In order to improve your website’s exposure in search engine results, it assists you with content creation and optimisation.

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) should also be taken into account, since AI-powered overviews on search engines like Google are progressively influencing what users see.

Here are a few successful strategies for using SEO to generate leads.

• Tap into search intent – You must know what your audience is looking for in order to make sure your content reaches them. To learn more, attempt social listening or research using tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console, or Answer the public. Think considering using email marketing or community group polls to find out more about your present clients.
• Target longtail keywords – Look up and focus on “money” keywords that convey a desire to buy, together with location-specific terms (e.g., “best sushi restaurants in Albany, New York”). This strategy has the potential to be very successful for lead generation and SEO.
• Optimize your page speed – Your performance and lead generation may suffer with a slow website. Try decreasing HTTP requests, making sure your pages are responsive to mobile devices, caching web pages, and compressing images to increase speed.
• Create a Google Business Profile – Create a Google Business Profile so that customers can find, read more about, and get in touch with your company.
• Regularly update your blog posts – Even if you have a great blog that draws in and keeps readers interested, it will lose its appeal if you don’t update it frequently. It might be as easy as adding new expert quotes, updating statistics, or adding a new data collection asset. It’s critical to periodically assess your blogs in order to track their effectiveness.Traffic might increase by up to 106% when your content is updated. At the DMI trends webinar, Luke O’Leary, Vice President of Media Strategy & Operations at NP Digital, stated, “You can increase backlinks by making it distinctive and stand out by updating it or adding proprietary data (which companies frequently have access to).”

3) Use social media

With more than 5 billion users globally, social media has grown to such a size that it offers advertisers countless chances to interact with customers by, for example, urging users to click URLs on X or adding a call to action at the conclusion of an Instagram reel.

The problem, though, is the sheer volume of social media sites and the intense rivalry for users’ attention, especially when it comes to lead generation.

Selecting the appropriate networks and creating content specifically for each is essential to social media success. You can learn which platform is generating the most leads by examining your statistics. Examine the most effective content types after you’ve determined which platforms are working the best.

For instance, producing genuine, captivating short-form films is necessary to draw consumers to TikTok, whereas real-time platforms such as X, Threads, and Bluesky benefit greatly from text, photos, and news-style content.

Promoting both sponsored and organic material on social media can be advantageous.

Posting organically fosters a community and fosters ties with customers, especially when combined with features like polls and user-generated content, even though interaction with organic content is decreasing, primarily because algorithms favour commercial material.

GoPro, for instance, demonstrates their technology using real footage in user-generated videos.

Paid social media material, on the other hand, is useful since it enables targeted, customised content that can increase sales or exposure.

To develop a social media plan that successfully generates leads, go over what has previously worked and evaluate the information you can learn.

4) Engage through emails

Because it facilitates the attraction, nurturing, and conversion of leads, email marketing is an essential part of every lead generation plan.

By promoting sign-ups for email updates or newsletters, or by providing lead magnets like ebooks or webinars, you can leverage email to generate leads. This increases brand awareness by keeping consumers updated on your most recent news, product launches, and corporate announcements.

The capacity of email marketing to nurture leads is one of its main benefits. You’re interacting with people who have chosen to get updates from you and are already familiar with your brand.

“At this point, efficient management of email lists is essential. You can send tailored messages that resonate and boost conversion rates by segmenting leads according to demographics, behaviours, or preferences using a strong customer relationship management (CRM) system, according to Anna Flynn, MarTech Manager at the Digital Marketing Institute.

To keep prospects interested over time, you could also want to set up drip campaigns or automatic email sequences, such welcome emails, retargeting messages, or cart abandonment reminders. Sending emails at scale with targeted content suited to the buyer’s journey can be facilitated by automation solutions.

The performance beverage firm Magic Mind, for instance, gives a fantastic example of a welcome email that not only welcomes a new subscriber but also provides a 15% discount to entice them to click through.

By gradually providing useful and pertinent information and assisting them in moving down the funnel, email marketing can convert leads. Leads that have not yet converted can be re-engaged using retargeting emails.

5) Build a community

Broader communities also offer useful places where customers may be involved and supported, even though social networks are excellent for educating and advertising.

Since individuals want to build lasting relationships, brands that concentrate on developing communal spaces for potential clients and consumers frequently have an advantage.

Especially for younger generations, this is true. 85% of Gen Z thinks it’s critical for brands to create a feeling of community, according to Tumblr’s The State of Community survey.

Communities can be formed elsewhere outside social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Opportunities for community interaction and content exchange are also provided by well-known forums like Reddit and Quora, messaging and video networks like WhatsApp and Discord, and publishing platforms like Medium or Substack.

Another powerful strategy for creating and fostering a community is to host events. While live events promoting new products or services might help create or convert leads, webinars featuring knowledgeable speakers on themes that are relevant to your community can draw large audiences.

To draw in marketing experts, for instance, one of our seminars acts as a lead magnet.

On a DMI podcast, Avocado Social’s founder, Alison Battisby, stated: “A community’s real worth is found in the exposure it generates and the deep bond it forges with your brand. People who have a good experience in your community develop a positive relationship with your brand and are more likely to think of you than they otherwise would.

How can you measure the success of lead generation?

It’s critical to assess the success of your lead generation activities after making a substantial investment.

Monitoring important indicators that show the calibre and efficacy of your leads is essential to achieving this. The lead conversion rate, which indicates the proportion of leads you create that turn into paying clients, is one of the most crucial indicators. A high conversion rate indicates that the correct people are being drawn to and successfully nurtured by your lead generation strategy.

The cost per lead (CPL), which measures the amount you pay on each lead, is another crucial indicator. An effective lead generating strategy is indicated by a decreasing cost per acquisition (CPL) and a stable or increasing conversion rate.

Additional KPIs to think about are customer lifetime value (CLV), which evaluates the long-term worth of converted leads, and return on investment (ROI), which contrasts the revenue from leads with the cost of acquiring them.

One essential component of marketing is lead generation. The secret to propelling business success and expansion is attracting, nurturing, and converting prospects.

Finding your target demographic, knowing which marketing channels work best, and using a variety of lead generating techniques are the first steps towards becoming a great lead generator. You can make sure you’re remaining on target by regularly monitoring and measuring your performance.

In your lead generation plan, don’t be afraid to experiment with different platforms, tools, or formats. Additionally, you might get ideas from rival companies or brands whose advertising strategies you respect.

Leverage digital channels to generate leads

A digital marketing certification is the fastest and most efficient approach to break into the digital sector. The industry-recognized Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing from DMI will educate you how to integrate AI into your marketing campaigns, provide you the fundamental skills you need for digital marketing, and offer helpful advice on how to hone your soft skills. In order to prepare you to carry out effective marketing campaigns across a range of industries, you will also delve into important channels including email marketing, social media, SEO, content marketing, and display and video advertising.