
Lead generation is a revenue growth engine for B2B and B2C companies.
But for many marketers, the entire process can feel like a puzzle. Too often, they experiment and waste resources on strategies that don’t yield results.
The solution is to develop a streamlined lead generation process. Without it, you risk losing opportunities to consistently lock in high-quality leads, boost sales and grow your business long term.
A structured lead generation process helps you focus on leads that are more likely to convert and put your money where it matters most.
Ready to create one for your business?
In this article, we’ll show you how to create a lead generation process that drives your revenue over the top.
Even if you have an existing lead gen process, we’ll walk you through how to improve it.
But before you dive in, watch this video to discover tips and strategies to launch a successful lead generation campaign.
Lead generation is the process of finding potential customers for your business and nurturing them until they become paying customers.
It’s the first step of the sales funnel, and the goal is to connect and build a solid relationship with leads so that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll consider you.
Keep in mind that not everyone who visits your website is a lead. A lead is any person who shows an interest in your company’s product or service.
The B2C and B2B lead generation process focuses on targeting leads with a high purchase intent that matches your ICP using a variety of tools and strategies, such as:
The lead generation strategy that will yield the best result depends on your target audience and niche. Once you have a database of leads, the next step is to qualify them to gauge their level of interest and fit for your product or service.
Lead generation is the engine of every successful business. It keeps your sales pipeline filled with potential customers who are ready to transition into paying customers.
Without an effective lead generation process, you’ll have a dry sales pipeline with no customers to sell to. And without customers, your business can't generate revenue.
That being said, here are the four major benefits of lead generation:
Before you can reel in leads and start scaling your revenue, you need to understand how the process works.
When you follow this proven pattern, you’re more likely to fill your sales pipeline with quality leads.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the typical steps involved in the lead generation process:
Just like any other business process, you need to set your goals for lead generation.
What outcomes do you want to achieve? Are you looking to increase monthly leads, boost event registrations or improve your conversion rate? Next, you’ll have to figure out how to measure the progress.
To set realistic improvement goals, you need to assess your historical performance to establish a baseline.
Better yet, work backward from sales targets to figure out how many leads you need per month to hit the quota.
When setting your lead generation goals, remember to keep them SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
For example, a SMART lead gen goal would be to ramp up the number of leads generated per month by 20% over the next quarter.
Read this guide to discover how to create SMART goals, along with templates to help you track performance. Here’s a customizable template to get you started.
Lead generation involves many moving parts, such as market research, content creation, advertising, analytics and reporting.
Assign roles and determine who will be responsible for each task. For example, a copywriter can help you write ads, emails, social media and landing page copy. The marketing team is responsible for researching competitors and industry trends.
The next step is to scope out your target audience. Do research to gather as much information about them as possible. You want to find out things like:
It’s a great idea to create an ideal customer profile or buyer persona. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, these tools will help you define the psychographic, demographic, firmographic, technographic and behavioral characteristics of your best customers, like their company size, the niche they operate in and the tools they use for their daily work.
If you’re in B2B, your ICP would comprise a business. However, your user persona would be the key stakeholder with decision-making power at the company you’re targeting.
In B2C, you’re better off creating a customer persona since you’re selling to an individual rather than a business.
The more insight you have about your ideal customer, the better you can create engaging and helpful content to attract them to your business. For example, you could share a free ebook or publish an insightful blog post that educates them or answers questions they may have.
Visme has a plethora of customer persona templates to guide your lead gen efforts. Just swap out the placeholder content with your own. Or, customize the template with our beautiful range of icons, illustrations, graphics, images, videos and other design assets.
Now you’re armed with insights about your target audience.
The next step is to use them to create compelling content that answers their questions.
Successful lead generation—whether for inbound or outbound—depends on great content. So, don’t just create generic content for the sake of it.
Identify where your prospects are in the buying process and provide immersive content that will nudge them to the next stage of the funnel.
The top of the funnel is where you build awareness and trust using blog posts, social media and videos.
As your leads get warmer in the middle of the funnel, you can engage them and highlight your value proposition using ebooks, case studies, whitepapers, newsletters, etc.
The bottom of the funnel is where the magic happens. At this stage, the prospect is ready to convert and your content should address any objections that may hinder the sale. FAQs, case studies, demos, reviews and testimonials are your best ally.
This infographic has a detailed list of content ideas you should create at different stages of the marketing funnel.
No matter the type of content you’re creating, focus on adding value. Whether you’re building awareness or educating your audience on different channels, your audience should get personalized messages that feel like you’re speaking to them.
In addition to sharing the right content at the right time, it’s important to share it on the right channel. As you create your ICP, figure out where they spend the most time online when searching for solutions or making purchase decisions.
Delivering content in the right channel, format and time will increase your chances of achieving your conversion goals.
When it comes to creating content, Visme has everything you need. Our template library contains a huge repository of content for every lead funnel stage.
We’ve also categorized our templates based on industry or role, so you can be sure you’re creating content tailored to a specific role or industry—not just some generic, run-of-the-mill content.
Another good thing about our tool is that you have the ability to collaborate with your team seamlessly. You can invite others to work on your lead magnets in real time and provide control access and permissions. Everyone on your team can:
Better yet, use the workflow tool to manage and monitor the collaboration process. You can assign the entire lead magnet form design or split it into different parts and share them with different team members to work on. It also allows you to create an approval process, fix deadlines and track progress and corrections—all in one place.
As you begin to drive traffic to your website, you’ll have to figure out a way to make people part with their information.
That’s where lead magnets or gated content come in. They are invaluable sales lead generation techniques.
One key reason they work so well is that you’re offering a free incentive or resource in return for their contact details. This could be an ebook or in-depth guides, whitepapers, exclusive videos or reports. Your visitors have to fill out a form or register for an account to access the resource.
These magnets are valuable because visitors are still in the awareness and consideration phase of the buyer journey. At this point, they’re still searching out solutions to their needs, and they want educational and actionable information.
So, your lead magnet will not only pique their curiosity but also make their transition from visitor to lead fast.
In the example below, Bplans gates a business plan template in exchange for information about a lead.
Now, the question isn’t whether you should use a lead magnet. The real question is: what type of lead magnet works best?
According to a survey by GetResponse, 47% of marketers said video and text-based lead magnets are their best-performing opt-in incentives. This is closely followed by tools, templates or access to a resource, visual, monetary value, interactive content and audio.
In this guide, we’ve shared different lead magnet ideas to drive more quality leads. No matter the type of resource you want to create, Visme has thousands of lead magnet templates to give you a creative head start. You can personalize the content, adjust colors, and modify layouts to align with your branding and messaging.
This video also shares information about the best lead magnets you should be creating.
By using templates, you get to save a lot of time in the design and content creation process. Our magnet templates are not only created by experienced designers but also replete with beautiful aesthetics and layouts.
This can enhance the perceived value of your offer and leave a positive impression on potential customers.
To get started, simply log in to your account. If you are a new user, the signup process is simple. You just need to enter your email and password or use the Google and Facebook signup options. Once you log in, the system will redirect you to the Visme dashboard.
Click on "Create >New Project" and select "Lead Magnets" from the list of available project types.
Pro Tip: If you’re running out of time, use our AI Document Generator to create a lead magnet complete with design and content. Just describe the type of lead magnet you want to create, choose your design and let the tool do the heavy lifting.
Landing pages are a critical piece of the lead generation puzzle.
Here‘s why they attract a conversion rate of up to 23%.
First, they are the destination for the links and CTAs in your ads. Second, they house the forms you need to collect valuable contact information from your visitors and move them through the sales funnel.
Landing pages should provide a focused, targeted and relevant message to your audience about your offering.
More importantly, the messaging on your landing page or form should spur your visitors to take action—whether that’s registering for an event or scheduling a demo or sales call. If your content isn’t compelling or convincing, leads will leave faster than they arrive at your site.
With Visme’s AI writer, creating a killer landing page or marketing copy has never been easier. Turn your prompt into killer copy or use it to proofread your text or tweak the tone.
For example, at Visme, we have created multiple landing pages for different products and dedicated landing pages for different ICPs, including sales teams, human resources and marketing.
Ensure these pages are optimized for mobile, as nine out of ten people use their mobile phones to search the web. But even if they’re mobile optimized, visitors won’t find them until they’re built for search engines.
To further enhance your landing page performance, use relevant and high-intent keywords in your copy. Include custom, clear and compelling calls-to-action that'll make your visitors take that desired action.
Remember to spice things up with interactive experiences like 2D and 3D animations, videos, quizzes, gamification or chatbots. These will grab attention and keep your visitors engaged and begging for more.
Measure your landing page performance consistently. Remember to split-test different page options to figure out what resonates most with your target audience, and optimize your website accordingly.
Want to learn about optimizing your lead gen landing page? Check out our guide on 10 lead generation examples and best practices.
Tap into our rich library of templates, stock photo library, icons and other design assets to create beautiful, eye-catching graphics for your landing page. And if you have an image that needs editing, our AI Edit Tools are your best ally.
If you don’t find something suitable, use our AI image generator to create one from scratch with a detailed prompt. There are several output options to select from: photos, paintings, pencil drawings, 3D graphics, icons, abstract art and more.
You've hooked potential leads in with your lead magnet or gated content. Now it’s time to capture their information.
This step is about creating lead capture forms—whether pop-up or in-page—to convert your traffic into leads.
There are different types of lead capture forms you can use. Ultimately, your choice will depend on your lead gen tactics and the information you want to collect from your visitors.
For example, if you're hosting online events like webinars and podcasts, a registration form can help you build a list of potential attendees.
Let’s look at all the types of forms for lead generation you’ll need along the way:
It’s important to keep your forms simple and easy to use, with clear instructions and minimal required fields.
Visme offers a powerful online form builder that allows you to create engaging, high-converting forms that drive 2x more conversions—without writing a line of code. The tool comes with a no-code form builder and hundreds of professionally designed form and survey templates across multiple categories, including:
Unlike traditional forms, Visme Forms uses captivating 3D animated characters, gestures and design assets. These elements are proven to engage your visitors and create an immersive and memorable experience.
We’ve tested our lead generation form on nearly 500,000 website visitors, and the results were impressive. Adding Visme Forms interactive animated characters to our lead magnet forms resulted in:
In this case study, we showcased how Visme Forms can improve form performance of a newsletter signup form to a wide audience: increasing engagement and conversions and reducing cost per acquisition.
With our AI-powered brand wizard, you can be sure your forms will match your branding. Easily customize fields for collecting the information you need, such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, company details or other information.
In addition, you can customize the lead magnet book cover and question cards. It’s also easy to design the thank you page with your branding, logo heading, text, button and footer.
Choose from an extensive hub of 3D animated characters to elevate your form design. You can build custom 3D characters or choose pre-built characters, and select the entry, waiting and ending poses.
Visme integrates with a wide range of popular third-party tools, including ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, MailChimp, Google Sheets and many more.
Our Zapier integration lets you connect with hundreds of other tools and platforms in your sales, marketing and productivity tech stack. This feature empowers you to gather and synchronize all of your lead magnets, form submissions and collected information with your favorite apps.
Once you’re satisfied with your design, publish it with a link or QR code, or embed it on your website using auto-generated HTML.
Track and analyze your forms' performance using our real-time analytics dashboards. Get insight into metrics like views, starts, submissions and completion time. You can filter your reports based on devices, data and time to get a complete view of your form’s performance.
Optimizing forms is another way to increase conversion rates.
If your forms are poorly designed or unoptimized, you risk low conversion rates.
We’ve already discussed how great form designs can improve form responses and reduce abandonment. However, there are other best practices to consider:
Now you have a database filled with leads. Congrats! Before you pat yourself on the back, remember that not every lead will become a customer.
For some, it could take a month, quarter or year to make their first purchase. You have to keep those leads engaged with valuable information to move them along the sales funnel.
That’s what lead nurturing is about. Even if they’ve not expressed intent to buy, follow up on any touchpoints they’ve engaged with your brand.
When done well, it can keep your brand fresh in their memory until they are ready to buy.
Read this guide to discover effective lead nurturing strategies to use. Let’s look at other lead management best practices you should adopt:
Not all nurtured leads will be ready to move forward. Some will be ready to buy today; others may just be getting more information and need more nudging.
So how do you identify and prioritize leads that are worth the extra push? The answer is lead scoring and lead qualification.
Qualifying a lead involves asking questions about their needs, budget, timeline and decision-making process. It helps your sales team determine whether a lead is a good fit for your product or service.
Moving forward, you filter out unsuitable leads and focus on qualified ones.
Lead scoring systems indicate where the lead is in the sales funnel or customer journey. Then, you can assign points to each lead based on the actions they take, such as:
For example, visiting your website could be worth 5 points, filling out a newsletter form could be worth 10 points, and reading your email and taking action could be worth 15.
A lead’s score would total 30 if they accomplish all three. The higher the score, the more likely the lead is to convert into a paying customer.
With lead scoring, you can prioritize your leads and focus your efforts on those who are most likely to convert.
The entire process of lead generation thrives on data.
This is the stage where you track results to see if your efforts are paying off.
By keeping a sharp eye on the important metrics, you'll be able to tell whether your lead generation strategy is on point or needs some tweaking.
Here are some metrics to track:
And with the right analytics and reporting tool, you can course-correct before you invest more resources into activities that won’t move the needle in terms of revenue and growth.
Share a report containing these metrics so higher-ups can make sense of it. Choose one of Visme’s report templates and customize it to your taste.
Present your data using charts, graphs and other data visualization tools so it’s easy to understand. Share the report online using an online link or download it in multiple formats (PDF, image, MP4) and share it offline.
Measuring the success of your marketing efforts is crucial to generating more leads in the future.
The insights you gain will help refine your overall strategy, create more relevant messaging and effectively target your audience.
But don't stop there! To truly stand out from the competition, think outside the box.
Consider using innovative lead generation ideas, such as automation, AI chatbots, influencer marketing or video content to capture your audience's attention.
Experiment with different offers and promotions to see what resonates best with your target market.
Remember, marketing is all about creating a connection with your audience.
So, don't be afraid to show some personality and let your brand's unique voice shine through in your messaging. And always stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies to stay ahead of the curve.
By using the insights you gather and incorporating new and exciting tactics, you can take your marketing efforts to the next level and achieve even greater success in the future.
Generating leads for your business is tough work. But without a well-defined process, you’ll struggle to get significant results from your efforts.
This guide has a complete overview of how to create an effective lead generation process and how to generate leads. We’ve also equipped you with tools to attract new leads and nurture existing ones.
So, put them to work. Visme offers a complete suite of tools to elevate your lead generation strategy. With our interactive online form builder and form templates, you can create beautiful lead forms that increase conversion by up to 207%.
Visme isn’t just a form builder. It’s an amazing visual content creation tool for businesses of all sizes. You can use it to create lead magnets, ebooks, whitepapers, newsletters and other content types that attract and nurture leads to purchase.
Create an account to discover how Visme can help you streamline your lead generation process.
Improve your data collection from emails, leads, to surveys and more, by using beautifully designed forms that convert up 2X better.
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