What Are Leads in Marketing? Definition and Ways to Generate More
As a business owner, you know how crucial marketing leads are. However, lead generation is only half the battle–successfully managing those leads is where your marketing and research skills really become necessary.
That’s why we’re here to help. Read on to learn how to create a lead management process that helps you generate and convert your marketing leads into customers for life.
Spoiler alert! We already have a solution to your needs. Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed. Podium’s conversational AI is outcome-driven, which means it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads, it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking.
Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium’s AI Employee aims to drive specific customer actions to help grow your business and guarantees your business engages with new leads within minutes of receipt during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between.
Transform your business with Podium. Watch a demo today.
What is a lead in marketing?
A marketing lead definition is a potential customer or prospect who has shown interest in your product or service. No matter your industry, generating and managing leads is a critical part of the sales and marketing process.
Of course, not all leads are equal. Here are a few types of leads and how they fit into each stage of your marketing strategy:
- Cold Leads: These are individuals or businesses who have shown little to no prior interest in your company’s products or services. Cold leads are at the beginning of the sales funnel and may need more awareness and information to move them toward a purchasing decision.
- Warm Leads: Warm leads have shown some interest or engagement with your company’s offerings but may not be ready to make a purchase immediately. They are typically further along in the sales funnel compared to cold leads but may still require additional nurturing and information before converting into customers.
- BOF (Bottom of the Funnel): “Bottom of the funnel” refers to leads that are near the end of the buying process and are close to making a purchase decision. BOF leads are often considered “hot leads” because they have shown a high level of interest or engaged with specific product details. They just need a final push or incentive to convert.
- TOF (Top of the Funnel): “Top of the funnel” refers to the early stages of the customer journey. Leads at the TOF stage are typically in the awareness phase, where they are introduced to your brand or product for the first time. (Also, they may not be actively looking to make a purchase yet.)
Understanding each type of lead in sales or lead in marketing and where it is in your funnel helps you tailor your marketing and sales strategies to effectively nurture and guide them through the decision-making process.
Difference Between a Marketing-Qualified Lead and a Sales-Qualified Lead
Now that we’ve talked about types, what’s the difference between MQLs and SQLs? We’re glad you asked. MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) are two distinct stages in the lead qualification process that represent different levels of engagement and readiness to make a purchase. Here are a few key differences to distinguish them from one another:
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) | Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) |
| Definition: MQLs are leads that have been identified by your marketing team as having a higher likelihood of becoming customers based on their engagement with your marketing efforts. | Definition: SQLs are leads that have been vetted and deemed ready for direct sales engagement. These leads have demonstrated a higher level of interest and are considered more likely to make a purchase. |
| Criteria: These are leads who’ve taken actions such as downloading a whitepaper, attending a webinar, or repeatedly engaging with marketing content. | Criteria: The criteria for classifying a lead as an SQL often involve specific behaviors that indicate a readiness to buy such as providing contact information, requesting a product demo or pricing information, or showing a clear intent to purchase. |
| Focus: Marketing Qualified Leads are in the early to middle stages of your sales funnel. Your marketing team aims to nurture and educate these leads further before passing them on to your sales team for the final pitch. | Focus: Sales Qualified Leads are in the later stages of the sales funnel. Your sales team takes over at this point, working to understand the lead’s specific needs, address any concerns, and guide them through the final steps of the purchasing process. |
Understanding the difference between leads, prospects, and customers is also helpful in ensuring you send the right communications at the right times.
- Leads are potential customers who have shown initial interest in you (or your communications).
- Prospects are leads that have progressed further in the sales process and are more likely to convert.
- Customers are individuals or businesses who have completed a purchase and entered into a transactional relationship with you. (Congrats!)
Leads Qualification and Classification
Of course, it’s important to remember that generating a lead doesn’t equal closing a deal. The process of qualifying leads involves assessing and categorizing potential customers based on their likelihood to make a purchase. This objective includes extensive collection and analysis of customer data and hitting the right moves at the right times, namely when the iron is hot.
Part of classifying includes numerical scoring. Lead scoring involves assigning numerical values to leads based on predefined criteria. Criteria for categorizing leads can include actions like downloading a whitepaper, visiting specific product pages, or filling out a contact form. As engagement of a particular lead increases, and the lead hits different benchmarks, they move forward through different stages of nurturing and ultimately reach conversion.
Pro Tip: World-class CRMs and other digital marketing tools like Podium can help you collect and analyze data to strike the right chord with your lead at every stage of the funnel.
3 Ways To Generate More Leads
Ready to generate more high-quality leads? There are thousands of inbound and outbound strategies to do so–email marketing, content marketing, referrals, SEO optimization, LinkedIn outreach, and more. But here are a few of our favorite, hand-picked lead-generation strategies that have proven most successful across the board.
1. Gather Customer Reviews
You’ve probably heard it a million times, but we’ll say it again: There’s nothing like social proof. Did you know that reviews influence a whopping 88% of consumers in discovering a local business? And most consumers have read a review within the last week. Gathering and maintaining customer reviews online is a massive lead-generating goldmine. And with Podium’s AI Response Generator, you can immediately generate a response to every review, making sure no one slips through the cracks.
2. Improve Engagement Speed
Want to see every single conversation you have with every lead and customer in one place? With Podium Inbox, you harness the power of multichannel messaging. Every text, review, chat, Facebook message, Google message, phone call, social media message, and more come into a single thread where you can respond, significantly improving your engagement speed. With the right automation tools, you can have faster follow-ups for potential customers and develop more effective strategies to improve conversions.
- Add Website Chat to Your Site
Want to generate up to 11x more inbound leads from your website? Want to qualify them and make engagement go through the roof? Introducing: Webchat, the king of inbound marketing. This text-based solution vets your leads, collecting valuable contact information directly from your landing page and connecting you to your leads through text. This way, the conversation can move from desktop to mobile and back again.
FAQs
How do you qualify a lead to determine if they’re a good fit for the product or service?
There are many different ways to qualify a lead, but one of the most popular is lead scoring. Lead scoring is when a company creates a value system to award points for specific actions the customer takes as well as shared traits with other converted customers. The higher a lead’s overall score, the more likely they are to convert into a sale.
Other methods for lead qualification include:
- Discovery calls to delve deep into the customer’s needs and see if they are a good fit for the product or service.
- The BANT framework, which looks at a lead’s Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. If all four criteria line up with what your business has to offer, then they’re considered a high-quality lead.
How can unqualified leads be nurtured to move them further down the sales funnel?
The key to effective nurturing is engagement. By keeping the potential customer engaged, you can build their interest in your product or service. You can use lead nurturing software to help your sales team automate targeted follow-ups. You can also run personalized social media or email marketing campaigns that speak to the potential customer’s specific needs or business area. Showcase how your product or service can help them and you’ll quickly move them down the funnel from a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-qualified lead. Be sure to measure the impact of marketing efforts so you’ll know which methods are most successful with your MQLs and can use them more in the future.
Get Started
Having the right tools at your disposal is a major part of generating leads, empowering every prospective customer, and achieving success. And we’ve engineered one specifically for lead generation that will help you drive your numbers through the roof.
Podium’s new LeadDrive tool allows you to manage every single lead, no matter the source, from one place, ensuring no opportunity slips through the crack. Every single inquiry, from CarGurus, Angie’s, and Thumbtack to your own website funnels into the same inbox. This empowers you to quickly and automatically engage—responding to every inquiry, beating the competition, and converting more prospects into customers who keep coming back for more.
Don’t let your competition beat you to new leads. Learn more about Podium and how we can help you generate more qualified leads today.
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