When do we need Lead Funnels?

In the previous lessons, we talked about Lead Generation funnels and I showed you an example of how I have built my lead generation funnel. 

We have also discussed that high-end B2B and enterprise products do not need a lead generation funnel and low-end simple B2C products do not need leads at all.

Lead generation is required when you are selling a product that is high-priced, is complex, and the buyer might have a lot of questions before buying your product or service.

 Please note that the requirement for lead generation and the requirement for lead generation funnels are not the same things.

 Lead generation is required when the product price is higher. But when the product price is very high and the target market is very small, a lead generation funnel is not required.

 A lead generation funnel is required when you have a balance between the two. Your products and services are not too cheap and simple, nor too costly and complex.

 A funnel is required when you have B2C products at a higher cost and B2B products at a lower cost.

Examples of products and services where a funnel is required:
High-end B2C Products like house, car, appliances.
Low-end B2B products like software
So how can we visualize this?

I have made this chart which explains it clearly. 

In the chart, you can see that there are two Y-axes.
The marketing effort goes down as the price of the product goes up.

The lead generation effort goes up when the price and complexity of the product increases.

When the price is too low, you don't need leads, so you don't need lead generation funnels.

When the price of the product is very high, every lead that you reach out to will be a very high quality targeted lead, and you do not need a funnel in that case.

For example, Infosys, a large enterprise IT company, would reach out to people who are the right fit for their services. They would already have a fair idea about their target customers. Pinpointing the lead is not a problem at all. They would do cold-emailing, meet, and connect with the right people in conferences and also reach out to them via referrals. The sale is more dependent on the sales effort than the marketing effort.

When do we need lead generation funnels?
We need lead generation funnels when we are somewhere in the middle of the chart that I have shown above.

In the previous lesson, I talked about how I generate leads, nurture them, and filter them to engage with the sales process. My business (the training one and not the agency) is a B2C business. But the products (my training programs) are not low priced. They are starting from 10,000 rupees ($150 approx). 

I cannot just market my products and brand and expect people to buy. That's why I create a funnel.
Let's take a look at one of the B2B products I have - OptinChat.com. It is a lead generation tool for website owners that collects names and email IDs of visitors. The cost of the tool is $49 a month. The price of the product is not too high that I would have a sales team that reaches out to people directly and sells them. The profit from each sale wouldn't be enough to pay the sales team.

So even though OptinChat.com is a B2B tool, I market it in such a way that I would sell a high-end B2C product. There are too many prospects out there for a manual sales outreach to effective.
I generate leads for OptinChat by giving the free version of OptinChat for free and I do webinars to sell the premium version.

In the next email, I will explain how the lead generation funnel for OptinChat (a low-end B2B tool) works. 

The funnel generates the leads, nurtures them to build trust with them, and converts the cold leads into warm leads even before the sales process begins.

How I Generate Leads for my Business

In the previous lesson, we talked about lead generation funnels and why they are important to filter out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones.

Filtering high-quality leads is important because when you are doing high-end B2C sales or low-end B2B sales you will have more leads and a good mix of low quality leads in it.

When you are generating leads via digital marketing a good mix of untargeted and uninterested leads will come into your system.

When you are prospecting for B2B leads and reaching out to businesses, you are generating very high-quality leads.

For example, Clever.com is software for schools for delivering education online. Their minimum pricing starts at $5000 per year. Most of their customers are enterprise customers.

In such cases, they will just reach out to their target customers via a sales force and start converting the leads.

If you are towards the middle of the pricing spectrum you might not have that luxury. That's why we need lead generation funnels.

Before we dive deep into lead generation funnels and how they work, in today's lesson I want to give you an example of my lead generation funnel.

To create a lead generation funnel, you need a lead magnet. The lead magnet is the first part of the entire funnel. Without a lead magnet, you will not be able to generate a lot of leads through inbound marketing.

My lead magnet is my free digital marketing course with 25 videos. For people who want to learn digital marketing, I give away this course for free. But to sign up, people need to give me their name and email ID.

Once they give me their name and email ID, they become my lead. I created this lead magnet a few years back. Once my lead magnet was ready, I went ahead and started driving traffic to it.

First, I used search traffic to get the leads. I used to get more than 5000 visitors a month via the search engines to my blog.

I converted the visitors into leads using this lead magnet. Then I started driving traffic to the lead magnet using Facebook Ads. And then I started using Google Ads to drive the traffic. (Hire Digital Marketing Company to Generate Leads for you)

Once they enter their name and email ID, their course will start. I deliver one lesson every day for 25 days. Until 25 days I do not sell anything. The videos are designed to provide value and build trust with the audience.

Trust building is an important part of sales. Without trust, sales cannot happen. In an offline sales model, trust is usually built via personal relationships.

If a salesman is good at his craft, he would build trust with his prospects and he would close the deals. But when you are generating 100s or 1000s of leads, you cannot have individual conversations with each person who is in your funnel. That's why marketing automation helps in lead generation funnels.

An automated sequence of emails builds trust with your audience on automation. You don't need to lift a finger. Setup the email sequence, get the leads and the trust-building happens automatically. But as we all know, without sales the funnel is not going to sustain itself.

"Sales" is the power source of the funnel. Sales give us transactions and transactions will give us profits.

When we make profits, we can reinvest the money back into the creation of lead magnets, back into traffic driving mechanisms like SEO, SEM, and Display Ads, and back into CRM and Marketing Automation tools that help us build trust with the audience.

So how do we sell in B2C when there is a funnel?

As we have discussed in the previous lesson, we need to pick out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones to engage them in a sales process.

That's where the concept of lead scoring comes in.

I score the leads based on their behavior. For example, let's take 2 leads. 1 lead is highly interested and there is a high chance she will buy. One lead is not so interested and has a very low chance of buying.

The highly interesting lead will open all my emails and read through all the lessons. The less interested lead will hardly open any emails. If I give 1 point for every email open and 3 points for every click inside the email then I can find out who are the highly interested leads and who is not so warmed up to my offer. (Learn Digital Marketing to Generate Leads for your Business)

I would end up calling the highly interested leads and engage them in a sales process.

"Sales" is a separate topic in itself and deserves a series of lessons on its own but you get the idea.

Lead Generation for High End B2C Products

Hera today we learned that we do not need lead generation for basic B2C products that are low priced and simple.

For example, if you are selling candy or a pen, it is a simple low priced product and doesn't need lead generation.

The sales cycle is short and the decision-making process is easy. Many of these products and services are bought on impulse.

Even if the end consumer makes a wrong purchase, it is not something to worry about. If I spend 10 rupees on a pen and if it doesn't write properly, I will not lose sleep over it.

My time is more valuable than going back to the shop and asking for a refund. However, when it comes to high-end B2C products, we need to do lead generation.

Let's take two examples of high-end B2C products.

What are the biggest purchases that a consumer will make in his lifetime? It is easy to guess.

The biggest purchase would be a house.

People end up spending their entire life savings to buy a home. The next biggest purchase that they will make will be a car.

Let's first think about buying a home.

The Process of Buying a Home:

If someone is interested in buying a home, he/she will look at an ad and will call the number on that ad. Or they will look at an ad online, click on it, visit the landing page and fill out a form with their contact information.

This contact information becomes a lead for the seller. As we discussed in lesson 1, this is a lead because it leads to a sale.

This contact information is the connecting link between the buyer and the seller. Once the seller gets the contact information he will call the prospective buyer and schedule a site visit.

Without seeing the house in person, the buyer cannot make a buying decision. This is a complex product and once the purchase is done, it is difficult to reverse the transaction.

So the buyer will visit the house (or a model house if it is still under construction) and then will ask a lot of questions to the salesperson.

Does it have a good water supply?
Is this a good neighborhood?
What about the facilities in this apartment building?
What about the security and so on.
These are the questions and objections that the buyer has before he can go ahead with the purchase. The decision-making process can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months. The sales cycle is long in this case.

The seller needs to generate the leads, profile the leads, score the leads, and then close the sale with constant follow up. (All these strategies will be discussed in the future lessons).

Now let's take another example of a high-end purchase.

The purchase of a Car: After a house purchase, the next biggest purchase for an end consumer would be the purchase of a car. It is not a one time purchase but it can happen once in 3-5 years. Since it is a complex product, lead generation is required for this.

This is how the process would flow:

The buyer sees an ad online for a car.
He visits the landing page and downloads a brochure.
He gives his contact details to download the brochure.
Then he watches a welcome video.
Below the welcome video, there is a link to request for a test ride.

The form asks a lot of questions such as:

What car do you currently own?
When are you planning to purchase the new car?
Will you be buying it as an individual or as a company?
When do you want to request for a test ride?
Do you need financing for the car or will you pay the full amount upfront?
The questions that are being asked in the form is very important to score and profile the leads. The salesperson may not have time to call every lead and give the test ride of the car to them.

He has to filter out the highly qualified buyers from the unqualified ones. Many car enthusiasts who don't have the money to buy cars would still request for a test ride.

The information filled in the form will help the salesperson to prioritize the leads. That's why lead profiling and scoring becomes important. In future lessons, I will show you how lead-profiling and scoring works in real life with practical tools.

You can see that in both the cases mentioned above the sale cannot happen without lead generation.

No one will see an ad and swipe their credit card to buy a home or a car. Lead generation and sales are required in this case because the buyer has a lot of questions that need to be cleared before the sale can happen. And that can be cleared only by a salesperson. And for that, the salesperson needs the contact information of the buyer.

That's why lead generation becomes very important. The same method can be applied for any B2C product that is high-end.

If you are selling an interior-design service or an appliance that is high priced, you need lead generation.

In the first few weeks, we will be focusing on the theory and fundamentals of lead generation which is very important. Without understanding the principles and fundamentals, the strategy and tactics will not make any sense.

If you are looking for tactics and strategies that you can apply immediately, please have patience, they are coming to you in the future lessons. If you understand the principles properly, you will be able to come up with your own strategies and tactics.

That's it for today's lesson on lead generation for high-end B2C products and services. In tomorrow's lesson, we will talk about lead generation for low-end B2B products and services.

In this era of paradigm shift, do you really feel turning to DIGITAL?

Few days back, while reading an article in a world famous magazine, will mention its name in the consecutive paras, that the time is moving with its own pace, wherein I read that few Entrepreneurs not giving a damn thought to optimize their digital products which could adversely affect their latency to attract their potential customers.

I am pretty sure, many of you must have started their ventures with a thought to take it to next level with each passing phase but the end result is, you’re getting very limited clients that too through your existing business relationships. Dear, now is the time to digitally engage your prospective customers.

Many businesses stillbelieve on the former marketing trends including advertisements, and other forms of marketing, which has a very limited geographical reachand sometime costly too.

However, Online marketing tactics made it easier than ever to target local customers to generate brand value locally, definitely by deploying specific realms of digital marketing for local positioning of the brand.

I am sure, that by now you must be thinking to practice Digital marketing tactics for your business. Thus, before a digital marketing firm, being a smart Business owner, you should know digital marketing basic terms like Digital Marketing, What is SEO, what is ranking etc. let’s start one-by-one

What is SEO?
According to Forbes, SEO is the process of optimizing your website in order to get organic or unpaid traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. It increases both the quality and quantity of your website traffic.

What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing works for companies with a global reach as well as for local businesses.

What is ranking over SERP?
Whenever you type a keyword on any of the search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing and press enter, you see a list of websites with a particular keyword you mentioned. This is called SERP ranking of a website.

Now! Let me ask you, do you really think that your business needs a Digital marketing services?Might be some of you say yes or some says no, but reality is Digital marketing is the best option in present scenario that not only gives you more n more reach among your potential customers in lesser time and economical ways but also build your brand value. Now, you will ask, HOW? Let’s go deeper

Cost-Effectiveness in the Targeted Customers For the marketing of any business, the cost always matters, so with traditional marketing tactics like ads on TV and print media, charges are very high, moreover, some businesses faces a hard time in competing with bigger Brands for ad space to gain attention of the consumers. While most of the digital marketing platforms are either free or are cost effective. Like for the paid campaign also you can measure the reach.

Targeted you Customers
In any marketing plan reaching out to the right audience is very important, digital marketing tactics helps to targeted people who would be atleast 95% interested in your company and products or services being offered.

Similar in paid campaigns, you can set your target audience using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad or a Facebook ad. You can set different attributes like age, gender, hobbies, occupation and others to target your audience. You can be as specific as you are willing to, when you’re targeting customers through your digital marketing paid campaigns.

Highly Measurable Results
One thing in digital marketing that will definitely help you to grow your business is, you can have a view over yourdigital marketing results and measure-them too. This means you could figure out whether your marketing campaign is performing well for you or not, giving any output or not, you can track everything in digital marketing.

Digital marketing has no room for guesswork as is the case with Traditional marketing. Each and every tactic used in any digital marketing campaign is measurable.

With the data offered by Google Analytics and other similar tools, you can have a look if a particular approach is effective or if it needs some tweaking. You can also use the things you learn and apply them to future campaigns to ensure better success rates.

Conclusion
Thence, to Conclude, it's time to think where you stand for your potential customer and whether what and how you are actually doing to bring them at your door to buy your services or products.

Companies are Turning To Digital Marketing To Survive during Corona pandemics

“We are in uncertain times, but with the increase of remote working and a collaborative approach, companies are turning to digital channels and embracing the transformation. We have seen a real spike during the last few weeks from companies wishing to create or update websites, launch new e-commerce channels and create social media campaigns focused on home-workers and a real focus on using influencers and SEO to reach new audiences.” Said by Scott Jones, CEO of 123 Internet Group

As we all know that, all the countries are facing the problems due to Corona Virus i.e Covid-19 and this will be create a big problem in upcoming some months or even years, so we can understand that all the profitable business of the world will be digital marketing dependents in the coming time.

So many companies are going to shutdown forever, and so many are closed for now, and bu, business gone in total lose where people come for a face to face business, in brief you can understand that the business where the physical engagement of the people required is gone down but those can wake-up those can run online, so now only those business can survive those can switch to online. So many B2B companies and various small companies those used to getting new customers through word-of-mouth publicity will be in very trouble, as the end customer is now not interested to enjoy their life so everything going to stop a some time.

Digital Marketing companies are likely to be the clear winner here, and companies – including ones that may not so much as had a Facebook page before – will need to move into social marketing, content marketing, SEO and influencer-led campaigns.

Of course, if you are a B2B supplier in an industry that has been slow to adapt to digital marketing will not survive. So the key factor is adaptability as soon as you adopt it. Adapting may mean opening new channels over web or social media platforms where introductions can be made and relationships fostered. In the coming months, your prospective clients are going to be less open to the idea of letting you walk through the door and shake their hand – and no-one really has any idea how long this will last and whether this will lead to longer-term change.

“There’s a window of opportunity here – when things are back to normal budgets will be going back into live events and that’s what they will be spending their time on.

“But if they see the benefits and opportunities that digital channels can offer, this will become part of their long-term marketing contingency plans.”

It’s certainly true that the coming weeks, or months – or however long this situation lasts – will be a challenging time for every company that isn’t ready to think about how they will replace the opportunities that have been lost.

As soon as businesses will shift strategically to digital marketing, there's no reason why it should just serve as an emergency fill-in, but could carry on providing long-term value when the world eventually gets back to normal. And of course, it would make companies more resilient to deal with any future un-predicted pandemics.

Why Your Business Needs a Business Growth Adviser

I think this was a very new word for me before 2 months, but when I met a person who introduce himself as "Business Growth Adviser",  then I was really very surprised that what is this profile, but the name is very impressive and impact-full, so I invested my 90 to 100 minutes with a long and deep discussion with him for various aspects and prospects of Business and its growth.

After a long discussion, I found that business is not only sales, but it is combination of Sale, Projects, Delivery, Human Resource handling, task assignment and completion with timelines.

Apart from this, this person keep a business owner active throughout the day, week and month, for every project, every client and even for every employee.

Now I have collected some points on which a Business Growth Adviser keep their very keen views and observation.


1. Keep you active and focused.
As a business owners so many times we think that everything is going well and never think that in the fast moving world it is really not a very time taking process to get pulled off track. Here A growth advisor keeps you active in your field, share you market trends/research and keen you focused on the more critical aspects that directly influence your business growth.

2. Provide external support and business structure.
When I was running my business in year 2016 than I was thinking that doing a business very easy and we can earn a lot of money, while within a year I realized that growing a business can be a lonely endeavor if you not have external support of market experts. Hence, a growth adviser or we can say mentor, worth their weight in salt, helps you employ growth metrics to measure your headway. The numbers never lie. They tell you whether you're growing or not growing. No guessing needed.

3. Offer you their expertise.
A business growth adviser spent a lot of time in the market trends, ups and downs, requirement, reason of boom and reason of slowdown or out of market, So a skilled growth advisers offer business expertise and knowledge about growth strategies and business development. This falls under the "two heads are better than one" scenario. Your ability to leverage additional business acumen lets you skillfully maneuver the curves and bends along the business growth road.

4. Propose insight.
Many times you're too close to your own situation to clearly see what's working or what's not. An extra pair of ears and eyes helps heightens awareness and keeps you hip to where to put your energy, focus, and effort.

5. Deliver guidance.
A good growth mentor or advisor provides guidance on growth strategies, key activities, and potential roadblocks. They make available analytical intelligence to make sure you're equipped to make smart, strategic decisions.

Finally, A business growth advisor is your well wisher who keep you updated abut the market trends, demand, you can call them mentor who can advice you time to time what to do and what not to do and support you in the digital marketing to bring best clients from all over the world.