Leads are a specific type of user that must be won over and treated with great attention and care by a brand’s team.

In this post, you will understand everything about leads in digital marketing: what they are and how to manage, qualify, and nurture them. In advance, we can say that they are essential for the sales success of a company. Stay with us and follow along to the end!

To read our complete guide on digital marketing, click here.

What are Leads in digital marketing?

In general terms, a Lead is the best business opportunity for a company striving for easy local influence and recognition. More precisely, a Lead is someone who provides their personal information in exchange for a value offer on a website, for example.

Usually, this information embraces only contact details – such as email, name, phone number, and related. Therefore, we define a Lead as someone who possesses and shows interest in your business. These are people who are likely interested in learning more about your company, products, and services.

How is a Lead’s interest showcased?

It is precisely by providing information that a lead demonstrates their interest – the customer’s curiosity begins at the very moment they fill out registration forms on the website to receive news and offers.

Once you have the email addresses of potential customers, you have the chance to contact them and offer your services in a more planned and precise way. The user becomes a lead for your company as soon as they complete their registration or download material, leaving their contact details along the way.

Once all is said and done, they will be placed in your company’s sales funnel, and from then on your team will need to work hard to close deals.

Why manage leads in digital marketing?

When the user provides their email in exchange for your quality content and products, they become a valuable asset for a company. But do you know how to manage so many assets? Do you know how to turn them into loyal customers?

According to a study conducted by the MarketingSherpa Research Institute, an average of 73% of leads of several companies are not ready to make a purchase from the get-go. For this reason, entrepreneurs who want to achieve sales success must never believe that generating leads is enough.

You see, companies must work hard and make the leads they’ve acquired evolve even further in the sales funnel. This way, the business will have more and more customers with the ideal profile – who will be more willing to buy your services or products.

Therefore, strengthen the relationship with the leads by offering more quality content and showing them how essential they are to your professional life. Although considerably complex, this process is simpler when there isn’t a large quantity of leads.

So, doing this work with the team – in other words, starting from the acquisition of the first leads – is essential for the process to evolve along with the company.

Qualifying, managing, and nurturing Leads: why is it important?

As soon as a new Lead is added to your database, their actions and choices are unpredictable, whether you like it or not.

This means that they may be there for various reasons – whether it’s because they consider your brand a possible solution to their problem, because they want to buy a product, or simply out of interest in the subject, without the actual intention to purchase.

For this reason, in addition to generating Leads, you must work to qualify, manage, and nurture these potential customers, facilitating the relationship for both sides.

Read as well: 10 reasons why email marketing is so important

How can you manage Leads in digital marketing?

Managing leads is a detailed process that needs to be well-planned, as it occurs in different stages. Below, check out some of these stages and tips on how to manage leads the right way:

Lead Attraction and Enrollment

Lead management always starts with lead attraction, where the company seeks to attract new potential customers.

During this process, the company’s strategies should be related to attracting and winning over leads. This is done through truly relevant and quality content, often posted on blogs, for example.

User Data Collection

User data collection occurs alongside the previous stage. Here, the potential customer’s data is used for lead scoring, a technique used in Inbound Marketing.

The strategy serves to track the user’s phases, which are: discovery, problem recognition, consideration, and decision.

Lead scoring, on the other hand, is the score obtained based on the data determined earlier. This score is responsible for demonstrating the qualification of a potential customer for your company.

Lead Nurturing

The lead nurturing stage is based on an Inbound Marketing score called lead tracking. These points are achieved after the user performs a certain number of content downloads and frequent material openings – determining whether a lead is truly ready to make a purchase or not.

After that, a professional contacts the user and starts a consultation to close the deal. From there, the lead is referred to the store’s sales team, becoming one of the qualified leads of the company.

Customer Delight After the Sale

After marketing-guided leads meet the sales requirements and become qualified leads (more on this in a bit), the purchase is completed and customer delight begins.

In this stage, the professional specialized in customer success engages the lead, nurturing the customer and keeping them connected to the company’s business.

Results Measurement

After the entire process, it’s time to measure the results – one of the greatest benefits provided by the tools and platforms of digital marketing.

Here, you will need to analyze the results and determine the best time for sending notifications, as well as the frequency and the right time of day for posting on social media or a blog. The idea is to analyze what really worked and how well it worked.

Make the most of your time; it is very valuable. As you may know, time is money, so dedicate a period of your day or week to focus on action plans that can improve your company’s sales.

Having visitors on the website and generating leads is not enough to win loyalty and convince them to buy a service or product. It is necessary to nurture your consumers because they need to stay engaged and evolve in the sales funnel, and the lack of content can be a significant obstacle to this.

One or two hours a day is enough time to produce quality content and keep customers attentive to your brand’s updates.

What are qualified Leads in digital marketing?

We talked about qualified leads before – but what are they? These are users with a higher likelihood of purchasing a product or service offered by a company.

That said, there are different types of qualified leads – as qualifications can be determined in different ways. This includes:

• Service Qualified Lead
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
• Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

The importance of nurturing leads

When a company faces leads with purchase intentions, it needs to be prepared to deal with them. Therefore, it is crucial to have strategies capable of nurturing each of these leads with relevant content about the solution sold by the brand.

You can rely on services like CRM – or Customer Relationship Management – used to automate and personalize your relationship with your customers and potential clients.

The goal of lead nurturing is to be present in customers’ daily lives, providing quality content that:

• Explains the product/service;
• Reinforces the relationship;
• Captures the lead’s attention;
• Addresses consumer questions;
• Makes the company more trustworthy.

Leads x Visitors: what’s the difference?

As not all users who access a website can be considered customers, there are differences between being a visitor and being a lead.

A visitor is someone who is merely exploring your web pages without showing interest in your business. In contrast, a Lead is a user who demonstrates interest in something offered by your company, indicating a higher chance of them being interested in another product or service offered in the future.

Need help with Leads in digital marketing strategies? Laços can help you

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Schedule a free online meeting with us – we want to get to know you better, discuss your ideal strategy live, and present our proposal to execute it. Laços is a digital marketing agency based in Brazil that is always ready to launch your plans off the paper and make you profit with them.