What is a lead in marketing?

What is a lead?

The term “lead” so important in digital marketing. It is both a common noun (in marketing) and a verb (generate, lead to). The lead in digital marketing is the holy grail and lead generation is the very “web” expression to designate all the techniques that generate leads.

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What is a lead in digital marketing

The lead is the point of commercial contact between a brand and a potential prospect of this brand, it being up to the latter to convert him into a prospect, then into a customer. Basically the lead is to digital what the “date” is to sentimental life!

Have you succeeded in having a first contact with a person composing your commercial target? You got a lead. When you are an exhibitor at a trade show, crowds flow through the rows. Whoever in this crowd will stop by your booth and ask you questions about what you are selling is a “lead”.

It’s exactly the same thing in digital matters: as you have established a content strategy that holds up, you generate traffic and among this traffic, these people who pass on your website, some will stop for longer and do the action you want it to do on one of the pages of your site. If so, they become prospects. Depending on the effectiveness of your content strategy, the leads collected will be more or less qualified. In any case, by doing this, you brought in a person who a few seconds before did not know anything about you, at your place. It is said in marketing jargon that you made it through your conversion funnel … and the report showing the number of people who finally did the action you want them to do on the one who initially came on your site (VU) is thus called conversion rate (or conversion rate).

Lead and lead nurturing

If your site is designed according to content marketing processes and methods , the action you have taken to switch from lead to prospect will have made it possible to collect the informational data of this lead (name / first name / professional function / type of the company) which will then allow you to set up a lead nurturing strategy. In English, to nurture is to water! Transposing to marketing jargon, doing lead nurturing is therefore to maintain, by regularly nurturing your relationship with this lead, his interest by continuing to provide him with information that you know is of interest to him.

What is a lead in content marketing ?

For the content marketer, a conversion to lead is the moment when, thanks to the fact that you have disseminated enough interesting content, you have managed to convince / encourage your visitors to give you enough personal information about them so that they now allow you to “market” them. This exchange of information between you and your audience can thus include various actions such as, for example, downloading a white paper, registering for a product demonstration, registering for an event, subscribing to a newsletter, ‘access to a resource center.

As long as you have the prospect’s permission, you can now use content to move them through your purchase funnel. This is called “lead nurturing” and it is the difference between cull emailing and “cold” email (basic purchase and mass mailings to anyone and everyone). By now being informed about what interests them and under what templates, you will be able to send (to your target audience / personas ) information on subjects that interest them and, information that you will “sprinkle” throughout their journey. purchase / purchase tunnel

To learn more about the content marketing method, here is my presentation made on the occasion of VLC 2014 . I presented the process to design its content marketing strategy as practiced in the United States.