What is a Lead? By InboundCycle

The definition we like the most is the following:

A lead is a person who has provided their contact information through a landing page form.

Typically, they are generated by offering valuable content that the user can download from our website. Therefore, to start generate leads You should create interesting content for your target audience and place it on different landing pages.

Therefore, a lead This is usually an Internet user whose name and email address we know. This is the basic information you need to maintain contact with the user.

As we mentioned before, this is the definition of lead with which we identify, but it is not an exact science: depending on the sector and objectives of each company, and also depending on the point in the funnel (or marketing funnel) where it is captured, a lead will be defined in one way or another.

What types of leads exist?

A Lead is in an initial phase of the purchase cycle, but there is still a previous phase that you cannot underestimate: the subscribers either subscribers, those who have agreed to receive information from you (through a newsletter or a subscription to your blog, for example), and to whom you can indirectly offer downloadable content so that they can be transformed into leads.

Once the user has downloaded some content from our website and we consider it lead, we can include it in different categories. Last week we talked about the difference between cold leads and hot leads, which allows us to quickly identify where the lead is in the purchasing cycle.

In summary we could identify 3 types of leads:

• Lead: They've downloaded some of our content and provided us with their basic information. They're usually at the TOFU (Top of the Funnel) stage, so they're still a long way from purchasing. This would be equivalent to a cold lead.
• Marketing Qualified Lead or Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)They're in the MOFU (Middle of the Funnel) phase because they've repeatedly shown interest in our content. They're typically triggered by requests for more information on forms; information that helps us determine whether they're a valuable business opportunity or not.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): They are in the BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) phase and are ready to purchase. These are leads who have generally moved through the marketing funnel and are responding to an offer much closer to the product or service you offer (a demo or trial, a phone meeting, a product sample, etc.). The form on this type of landing page is usually quite long because it gathers all the information we need to schedule the meeting or transaction. We are, therefore, talking about a hot lead.

What can you do with leads?

As you can see, user behavior and attitude vary depending on the stage of the buying cycle they are in. Therefore, you must adapt your marketing actions to the lead's state.

Lead Nurturing & Lead Scoring

He Lead Nurturing and the Lead Scoring These are two complementary techniques that you should implement from the moment an anonymous user fills out a form and becomes a lead with a name and email address.

• He Lead Nurturing Its goal is to "nature" leads. It does this through automated email chains in which it gradually offers them content that moves them forward in the buying cycle. It's a kind of business opportunity filter.
• He Lead Scoring, on the other hand, consists of assigning a score to the Lead based on the actions they take. The more they interact with your website and content, the higher their score and the greater their interest in your products. We could consider it a ranking of business opportunities.
  These actions logically apply to so-called Leads and MQLs.

Once a lead has gone through this entire process and we've classified it as an SQL, the moment you've been waiting for has arrived: you can now send it to your sales department or offer your product directly for them to purchase. Congratulations! 🙂