How Do You Generate Leads?

How Do You Generate Leads? The Mechanics of Lead Generation

Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the whole inbound marketing methodology, let's review the actual components of the lead generation process.

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• Landing Page: A landing page is a web page a visitor lands on for a distinct purpose. While a landing page can be used for various reasons, one of its most frequent uses is to capture leads through ...


• Forms: Forms are hosted on landing pages. They consist of a series of fields (like in our example above) that collect information in exchange for an ...


• Offer: An offer is the content or something of value that's being "offered" on the landing page. The offer must have enough value to a visitor to merit providing their personal information in exchange for access to it.


• Call-to-Action: A call-to-action (CTA) is an image, button, or message that calls website visitors to take some sort of action. When it comes to lead generation, this action is (you guessed it!) to fill out the form on the landing page and redeem the offer.

See how everything fits together?

Once you put all these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to link and drive traffic to the landing page so you can start generating leads. Here are some example pathways for lead generation:

Why Not Just Buy Leads?

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel -- and they want to fill it quickly. That's where the temptation to buy leads comes in. Buying leads, as opposed to generating them organically, is much easier and takes far less time and effort -- despite being more expensive. So why shouldn't you just buy leads?

First and foremost, leads you've purchased don't actually know you. Typically, they've "opted in" at some other site when signing up for something -- and didn't actually opt in to receiving anything from your company. The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages, and sending unwanted messages is intrusive, not inviting. If the prospect has never been to your website, indicated an interest in your resources, products, services, or even industry, then you're interrupting them ... plain and simple.

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If they never opted in to receive messages from you specifically, then there's a high likelihood they could flag your messages as spam. This is quite dangerous for you. Not only does this train their inbox to show only emails they want to see, but it indicates to their email provider which emails to filter out. Once enough people click flag your messages as spam, you go on a "blacklist," which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it's really, really hard to get back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It's always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Read this blog post to learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.

Want more lead generation insight? Download our complete guide to lead generation for even more lead gen tips.