There’s a common understanding that marketing and lead generation are more dynamic and ever-changing than ever before. Studies have found that the pandemic caused by COVID-19 changed consumer behavior in more ways than most people could ever expect. As a result, consumers have changed how and where they engage with the brands. That is the main reason why lead-generating campaigns should change as well, and marketing departments need to react to these changes accordingly.
The drastic decrease in face-to-face interactions has undoubtedly contributed to this industry-wide change. When the opportunity to host a trade show or participate in one is strictly limited, and the termination of cookie-based tracking approaches, it will become essential to utilize every marketing avenue available to find and nurture new prospects.
Successful lead generation strategies are all about data, as they follow influential lead generation industry trends. This includes specific data on each marketplace, as well as different segments within them. Without knowing the needs of your audience, you will have difficulty in making your services appealing to leads and publishers.
The following are lead generation trends that will likely rise in popularity next year.
Viability Of Email
Content strategies will have to adapt to identify touchpoints that are critical to creating a customer journey map. As a result, it will be easier to understand the customer experience and optimize the interactions with the content that resonates with your target audience. That being said, getting the contact information is only half of the job. Reaching the customers is the other.
Despite being one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, email is expected to be on the upswing compared to other lead generation types. Response rates to sales emails have been steadily rising since the beginning of 2020, with an expectation to grow further in 2025.
The beauty of email marketing is that it is universal across all industries, including lead generation. With that in mind, it doesn’t require any extra personalization to be an effective marketing tool.
On-Page Lead Qualification
Even the most successful marketing strategies generate a certain percentage of leads that carry no value to the business. Needless to say, there are multiple reasons why you can end up with prospects that your brand cannot cater to.
Most of the time, the practical qualification of leads is tricky, and trying to qualify all your leads manually is simply impractical. With that in mind, even some automated solutions require you to collect sufficient data on your prospects before you can even make an informed decision on a marketing campaign.
On-page lead qualification is one of the top methods for qualifying new leads. The process allows analyzing the prospects and qualifying them as leads after the initial sign-up. When paired with other automated tools on your platform, on-page qualification enables you to significantly cut the need to manually qualify your leads and speed up the process of generating new leads.
Video Content vs. Standard Blogs
Although it may take some time for video marketing to get to the levels of regular blog posts in terms of popularity as a marketing tool, the potential of video-based content is higher than ever before. Obviously, the video format is more convenient to consumers than other media types when we look at them as marketing instruments.
Demos, live streams, webinars, short informational videos, explainers, video reviews, and webcasts are only a few channels you can use to introduce your content or services using video-based marketing.
Although not every consumer prefers watching videos to reading, the popularity of video content will continue to rise. So with that, let’s not diminish the importance of classic whitepapers just yet, since they are unlikely to lose their viability for consumers anytime soon.
Conversation-Based Marketing
Chatbots are yet another form of artificial intelligence that can be utilized to interact with customers. These bots can collect lead data such as email addresses, contact numbers, and names from customers.
Perhaps the most significant benefit of chatbots is that they are available 24/7, making them useful as a part of your digital support. Also, since the tech allows customers to get responses to their questions and inquiries faster, you secure the conversions and help the customers while saving resources.
Even though no chatbot will manage to build the trust of your audience, it can help ease the day-to-day tasks of your sales team, which can prove beneficial in the long run since it allows you to offload a lot of manual tasks.
Marketers need to have quick lead response times since prospects expect businesses to quickly resolve their inquiries and questions, which will be even more true for lead generation in the next year.
According to a report on lead response from 2018, it is critical to respond to any new leads within 5 minutes to maximize the chances of conversion. Nonetheless, only a small number of companies can engage customers in such a small time frame.
User Analytics
The advancements in artificial intelligence tech don’t stop at just chatbots. There are many AI-based sales and marketing tools available today that can gather data on prospects and leads and help extract the information you need from them.
First, AI can better identify market opportunities, saving time otherwise spent on manual evaluation and analysis. Likewise, automated tools make it easier to identify prospects based on ICP, which can speed up the process of aligning the prospect’s profiles with your marketing and sales strategies.
Lastly, using AI as a component of existing marketing tech helps boost your sales department’s future revenue.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Companies that focus on customer needs will be more committed to generating the right leads than just working toward a larger lead quantity.
In recent years, we’ve seen that despite concerns about digital security, people are willing to exchange their contact data for personalized offers. This is nothing new in terms of lead generation trends. However, if you take the lack of cookie-based tracking into account, getting that data becomes tricky.
A good strategy, in that case, is to focus resources on a set of specific accounts instead of casting a wider net. ABM can help businesses to increase the relevance of accounts, identify specific contacts within specific markets, and finally, get the best value out of marketing efforts.
Account-based marketing provides companies with more sales opportunities while delivering results when done right. Even though it is unnecessary to have an ABM in place to reach higher ROI, its core principle — solving the buyer’s problem — should be a priority in any marketing endeavor.
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