A lead is any user who achieves a website’s defined goal. It’s that simple. More simply, it would be an e-consumer who visited a major online retailer and purchased a specific product advertised on Google , social media , or via email marketing . It sounds simple in theory, but not so much in practice.
Why Objectives Matter in Digital Marketing
Before any digital project goes live, whether it’s a website, a social media campaign , or even an email blast, it needs to have a clear and precise objective. This objective shouldn’t be confusing or full of frills, as the more complicated it is, the more difficult it will be to achieve. This objective is defined alongside the planning process, which will be the key to ensuring the project receives the maximum number of leads possible and thus achieves its marketing objectives.
Let me give you an example. Every client has a problem. In my humble opinion, 99.9% of these problems are related to sales. Everyone wants to sell more. Small, medium, large, giant, and multinational companies have growth goals every year. These companies’ agencies are called in to solve this problem, or in some cases, to tell the client they have a problem, but that’s a discussion for another article.
Path to More Leads and Sales
Strategic planning creates the entire strategy to solve this customer problem. No matter how “contrived” the action, the objective must be clear: generate leads for the website, that is, impact a large number of people within the brand’s target audience, generating attention, interest, desire, and the action to visit the point of sale. Let’s assume all of this occurs with an online retailer; that is, the campaign ( banner , tweet , blog post , SMS , email marketing , etc.) must impact people and encourage them to visit the website and make purchases.
But a lead doesn’t need to be measured solely in sales. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, a lead is a user who achieves the project’s proposed objective. For example, a school’s success in an initiative might be having a large mailing list for future initiatives. Some companies find outbound telemarketing highly effective, so a lead can be measured by the user who completes a registration form. Whether the telemarketing ultimately converts into sales is another matter, but the objective was achieved.
