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August 13, 2024
Ron Tuch
Creating a handful of customer personas (or buyer personas) helps you better wrap your head around your target audience so you can learn what motivates them, and, ultimately, how you can help.
One other way to better understand who you’re selling to is to learn how they found your business in the first place.
Why? Because if you’re reaching out to prospects on Facebook and LinkedIn, and for every qualified lead that you get from LinkedIn, you get 100 from Facebook, you suddenly know where to focus more of your efforts in the future.
The way a lead finds you matters. In this post, we’ll show you what a lead source is and how you can use it to improve your lead generation efforts.
A lead source is a place leads come from. It tells you where someone first heard about your business.
Typically, this will be why someone visited your website or heard about your product or service. For example, this could be a social media ad, referral, Google search result, or radio ad.
Most businesses have multiple quality lead sources. Tracking these sources is vital for determining where your lead generation efforts have the most success. Let’s discuss both online and offline lead source channels.
When people think of lead sources, they typically think of online channels. In today’s digitized world, this is probably where most leads come from — and where you’ll spend most of your marketing budget.
Here’s a rundown of the top places to generate leads online:
Social media remains an excellent way to build brand awareness and reach vast audiences.
But which channel works best for your business largely depends on your target market (ex. B2B buyers vs. B2C buyers), product or service, and business size because the audience you’ll reach on TikTok is different than the one you’ll reach on LinkedIn.
Most online experiences begin with a search engine. Local searches are especially powerful, with 77% of consumers using Google in 2024 to search for local businesses. Successful SEO campaigns make sure your business appears higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) for your audience's search queries.
Paid ads offer an option for skipping the time-consuming process of building a social media following and getting to number one on search engines. Businesses often drive traffic to their websites by using Facebook ads or Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) platform to have their content show up in the Sponsored section at the top of search results like this:
Email outreach is an outbound marketing strategy that’s essentially the email equivalent of cold calling. Targeted email blasts introduce your business to prospects and include links for readers to click on.
The most effective cold email outreach programs typically provide valuable, educational content to hook potential leads.
Virtual events are another popular lead source. Hosting a webinar or workshop takes some upfront work, but it pays dividends because these events organically attract warm leads. Alternatively, virtual events you attend yourself provide networking opportunities, which could lead to future business.
Sales lead sources have existed long before the Internet became mainstream or the Industrial Revolution happened; ever since the beginning of business, people have studied their lead sources and figured out where they’re most likely to find good business. Here are a few of the most common “traditional” lead sources we see today:
Cold calling involves picking up the phone and calling your target audience. While its effectiveness has fallen as people increasingly ignore calls from unknown numbers, many businesses rely on cold calling to source leads and generate new business.
Traditional advertising is a catch-all term used for the advertising channels businesses relied on before the Internet age. Some examples of traditional advertising include:
Attending conferences, seminars, and business openings are all opportunities to generate leads through networking. Whether you’re inviting people to attend your event or shaking hands at an international trade gathering, in-person events often set the stage for long-term relationships.
Referral marketing is among the most powerful lead generation tools businesses have. People tend to listen to recommendations from family members, friends, and teammates more than corporate marketing materials or sales reps. This is why some companies offer discounts or straight cash for customers who refer people to them.
Direct mail used to be one of the cornerstones of marketing. Every time you receive a flyer or postcard from a business in your mailbox, you’re part of a direct mail campaign. Non-profits and credit card companies often use this tactic to great effect.
A customer is a customer, right? Wrong.
Where your leads originate offers valuable information to refine your sales process and learn more about your customers. Here are four things to focus on as you optimize your lead sourcing:
In the past, finding where a particular lead first came from involved asking them how they found your business or requesting they fill out a form. This manual process is inefficient and ineffective for tracking all (or even most) of your leads.
Automated lead tracking solutions empower businesses to attribute leads to certain sources without actually asking customers directly how they first heard about you. Now, you can put your lead-tracking activities on autopilot and create a continuous stream of data.
Knowing where you get the most leads will tell you where to direct your efforts. Trying to hit every channel equally wastes your marketing budget and sales team’s time.
Furthermore, continuous lead tracking provides a heads-up when your audience is changing. Don’t assume that your most valuable lead source will be the same five years from now.
Trimming your sales cycle means reducing the time it takes to engage with someone for the first time and then turn them into a customer. Shorter sales cycles make your operations more efficient and ultimately boost profits.
A key part of attracting the right leads to shorten your sales cycles is making sure you’re talking to the right people. Study your most successful current customers and make sure your most qualified leads are people who have similar needs, budgets, and goals.
Lead sourcing improves the way you drive a strong marketing ROI because it tells you where to direct your resources for future campaigns. Data-driven businesses use hard numbers to influence where they go next instead of just gut instincts alone.
Over 90% of organizations planned data initiatives in 2023 because businesses that harness big data have time and time again proven they have unrivaled insight into their customers. Lead source information helps determine ROI figures for each channel, guiding your marketing team to make decisions that’ll give them the biggest bang for their buck.
Adopting a few lead source best practices is wise if you want your business to grow reliably. Let’s discuss how your sales and marketing team can maximize lead sources to their peak potential.
First, you need a system that tracks where leads come from. Doing this manually is impractical, so you’ll need several tools. These include an actual tracking or attribution platform and data analysis and reporting tools.
Don’t lose sight of the big picture as you track each lead’s source. Lead sources form part of the overall lead generation process. You need to connect with prospects and take them through the sales process, and this is where a CRM tool becomes key to keeping your team on track.
Tools like Streak enable you to manage the entire lead generation process from right within your Gmail inbox. It’s designed to save time, keep your reps focused, and collect everything you need to learn about individual leads. It looks like this (and you can try it free for 14 days if you’re curious about how it works).
Don’t just list a lead source with a generic term. For example, if you got a lead through social media, don’t list it as “social media.” List it as “Facebook,” “Instagram,” or whichever platform they came from.
Sub-categorizing your lead sources allows your sales team to drill into the lead generation process later.
The quantity of leads you generate matters, but it’s not the most important consideration. Here’s a hard truth: 80% of new leads never convert to sales.
Unqualified sales leads mean much less than qualified leads because the former need more work on your part. Instead, strike a healthy balance between the quantity of leads you generate with the quality of leads you collect.
Finding your top-converting channel requires extensive trial and error. Letting your intuition decide one channel is better than another means leaving opportunities on the table. This is why it’s vital to diversify your efforts across multiple channels.
Running cross-channel lead generation campaigns offers several benefits within the context of lead sources, including:
Some businesses have a single, particular customer persona within one niche. Even these businesses should never rely on a single marketing strategy that they copy-paste across multiple channels.
The reason is that the expectation differs even though the audience might be the same. Someone browsing Facebook might also be on LinkedIn, but they expect certain content on the former vs. the latter. Account for this by using tailored lead source marketing strategies to increase your success rates.
What does the buyer’s journey look like for each lead source?
Google may involve typing a keyword, clicking on your blog, reading said blog, and then getting in touch with you. Facebook ads may lead a prospect from the ad to a sales landing page and then to your sales team.
The buyer’s journey always differs based on the channels (and even between campaign types within channels), so it’s crucial to map out what this looks like so you can improve the experience at every turn.
Content triggers action. But is your content aligned with your buyers within each lead source?
Businesses must consider the nuances between separate buyer journeys. Knowing the buyer’s journey for each channel is crucial because it enables your content team to produce content that gives sales leads what they want at each stage.
Finally, ensure you’re tracking your lead sources continuously. Your team needs a steady understanding of what sources are bringing in the highest quality leads, so find a lead and pipeline tracking tool for real-time data capture and analysis. Furthermore, set aside time for your sales and marketing teams to discuss the results and any needed changes to the lead generation process.
Stay agile, stay flexible, and you’ll stay growing.
Focusing on lead sources provides you with greater insight into your customers so you can generate higher quality leads. However, leads are not customers. They still need to be nurtured and guided through a customized sales pipeline.
This is where Streak comes in. Streak’s CRM tool for Gmail makes managing thousands of qualified leads effortless by enabling you to nurture them without ever leaving your inbox.
The best part? It only takes a few seconds to request a 14-day free trial. Join more than 750,000 happy users who already use Streak today.
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