Lead generation in the simplest form involves creating and distributing content related to your company’s products and services which would rope in people to invest. The content could be anything from a simple news or blog article to well-curated email, high-quality video and posters.
For any company to successfully and continually generate revenue, its sales funnels should be very efficient. Lead generation comes very early in the sales funnel of a business model and plays a pivotal role in dictating the efficiency of a company to target the relevant audience and bring in new clientele.
Your marketing team should to only be able to curate the content for a broader target audience but also be well versed in segregating the leads to further niche down the content, products and services marketed to them.
All leads are not the same. Furthermore, a single set of the target audience could encompass different types of leads. On a broader spectrum, leads can be of four types:
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MOL)
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
- Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
- Service Qualified Lead
Did you know that the use of Extended Reality (XR) in marketing strategies can dramatically improve lead generation, customer retention and also support your brand’s upselling efforts to existing customers?
Generate Leads with AR and VR
Using AR and VR in your marketing campaigns can skyrocket brand awareness and website traffic at unprecedented rates.
One of the early and effective uses of this was for the promotion of Steven Spielberg’s movie ‘Ready Player One’. The film crew took to Facebook where they deployed an AR content for audiences to use. Through AR development platforms, you do not need to create a new application from the ground up.
Such an innovative marketing campaign played a huge role in the film’s success.
Spurring Customer Retention Rates with AR
Augmented Reality can help businesses improve customer retention rates as well. Marketing teams could cleverly nudge the audiences to engage in the brand’s AR service like showcasing a product or showing different variations of a product displayed in a store. As per Houzz, users that access AR functionalities on a mobile are 11 times more likely to complete the purchase!
A scenario of improving customer retention is in the automotive sector. Customers can be persuaded to opt for an upgrade of their car from the same company by delivering services like simple car diagnostics through web AR.
Marketing Team Should be “Right on Target”!
Before diving deep into the intricacies and the process of lead generation, every member of the marketing team in your company should have crystal clear clarity about the target audience. This is because the target audience is one of the most heavily contributing factors to decide what kind of content should be generated, curated and distributed.
As mentioned before, the content your company and the marketing team puts out for the target audience is what brings in the good leads. So, if you were to generate offline content like newspaper articles for your target audience like digital designers, who spend a majority of their time in the digital world, then your sales funnel’s efficiency would drop dramatically!
Use AR for Better Targeting
Did you know, according to Thrive Analytics, more than 70% of consumers love using mobile-based AR!
The use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality is a whole new and interesting way to generate more leads, because such content is bound to raise eyebrows and pique the interests of people.
Old but Gold Tactics
Over the decades, technology has advanced unprecedentedly. The entire process of bringing in more leads has seen a huge shift and, safe to say, has become a rather complex task requiring several people and large teams.
However, some tricks of the trade from the good old days are still relevant today.
- Cold Calling
- Cold Emailing
Note that cold calling and cold emailing are better suited to small and medium scale businesses, and not large enterprises.
Cold Calling
Train your marketing team to be persuasive over phone calls.
In cold calling, the marketing team members dial up the audience from the numbers they have collected and offer them the products or services that your company is offering without any background details of the customer.
To find the contact numbers of your target audience, prompt them to fill in a contact form or visit websites that may have listed the contact numbers.
Cold calling is typically easier for B2B companies since finding the contact numbers of other businesses is easier than acquiring numbers of customers if you are starting from scratch.
Combine Cold Calling with AR and VR
As times change, tactics should evolve too! Thanks to improved technology, AR and VR, cold calling can soon be taken to new heights where the calls are not just based on audio but are also interactive!
Hence, more customers are bound to walk in when such technology is used by stores. As per the insights by Lumus Vision, 7 out of 10 people who shop prefer stores that have adopted AR!
Cold Emailing
Cold Emailing is an easier way to generate leads than cold calling for B2C businesses.
Just like cold calling, cold emailing involves sending unsolicited, well-drafted and highly persuasive emails to the company’s target audience.
Moreover, including Augmented Reality (AR) content in emails has borne great fruit for companies like Apple and One Plus. These companies have started marketing their products through AR. One Plus had even made their entire launch even in 2020 based on Augmented Reality! But how can marketing teams incorporate this into the email?
Web AR in Email Copies is the Way Forward!
Many brands, till date, employ cliché techniques of cold emailing. Cold emailing is still a powerful way to connect with people, but the way this process is carried out should evolve.
Make AR the selling point in the email copies, then include strong CTAs to a landing page where they can view the product or service in AR. Such a selling point ought to urge a greater number of people to click on your emails and drop in to your website because very few brands have taken advantage of web AR in the current times.
Cold emailing is much faster because hundreds or thousands of emails can be sent in an instant with the help of third-party email marketing services.
Conclusion: Invest in Lead Generation Strategies and XR
Train your marketing team to put out impactful social media marketing campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat and Instagram while you invest in strengthening your brand’s AR capabilities.
Launching XR-focused marketing campaigns on such platforms will also provide high-quality insightful data into the performance of ads. Through regular iterations, the lead generation rate and conversion rate can increase manifold!
There are billions of people on the internet. This makes digital marketing much more impactful and profound than conventional modes of marketing. Combining this with ground breaking technologies like Extended Reality will lead to increased effectiveness of the marketing team’s lead generation process.
