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This excerpt from the B2B Lead Generation ebook leverages SEJ’s internal expertise in generating leads through various media channels.
Human behavior is influenced by a blend of desires, wants, needs, experiences, and external pressures.
Building trust and converting a prospect into a lead, and eventually a paying customer, can be a gradual process.
Understanding the intricacies of logic and psychology can significantly impact your ability to engage with audiences effectively and cultivate strong leads.
Each potential customer you engage with places a high value on their own effort and information. This is influenced by the endowment effect, where individuals assign greater significance to their time and data than you might perceive.
Conversely, this effect also means that you may overestimate the value of what you’re offering in exchange for people’s information.
If what you offer doesn’t match the perceived value of the time and information consumers provide, conversions will likely be low.
The solution? Enhance the perceived value of your offer or reduce the perceived cost to the user for accessing what you provide.
Humans assess rewards based on various factors, such as the reward’s magnitude, the delay until receiving it, and its certainty.
The longer the wait for a reward and the less assured its value, the more effort is needed to engage someone.
Providing immediate value—whether it’s through a live event, ebook, or demo—can spur immediate action and persuade leads of the enduring benefits of their engagement.
This upfront value can also serve as a primer for the subsequent stages of lead nurturing, suggesting additional benefits to come and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your lead generation strategy.
This underscores the importance of inbound content in supporting lead generation efforts. Short-term benefits from highly valuable ungated content help prepare audiences for the long-term advantages offered in the future.
While every lead generation journey is meticulously planned, designing it strictly as a funnel can lead to missing out on numerous qualified leads.
The funnel analogy implies that all leads interact with your brand or offer uniformly, which isn’t always the case, especially for high-value products or services.
In reality, these journeys are more fluid. Leads often navigate between stages, influenced by various factors such as changing circumstances, organizational barriers, channel shifts, or evolving needs.
Rather than confining journeys to audience segments, consider optimizing for paths and contexts as well.
Optimizing for specific contexts and encounters provides multiple chances to capture leads when they are in particular mindsets. Each interaction represents an opportunity to engage with varying “costs” in terms of time and data, aligning your key performance indicators (KPIs) accordingly.
Contextual journeys also offer distinct opportunities to gain insights into different audience segments, including their primary interests, the offers that attract them, and their specific concerns about your brand, product, or service.
Free trials and discounts may catch attention, but they do not always translate into benefits for your brand.
Many brands assume consumers will invariably opt for the product with the lowest price. However, this is not always true.
Consumers operate within what is known as the “zone of acceptability,” a price range they consider reasonable for making purchasing decisions.
If your brand’s price falls outside this range, you may attract leads initially, but they might not convert into actual purchases later on. While the initial offer might be appealing, a perceived lower value could hinder your efforts to close the sale.
Several factors influence consumer sensitivity to pricing discounts, including the overall cost of the purchase.
Higher-priced items, such as SaaS subscriptions or real estate, can be particularly sensitive to price reductions. Such discounts might cause your audience to perceive the product as lower in value or indicate financial struggles. We often observe a clear relationship between price and quality in various aspects of life. For instance, if you opt for the cheapest airline ticket, you might not expect a punctual and comfortable journey.
Offering specific advice on these matters is challenging. Determining optimal price points and discounts requires robust feedback systems from both customers and leads, along with data on how different audiences engage. However, there is merit in not positioning yourself as the cheapest option.
Every significant purchasing decision involves several distinct roles:
These roles can be performed by different individuals or by the same person assuming multiple roles. It’s crucial to cater to the needs of each role at the appropriate stages of the decision-making process. Failure to do so can lead to decreased conversion rates early in the process.
To avoid this challenge, it’s essential to identify who you are attracting when you capture a lead and to provide the necessary information at the right times throughout the conversion process. Understanding these roles helps in effectively addressing the concerns and requirements of each stakeholder involved in the purchase decision.
Many businesses invest considerable resources in nurturing leads and analyzing the characteristics of potential customers who complete lead forms.
However, what about those who do not fill out these forms?
It is crucial to understand these values and the factors influencing purchasing decisions.
While your proprietary customer data, including analytics, client information, and lead interactions, provides a solid foundation, it’s essential not to rely exclusively on the data gathered from existing leads.
This data offers insights into those who are already engaging with your business but does not encompass information about the broader audience that you have not yet captured.
Beware of survivorship bias, where you only analyze data from people who have successfully passed your selection filters. This is especially critical in lead generation because not all groups are desirable leads. It’s essential to attract ideal leads while filtering out suboptimal ones. Understanding why some potential leads don’t convert is vital to refining your filters effectively.
To gather insights, consider analyzing the segment of your target audience using competitors’ products. Utilize psychographic tools such as “values and lifestyle surveys” (VALS) to gain deeper understanding and make informed decisions.
In today’s competitive digital landscape, precise lead generation is essential. Understanding the motivations of your target audience prior to lead capture and meticulously designing every aspect with conversion in mind will enhance your ability to capture more leads and drive sales, solidifying your brand as a market leader.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal
