Lead Generation For Dummies
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The world of marketing, sales, and lead generation has plenty of jargon, so here's a glossary of terms to help you know what's what. Also, here is a round-up of eight incredibly useful free apps that help you with everything from evaluating your website for broken links and good search engine optimization (SEO) to determining how engaging your marketing emails are.

Familiarize yourself with lead generation terms

When you’re getting started with lead generation, you should familiarize yourself with a variety of basic terms. Here’s a glossary of some basic lead generation and sales terms and definitions for your reference:

  • Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU): Prospects that are at the bottom of the sales funnel and nearing a purchase.

  • Budget, authority, need, and time (BANT): A method for qualifying likely sales prospects. You want to talk to people who have the budget, authority, need, and time for your product or service.

  • B2B: Business-to-business.

  • B2C: Business-to-consumer.

  • Call-to-action (CTA): Asking a lead to take an action. A CTA often takes the form of a digital image that encourages a lead to move closer towards making a purchase.

  • Click-through rate (CTR): A percentage of how many users actually click a link; a way of measuring the success of online or email sales campaigns.

  • CMS (content management system): A computer system that allows users to publish and edit content from a single interface.

  • Inbound marketing: A marketing strategy that earns the attention of customers, drawing them in to attract new business through content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and more.

  • Lead generation: The marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline.

  • Lead nurturing: The process of building relationships with qualified prospects, regardless of their readiness to buy.

  • Lead scoring: The technique of assigning leads a score based on points given to a lead’s demographic attributes, behaviors, and web activity for the purpose of sending warm leads to sales.

  • Middle-of-funnel (MOFU): Prospects in the middle stages of the sales funnel.

  • Outbound marketing: The process of pushing your message out to customers through general advertising and other paid programs.

  • Pay-per-click (PPC): An Internet advertising model where advertisers pay every time their ad is clicked by a user.

  • Return on investment (ROI): The results gained for your dollars spent.

  • Sales and marketing alignment: Collaboration between the sales and marketing team for common definitions of what constitutes a good lead and closed-loop lead lifecycles.

  • Sales funnel: The progression that your company tracks while generating, qualifying, and closing leads throughout the sales and marketing lifecycle.

  • Service-level agreement: A part of a contract where a service is defined.

  • Top-of-funnel (TOFU): Prospects in the top or beginning stages of the sales funnel.

8 useful, and free, lead generation apps

Many applications and websites are available to test your lead generation techniques and strategies. From determining how to test a landing page, to seeing how your emails look on various devices, to seeing how well your website is optimized for keywords, free tools can help you do lots of things.

Take a look at this list to learn about eight useful and free lead-generation applications:

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Dayna Rothman is the senior content marketing manager at Marketo, a leader in the marketing automation space. Dayna leads content creation and strategy at Marketo and is the managing editor for the Marketo blog, which receives more than 400,000 unique visitors per year. Dayna has also been featured as one of the top 25 content marketers to watch according to Kapost, and one of the top 50 content marketing influencers according to Onalytica.

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