As the internet and social media mature, it is important for business owners to understand the different ways to see results across all digital marketing tools. Additionally, it is important to know the digital marketing strategies to use in driving two key performance indicators online: lead generation and engagement.
What’s Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the tool of gaining potential customers’ data, whether through their email address, phone number, or other means. Lead generation is most notably important for service-based businesses to create sales and for more direct product businesses to build a network of potential buyers to whom they will market their offerings. If you’ve ever run a digital campaign to collect phone numbers, email addresses or followers, you’ve most likely ran a lead generation campaign online. This is great for potentially boosting sales, but if someone becomes a lead, it is less likely that they will engage with your content (like, share, comment) in the same vein.
What is Engagement?
We, digital marketers, could engagement as any view, reaction, share, comment or save that you use on any digital platform, though it is more common on social media channels. Engagement shows you what type of content is working for your audience at the time. Engagement is also one of the biggest indicators of organic success – that is the success of your content without boosting it with online advertising. Engagement helps increase how many people your content reaches and could be a perfect indicator of your success online.
However, engagement is not lead generation and vice versa. This means, when planning your content calendar, you want to ensure that you have a mix of engagement posts and posts that are catered to lead generation. In fact, some companies have their engagement posts as the primary “feed” focus, while they leverage lead generation campaigns using “backend” digital advertising tools. This allows them to reach new people while catering to their growing base audience.
Lead generation posts ask people to take action that will manifest into business or some type of marketing relationship. With engagement posts, you’re particularly focused on entertaining the audience where they are with your content and are not necessarily looking for a sale or a conversation.
We at StreamLined use a mix of engagement and lead generation posts to make your company feel more authentic to your audiences. Want to audit your posts and their success? Contact us today!