Lead aggregation is a way to gather a large number of leads at one time in one place to help streamline the sales process. These leads are then followed up on or sold to others to use for their sales and marketing needs. The development of new technology and tools in the marketing sphere has changed the way lead aggregation is done and how efficiently it can be accomplished.
Lead Aggregation Vs. Lead Generation
Although lead aggregation and lead generation are often used interchangeably by some in marketing, there is a difference in their meanings. Lead generation is a method to produce leads, usually in mass quantities, for the purpose of your own business or to sell to other businesses. Lead aggregation is a way of collecting leads that have already been generated, and then sorting and distributing them. Lead aggregation has become very profitable for many businesses. The ultimate purpose of lead aggregation is to effectively group leads in order to simplify and streamline the sales process.
Why Lead Aggregation?
Lead aggregation is needed to keep up with today’s competitors. Good quality lead aggregators collect large amounts of quality leads, giving the business or whomever they sell them to a better chance of converting those leads into sales. The more quality leads produced through lead generation and aggregation, the higher your conversion rate will be. Without modern lead aggregation and generation tools, more traditional, tedious methods of tryimng to find leads to convert such as cold calling, mail solicitation, etc. must be used and manually organized by the marketing manager or salesman.
Not using lead aggregation tools is like finding the one good email in a list of spam.
Lead Aggregation System
A lead aggregation system is a framework or tool that helps you convert leads. Typically, your lead aggregation system is customized to center around your website, as that’s where most leads are collected. Building a streamlined lead aggregation system is key to how well your leads convert from your website, landing page, and custom forms.
An effective lead aggregation system will have different stages in which your leads enter and move along through. Part of this is intended to nurture the leads so that only the quality leads are aggregated in your system. For instance, you may have a stage that automatically sends out an email to your lead, and another may make a follow-up appointment for your sales team to call them.
Get More Targeted Leads to Your Aggregation System
A lead aggregation system will not work properly if you don’t have visitors going to your website looking to potentially convert. There are many strategies to help get people to your site, one of which is paid traffic generation. Paid traffic generation comes in three main categories:
- Pay-per-click – the most well-known and popular option. You pay for this option when people search for terms relevant to your product and click on your ad or link.
- CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) – With this method, you pay when someone “views” your advertisement no matter if they click on it or not, and is generally priced per thousand views. Usually, this method is more effective for branding efforts and tends to be less targeted than pay-per-click.
- Pay-per-action – Another familiar option is the pay-per-action method, or CPA. You pay when one of your visitors takes action on your site, such as filling out a form or requesting more information via email or phone call from your site.
Google tends to dominate the pay-per-click market because of its huge share in search.
There are other steps you can take to ensure your lead aggregation system is set up for success. Apart from lead generation, below are a list of needs for your system:
- The capability to distribute leads to your sales team once they become sales ready.
- A way to profile and prioritize leads based on what actions they have taken.
- A quality tracking and reporting tool to identify your strengths, weaknesses, and areas you can capitalize on.
- A way to build a summary of your ROI quickly so you can easily determine which activities generate leads and, most importantly, sales.
- A way to determine which keywords to use and how often to use them within your content.
- The ability to manage and integrate your aggregation system so you can ultimately manage your leads from one location (an all-in-one solution).
FINAL THOUGHTS
Lead aggregation is a way for the marketing managers to better collect and organize leads, thus allowing them the time to generate more leads, resulting in more conversions and a better return on investment. Take advantage of what lead aggregation and the tools have to offer.
“Stop thinking about what could go wrong and instead think of what could go right.”– Author Unknown
