Lead generation has four main stages. The ultimate goal is to move someone from awareness all the way to conversion and at each of these stages, look into a potential customer’s evolving relationship with the organization.

• Lead Awareness 

This pertains to how leads become aware of a business and its offerings. The primary activities in the lead awareness stage include networking, advertising, public relations and content. 

• Lead Education

Once lead awareness has been created, you need to build trust for your services, products, and expertise. A regular newsletter, seminar, or event can be a great tool for lead education because it allows you to show your knowledge, expertise, resources as well as experience over time. Lead education offerings which teach really matters here. When you develop a process to teach people, you have chances of getting invited to places where there is an opportunity to sell.

• Lead Sampling

Lead generation in today’s times entails lead sampling. Prospects like to sample your product/service and expertise, and this is the easiest way to move people to lead conversion, especially in highly competitive as well as highly priced situations. Continuing to develop trust through audits, demos, trial offers, assessments, samples, and so on is an important element of buying. 

• Lead Conversion

Lead conversion, or what is generally referred to as selling, is the crux of this process. If the lead generation process has been followed throughout, there is really little selling that remains. Here, the intention is to make sure the prospect can understand how they can get the desired results with your product/service. Education as well as content play is still involved but now it’s more about showing proof and predicting results in your process.

SEO is the abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, this entails the process of improving your website to expand its visibility when people search for solutions or services which are related to your business in Google, Bing, and other such search engines. The more visibility your pages have in search results, the greater likelihood of you getting attention and attracting existing and prospective customers to your business.

An SEO specialist performs page optimization throughout a website to ensure that search results are relevant. This, in turn, creates a positive user experience, increases website traffic, leads as well as brand awareness. In simpler terms, an SEO Specialist generates more sales for the company.

By carrying out keyword research and making use of SEO tools like Google Analytics, a Specialist can enhance a website’s visibility on Google, which can have immense benefits for any business. An SEO specialist can also coordinate with the marketing team to formulate new initiatives or manage social media accounts better to increase traffic and user engagement.

The bulk of online activity, which includes product as well as service research, starts with search engines.

Queries that are typed into search engines are usually highly targeted as the user is particularly looking for information related to that query. Therefore, it is important for a business to offer relevant content if there is a product or service related to the query.

Most searchers pick the first links on the page (barring advertised links). In general, they only click links on the first page and very few get onto the second page of SERP. So, having an SEO strategy that ranks your business on page one of SERP is crucial. This placement helps to get you noticed and rewards you with the benefits that SEO brings along. These include greater brand visibility, increased website traffic, more conversions, greater credibility for the company and a good user experience.

Web design is the design of websites which are displayed on the net. It generally refers to the user experience part of website development over software development. Web design earlier used to focus on designing sites for desktop browsers. But from the mid-2010s, the design for mobile browsers has become increasingly valuable.

Web designers take care of the planning, creating and coding of internet sites and web pages, out of which many combine text with graphics pictures, sounds, and video clips. A web designer is accountable for creating the layout and design of a website or web pages. This includes working on an entirely new website or updating a site that already exists. A web designer makes suitable big-picture decisions for the website, such as the menus listed on the website, and other details, like which color, font and graphics to use. By developing the layout and design of a website, a website designer can make a site look visually appealing.

A well-designed website can help a business to form a favourable impression on prospective customers. This, in turn, can make it easier for you to nurture your leads and gain more conversions. More importantly, a good website design offers a good user experience, helping your website visitors have access to and navigate your website with ease.

For the creation of an entirely new website or new functionality, that specific website can be classified under capital expenditure. The cost incurred for designing, developing as well as programming a website is under capital assets. This can also be included when the business purchases all the relevant hardware to support development of the website. These purchases will conform to the existing capitalization policies.

Yes. A website can definitely be copyrighted. A copyright essentially protects original works of authorship, which include your website and any graphics that you made or picture/photograph you took for your site.

For copyrighting, websites must meet the following requirements. These include:

• Original work of authorship
• Attached to a tangible medium that permits the site to be communicated and perceived
• A minimum amount of creativity

The ultimate goal of advertising is to spur people’s interest in a service/product being sold. After spiking interest, the goal is to convince people to buy the service/product, even if they had not earlier considered buying it. Ads use various psychology techniques to influence the way individuals think and feel about a service/product.

Advertising can raise sales volumes by informing existing and potential customers about your new solutions from your company as well as improvements and special offers. Apart from keeping your business in the mind of customers, advertising can help in creating or developing a unique brand for your business.

There are various techniques used by advertisers. Emotional Appeal, Promotional Advertising, Bandwagon Advertising, Endorsements, Complementing the Customers and so on. 

In the online world, some distinct techniques are used for online advertising like web banner advertising where a banner is placed on web pages, link advertising providing links on various sites to directly visit the product website, content advertising that uses content to advertise the product online, and so on.

Marketing and advertising is used interchangeably these days. Marketing basically identifies what customers want, persuades them to buy as well as engages with them later to keep their loyalty. To get their attention and make them know you have what they are searching for, you need advertising. Also, today narrative advertising has become increasingly popular. For example, while the product features are still highlighted, more importance is laid on an individual using the product/service and their experience. Also, advertising allows you to target specific customers, retain customers and make businesses stand out in the market. 

Advertising media include organic social media, paid social media, pay per click or PPC advertising, podcasts, streaming audio and so on. Any type of advertising medium has the potential to successfully promote your company. But whether you should pursue one strategy over others boils down to what exactly your goals are, the people you are trying to reach out to, and what your product or offer is.

So, any marketing channel, at the end of the day, can produce the desired results for your company. With the sea of possibilities out there, the key is to concentrate on the core channels which will work best for your business and impact the bottom line.