Digital marketing has truly transformed the way financial services, including NBFCs, interact with potential clients or leads and coax them to explore financial brands. Lead generation has become integral to the practice of marketing over the internet, augmenting revenues and generating loyalty in the long run. The question is, how do lead generation right for the NBFC sector?

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation refers to the initiation of a sense of interest, curiosity or inquiry in customers towards a business. These days, lead generation is often associated with the internet and is getting redefined with every passing day. The one constant is that lead generation requires strategic thinking, new social and digital techniques and knowledge of advertising, both for B2C and B2B marketing.  

What Are Some Steps for More Effective Lead Generation?

With changes in the buying process, which has largely become online, more transparent and more talked about, the marketing scenario for NBFCs also demands transformation. For instance, representing the customer is more important now than representing the brand; being found is more crucial than finding customers.

Similarly, the era of mass advertising has gone extinct. These are the days of 1:1 targeting and behavioural customer intelligence. NBFCs need to maintain a continuous flow of leads instead of a point-in-time tactic. Fact-based decision making is taking precedence over intuitive decision making, as is the relevance of exploding and integrated channels.

85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal. The process needs to focus on building trust within the audience pool and build awareness about your financial products and services. Only the right strategies can ensure all these.

A Website for Converting Leads

Your website is the first point of contact between your potential customer and you. Therefore, this is the first place where you need to focus on conversions. From encouraging buyers to sign up for your newsletters to filling out a form for getting their hands on a product’s information, you can use your website cleverly to convert wandering browsers into real leads. Several tools can work in your favour – forms, calls-to-action, newsletters, account signups, live chats, landing pages, free eBook downloads and more.

High-Quality Content and Targeting

Nothing works better in the digital marketing world than good content if you are eyeing lead generation. The prime motive for NBFCs today must be to generate as much consistent traffic as possible on their website to fuel real business numbers.

One way to do this well is by creating high-quality content targeting specific pain points of the very customers you want to convert. You could provide them with financial solutions, resolve their queries on loans and interests, or inform them about the financial and trade market through blogs, infographics, videos, eBooks, webinars and social media posts. 90% of customers say videos help them when making buying decisions.

You can put to use inbound marketing strategies, such as blogging, guest blogging, blog syndication, social media engagement and SEO on-page optimization for attracting qualified sales leads. Also, you can use digital channels including PPC, print and digital media ads, email marketing and even direct mails for targeting relevant leads. Even conventional approaches of seminars and personal networking can work the trick.

Nurturing Existing Leads

Even after you have generated a lead, you need to ensure their movement through the sales funnel so that they finally purchase your financial product. A prudent step to take at this stage would be to maintain or even augment their interest through interesting insights, offers and added benefits.  

Lead Segmentation

For a seamless movement down the sales funnel, it is important to set up marketing automation workflows and sort leads into different categories. Some NBFCs customers are looking for loans, some might want to invest, yet others are looking for insurance benefits while the remaining are just curious. These lists can be used to nurture leads based on content relevant to their needs, tailored CTAs, targeted email campaigns and so on.  

Lead Scoring

Not all leads are going to convert, are they? Only 4% of website visitors are ready to buy. Therefore, you must score your leads, classifying the more valuable ones based on characteristics such as:

• Persona – their industry, designation, company size, revenues, role
• Engagement – the number of one-time and repeat visits, unique page views, downloads, email opens and clicks, comments and shares of content, social media mentions, form conversions
• Lead lifecycle – mid-funnel and bottom-funnel offers and response based on specific content
• Velocity – how fast they proceed from one stage to another, volume and recentness of engagement suggesting higher intent for purchase

Continuous Flow to Sales Funnel

With lead generation, you can set your stages in the lead management process to ensure a continuous flow of leads from the beginning to the end of the sales funnel.

Monitoring and Analytics

The lead generation process must be continually monitored by an efficient, expert team to identify the metrics of the lead generation outcome, budgeting and staffing requisites, room for improvement, current market trends as well as upshot of each stage in the funnel. Various analytics tools and reports can be used to assess performance and make strategic decisions.

Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Lead Generation?  

Most NBFCs, both old and new ones, have zero experience or expertise in producing leads using digital channels either because they have been around without having to do it or they have just entered the business. 

When you outsource lead generation services, you are hiring experts who are not just the best for the job but also are an efficient mix of different people suited for different roles – web designers, content creators, customer relationship managers, sales experts and so on. Imagine having to hire all these experts individually for your organization and the cost, time and energy it would entail!

Outsourcing lead generation services to a promising B2C or B2B marketing company also brings to the table years of industry-rich experience that ensures quicker, better results than you trying to figure things out on your own from scratch. A dedicated lead generation service is also well-equipped with the latest technology, software know-how and a standard infrastructure setup which you are probably lacking for the process. You can spend all the saved time and effort towards the core objectives of your organization.

Food for Thought:

Since you must invest in lead generation anyway, why not invest in the right place?