But seemingly thousands of different ways that you can generate leads online today, I want to really simplify things and go over the three core types of lead generation and which one is gonna be right for your business.

Hey, how’s it going, Ryan Caswell here from b2b leads.com. Today we’re gonna be talking about the three foundational types of lead generation methods. That are available to you. So you might be thinking three sounds. Doesn’t sound like a lot. You know, with, with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, paid email, all the different types of things that you probably are aware of.

Three doesn’t sound like a lot, but they can all fit into three broader categories essentially. So you’ve got inbound leads where they’re coming to you from things that you are putting out there. You’ve got outbound lead generation where you are reaching out to people who don’t know about you. In order to generate interest in what you do.

And then you’ve got your word of mouth and referral type leads. So each of them have their own place and values and strengths. And today I’m gonna be going over each of these three. What the potential benefits and downsides of each are and which ones you should be focusing on. So here at B2B leads, we focus entirely on outbound lead generation using LinkedIn, which is essentially we’re reaching out to people who don’t know anything about you or well anything about us, and we’re trying to generate interest in what we do Now, this is a really powerful type of lead generation, especially for brand new businesses or new businesses or for business offerings.

For new products or things that people don’t know about yet. So it’s essentially what’s called push marketing, where you are going out to people that don’t necessarily know about what you do in a way to get them to understand what you do with a strong offer and get them onto a phone call. Now, a lot of people don’t like the idea of reaching out to people and essentially bugging them, like things like cold calling, cold email, but it’s a really powerful strategy.

To get in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise be thinking about what you do. And it works really well if you have a strong offer. But the strong offer has like a benefit, a timeframe, and a risk mitigation like the good ones do. And it’s very obvious how you can add value and very quickly you can convince someone who’s never heard of you.

To start thinking about you and want to get on a call, learn more, and potentially become a sale. The downside to this is that the trust gap is incredibly large for this type of lead generation because as you’re reaching out to people who don’t know you, they don’t know you, they don’t trust you. And there’s a lot more of a gap to close in terms of building that trust with your audience.

Benefit to this is, of course, once you have a process that works, it’s very easy to just start reaching out. You’ve got a process that you know works. You just keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it. You grow your business very reliably. Now, when it comes to. Inbound lead generation. This is the area where most people really want to thrive in, is where you are posting content, you’re putting information, thought pieces out there, and people are coming to you.

Now, the trust gap is generally lower here because there’s, they trust you, they know you, they see that you’re an expert in the space and they convert. Easier problem with this is. It’s hard to really get started here unless you have that audience with which to leverage content. And it generally takes a long time to nurture that audience and build trust with that audience to get them to the point where they understand that you’re the expert in the space and they want to come to you.

Of course you want to, this is a really great strategy, but it’s not always easy to do when you’re just starting out. You don’t have that audience. You don’t have that time to build it, and that’s where outbound’s really powerful in that. You can just reach out and start conversations straight away. But also what you’ll find is that outbound will feed your future inbound.

Now, when it comes to the holy grail of leads, I want to talk about referrals and word of mouth. If we had no choice but to only get word of mouth and referrals, this is where we’d want to. Obviously focused, and if you can have a business that operates solely on word of mouth and referrals and grows that way, then that’s, I mean, that’s amazing.

You don’t need to do anything else. In fact, it’s the only strategy that can reliably grow exponentially because if one person likes what you do and they tell two people what, tell two people and they become clients and then they tell two people, you can actually get exponential growth. Once again, the problem is in the beginning, you need a way to reliably. Get customers and until you have a big enough network of customers, it’s very hard to get that growth. Plus you’re, if you are just starting out, maybe your product isn’t good enough that you’re getting raving fans who are telling their friends and family and stuff about what they’re doing in order to get that exponential growth.

And you need a way to reliably acquire more clients, essentially buy more clients with things like outbound. Which can feed you inbound, which will feed your future word of mouth and referrals. So as far as what’s right for you and your business, it really does depend, but outbound is a great strategy for any business to start building that network of people to work out what your core offering is, and building a strong offer and testing that against a market really quickly and reliably, and low cost.

Then once you’ve built that network, Then you can start feeding at content and then you can feed future inbound leads. And all the while you’re obviously helping people, you’re working out how to improve your product and service, and this is gonna help you grow your word of mouth and referral leads as well.

So in terms of what’s right for you, I mean, really. They should all work hand in hand together in order to provide, you know, a business model where you have control over being able to buy clients when you need to. You have new clients coming to you cuz they see the value in what you do and they’re low cost, high value leads and you are helping your clients to the point where they’re creating, they’re becoming raving fans and they’re telling more people.

And you have that chance to grow exponentially as well. So, Some food for thought. Hope that helps. We’re experts at outbound lead generations, so if you’re interested to learn more about what we do, head to B2B leads.com, check out the channel, plenty of great content, and as always, have a great day. Ryan Caswell from B2B leads.com.

Cheers.