Marketing Leads: What Are Leads and How to Generate Them in 2025

Every company needs to generate business opportunities, which is synonymous with generating marketing leads.

If you’ve made it to this article, you’re already aware of this and are searching for ways to make it happen.

Lead generation in marketing marks the starting point of engagement with consumers and is a surefire way to boost your sales strategy.

With this article, learn what marketing leads are and discover how to classify, qualify, manage, and nurture these contacts to convert them into customers for your brand

What Are Leads in Digital Marketing?

Let’s get straight to the point: a lead is any user who has interacted with your company and provided personal information, such as their name and phone number, in exchange for some form of information or content.

This exchange of information happens voluntarily, and for this user or website visitor to convert into a lead, they must authorize your brand to send future communications via channels like email or phone.

However, there is a journey a lead must take between that first interaction and the purchase. This is what we call the Buyer’s Journey or the Marketing and Sales Funnel.

This is where other terms come into play. As leads progress through the funnel, they receive different classifications and terminologies.

Let’s break these down 👇

What’s the Difference Between Leads, Visitors, Prospects, and Contacts?

The term lead is widely used in marketing and sales, along with other terms that refer to potential business opportunities for a company.

These terms can sometimes be confusing, but let’s clarify each one so there’s no room for doubt:

What Are Visitors?

Visitors are people who have accessed one of your brand’s online communication channels, such as a website, social media, or media channels.

Typically, however, the term refers to people visiting your website.

But hold on—visitors are not yet leads!

In fact, not all visitors will become leads. To be classified as a lead, they need to provide your company with their contact information and grant permission for future communications.

What Are Prospects?

Prospects are individuals who perfectly match your target audience, making it easier to close sales, as they already show significant interest in your company’s solution.

The term comes from English and is used to describe potential customers. In theory, everyone is a prospect because anyone can make a purchase.

In practice, though, the term refers to people who are more likely to buy—those your marketing efforts aim to target.

What Are Contacts?

No, a contact is not the same as a lead. 🙃

Contacts are individuals who have already been approached by your sales or marketing team with a clear sales-focused purpose.

These contacts have advanced through the funnel and are now receiving more direct communications, such as a phone call or a message from a salesperson.

Typically, this interaction is targeted toward qualified leads, such as MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) or SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).

We’ll dive deeper into these two concepts throughout this article. But if you want to learn more right now, check out this other article on our blog. 🤓

What’s the Difference Between Leads and Contacts?

Let’s put it this way: a contact has a closer relationship with your company because they are directly engaging with someone from your sales or marketing team, having advanced further along the funnel.

On the other hand, a lead is simply someone who has provided their information and allowed for future communications but hasn’t yet engaged directly with your team or qualified for the next stages of the sales funnel.

To summarize, every contact was once a lead, but not every lead becomes a contact.

One key point before we move on: contacts, being qualified leads, are verified. You know the phone number is real. You know the email is valid.

A lead doesn’t offer that guarantee. Sometimes they might provide false information just to download a resource.

Why Is Lead Generation in Marketing Important?

Lead generation is the foundation for a company to build relationships with potential customers, gain trust and relevance, connect them with the brand, and guide them toward making a purchase.

Generating leads for marketing and sales is essential for creating business opportunities and addressing consumers with different needs and at various stages of the buying journey.

When we understand that the path from the first contact with a brand to the final purchase is often long, it becomes clear why lead generation is an effective way to deliver content and offers aligned with what the consumer seeks at each stage of this journey.

Attempting to sell to a customer who is not yet interested is far less likely to succeed than selling to a lead who has been in touch with your brand, asking questions, building a relationship, and understanding why your solution is the right choice for their problem.

Lead generation means attracting potential customers and turning them into business opportunities for a company. And we are confident that this is what you aim to achieve.

From a more technical perspective, lead generation is critical because it is the cornerstone of any Inbound Marketing strategy and the foundation of a functioning marketing and sales funnel.

In other words, you can only attract an audience to your brand fluidly and close sales if both strategies work effectively together.

Top-of-Funnel Leads

Top-of-funnel leads — or TOFU — are those who know little about your company and even less about your product or service.

This type of lead might find you through a successful article, a Google search, a recommendation from a friend, or an ad.

Top-of-funnel leads are the most common. If your company invests in lead acquisition, it’s normal to accumulate a list that reaches thousands annually.

This might seem like a lot, but it’s necessary: the wider your funnel’s top, the more opportunities you create for subsequent stages.

Middle-of-Funnel Leads

Middle-of-funnel leads are those who have already shown some interest in your products or services and are seeking more information before making a purchasing decision.

For instance, you might be exploring marketing and sales chatbots to enhance your lead generation process.

You’ve been researching the topic and learning about various brands until you come across a resource from Leadster that requires filling in some contact information to access.

This is a middle-of-funnel lead. They’re further along in the funnel, familiar with some solutions, and knowledgeable about the topic but not yet ready to buy.

To nurture middle-of-funnel leads, it’s essential to provide them with relevant, personalized content that helps them better understand their needs and challenges and how your products or services can help.

Common strategies for generating middle-of-funnel leads include webinars, whitepapers, and competitive market analyses.

Middle-of-funnel leads can also be generated by nurturing top-of-funnel leads. You can learn more about this process in the linked article.

Bottom-of-Funnel Leads

Finally, bottom-of-funnel leads are those who are ready to make a purchase.

These leads may have requested a demo, spoken with a sales representative, or visited your pricing page.

They’re often generated by qualifying middle-of-funnel leads, transforming them into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and passing them to the bottom of the funnel as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), eventually converting them into sales.

The most common strategies for generating bottom-of-funnel leads include free trials, demonstrations, and success stories.

How to Generate Leads in 2025?

If lead generation is crucial for marketing and sales strategies, how can you put this plan into action?

There are numerous strategies and actions you can use to attract new leads effectively.

Here’s a selection of seven strategies you can invest in to generate even more leads for your business. Let’s dive in!

Conversational Marketing

Conversational Marketing is one of the most modern approaches when it comes to generating marketing leads.

Tools like chatbots and virtual assistants are part of this strategy, offering personalized experiences through messaging boxes and interactive conversations to drive engagement and conversions with visitors to websites, blogs, and landing pages.

This approach also allows for generating qualified leads, as you can tailor your questions based on the interaction guided by the visitor. 

In this way, you can individually understand their needs and gather more than just data like email or phone number.

Leadster is a specialist in Conversational Marketing in Brazil. Learn more about this emerging trend by watching our free training:

Blog

A well-planned blog content strategy increases traffic to your website and positions your brand as a reference in its market.

Additionally, it enables you to embed conversion hooks into many pages, such as newsletter sign-ups or offers for more comprehensive materials, often referred to in digital marketing strategies as “rich materials,” like e-books and webinars.

Paid Media

Any type of online advertising or paid media can boost lead generation.

Since campaign targeting can be highly specific regarding the audience you want to reach, investing in media is an excellent way to drive qualified traffic to your website, landing pages, or blog.

Some platforms, such as Facebook Ads, also enable lead generation without requiring users to leave the social network.

Explore sponsored link campaigns, display networks, and social media ads for comprehensive online media campaigns to generate leads.

Co-Marketing

Co-marketing involves creating partnerships between companies to combine strengths and extend the reach of your content, campaigns, and materials for lead generation.

You should look for companies aligned with yours and offer content relevant to both audiences.

Co-marketing initiatives allow you to reach an audience that already has a relationship with the other brand. This is a critical validation, considering that a brand endorsement from a trusted source carries weight with consumers.

Product Demonstrations

Offering visitors a product demo or free trial is one of the best ways to generate leads—particularly highly interested leads in your solution.

It’s also an excellent way to delight potential customers by giving them a glimpse of the experience they can expect post-purchase.

Live Streams and Webinars

Another effective option for generating marketing leads is offering video-based materials.

This content type has seen a surge in popularity recently and continues to capture the attention of potential customers.

Leverage live streams and webinars to create educational and topical content that engages visitors and converts them into leads. You can gather their information before the event through sign-ups or during the sessions.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are rich materials and offers designed to capture visitors’ attention by exchanging something of value for their contact information.

Examples of lead magnets include discount codes, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, templates, infographics, and basic free tools.

These materials are crafted to generate more leads—while also educating users—as they offer valuable content in exchange for data like names, emails, and phone numbers.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Merely attracting leads and establishing direct communication isn’t enough to encourage them to purchase or sign a contract with your company.

This is where lead nurturing comes in.

Also known as leads nurturing, it involves building a relationship between the brand and potential customers, guiding them through the sales funnel or purchase journey.

Why is Lead Nurturing Important?

Lead nurturing is essential for steering consumers through the buying journey, maintaining and heightening their interest in your brand and solution.

Nurturing efforts educate leads, deliver relevant content, introduce them to the solutions they need, and build trust in your brand.

This phase prepares marketing leads to transition into sales leads, enabling the sales team to focus on more qualified prospects.

How to Nurture and Qualify Leads?

To nurture captured leads, develop a strategy that maps out the journey from initial contact with your brand to the moment of purchase or contract signing.

Here are seven fundamental steps to create a nurturing flow:

1. Optimize Conversions – Develop strategies to attract the right audience from the outset to enhance conversion in subsequent funnel stages.
   
2. Build an Engaged Lead Base – Prioritize highly qualified leads who are genuinely interested in your product or service and fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
   
3. Create Relevant Segments – Segment leads by demographic information, engagement levels, and persona characteristics.
   
4. Plan Nurturing Flows and Test – Design your sales cadence! For email marketing, consider testing different subject lines, images, or slight changes in the email article to conduct A/B tests. 😉
   
5. Invest in Effective Copy – Copywriting is key to the success of your nurturing flow. Use storytelling combined with materials like case studies and data insights to captivate your audience.
   
6. Follow Best Practices – Personalize content, maintain appropriate frequency, provide relevant materials, use strong CTAs, and continually test and optimize.
   
7. Track Engagement and Results – Analyze whether your nurturing flows are yielding good results or need improvement.

Types of Leads

As we’ve mentioned, there are various lead profiles. 

Each category has distinct interests and responds to different engagement strategies.

Once a lead engages with some of your company’s channels or materials, they may show further interest and progress in their buying journey. 

This is known as lead qualification, transitioning from a mere contact to a consumer with greater purchase potential.

Here are the main types of qualified leads:

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

MQLs are leads nurtured with relevant content like blog articles, e-books, videos, and live sessions. 

This content increases their interest in the solution you’ll ultimately offer.

An MQL is aware of their problem but hasn’t yet decided on the company or brand to solve it.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

After obtaining the necessary information and resolving their initial doubts, leads move to the next stage—focusing on solutions.

Here, they are ready to choose a solution and have the resources to make a purchase. 

This is where your sales team intensifies efforts to close the deal, ensuring your brand is the preferred choice.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

PQLs are leads who have tested your product through free trials or demos, gaining firsthand experience of its value.

These leads are highly likely to convert, requiring a tailored sales approach focused on their unique needs and experiences.

Strategies to Convert Leads into Sales

Although lead generation starts with marketing and the qualification of these leads also happens through strategies from this sector, the sales team’s role is essential, especially in the final phase of converting these contacts into customers for your company.

It’s also crucial to think about the process as a whole.

The actions proposed within the sales funnel should always focus on the customer’s needs, not the company’s or the salesperson’s needs.

Therefore, your sales team must be aligned with the strategy from the outset.

The marketing team’s objective is to deliver leads that are better prepared for the sales interaction.

Additionally, the sales department will have valuable insights into each consumer’s buying profile and habits, which significantly aids in converting leads into business opportunities.

What Metrics Should You Use in Lead Management?

Last but not least, we want to emphasize another vital aspect of the entire process of acquiring, nurturing, qualifying, and converting leads into customers: tracking results.

Lead management metrics allow your company to understand the return on investments and identify the actions that yield the most results for your business.

Here are some useful metrics:

Number of Leads

The first metric your team should track is the total number of leads generated.

This rate helps monitor the growth of your contact base and can serve as a benchmark for goals set during the planning phase.

You can break this metric down by lead type, tracking the number of general leads, qualified leads, MQLs, SQLs, and PQLs.

Also, monitor the number of leads generated by each campaign and channel used by your brand.

Conversion Rates

To understand how leads are progressing through the purchase journey, track conversion rates between the stages of the funnel.

You should monitor the number of visitors, leads, qualified leads, opportunities, and customers.

Conversion rates reveal the percentage of visitors who became leads at the funnel’s entry point; the percentage of leads who were qualified; in the middle of the funnel, how many MQLs became SQLs; at the bottom of the funnel, how many SQLs became opportunities; and finally, how many opportunities turned into sales.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

This metric relates to the investment made to acquire each lead.

To calculate it, simply divide your marketing investments by the number of leads generated.

You can calculate both the overall cost per lead and the cost per qualified lead.

Leads Per Sale (LPS)

To complete your monitoring metrics, we recommend tracking how many leads need to be generated for each sale to be finalized.

To calculate LPS, divide the total number of leads by the number of sales within the same period.

How to Boost Lead Generation with Leadster

Lead generation is a complex process that requires extensive strategy and ongoing optimization.

After reading our article, you now have enough knowledge to begin planning your lead generation efforts and understand what to do with these contacts after the first step.

Leadster is a Conversational Marketing platform that dynamically and personally engages and qualifies your leads, seamlessly integrating them into your sales process.

Want to bring this type of strategy to your brand?

Learn more about our lead generation tool by exploring our demo today!