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The Best Ways to Generate Leads
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Exponential growth is a long-term process that involves making the right decisions at opportune moments along with tons of patience. Among the several fundamental elements of growth, a continuous stream of sales leads is paramount.
But what is the best way to generate leads? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. All lead generation strategies can work wonders if implemented in the correct sequence. But to put it simply, the best lead generation process is the one that works for you.
How to Generate Leads for Your Business?
Lead generation is the practice of converting prospects into customers. The process typically requires a prospect to express interest in what you’re selling and leave their contact details for you to revert with the desired information. Common examples include job applications, coupons, live events for content marketing, and more. Let’s explore a few lead generation strategies.
Direct Engagement
If you’re selling a high-value product or service that is billed every month, approaching the customer directly with new offers is the best way to generate additional sales. You can reach out to customers via email, phone, or social media. However, if your business is based on the low-value, high-volume model, direct engagement might not work for you.
Retargeting
While social media is a crucial digital marketing channel, it’s hardly the sole platform. Targeted pay-per-click advertising from Google or Bing is essential for contacting customers that are relevant to your business. Barely a handful of site visitors convert on the first interaction. Retargeting leads with PPC ads help kindle their interest in what you’re offering.
Referral Traffic
Customer referrals are one of the most ancient and efficient lead generation techniques in existence. If a customer likes your products or services, encourage them to share their experiences with friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, or strangers on the internet. Basically, anybody that would benefit from what you’re offering! You could also offer incentives to sweeten the deal.
LinkedIn Marketing
According to research, LinkedIn users have double the purchasing power that of standard web users. Therefore, running B2B marketing campaigns can be quite beneficial for yielding hefty profits. If you have the budget, cross advertise on several social media channels to unlock LinkedIn’s maximum potential. For best results, you could connect with your target audience, engage with the readers, and approach them with your products or services.
Direct Leads from Quora
Amateur marketers often overlook Quora while searching for new leads. That’s a major mistake as the social Q&A website has a loyal following among millions worldwide. Find questions related to your field of business and diligently answer them while subtly promoting your brand. A couple of backlinks to your website should suffice, but don’t go over the top.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the key components of any lead generation strategy and is a great way of earning bonus traffic. Blogging helps form new connections, boost SEO by earning high-value backlinks, and improve referral traffic from the industry. You can generate leads by blogging for websites that are relevant to your area of expertise. For optimal results, make sure the website where you post is relevant to your business and physical location.
Forum Posting
Answering questions on forums is an excellent lead generation strategy that helps establish authority in your field of business. If done strategically, it can help create interest and brand awareness within a short period. Platforms like Quora and Reddit are perfect for reaching out to the target audience. Find a relevant category and start answering questions. However, make sure your answers provide relevant information and value.
Networking
While networking doesn’t generate revenue directly, it’s ideal for nurturing new opportunities. Look for networking events that are local and directly related to your field of business. This will boost visibility in the region while keeping your travel costs low. If you look for instant ROI, you will be disappointed. So the trick is to work on your long-term goals. For instance, maybe you’ll meet an influencer that agrees to interview you or a business that you can partner and share leads with. More often than not, networking opens up guest blogging opportunities.
Influencer Interviews
Influencer interviews don’t just introduce your products to a wider audience; it creates multiple learning and networking opportunities with experts in your field of business. You can also use the platform to create powerful content. For instance, video record the interview and turn it into a podcast or a Q&A blog post. Framing the interview in such a format will help leverage the opportunity and direct the audience towards your social media profiles. The influencer will usually share the results of the interview within their network, further increasing your ROI and outreach.
Case Studies
Prospective buyers generally analyse your products and services and consult like-minded decision-makers before spending a dime. Case studies enable them to view your history and learn more about how clients have interacted with your brand in the past. This makes case studies a crucial tool in the end stages of the lead generation funnel. But simply creating them isn’t enough. You must shamelessly promote the case studies via all available networking channels for maximum conversion.
Email Lists
To generate leads, sometimes, you must look for existing untapped resources instead of trying to reach out to a new audience, starting with your email lists. If you have a list of email subscribers, come up with a special offer. A limited period deal or a special discount can work wonders in turning a passive audience into prospective customers. If you’re actively partnering with businesses in your industry, you could also create special offers for other people’s email lists.
Offer a Free Tool
Offering a free tool is a great way to generate leads. Just make sure the tool solves a unique problem and highlight those benefits during promotions. For instance, imagine you’re a Detroit-based automotive repair shop. After running a poll on Twitter, you determine that the audience is interested in learning about the service costs and spare parts prices for their vehicles. You could compile an eBook outlining the price ranges of generic wear-and-tear parts of the most popular vehicles in the state and explain your services. Create a teaser for your blog post asking the audience to fill in their name and contact information like phone number & email in exchange for the eBook.
Newsletters
Once you have a list of prospects at hand, it’s time to cultivate those leads and direct them through the sales funnel. Email newsletters are excellent for official communication. Simply integrate it with your email list and periodically follow up with the recipients.
Sales Funnel
Once you’ve shortlisted the target audience and determined the best path to reach them, it’s time to work on a sales funnel to gather their contact information. Channel your leads through a standard contact form with a value-added incentive at the end. This will help you build a CRM database that can be used to track potential customers in the long run.
The 5 Best Lead Generation Strategies
Online lead generation covers several strategies, campaigns, and variables depending on your preferred platform. We discussed how lead generation works earlier, but how do you get visitors in the first place? Let’s walk you through five crucial lead generation tactics that work.
Facebook Lead Generation
LinkedIn Lead Generation
Twitter Lead Generation
B2B Lead Generation
PPC Lead Generation
Facebook Lead Generation
Facebook has been the hub of lead generation since the inception of Facebook ads back in 2007. Since the algorithm began favouring businesses using paid adverts, a major shift in marketing strategies for generating leads was observed. The company soon created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has the option to include a call-to-action at the top of your page to direct leads to your preferred landing page.
Since the early days, LinkedIn has been increasing its stake in the digital marketing space. The company created Lead Gen Forms that auto-fill a user’s data when they click on your CTA. This simplifies the lead generation process by eliminating the need to type in the desired information and is a critical feature for aspiring marketers.
Twitter uses Lead Gen cards that let you generate leads without leaving the platform. The card automatically pulls up the contact’s name, phone number, email address, and Twitter handle. Users just need to verify the details and click on submit for you to get a new lead.
B2B is a niche lead generation model that requires SEO for capturing business leads. It’s most effective when paired with social media and email marketing techniques. Needless to say, the effectivity varies on your preferred marketing channels.
Search engines are perhaps the largest real estate for running ad campaigns. With Google recording over 3.5 million average daily searches, PPC is an efficient lead generation campaign. However, the success of your PPC campaign depends on your budget, target keywords, seamless user flow, and several other factors.
Lead Generation Tips and Tricks
Every effective lead generation strategy has several moving parts. It can be difficult to predict which parts are working fine and which ones need oiling. Here are a few tips to remember while creating best-in-class lead generation campaigns.
Find the Right Lead Generation Tools
The most successful marketing teams use a formal system for organising and storing their leads. Without proper lead generation tools, this is a mammoth task. Here are a few useful tools most marketers use for creating lead generation assets to use on your website.
Free Marketing and Lead Generation Software
HubSpot’s free tool includes contact insights and lead capture that scrapes pre-existing forms on your website and adds the leads to a central database. The tool also lets you create hello bars, pop-ups, and slide-ins that can help you instantly turn visitors into leads.
Form Scraping Tool
Form Scraping Tool lets you gather submissions on your website’s existing forms and merge the data with a central database when new leads appear on your website. HubSpot users can automatically integrate the tool with their CMS. Although non-users must use a form creation tool like Google Forms, JetPack, or Contact Form 7 before using Hubspot’s free collected forms feature to aggregate the information into a central database.
Visitor Tracking
Hotjar has a visual tool that creates colour-coded representations of how visitors interact with a website. This helps you figure out what the visitors want, their browsing habits, and preferences. It tracks individual patterns and tells you where the users spend most of their time. You can use it to gather information from surveys, feedback forms, or lead generation forms.
Create Offers for Customers in Different Stages of the Buying Cycle
Not every lead is interested in your company or ready to interact with the marketing team. While a person in the early stages of the buying cycle might be interested in an education piece like an eBook, someone who’s familiar with your business might be interested in a demo or free trial. Therefore, it’s important to create offers for customers in various stages of the buying cycle.
Deliver on Your Promises
The most popular lead gen campaigns are the ones that deliver on their promises. From creating a seamless transition with the ad copy to design, and delivery, make sure you’re giving out a consistent message every step of the way. Don’t forget to deliver value with your campaigns to everyone engaging with it.
Include a CTA
Direct the audience to dedicated landing pages with unique CTAs. While this might seem like a no-brainer, you’ll be surprised by the number of marketers who skip this step. Don’t direct visitors to your Homepage using a CTA as landing pages offer focussed results relevant to what they are looking for.
Why Could Buying Leads be a Bad Idea?
Most marketers want to fill their sales funnel in the shortest period, and in their haste, they might be tempted to buy leads. Buying leads, as opposed to lead generation, is quicker, easier, and cheaper. And since you’re already paying for advertising, why not just buy leads? There are several reasons for that.
For starters, the leads that you’ve just bought don’t know you exist. Typically, these people unknowingly opted in for something on a different website while signing up for some service and haven’t got the faintest idea about your business. Therefore, the emails you send them are unwanted and therefore intrusive.
So, in simple terms, if a contact hasn’t explicitly approached your website or shown an interest in what you’re selling, your messages are interrupting them. Therefore, no matter how tempting your offers might sound, your messages will likely be flagged as spam, which is detrimental to your cause. And once enough people mark your messages as spam, most reputed email providers will blacklist your account.
Therefore, no matter how tempted you might be to buy leads, steer clear of such practices. There are several honest ways to generate leads, and every one of them delivers better results.
Conclusion
Now that you know a lot more about lead generation than ever before. While we’ve covered the basics in this blog post, you’ll get the hang of it from experience. Don’t be afraid of experimenting and making new mistakes. If you need help along the way, the experts at Revpanda are right here!
