Let’s start with a simple truth.
Lead generation is very crucial to a business. One of the main motives of a business is to make money and profit. Without leads, many businesses will fail to achieve this goal.
Lead generation directly affects the sales and growth of your business. Moreover, lead generation can also help you drive traffic to your website, or can even drive attention towards your business that can help you convert these leads into customers.
In other words, lead generation helps you increase your organic customers. These are just some of the many benefits of lead generation. To generate solid leads, you need to have an effective lead generation strategy.
So, how can you generate leads for your business easily and effectively? Don’t worry, we are here to help. In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the best Lead Generation Strategies that will help you generate more leads and revenue.
But before we get into that, let’s discuss what exactly is “lead” and lead generation. Let’s get started!
What Is A LEAD And LEAD GENERATION?
From a business perspective, a lead refers to an individual who expresses interest in your company’s product or service, which makes him a potential customer. This entity expressing interest can also be an organization. This interest can be in any way, shape, or form. The lead is also known by various terms such as a business lead or a sales lead.
The term “lead” may hold different meanings to different users. For example, it can be a contact already determined to be a prospective customer. For others, a lead can be any sales contact. But the fact that a lead has the potential to become a future customer or client remains the same.
Generating as many leads as possible is one of the most important goals of any business. It is also the first step of the sales cycle and leads are essential for maintaining a good conversion rate. A business can generate leads with the help of a lot of sources.
They are also obtained from a variety of methods, for example, through the referral of an existing customer. They are also obtained digitally via the Internet, through telephone calls either by the company or telemarketers, through advertisements or marketing, and through events.
This process of obtaining or generating leads is known as lead generation. It is a marketing process through which a business tries to attract prospects and tries to cultivate in them, an interest in your company’s products and services. Blogging, Email marketing, Coupons, and Live events and seminars are some of the commonly used strategies for lead generation.
After generating these leads, the businesses then follow up with each of these leads to ascertain if this business lead can be converted into a customer i.e. whether the lead is a good fit for their products and services.
LEAD GENERATION STRATEGIES
To generate more leads for your business, you’ll need to have some basic lead-generation strategies in place. A lead generation strategy, just as the name suggests, is a targeted strategy or plan that is aimed at attracting and converting new leads.
Each strategy you implement can help boost your revenue. In most organizations, the marketing department is responsible for generating leads. Now, we are going to take a look at some of the best lead generation strategies that you can use to make this whole task easy and efficient.
EMAIL MARKETING For LEAD GENERATION
Email marketing, in simple terms, is a marketing strategy where you send a commercial message or email, typically to your customers who have “opted in” or “subscribed” to your emails. It is done to essentially promote a business’s products and services, even though different businesses may have different marketing goals.
Lead generation includes newsletters, information about promotions, sales, and deals for subscribers, and so on.
It is a great way of marketing that helps you educate the audience on the value of your brand, keeps your customers informed and aware about your products and services, and enables you to communicate with them. It also helps you to target a specific set of customers or even specific individuals. Not only this, but lead generation also helps you drive traffic to your business website, social media accounts, or anywhere else you’d like your customers to visit.
Email marketing can prove to be the best lead generation strategy for your business. To begin with, it is important to develop a mailing list. An email list (also known as the mailing list or subscriber’s list) is a list containing email addresses that you have received through your blog or website. In other words, it is a list of contacts who have consented to receive your email updates.
You can use these email addresses to send marketing collaterals to multiple recipients. Compiling a mailing list is the first and the most important step in email marketing. You cannot run an email marketing campaign if you do not have any contacts to send your emails to. For this purpose, you can make use of tools like Monster Leads that will help you in building your email list and also help reach out to leads.
One of the best strategies that you can adopt with the help of a mailing list is an Email Drip Campaign. An email drip campaign can be referred to as a group or series of emails that are sent out at particular intervals of time via automation.
The very first email in the series can be a Welcome or a Thank-you email for the lead. Its main purpose is to thank the lead for subscribing to your mailing list. After sending out your very first email, you can make use of other strategies like mailing them welcome discounts, promos, and offers or even a link to your best blog posts. You can even talk about your products and services, share important and relevant information about the industry dynamics, and finally, you can also share with them, the very best incentives that your business can offer along with sharing the deadline for them to avail these benefits.
With the help of drip campaigns, your subscribers get used to your pattern of sending an email. This can go a long way in helping you build a relationship with your customers. A drip campaign can go from weeks to months and keeps you in the minds and radars of your subscribers. This gradual process will slowly build up more interest in the leads without making your business look pushy.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION For LEAD GENERATION
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is a marketing strategy that makes use of non-paid or “organic” search engine results to get targeted traffic to a website. The main goal here is to boost your website’s visibility while also improving your search result rankings. By having better and higher visibility and search result rankings, you can efficiently attract existing and potential customers.
As is obvious by the name, search engine optimization works by optimizing your website for search engines that you want your website to rank for. By optimizing your site with the help of an SEO strategy, you can easily provide better quality information to search engines like Google that can use this information to display your content at a higher search result rank.
Many businesses make use of paid advertisements to attract people to their websites. Even though there is absolutely nothing wrong with using paid advertising for lead generation, it is important to consider that 70 percent of visitors do not pay attention to advertisements in search results.
This makes it very important for your business to target organic search results as a tactic to generate more leads.
With the help of SEO, you can achieve an organic and higher search result ranking. This will make your business website more visible to the users searching for content or for other related stuff online. If your SEO strategy works out well, more and more visitors will visit your website. This leaves you with ample opportunities to convert these site visitors into leads.
As a first step, clearly define what a lead means for your business. Decide and state very clearly what counts as lead generation for your business. For example, a lead conversion might occur when a visitor completes a subscription form, or when he follows you on your stated social media handle.
This will make your SEO lead generation strategy more specific and will help you measure its success in an effective way.
You may also wonder – “how can I convert all the traffic that I receive into leads?” Well, one way to achieve that is by using a lead magnet. A lead magnet can be used in a lot of different ways. For example, an eBook, a download, or anything that provides value to your customers. It is generally offered in exchange for the user’s email id. So when you build your list, you can also use the above-discussed email marketing strategies in conjunction.
CONTENT MARKETING For LEAD GENERATION
Let us look at what the Content Marketing Institute has to say about Content Marketing. They define it as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Sounds confusing, right? Think it this way. Content Marketing is a marketing tactic in which you can create relevant and consistent content to communicate with your target audience. And not just communicate, content marketing can also help you to grab your audience’s attention and maintain a positive brand impression with your audience.
Contrary to the traditional ‘push marketing’ techniques, content marketing is based on the principle of ‘pull marketing’ or inbound marketing. It focuses on owning media instead of borrowing it. Here, you are offering relevant and consistent content to your audience that lets you create a positive experience for your customers.
Some good examples of content marketing tactics are publishing blog posts, E-books, sending out email newsletters, social media posts, etc.
With the help of content marketing, you can attract new audiences and then convert them into leads and fuel your revenue growth. Additionally, you can use content marketing to keep your already existing customers informed and interested. For lead generation, it is important to curate content that describes your business and your services well.
Moreover, it is also crucial to keep in mind that the content you create must generate interest in the mind of the users. It is recommended to focus on content that propels the users to actively buy from you.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING For LEAD GENERATION
Just as the name suggests, Social Media Marketing, or SMM, is the use of social media for marketing and branding. It is the use of social media platforms to build your brand, promote your brand, products, or services, increase sales and website traffic, and so on.
Social media marketing involves a lot of marketing techniques like publishing creative and engaging content that is aimed at driving audience engagement and essentially involves paid social media advertising
A great social marketing strategy involves creative and consistent use of great content on your social media profiles, interaction with your audience, follower engagement, driving and listening to conversations about your brand, analyzing the results, and much more. At the moment, the biggest social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.
In today’s world, Social media has become one of the most crucial and beneficial virtual spaces. With almost 59% of the world’s population using social media, its reach is more than other mediums like print or television. By 2021, the number of social media users is expected to reach 3.1 billion people worldwide.
Keeping these statistics in mind, it will not be wrong to conclude that many of your leads may be spending their time online. So why not use social media to generate leads?
Social Media platforms can help you generate quick and solid leads and you can drive them directly to your landing page. According to statistics, more than 65% of people have bought something from a business after following them on their social media handles.
By creating content and posting them on social media you can stay at the top of the radar of your leads, build brand awareness and so much more. By working on increasing your following, you can get more people to follow you which can make your social media handles an amazing platform to advertise your business and its products and services.
You can hold online chats, initiate conversations around your business, and even listen to conversations that are happening about your brands and business. By making use of user-generated content and time-sensitive content like polls, and stories you can attract even more and more audiences and convert them into leads.
What strategies do you adopt to generate leads for your business?
