Lead generation is one of the most, if not the most, important functions a successful business has to master in order to survive and thrive. Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and cold prospects into warning qualified leads who are potential candidates for making a purchase of your product or service offering. For a business to survive it needs a continuous stream of new potential customers. A lead is a person who has indicated an interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. Whenever a cold prospect shows an interest in your business, it’s the prospect that’s initiating the relationship with you, rather than you, the business, initiating the relationship with the prospect. This makes it easier and more natural for the prospect to want to make a purchasing decision from you somewhere down the line.
This article covers 10 of easy to implement and ideal ways you can create potential customers for your business starting today.
What are sales lead?
A qualified lead with purchasing intent is a potential buyer of an item or service. A lead is generated for your business when an individual or business demonstrates an interest in your product or service and in turn for something of value provides their contact information. This value proposition is what we call a sales hook. A qualified lead is vital to your business being able to eventually generate revenue and profit and is done by matriculating the lead through your sales funnel pathways. A successful business should have a well-defined lead generation strategy in order to procure the best quality leads, at the lowest price, which has the intent to make a purchasing decision at a later date. Businesses engaged in lead generation activities can generate qualified leads in any number of ways, such as online advertising, social media promotions, trade shows, email, as well as numerous other marketing techniques. The list of potential lead generation techniques is endless and only bound by one’s creativity.
Look at it this way, if you generate more leads, but only have an average product, you still win! This is because leads mean more revenue for your business. And revenue means there’s the potential for more profit.
How to generate leads online?
Nowadays generating leads online has become a lot easier due to the availability and multitude of online platforms and channels. For example, social media provides an excellent communication conduit for promoting and engaging your brand with consumers by directly connecting with them anywhere in the world. It’s almost a given that your business must have an established brand presence on social media channels as well as a clean and modern website so that leads can easily find and review the products or services you’re offering. Given this, it’s easy to understand that online promotional activities are one of the best lead-generation techniques in modern marketing.
The following are ten lead-generation techniques that you might consider incorporating into your marketing mix.
1. Target Leads through Content Marketing
By now, it should be obvious that content marketing is one of the staples behind driving quality web traffic to your website in an effort to generate consistent leads that will eventually turn into sales. The more focused your content marketing is on solving the pain points of your targeted audience, the more likely those website visitors will be likely become loyal consumers of your brand’s product or service. Your content marketing efforts must focus on one thing and one thing only which is providing value to your target audience in the form of tips, tricks, how-to’s, and more. If you remember to focus on solving your target audience’s pain point in every content article you carefully craft, you will eventually find success in generating well-qualified leads. High-quality content can also be a benefit for your business as it will draw more attention to your site from influencers and others within your industry in the form of backlinks. Backlinks are one of the most important aspects of getting your content and website ranked on the first page of Google’s Search Results Page (SERPs). Be sure to add relevant pictures, video, and infographics to expand the reach and engagement of the article, as well as give your target audience a more visual way to absorb your content (not everyone learns the same way so mix it up to appeal to more than one type of learning pathway). Allowing our site visitors to self-discover your interesting tips, event, how-to, or news interest pieces, will help to establish your authority and brand presence in your given niche.
2. Be Active in Discussions and Forums
Potential clients are everywhere throughout the world and they’re most active on all discussion sites also better known as forums. Forum users will discuss any and all issues related to a business’s product or service. Forum users are there most of the time posting about these issues in order to interact with other skilled people who can help them. This is the place your organization can provide solutions to these problems as well as keep your brand center stage with them. This is one best lead generation techniques you can use that doesn’t cost money. All you have to do is search the forum discussion boards and have an active presence on them and make sure you’re timely in responding to inquiries on a consistent basis.
3. Connect with People through Quora
Quora has been proven as one of the best lead generation techniques you can use to actively engage with consumers and answer their questions regarding your product or service. What makes Quora an excellent lead generation technique is that it connects you with your target consumers in a question-and-answer format. As an online advertiser, you can make a profile and answer questions, and can interact with people in need. It’s a good platform to generate sales leads and very helpful in the b2b lead generation side.
The purpose of Quora is to connect skilled individuals and companies who have the information and skill sets with those who seek it. The focus is on uniting individuals with varying points of view in an effort to diversify one’s way of thinking and/or learning on any given subject. Quora provides everyone with a chance to share their insight and the unique perspective they may have gained from practical application and experience. You can easily participate in this knowledge-sharing social media platform and promote your business without spending a dime. Additionally, you will get first-hand experience and knowledge in order to know and understand your target audience’s pain points and how to provide them with a solution that will amplify your lead-generation efforts many times over.
Sharing videos on social sites is one of the best lead-generation techniques that doesn’t require capital to begin doing. There is a number of web-based social networking platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and so forth, each having a unique way to engage with your target audience. YouTube is the most popular social channel for sharing video content. YouTube isn’t only a video-sharing site; it’s also the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. This social platform allows your organization to create and maintain your own channel where you can share recordings with respect to specific occasions and events, instructional-based videos, and just about anything you cant think of. This will help your company stay in front of your rivals which helps in your lead generation activities to procure new and ongoing sales leads. All you have to do is create a video, add it to your channel and share the simple, concise, and easy-to-digest product videos in order to attract new leads that will eventually land on your company’s website.
5. Optimize your Website
The leads you obtain are only as good as the website that produces them. If you look at examples from some of the top converting lead generation sites, you can learn what and why work on that site and apply the same techniques to your website. As a general rule, there are general elements that should be found on every landing page you use, which include: the company phone number, short contact forms (example: full name & email), social proof in the form of customer testimonials, videos that directly speak to your audience, the use of powerful action verbs such as “get”, “feel” and “have”, with a consideration of your end-goal (get their contact information), and always test, test, and split test again. Additionally, you must follow the best on-page SEO techniques to ensure your content gets listed by search engines.
6. Discover Your Target Audience through Social Media
The one thing you should take into consideration when using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram is that you can showcase your brand in front of your exact intended targeted audience. With the internet and social media, everyone is online 24/7 and using social media platforms consistently, with reports showing users averaging several hours per day. Thus it’s a platform where you can find sales leads and by sharing quality information lead generation can be done more easily.
With Facebook and Instagram leads are created by socio-economics, for example, age, sex, occupation, single, married, area, instruction, and interests, with the sky being the only limit. Putting your capital resources to work in social communities may be one of the best methods to promote online, given the present market conditions.
7. Catch the Attention of the Press
This old-school marketing tactic is one of the most reliable lead-generation techniques. There are numerous reasons for including press releases as part of your overall marketing strategy, they can play a very powerful role in making your target audience take notice of your business. Simply put, your target audience can not conduct business with you if they do not know that your brand exists. This being the case, a press release can generate awareness of your brand.
When you launch a new product or service, one of the first things that should be done is to issue a press release informing the public of it. You have to provide the context as to what the main pain point is that your product or service solves. If you remember to answer the question, “Why should I care?” for both the journalist who will be reading your press release and the target audience interested in your niche, you will be able to get it in front of a large number of eyeballs which translates into web traffic.
Press release distribution platforms such as PRNewsWire will get you traffic from various local and national media houses. However, if you self-publish your press releases on your own website it will count towards your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in order to drive free traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing
