As your company evolves, you want to look into generating new leads that assure the continuation of your business results. You’ve probably heard of lead generation before; you might have heard about its challenges and effectiveness. So, are you ready to get started yourself? Let us fill you in on the many methods of online lead generation so that you won’t have to worry about collecting leads again.
Why Lead Generation
As the world of advertising changes, businesses are abandoning bombardment strategies like mass advertising in favor of those who pull customers to them, like lead generation. Lead generation strategies work by piquing potential customer’s interest and attention, leading them towards taking action. Modern businesses need lead generation because it is one of the most effective ways of being heard through the highly prevalent noise of advertising and functions to build better relationships with consumers.
Why you don’t have to use software
To be successful in generating leads, you don’t have to get some fancy, adequately packaged lead generation software. Instead, the things you need for lead generation are all around you on the internet, most of them freely accessible; in fact, you probably use them right now! Read on to find out what kind of lead generation tools you will use to get leads.
The Different Ways to Generate Leads Online
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best lead generation strategies available right now. With email marketing, you can push promotions and pull existing users back to your site with engaging new offers. To maximize your email marketing results, we suggest you do several things:
Use a personalized email
Using a generic email like info@yourbusinessname.com simply won’t cut it when it comes to building rapport and relationships with your prospective customers. Using a personalize email helps with spam filters and makes you more relatable. It has been proven that this makes for better results such as a higher open rate, click-through-rates, and a lower unsubscribe rate.
Provide tons of value
People will be much more inclined to engage in what you have to offer, instead of tossing your email in the bin, if you provide them with value. The value you submit should be apparent and highly attractive. So, what kind of value could you offer someone through email? You should focus on resolving a particular problem they are facing (address their pain points), offer advice, improve accessibility through discounted services or products, prove insightful information about your market, and much more.
Use a kick-ass subject line
The key to getting people to open your emails is to use an imaginary subject line. The subject line is like a business card and offers critical information that your audience will use to decide to open your email (or not). When you create a subject, use short a short sentence (no more than five words), and make sure it is alluring. An enticing subject line will intrigue or persuade the reader enough to trigger the desire to open your email.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another excellent way of generating leads for your website. Content marketing is efficient because when done correctly, it provides a tonne of value to your audience. The creation of content involves creating, publishing, and distributing articles, infographics, manuals, videos, podcasts, and more for a target audience to generate leads. Here are some of the best ways you can do content marketing:
Create a blog
Having a well-formulated and SEO optimized blog will do wonders when it comes to generating leads. If your blog posts are comprehensive, entertaining, and insightful, you should be able to build a trustful relationship with your audience that will give you the authority on your niche. Even if your blog posts do not generate leads immediately, an excellent blog will entice readers to come back regularly for more content and eventually make them curious enough to check out the rest of what you have to offer.
Guest posting
When it comes to guest posting, you are able to use your own articles to tap into another website’s stream of visitors. The better the domain authority and rating of a site are, the more traffic you will receive from your guest post to your website. Why does it work that way? Well, when you place a guest post, you also include a do-follow link as a call-to-action within your post. That call-to-action links back to your website. Be sure to have a value-packed and informative guest post. Otherwise, people might not be convinced enough to click on your link.
Using lead magnets
Using a lead magnet is an excellent way to obtain people’s email addresses that you can utilize for email marketing campaigns. A lead magnet is usually an exchange of a piece of valuable content for someone’s email address. From the user’s perspective, this is a great deal – they’re not losing anything, all they have to do is type in their email address. The most successful lead magnets tend to be free PDFs, Ebooks, Case Studies, and Webinars.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Keyword planning
Keyword planning is essential for website ranking, content creation, and the generation of leads. The process involves determining what particular set of words your target audience will use on a search engine to find your business. A good set of keywords will be geo-specific and highly relevant to your niche. When keyword planning, it is vital to use a combination of long-tail (a long string of keywords, that forms a sentence) and short-tail (keywords that consist of 1-3 words) keywords. The combination of keywords ensures you’re using those with a high volume of competition and improves your chances of being found on the first pages of the search engine. Keyword planning is also necessary for completing the next step.
On-site optimization
After determining your keywords, you can optimize your website for search engine results pages (SERPs) by distributing the keywords throughout your site. Include your keywords in the title tags, H-tags, and within the body of your pages. But be aware that you don’t overflood your pages with unnatural sounding content just to create more keyword relevance. On-site optimization doesn’t just focus on keywords; it includes speed optimization, another critical ranking factor. Ensure to compress your images, keep file sizes small, cache your website, and minimize your javascript and CSS files.
Social Media Marketing
Almost everyone spends time on at least one social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram. A benefit of social media marketing is your creative freedom. These platforms let you come up with new, entertaining, and informative ways to present your offers and interact with your audience. As a bonus, many platforms have groups and communities where you find your target audience, providing you with more consumer knowledge and direct access to potential customers.
Website Optimization
Optimizing your website for lead generation is a process with many steps and facets. In general, you want to ensure your content is visible on significant screen sizes. Secondly, you should make sure that your website fully loads in approximately 3-4 seconds to prevent impatient users from bouncing. There are various other things you can do to optimize your site, including:
Use google analytics
Google Analytics is a service that tracks and reports all website traffic, providing you with a wide array of different metrics, useful for determining the effectiveness of your leads. You’ll be able to view metrics such as click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, bounce rates, time spent on each page, user demographics, device types, browser types, and much more. Mostly, Google Analytics takes the guesswork out of your lead generation strategies, allowing you to determine what works, what doesn’t, and will enable you to refine and optimize your strategy. You should also check out online academy for more in-depth articles like these.
The power of pop-ups
Including pop-ups on your website is another excellent way of generating leads. You can schedule to have a pop-up after a certain amount of time spent on your website. Or a pop-up can be triggered when your website detects that the users might leave the page, to remind the user of the value of your service or give an offer.
Growth Hacking
Offer free trials
Offering free trials is a fantastic way of generating leads because it addresses one of the key concerns that users have when faced with buying a new product or service: does it solve my problem? You’re essentially taking the guesswork out of their decision, triggering them to accept your offer. If they like the sample, they will come back for more, and at the very least, you received a new email for your email marketing campaign.
Provide coupons
Everybody loves a discount, and issuing vouchers provides precisely that. There are many buyers, especially in the B2B sector, that conduct elaborate research when it comes to buying a product or service. Often, with a little push in the form of a discount, they will make a decision. As an added benefit, promoting the fact that you’re giving out coupons is an attractive and enticing lead generation strategy that you can advertise in your email marketing campaign, google ads, social media posts, or even pop-ups.
Things to remember
Firstly, remember that your sales leads are only as good as the amount of value that you put in them. If customers don’t see how it may benefit them or solve their problems, your leads won’t work. Secondly, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Aim to diversity the types of lead generation strategies you employ – there is no limit to how many strategies you can use, so you might as well make the most of as many as you can! Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment a little. You can use metrics to determine the effectiveness of your sales leads if they don’t appear to have the desired effect, adjust them, and try them again.
Conclusion
Lead generation is essential because it attracts customers and entices them to convert. Lead generation strategies focus on providing value, either through solving a customer’s problem or benefiting them in a particular way(s). The best ways to generate leads involve email marketing, content marketing – such as creating a blog, guest posting, and using lead magnets, and social media marketing. Using growth hacking techniques and optimizing your site for search engines, page speed, and mobile responsiveness will help enormously in your lead generation efforts.
