Lead generation is something that many business owners and those in sales wish was as simple as unlocking a secret to make it effortless. With more than half of companies struggling with lead acquisition, you can see why they are keen to find an easy solution to all their lead generation woes.
However, within the digital lead generation world, there isn’t one magic strategy that results in floods of customers heading to your website or door. What works for one industry doesn’t necessarily work for another. It may even differ from business to business within the same industry.
So while everyone wishes there was one easy solution to unlocking the true potential of sales lead generation, the reality leaves many on the lookout for new strategies. Throughout the year, they must assess how their lead generation process has worked before searching for new ones to try. While the trial and error method may seem like a risk, it is the best way to stay competitive.
The clue to lead generation is that there is no one secret strategy: there are lots!
Understanding Lead Generation Strategies
If you are willing to change your strategies and tailor them to your business, you have a better chance of finding new leads – sticking with the process you used 10 years ago isn’t going to be effective for today’s leads.
The good news is that you don’t have to struggle to navigate the lead generation world alone. We want to ensure that as many of our clients or prospective clients as possible know precisely how to make the most of lead generation strategies and help their businesses grow. This is the lead strategy guide you need.
What Is Lead Generation Marketing?
Lead generation marketing, also shortened to lead gen marketing by many, is all about identifying and getting the attention of potential customers, finding their lead contact information and details, and then turning them into paying customers.
You are essentially marketing to your consumer, trying to get them interested in using your services before you can take them down the consumer journey. All those in the B2B sectors will try to make the most of online lead generation. B2C sectors can also benefit from this, nurturing those consumers who are unsure of taking the plunge to purchase something.
Some excellent lead generation examples include blog posts, events, offers, free tools, and webinars. To truly understand marketing lead generation, let’s dive deeper into one of these examples.
Lead Generation Example: Offering Free Tools
You are currently looking for lead generation strategies, so start searching for free resources you can use. While looking, you come across lead gen tools that a leads sourcing company offers for free. Brilliant! Your team can get to work using these sales lead generation tools and begin your journey.
While this benefits you, it also helps the company offering the free tool with their own lead generation campaign. You had to sign up with an email address to use their tool. The company now has your contact details, meaning they can educate you about who they are as a business and what else they can offer you. With plenty of nurturing, they should have an easier time converting you into a customer. As you can see, this leads generator technique benefits both parties, eventually.
Business Lead Generation Benefits
Why go to the effort of lead generation when it seems to be a lot of hard work, and you have to change up the strategies? The simple answer is that it offers incredible benefits to those who find success with it.
Lead generation expands your market and grows your following, and you can gain more reviews, earning even more customers. The benefits go beyond this. You can boost your revenue, generate more business opportunities, improve lead quality, and build brand awareness. What lead generation does, in addition to all this, reduces the need for you to send out emails or conduct cold calling with no response. A business can go from losing money to making money with the right lead generation strategy.
With all these benefits, now is the time to make yourself aware of the lead generating strategies to use.
Best Lead Generation Techniques And Strategies To Use
There are numerous strategies to use, so to make it as simple as possible, we’ve split it up into 5 categories:
- Content
- Marketing
- Brand
- SEO
- Paid
You will need to tailor them all to your business and target generated leads, but this should give you an idea of what you need to be doing to generate sales leads.
Use Content To Generate Sales Leads
We preach “content is king” a lot, but for a good reason. Content helps many aspects of business, including helping generate leads for sales. You will need to ensure that you are doing the following strategies:
Focus On Evergreen Content
Creating evergreen content will boost your credibility and help you become an expert to many. Blogging this content regularly will expand your reach.
Why evergreen content is so highly rewarding for any lead generation system is that it provides value to a customer no matter when they find your blog. Make it informative and engaging, and you gain their trust and loyalty. The more they see consistent content and come away feeling entertained or educated, the more inclined they may be to spread the word about it to their friends. What is more important in terms of lead generation goals, though, is that they are also more likely to get in touch with the sales team.
Brands that can be more consistent have an opportunity to boost their sales lead generator by an average of 4.5 more times than those that do not release as much content. The biggest problem brands have with achieving this is keeping the quality while delivering content on time. Trying to blog regularly can be a mammoth job, but you cannot risk the quality of it dropping throughout the process. You should consider Content Writing Services from a Blog Writing Agency to ensure that you can keep the quality while meeting the necessary monthly volume.
Offer Content For Something In Return
When creating your content, try to mix in some gated content – white papers, articles, videos, etc. – that involve users filling out a form to access it. You can do the same for some of your more elite blog content. You now have a growing contact list if you request that people sign up with their email to access the content. It doesn’t have to be their email address; you could opt for personal details, but people may be more willing to give up their emails. Make the signing-up process simple to ensure people don’t backtrack away from your content. The fewer boxes you have for them to fill out, the better.
Video Marketing
When we said content was king, we weren’t just referring to written content. We meant all types, including video. It has been known that the Fortune 500 will view video content regularly, visiting many of the sites after. They won’t be the only ones watching these videos, making it an excellent way to reach new leads and establish yourself as an authoritative figure. Many people will be more willing to watch a short video than read a lengthy whitepaper or study. Without ramping up video marketing and content creation, you could be missing out on leads.
Write About Success Stories
Creating content involves showing what you know and teaching others more about the subject you are an expert in, but it also gives you a great opportunity to show how you’ve used what you know and do practically. People love success stories; they have more trust in a brand that can show proof of how they have turned things around for a client or the difference a product has made in their customer’s life.
Marketing
Digital marketing lead generation strategies are a must for businesses. These are the top strategies that you need to consider using.
Offline Events
Some people like being able to put a face to the name and have in-person conversations, giving them a better idea of what you are like to work with. Therefore, it is vital to send your marketing and sales team to networking events, like tradeshows and conferences, where they can sell your brand and generate leads. Set up a booth or attend just to network. By taking your marketing team there, they can also begin nurturing them. To take it further, you could even volunteer your time to do a talk (5-10 minutes could prove valuable to generating leads). If you develop your content and build authority, you may even be asked to do a talk.
Retargeting
One of the best ways to generate leads is to look at the ones that didn’t complete the buyer journey. The ones that found your website but only visited it. These people aren’t a lost cause. In fact, with the right retargeting strategy, you can give them a reason to come back and use your business. Retargeting ads look like normal ads but, unlike normal ads, will offer a discount usually. This is designed to give the visitor a reason to return to the website. Retargeted ads offer a 0.7% success rate, which, while it might not seem like a lot, is much higher than regular ads.
Incentive-Based Referral Programs
When you have a group of people who love your brand, you have an opportunity on your lap. They may share their love of it with friends, family, work colleagues, or social media followers. However, there is no saying that they will, and you can’t wait to see if they do. Therefore, you need to give them a reason to refer you. You need to make this as easy as possible and highlight the reward, whether a discount, freebies, or money-back for every new customer they refer. Whether you want them to give you a shout-out on social media or leave a review on review sites, ensure there is a good enough reward and incentive for them to do so.
Post Consistently On Socials
Social media is the best place to engage with your leads because so many people spend their day on it. There is plenty to post on your socials, from sharing content to advertising your latest offers, and you can even make it fun. For instance, you could run a competition that requires people to sign up with their email addresses to be put in the hat for giveaways or special limited-time offers. Not only do you get their email addresses, but you also give them the chance to try out your product or service and show them why they should choose your brand over others.
You need trust to build leads, so start asking for reviews. You can do so using your social media platforms, which is another great way to use your social media consistently.
Email Marketing
Personal ways of contacting people are great, and many believe email marketing is losing its place in the world. However, this is far from the truth. Email marketing is something you shouldn’t ignore for the simple reason that it is an effective way of nurturing a lead. When a brand offers some content in return for an email address, marketers can nurture their subscribers. Over time with careful emails and wording, they can inform them about the brand, offers, and the value you would offer them, and hopefully turn them into customers. With email addresses, you can send out similar information to your social platforms and offers, giveaways, and updates about your company.
Brand Changes
People’s impression of your brand matters greatly if you want your lead generation to grow. Therefore, as you look to new lead generation solutions, it may be time to assess how outsiders view you.
Make More Meaningful Relationships
People want to feel special when using your services. They want to feel like they are important to the business. If you are not developing more personal, meaningful relationships with your customers, you risk them heading to a company that focuses on personal experiences. To have generated leads from a strategy of this kind, you need to be giving out personal offers that are unique to each customer and address their first name in emails and social media interactions. In addition, call them (in-person conversations are so much more personal), and adding a live chat to your website can be helpful. You can build even more meaningful relationships by creating an online community.
Work Closely With Your Teams
Your sales and marketing teams must work in unison, and you, as the business owner, must work closely with both of them. Sometimes it works best when the marketing team starts the process and the sales team takes over, but it is important to remember that it should work the other way too. For instance, once the sales team has found new leads, the marketing team should nurture them to ensure more trust is formed. Then, with nurturing underway, the sales team can step back in and hopefully finalise a sale. It may not be as straightforward as this, so the teams must work closely to ensure they get as many leads as possible. They need to work in harmony together.
Make A Plan And Stick To It
One mistake brands often make is not making a plan or making one and then not sticking to it. While it is important to be flexible in how you approach your business sales leads strategies, lead generation grows when you make a plan and stick to it. You can make changes upon review time. Set goals, like how many leads you want to find, how many you want to convert into customers, how you will communicate with them, and when you want to achieve this.
SEO
On-site SEO and off-page SEO are effective campaigns to start to rank higher in the search engines, but they will help your lead generation system.
Optimise Web Pages
You may be working on some great content, publishing it, and even advertising it on your socials, but to ensure that your authority is established, you need to move up the ranks of search engines. Big lead generation growth will require you to optimise your web pages. This means including relevant keywords and having effective CTAs on all pages. Make it clear as possible what action your visitors need to take.
It can also be helpful to install widgets such as AI chatbots. This can be a lot of work and takes a long time to master. Turning to SEO Experts ensures you can make all the right changes to your website to help your business leads generation goal. If you don’t know how well your pages are currently performing, it is recommended that you get SEO Auditing experts to assess and report what you are doing well and what needs work. Then, by working with a company that offers Managed SEO Services, you can implement these changes successfully.
Expand Your Online Presence
You can expand your online presence in several ways, which will help you achieve more leads. You should first start with link building. A Blogger Outreach Agency has all the expertise and experience you need to get started with this. Make sure that any links you have in content take people to the most relevant page to ensure they take the right action. As you build links with them, you could take this another step forward and look for broken links. Reach out to the publishing site with the broken link for another brand and take the opportunity to put your brand in front of a new audience.
Top Tip: A Backlink Audit will also ensure that you only have the best backlinks coming to you.
Expanding your online presence by interviewing journalists or micro-influencers and answering expert questions on forums outreach puts your brand in touch with an audience you might not have reached by yourself.
Paid Campaigns
SEO works in harmony with Paid Social Services and is the perfect strategy for securing leads. It can be helpful, therefore, to reach out to an Enterprise SEO Agency that also offers paid services, which is exactly what we do. These are the strategies you need to look at:
Social Media Ads
Retargeting those who left your website and getting started on PPC to rank for certain keywords will help you find new leads to nurture and turn into customers. It puts your brand right in front of those who are interested in what you are offering.
A/B Test Your Paid Campaigns
Learn what is working and what isn’t for your paid campaigns to ensure that your lead generation strategy is working to the best of its ability. You should split test even when you don’t think you need to, such as using the word “my” instead of “your” on your ad or vice versa. Test different images, wording, and immediacy.
Our Final Lead Generation Tips
CRO
If you want to boost your leads, CRO Services will come in handy here. You need to know why your visitors to your website aren’t converting, whether this means filling in forms or purchasing your services or products, and record this so that you can see consistent patterns.
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Not only is mobile-friendliness one of the key factors that Google looks for when ranking, but it is a great way to ramp up your leads source efforts. You need to turn to web designers to create a website that will work effortlessly on mobile and tablets to ensure that you don’t miss out on any leads that are searching from their mobile. Remember, the chances are high that most will be using these devices nowadays. Those that are mobile-friendly enjoy customer loyalty and more purchases.
How to start a lead generation business
Do you feel inspired to help others with their lead generation by opening your own lead generation business and offering online lead generation services? Let us help you put your business name out there with our Pay Per Click Services and boost your authoritativeness and traffic with Link Building Services and local SEO. The next time someone types the search query “lead generation companies near me,” we can make it a possibility that you show up.
The leads meaning in business can also be referred to as a sales lead. They are a potential customer interested in what you have to offer as a business. Finding leads is the first step businesses must take to start the sales journey.
This is the process of finding leads who are likely to turn into customers. It involves identifying who these people are and then requires strategies to grab their attention. Nurturing is a vital role in this to ensure that they become a loyal customer.
A lead generator is a marketing strategy for helping businesses find leads who will be interested in them. A lead generator could be creating a tool, advertising, creating content, or going to trade shows.
The best lead generation tools will be easy to use, accessible, affordable, offer solid support, and are designed to help you target your ideal audience. Options include OptinMonster, TrustPulse, WPForms, Sendinblue, and Hunter.