stmThinking of setting up a business online? In today’s guide, I will be sharing with you some effective lead generation strategies for any type of business.
I can guarantee you that if you truly employ all the tips here, you will only increase your sales and make more money online, you will also have a list of customers who will always be waiting to buy your products.
Before going into the effective lead generation marketing strategies, there are some things you need to know as a business man or a company owner. Check them out below!
What Is Lead Generation In Digital Marketing?
In digital marketing, lead generation is simply a process whereby a business owner attracts, identifies and transforms online users into prospects for his/her business.
Lead generation normally utilize digital channels, techniques, and strategies such as paid advertising campaigns through electronic mails (email), paid social media advertisements, or even offering downloadable content through a landing page.
The main aim of digital commerce is to reach a wide range of prospects around the world at relatively short period of time while spending much less. With the advent of modern technology, business promotions are not only done through TV placements, newspaper advertisements or sharing flyers.
Gone are the days where traditional marketing methods such as trade shows used to be enough to draw the attention of customers, due to the abundance of information and the increase of competition, it is now more difficult for businesses and companies to reach and engage with potential customers.
Lead generation is very useful for any size or type of business, both for Business-to-customer and for Business-to-Business spaces. According to research, lead generation is a key point for over sixty percent of marketers.
Business owners and companies can now launch a digital campaign through the Internet, using a smartphone, laptop or tablet.
The Importance Of Lead Generation To Online Businesses
Leads are very important in order to sustain your business. But you might be wondering how lead generation actually benefit your business online. Here’s a look at some reasons why you should focus on lead generation.
- Build Visibility and Awareness
Whether your business is just starting up and you need more clients, or you’re already established but you’re not satisfied with the number of clients you have.
Creating visibility and awareness is important to turning the competition in your favor. You can do this by creating valuable content for your audience and sharing them on the channels they frequent.
- Expand Your Business
Lead generation gives you the opportunity to learn about your prospects. By learning more, you’ll have the insight to expand your business. When you started newly, you may likely be targeting a particular group of people. But with Lead generation, you get to understand that this is not the only sector you can and should be targeting.
You might also be getting engagement from organisations and job roles not listed in your marketing campaigns. With lead generation, you’ll see this trend and then add them to your campaign.
- Improve Lead Quality
Creating content and dumping it into the web can get you traffic. Maybe even a ton of it. But if your targeted audience are not converting into leads, then it’s a futile gambit.
- Gather More Customer Reviews
Customers review is very important when it comes to online business, it helps you convert prospects to clients, and it builds trust of other customers in you.
But you don’t automatically get this, so it’s advisable to always ask customers that gets your product to do a short video and send to you. I assure you, it pays!
You can then use this review (photos or videos) in your marketing collateral, such as your website, videos, emails, infographics and social media posts.
- Boost Your Revenue
Lead generation can help expand the ability of your brand to reaching target prospects. This requires using the right offer, messaging, and valuable content to generate interest from specific groups.
If this is done properly, you’ll find it very easy to get the attention of qualified leads, which makes it easier to convert them. Especially if you are into CPA Marketing.
- Generate Business Opportunities
Lead generation does not only assist you to find prospects. But it can also present you with business opportunities. It might involve teaming up with a non-competing brand in your industry to gain access to their audience (and vice versa).
This is a mutually beneficial partnership that can lead you acquiring more leads.
- Eliminate or Reduce Cold Calling (and Emailing)
When you start having hot leads coming to your way, they’ll be no need to continue using unnecessary outbound methods like emailing and cold calling? This will give your sales person enough time to focus on closing more deals with leads they are certain wants your product.
- Automate Lead Management
Technology has made things easier for everyone, there are now software tools you can utilize to automate lead generation and management processes. This software tools includes; CRMs (Customer-Relationship-Managements) email marketing software, and customer data platforms (CDP) and Sending Platforms.
By implementing these software into your lead generation strategy, you can simplify and fasten up the process.
For example, your CDP (Customer Data Platform) saves information about prospects. Then prospects are divided into a nurturing campaign carried out by your email marketing tool. Then your CRM (Customer-Relationship-Managements) keeps track of all communications between leads and your business.
When you make these tools accessible to sales, marketing, and customer support teams, you can synchronize data and initiatives.
- Grow Your Followers
Creating quality content and starting conversations are very important for generating leads especially on social media channels. The main aim is to share valuable content with your prospects.
If this is done very well, you’ll end up building a community of professionals who follow and like your brand. Some of the prospects will become customers while some may turn into brand advocates.
How To Do Lead Generation (Examples)
There are two types of leads an individual can create online: Business-to-Business leads (B2B) and Business-to-Customers leads (B2C).
The process of Business-to-Customer lead generation is easier because prospects might fall in love with your product along the way. However, Business-to-Business lead generation is a longer process and requires more time and attention.
The process of customer acquisition is broken into three basic steps as listed below:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
These are the three minimum steps for lead generation. Do not aim to generate lead using a single step because it won’t work.
Below are some examples of Digital Lead generation;
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INSTAGRAM
A lot of people think that Instagram is used for branding alone, but it can also be used to acquire leads. The Instagram platform is growing rapidly and hence, it opens new opportunities to its users. People can now acquire lead through Instagram TV and ads.
However, there is a simple strategy to acquire leads on Instagram:
- Choose an Instagram business profile, then you run ads on Instagram placements. After which, you select users from your target audience who have interacted with your ads, posts or profile.
- Your ad format should be an Instagram story ad, which should be a vertical video or image that appears in your audience’s story. Instagram story ad is a new ad format on Instagram which helps your Click-through-rate to be much higher than normal.
If you’re planning on using a landing page to acquire lead, you need to have valuable content. This will create a great foundation for the last part of your campaign.
- It is advisable to aim at those who expressed interest towards your content. You should focus on users who did not leave but rather stayed on your page and interacted with it.
- Ensure to use a simple Instagram image advertisement format and take the traffic to a convert page that has a single goal which is to convert these users into hot leads.
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FACEBOOK
According to reviews, people say that Facebook does not really work for Business-to-Business marketing because people visit the social media platform to relax and see what’s going on with their family and friends. If your ads are poorly targeted and irrelevant, it’s only going to annoy Facebook users.
However, if you have a very good content and properly target your ads to selected users. Facebook ads will generate a whole lot of leads.
Furthermore, below is a simple recipe for generating leads on Facebook
1) You need to talk more about the value proposition and benefit of your service or product in the awareness stage of your lead acquisition. The awareness stage is mostly about your brand and building the foundation of good first impressions for the next step.
You can select from the varieties of Facebook ad formats, like the carousel ad, image ad, slideshow or video ad.
2) Secondly, ensure that your targeted audience focus on engagement and understand your value proposition.
For this stage, you can use the Facebook canvas ad, which is very similar to a normal landing page inside Facebook just by clicking on a normal ad in the feed. The sole purpose of the canvas ad is to know your audience before you convert them to your site.
3) In this stage, you can now convert your target audience to your website. However, you should pay more attention on those who interacted with your ads or those who spent the more time on your website.
The format of your ad will be the lead generation card, and the objective is to generate leads. The final stage which is also the decision stage warrants you to ask for an email address, mobile number or company name (and other useful information).
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GOOGLE
When a user uses Google search, it simply means that the user is already in the consideration stage and he/she is looking for a solution to his/her problem. You might be asking yourself what this means to you.
If you react with current search and also have a very good landing page, you can easily skip the awareness stage. That means you’ll only need one more stage to convert your Lead.
However, you should focus on cold traffic on Google. Below are some professional tips to make things easier and produce effective results:
1) You can start your lead generation campaign with a Youtube ‘bumper video ad’ format or a GDN (Google Display Network) banner set.
2) Upon generating traffic to your site, you can use the RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) campaign, this will allow you to bid higher for those users who have previously visited your website and are searching for terms related to your business.
After which you bring this traffic to your web page which gets traffic only from this source. By doing that, you’ll be able to remarket to users who went through this specific step of the sales funnel in the third stage.
You can even remarket to users through a different ad platform. This simply means that you can start the funnel with a search ad via Google and remarket using Facebook or you can basically use any other channel.
3) Upon setting up your web-page specific remarketing list, you can begin your GDN (Google Display Network)/or Youtube campaign again, based on how much you’re willing to spend. Lastly, after doing that, you take your traffic to a landing page where you can start generating leads from them.
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LINKEDIN
Linkedin is the best but the most expensive channel in Business-to-Business marketing. It won’t be difficult to generate leads on Linkedin. But finding the right audience is just the beginning of lead generation.
1) In the awareness phase on Linkedin, it is important that you begin your lead generation with profile auto-visiting. You can download some online tools for that.
If you auto-visit either a group or any of your connections in Linkedin, they’ll get notified that you viewed their profiles. In doing that, they are helping you get your first impression for free.
2) In the consideration phase, it is always advisable to target the profiles you visited with promoted content. You can now convert the traffic you got from them to a landing page. You’ll now list the benefits of your service or product in your page.
We recommend you to use micro conversions to engage your traffic. If used properly, you can earn up to $4-8 CPC (cost-per-click) and, at first glance, poor CTR (click-through-rate) of 0.1-0.3%. Without doubt, Linkedin is sometimes 10 times more expensive than Facebook.
However, you will be compensated for your higher ad spend with alot of focused target.
3) The last phase of lead generation through Linkedin is using sponsored inMail. This stage has to be very short and sweet. I won’t be wrong to say that the open rate of your letter will be around 75-85%. However, this doesn’t mean that the targeted audience will write back.
Before some audience (prospects) write back, they go through your profile. That means the chances of a prospect writing back depends on your copy and your profile.
It is important to note that, before creating this campaign in Linkedin, you should have a good knowledge of writing outstanding inMails, because it’s totally different from email or ad copy.
Lead Generation Software And Tools That Converts (Best Lead Generation Tools)
Here’s a summary of the tools for lead generation.
- On-Page Lead Generation Tools
- Email Marketing Tools
- Email Address Finders
- Prospecting and Outreach Tools
- CRM (Customer-Relationship-Management) Tools
- Sales Tools
- Communication Tools
- Advertising Tools
- And Lots more.
On-page Lead Generation Tools: An on-page lead generation tool sends leads directly from your site via opt-in forms and campaigns
Email Marketing Tools: These help you nurture your leads with campaigns to keep them engaged with your business brand.
Email Address Finders: This tool helps you connect with people who are not even on your email list
Prospecting and Outreach: This tool collects contact information on visitors and reach out to them later.
Customer Relationship Management Tools: This tool helps you Connect and track leads throughout the sales pipeline
Sales Tools: This tool helps you turn leads into customers while also staying in touch with existing customers.
Communication Tools: This tool helps you to send automatic messages to your leads. People love to chat from time to time.
Advertising Tools: This tool helps you to send traffic to your site from social media pages and through paid ads.
The tools might seem much, but it is not mandatory to use all of them at a time, just know the one that works for you and use them effectively.
Effective Digital Lead Generation Strategies Or Ideas To Increase Conversions
Once you’ve identified your potential customers, you then use the right strategy to convert them to closed sales. Below is a list of the strategies to use:
- Email Marketing
E-mail marketing is one of the cheapest and conversion rich forms of digital marketing.
Email marketing has been in existence for a very long time, yet it’s still one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate.
If you operate an electronic commerce store, ensure that you follow up with emails when customers abandon carts, visit your website and even buy.
You can also use email for following up after a video call, especially when it involves a B2B Sales lead
- Exceptional Landing Page
After setting up your ad, video, etc. What you really need now is to have a good converting landing page. A good landing page consists of the following:
- A solid offer
- Flexible ways of taking actions
- Testimonials
- A solid guarantee
When all these are in place, your system will start to convert more leads!
Another importance of landing pages over a traditional website is that there are lesser distractions.
When customers see many different buttons and ads on your website, they’re more likely to get distracted or pissed off and ditch what you wanted them to do.
For that reason, the landing page is your best shot for customers to buy or opt in to your lead magnet.
- Text Message Marketing
People spend much time on their phone these days, doing one important thing or the other.
If you could re-engage audience through text messages, it can prove to be a powerful tool in your toolkit. Moreover, immediately you send in the message, who knows? The prospect might be on his/her phone. So there’s no ignoring it.
Whether it’s Business-to-Business consulting, Electronic Commerce Stores or Webinars. Text message/SMS marketing is the real deal.
There are a lot of software that can help you send automated text messages.
According to research, about 64% of consumers think businesses should contact them via text messages more often and 75% of consumers want to receive texts with solid offers.
- Retargeting Ads
According to customers’ reviews, it is proven that one needs to see an ad like 7 times on average before converting or taking some kind of action.
This is also called the “7 times Factor” in marketing.
Ensure to run retargeting ads for visitors on your website as well. You can do this by just installing a Facebook pixel to your website and let the data build-up.
- Great Sales Skills
You should always measure the rate of conversion, because it’s what drives your revenue.
In the Business-to-Business space, having the ability to sell well is a major factor to your revenue increase.
As a business owner, having a great sales skill goes a long way in the lead conversion process.
A wise man once said “selling is one in all the foremost important money making activities you could do for your business”.
- Get Social
There are over 3.8 billion people using social media around the globe. No modern company can ignore this number because it is a major place to get prospects.
Whether you run an offline or online business, having a social media presence is very important.
One of the best things about social media is that it allows you to initiate conversations with your desired audience and regularly interact with them. Social media also allows you to get to know your potential customers better and convert more leads into customers.
Conclusion
In modern businesses, especially those online, lead generation is very important. It grants you the avenue to systematically develop credibility, gain more visibility, build trust, and get people interested in your offers. It helps you discover what is working, where to make amends and make more sales.
So by focusing on lead generation, it can help send a whole lot of traffic from high-quality prospects. And don’t forget, with an influx of high-quality prospects comes high-value customers.
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References:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/lead-generation-strategies
https://adsterra.com/blog/lead-generation-strategies
https://www.leadfeeder.com/blog/b2b-lead-generation-strategies-and-tactics
https://designrr.io/lead-generation-strategies
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/beginner-inbound-lead-generation-guide-ht
stm