Posted by Generating leads is critical for every business. Improving brand awareness, nurturing leads, improving the marketing funnel, and building strong customer relationships are a few other factors that contribute to the business’s success.
However, constantly working towards lead generation is vital for the growth of any business. While every marketer has their overall sales numbers, they are almost always on the lookout for effective strategies that help to generate leads.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is a process that helps to capture the interest of a potential prospect. Lead generation allows businesses of all sizes in the B2C and B2B spaces to improve their sales funnel. While most organizations target everyone, it is essential to concentrate only on those who have shown interest in the brand/the offering of the company.
Lead generation involves attracting and converting the prospects into showing interest in the products/services offered by the company.
Blogging, Email Marketing, social media marketing, networking, website landing pages, coupons, seminars, and live events are a few lead generation strategies that help companies attract potential customers. The lead generation strategies comprise of four components:
1. Lead Segmentation:
Classifying potential leads based on their habits, activities, pages they browse, and other information enables companies to create content that helps them convert.
2. Lead qualification:
Utilizing the information of a potential lead and ascertaining their interest level in the product/service offered help decide whether they should be moved further in the sales funnel or removed from it.
3. Lead Capturing:
Collecting information about the potential lead like their name, designation, the strength of their company, and a few others helps provide them with relevant information that enables them to make the buying decision.
4. Lead Magnets:
Offers, coupons, discounts, and other incentives help drive prospects to become new leads.
While these components are helpful to drive sales, it is equally essential to consider lead generation strategies.
Targeting potential leads and converting them to buyers seems a lot more natural than generating interest in an audience that has no idea about the brand/product offered.
Targeting the right customers, collecting essential information about the prospective leads, improving brand awareness, building communities through loyal customers, and enhancing brand loyalty are a few reasons companies benefit from lead generation strategies.
Lead Generation strategies:
1. Leveraging chatbots:
Chatbots are a part of the lead generation strategies. It helps companies build relationships with their prospects since they can cater to their needs 24/7, unlike their human counterparts. In addition, chatbots are helpful to match the brand personality and function as an automated part of the marketing/sales team.
For Example: The users can interact with the chatbots to derive more information about any brand. However, a survey suggests that 45% of consumers prefer chatbots to communicate due to quick response. Meanwhile, email has been one of the main channels of communication with clients. Bots enable both prospective leads and the company to learn about each other without any hassle. The setting up of a meeting for further discussion happens after the exchange of initial details.
2. Creation of gated content:
Gated content is online material that is accessible to users only after they fill a form. While the regular blog posts or landing pages are available for the general public, the gated content is available only to those audiences that are high-quality leads with an interest in the topic and its related news by the brand. Online tools, e-books, white papers, guides, courses, and reports are a few types of gated content.
For Example: Some content marketing software suites can provide dozens of gated content assets on their website, and users can take help from it after filling out the form.
3. Newsletter creation:
Newsletters play a vital role in encouraging prospects to connect with the brand. Newsletters also work like promotions of the brand and enable companies to communicate with the targeted audience. Blog posts, updates about the products offered, special offers, upcoming events, and recommended reads by other thought leaders. You can stay at the top of the mind of customers by sharing promotions for your products and services and drive prospects down the purchase funnel.
For Example: You can refer to some good websites to collect ideas about unique newsletter content and something that a marketer would consider.
4. Host an Event:
In-person and online events help attract leads and enable companies to capture the interest of their target audience through event registration.
Live events also would allow marketers to connect with the prospects in real-time, answer their queries, and learn about the needs of their target audience so that they receive guidance through the next stage of the sales funnel.
Webinars, seminars, conferences, and workshops are a few types of events that can help generate an enormous amount of prospective leads.
For Example: Marketers can host live and pre-recorded events to generate more traffic for the website and nurture the prospects through event-based email campaigns. You can analyze your target audience showing interest, attend the event, and move further through the sales funnel.
5. Offers:
Offering coupons and discounts to convert prospects interested in the product/ service provided is an excellent choice of lead magnet. It helps to attract both short-term and long-term leads.
6. Website optimization to Promote Your Lead Magnet:
On-site funnels and lead magnets help segment audiences and drive them towards conversion since it matches their needs and interests. Adding a call to action to the primary homepage, promoting lead magnets at the end of blog posts, pop-ups, a resource library with gated content, and promoting lead magnets in the right places.
For Example: Ensure to take help of some email automation software, which offers tons of exciting features to manage lead generation.
7. Promote lead magnet:
Creating brand awareness through social networks and engaging with potential leads. Leveraging call-to-action through links and driving more users to the homepage also highlights valuable lead magnets.
8. Paid promotion on social media:
Leveraging social media like Facebook and Instagram to show ads to the most likely audience helps brands target people based on demographic segmentation and behaviour-based segmentation, thereby ensuring users connect with specific audiences.
9. Top-of-Funnel Keywords:
Creating content-based on keyword terms that are most searched and finding keywords searched by the potential prospects. These keywords are helpful to create evergreen content, develop blog – strategy, use them in pay-per-click marketing, and a few other strategies. Following the best practices for SEO helps increase the chances of showing up on search pages, thereby leading to increased visibility and traffic.
10. Retarget leads that have previously engaged:
Generating leads is tedious, and letting information go because it did not work the first time around would be wrong. Instead, retargeting with previously interested prospects and having engaged with the brand would be a great idea since the possibility of conversion is much higher in such cases.
11. Create a Referral Rewards System:
Offering a reward system to existing customers helps generate leads free of cost. It is made possible through a referral reward system and discounts for referrals. References by an existing customer are a lot more valuable than a new lead generation.
12. Highlight valuable lead magnet on social media profiles:
Ensure to inform your social followers about your valuable lead magnet; you can even highlight it on different social media platforms. So, your users would get to know about the offers. You can even add links to your lead magnets for leveraging the call-to-action buttons and drive your users towards the web pages.
Conclusion:
Suppose you are interested in getting more leads for your business and growing your company. In that case, you can take the help of marketing automation tools to leverage your lead generation strategies. With the use of these top lead generation strategies, you can attract, generate, and convert qualified leads. In addition, however, these lead generation strategies can help users better understand the best ways to reach their target customers.
Whether it is a B2B or B2C space, content on blogs, email marketing, or other content that helps attract qualified leads, using the most popular keywords among the target audience helps better engage with them and attract/convert those leads.
Furthermore, segmentation, classifying qualified leads, lead capturing, and content for lead magnets, when planned and designed in sync with the targeted audience, helps to generate more leads efficiently.
About the author: Ankit Prakash is the principal founder of EasySendy and Aritic. Ankit is a passionate and determined entrepreneur; building successful Internet products since 2006.
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