Approximately one-third of businesses drown within their first two years just because they fail to generate leads. And almost 60% of marketers find lead generation as the most difficult task. Companies spend a large chunk of their budget on web designing and marketing, but sometimes even the best-designed websites often fail to generate leads, where all they are lacking is the right lead generation strategy.
Your business success majorly depends on your lead generation strategy. If you succeed to generate more leads, but if you have an average product – you will still win.
For your venture to scale quickly and for consistent lead generation, you must learn how to generate leads. This guide on “ how to generate leads” will help you with everything you need to know for generating quality leads for your company.
Before moving forward to lead generation strategies, let’s first understand what lead and lead generation is?
A lead is an individual or organization with an interest in what you are selling and who may eventually become a client. Their interest is expressed by visiting your site or sharing contact information, like an email ID, a phone number, or even a social media handle.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting prospects into someone who has previously shown an interest in your company's products or services. The process is intended to generate leads with the hope of nurturing them throughout the buying process and converting them into paying customers.
What is Lead Generation in B2B?
B2B stands for business to business. This is where a company will sell its products and services to other businesses. And if we talk about lead generation in B2B, it is nothing but the process of identifying the ideal business clients for your product or service, then attracting them to buy.
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What is essential for business growth? It is to create brand awareness and attract interest and drive sales. In simple words, you need to market and acquire lead generation. Here, the marketing methodology is inbound, and it focuses on delivering valuable content for the customers.
After content attracts the prospect's attention, they express interest in your product or services and move on from the stranger to the customer phase.
After attracting the customer's attention, you need to convert them into your sales-qualified leads. Later on, they become your loyal customers who serve as your brand promoters.
You can map this entire process into a simple flowchart like:
Now, as you are aware that lead generation falls under the umbrella of inbound marketing methodology, a step-wise brief will aid to comprehend the how generate leads concept:
Here, the freebies refer to valuable content like a monthly newsletter, eBooks in PDF, limited trials, whichever applies to your niche. This stuff should be persuasive enough for the visitor to provide personal info with you.
So, how to categorize your leads? The following brief about the different types of leads will be handy enough to do it.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
When the contacts do some actions that clearly state they are interested in becoming your paying customer, they are sales-qualified leads. The sales team can now pull out all strategies to convert prospective customers into active customers that generate leads for sales.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
When the contact has expressed some interest in your brand offerings, they are marketing qualified leads. In general, MQL turns into SQL and then into customers. An instance of the generate leads marketing category is a contact who has added e-commerce items to their cart.
Service Qualified Lead
When the contacts confirm their interest to your service team in becoming a paying customer, then you can categorize them under Service Qualified Lead. An instance of this zone is when a lead is willing to upgrade a software subscription and informs the customer service rep.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
When the leads have consumed your products and expressed their interest in becoming paying customers, they are Product Qualified Leads. For example, when the contact has used the free trial version and enquires about the paid features, they are PQL.
By now, you know what lead generation is, and its types, and how critical they are for business growth. However, lead generation needs robust planning and seamless execution. Check out our next section that unveils the winning ways to generate quality leads for your business.
Increase your revenue and grow your business today with these 10 amazing lead generation strategies.
How to generate leads online? The first step of lead generation is identifying your potential target audience. You can't successfully reach and sell to your ideal customer if you don't know them exactly. So it's important to research your audience and come up with a clear understanding of:
After knowing your target audience, you can plan your lead generation strategies accordingly.
Pro Tip: You can use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers and there are various advanced analytics tools that can help you know your customer behaviour and demographics. You can even study your competitors and identify what audience base they are catering to.
Once you have figured out your target audience, it is time to create content for them that is engaging and appealing. Quality over quantity is significant to procure lead generation. So, having a single stand-apart one gets the required attention rather than having thousands of irrelevant ones. Therefore, invest your time drafting content that can connect with the audience.
Thus with high-quality content, you get assured of more shares. Your goal is to wow the audience, and then the rest of the lead generation process will fall in line.
Pro Tip: You can use Blog posts, Social media posts, Infographics, YouTube videos, Podcasts, Free eBooks for traffic generation. Later, you can use Free reports, Webinars, Discounts and Coupons, Free quizzes for lead generation.
Once you know your target audience and their demographics, you can plan the right strategy to reach them accordingly. Then you need to create a proper sales funnel and funneling all prospects to a standard form or landing page that encourages them to share their contact information, generally in return for a free gift, a coupon, free ebook, free download or some other value-added incentive.
Pro Tip: At this point, it is vital to have a customer relationship management (CRM) database that will help you track potential customers' behavior through the entire process.
When you opt for social media marketing, deliver the same message that is rephrased and with a different tone for each one of them. The Facebook and Twitter conversation should mean the same but inherently in a different manner.
Pro Tip: You can use the social listening features in the CRM tools to have the correct brand conversation on social media platforms.
Once the customer visits your sites, your website needs to be well optimized for lead generation. When it comes to lead generation, typically you are trying to capture a prospect’s contact information, such as their name, email address, phone number, and other qualifying attributes that will aid your lead generation and selling process. So here we have some tips to optimize your web pages :
Pro Tip: Make sure to have mobile responsive, intuitive, and user-friendly web design as about 90% of the global population use mobile devices to be online and interact with digital businesses.
SEO is vital for lead generation, so make it a habit to avoid keyword stuffing. You can use your primary keyword a maximum of four times and maintain that keyword density consistency.
Also, conduct keyword research to discover what your competitors are using. Jot down the keywords they use to boost their lead generation. Try targeting those sets of keywords for your site.
Pro Tip: Opt for paid campaigns and run A/B tests to figure which keywords deliver the best leads.
You can use a web page template that allows you to embed the testimonials at the footer of each page. So that the users need not navigate to a separate page to check out your brand reputation.
You can deploy either of the following:
Main KW – Secondary KW - Brand
The optimum character count for the web page title and description is 60 and 160. If you exceed the recommended description length, Google will automatically truncate them in the search results.
Pro Tip: There are many free online character count tools that you can use to be sure.
The landing pages that are easily skimmable will provide the users with the information they were looking for and benefit them in the process. As a result, they are likely to take some action that will profit you in return in the form of qualified leads.
So, make it a point to make your landing pages structured, informative, brief, with impressive images.
Pro Tip: You can try video landing pages. It helps you explain the details of your key offerings without an overwhelming amount of textual information.
Some of the best practices for effective CTAs are:
For getting a good number of leads, you need a well-planned promotional strategy that will get your products and services in front of your target audience. There are a number of ways you can promote your business, and again, you have to identify the most effective methods for your business.
Some marketing ideas for Lead Generation are content marketing via informational websites, blogging, guest posting, influencer marketing social media, affiliate marketing, industry events, current customer referrals, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and traditional advertising.
Pro Tip: Use multiple strategies to promote your brand so that you can reach wider audiences.
By using Google login, you can personalize your efforts and enhance your customer experience by providing them easy access to accounts. With Google login, you can acquire more leads to your business by limiting the amount of information that they need to input in the signup forms. That’s how successful companies are generating leads for sales and it can work for you, too.
Pro Tip: How to generate leads online? Considering the popularity of social media, you can allow them to login via Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin account.
Running a contest or special offers is one of the best lead generation strategies to know when you are learning how to generate leads. It can generate a ton of email and social leads in a short span of time. It works like this – brands offer a special prize in exchange for participants to refer a minimum of three other friends, share content, and like their social media profiles. The purpose of running any special offer or contest is to create an urgency among viewers to take certain actions.
Pro Tip: You can add free gifts, shopping coupons, or limited offers to grab more customer attention
Direct customer engagement should be one of your top priorities when you aim to drag more leads. If your business sells a high-value product or a service then direct engagement with a potential customer is a great approach to generate new opportunities. Even if your revenue model operates on low-value high-volume sales, it is the best strategy to follow for more user engagement and lead generation.
Pro Tip: You can reach out to prospects directly through social media, email, by phone, or you can make use of live chat, forums, and help centers – where your customer service representatives are available 24*7to make sure every query is answered and resolved properly. More direct engagement enhances customers’ experience and results in better word-of-mouth and more leads.
LinkedIn is a business-centric social networking website with 2x the buying power that your average web audience has. It could be one of the best platforms known for bringing new clients to your business too. Linkedin is widely popular for lead generation in B2B and also allows you to run lead generation campaigns.
Lead Gen Forms on LinkedIn are among our most popular ad products, because of the way they directly support lead generation. By integrating this feature with your LinkedIn campaigns, you can collect valuable leads and customer professional details while minimizing hassle and friction for users.
Pro Tip: Keep your lead generation forms fresh and follow up with leads in a timely manner.
With the ever-changing landscape of digital advertising, the fight for grabbing the audience's attention and lead generation is also growing.Using social media to advertise is also a great way to expand your reach to social audiences and generate more leads. You can use targeted pay-per-click advertising and retargeting to serve ads for searches extremely relevant to your business, increasing the likelihood that those people who know you will convert.
Pro Tip: You can use Email marketing for advertising by which you can reach the target audience directly in their inboxes.
Existing Customer referrals are one of the oldest and successful lead generation strategies that can help you get good leads. If your product or service has delighted a current customer, you can ask them to share their experience with their friends who also might benefit, or you can introduce any thriving offer like refer two other friends and get 30% off .
Pro Tip: Your most loyal customers are probably going to be the ones who refer to your brand the most, acknowledge these groups by creating a customer loyalty program.
Lead generation is not a one-day task, it should be thought of as a long-term and continuous process. If you get the right strategy with an efficient system, you can streamline the lead generation process and increase your opportunities for business growth.
Let's have a quick glance at the best lead generation strategies, we have discussed above.
If you are new to this online world, not feeling comfortable implementing these lead generation strategies on your own but interested in getting more leads for your business and growing your company, the experts at JanBask Digital Design can help. Our marketing agency can help improve your lead generation and meet your bottom lines.
Hope this guide on “how to generate leads “can help you learn the best strategies to generate sales leads.
Did we miss something or do you want to know anything related to “how to generate leads online”? Feel free to reach us or comment below!!
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E
I am a digital marketer and as per my personal experience lead generation is a really daunting task , if you don’t follow the right strategy.
S
Influencer marketing really helps my business and brings more leads, even extending my reach to all social platforms very rapidly.
T
Some listed strategies are really too effective, I think you have ignored social media, other than that rest blog is good.
R
Quite informative post, too helpful, have some good tips to improve lead generation process.
D
I am new in the business field and I don’t know much about how to generate leads and how to convert them successfully. Can your professional help me with this?
L
Your tips and tricks are really helpful, I followed them and got positive outcomes. Thanks to the team for the help!!