Regardless of size or industry, businesses need to generate leads to survive and grow. There are many ways to generate leads, some more effective than others. This blog post discusses practical methods of generating leads. We’ve narrowed down eight effective methods.
Traditional Methods
Traditional marketing methods are time-tested and effective. Many businesses employ them today to generate leads and close sales. Let’s examine each of them and how they can help your business generate leads
1. Cold Calls
Cold Calling is an unsolicited interaction between you and the potential client via a phone call (hence why it’s called a “cold” call). It’s a common outbound marketing technique that’s been used since the late 1800s. Compared to digital forms of outreach, cold calling allows you to give your potential leads a personal touch; you get to interact with leads, hear their voice, and connect with them. When done right, it’s one of the best methods to get important information on your leads. With cold calling, you can:
- Identify your market
- Build your brand’s identity
- Increase your sales
- And personally get involved with clients from the get-go
2. Direct Mailers
Direct mailers have helped many businesses earn high revenue through lead generation since the dawn of the internet. Marketing teams usually combine direct mail with other forms of outbound marketing activities (like emailing after a cold call). Direct mailers are an effective and often-preferred marketing strategy for leads who are usually too busy for a phone call. They allow leads to look through your pitch in their own time. It can also save you time: you can send identical emails to multiple leads at once. The only downside is if your email’s too “cookie-cutter,” people might easily ignore it.
3. Exhibitions, Trade Shows, and Conventions
Nothing gives your lead generation a more
personal connection than meeting them face-to-face. Exhibitions, trade shows, and conventions are excellent places to strategically target hand-picked and highly potential leads who’ll almost guarantee a sale. To pull this off well, marketing teams should know the leads they’re targeting, seek to understand their pain points, and actively engage with them. Think of it as a face-to-face cold call, but there’s a little more involved. In our experience, you’re more likely to convert leads if you present yourself as someone likable, reliable, and trustworthy.4. Building a Network From Scratch
This method requires more legwork, but it offers insane results when done the right way. Building your market from scratch requires you to be adaptable, strategic, and well-versed with your leads’ industry requirements. You can start by listing out who you’re already networking with and build your connections from there. From attending networking activities to casually connecting with potential leads, you can build rapport by getting settled in their comfort zone. Once you’ve established trust and reliability, you can slowly begin to convert those leads into sales.
Modern Methods
The “avant-garde” of marketing blew up with the rise of the digital age. Today, several businesses swear by these methods to generate solid leads and expand their businesses.
1. Social Media
With 3.6 billion people using social media, it’s one of the most lead-dense hotspots for your business to go fishing. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the best social media platforms for new businesses to advertise their product/service. With these platforms, you can set your budget for your ad campaigns and plan your ads accordingly.
2. Digital Display Advertising
This is basically advertising your business with graphics on different websites, social media platforms, or apps. This method is more commonly employed on social media websites because of the traffic on those sites. Businesses usually use these ads to bring potential leads to their website and prompt them to apply for an email subscription through which they can receive more information.
3. Search engines
SEO Marketing is a strategy businesses use to get more visitors to their website. It involves using the right keywords, images, links, NLP phrases, and headings to rank your website at the top of Google’s search list. We’ll cover more about this later in the article.
4. Email Marketing
Not to be confused with direct mailers, email marketing can be thought of as a more prolonged, relationship-building marketing tool. Businesses employ email marketing to pepper potential leads with content that can convert them to paying customers.
How to Effectively Generate Leads
1. Leverage Social Media
Social media should be your go-to place to advertise your business and pull leads. If you’re new to this, spend some time learning how to navigate through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These websites are valuable sources of leads. And they’ll help you niche out your target audience. Facebook ads, for example, helps you run multiple ad campaigns for various combinations of demographics, age groups, and geographies so you can select the one that works best.
2. Target, Advertise, Retarget, and Re-Advertise
When using social media or other methods to target the right audience, you hardly get any leads on the first try. For example, you may have gotten the wrong demographic or age group. That’s why you run multiple ads or pay-per-click campaigns. Then using data on which ad ran the best, you shoot out more advertising to the demographic that responded well.
3. Community Engagement Blog Posts
Most successful businesses have a blog on their website which does three things:
- Community engagement
- Product awareness
- Sales
The goal of community engagement blogs is to get your leads excited about your product. That’s why most business blog posts end with a call to action (CTA) or a money page (a link that takes readers to the product page). Your articles should establish enough expertise to draw potential leads to your product. A good plan of action would be generating enough content for an extended period of time (perhaps a year) or using a content calendar to shoot out blog posts regularly.
4. Rank Higher With SEO-Optimization
You can write all the blogs you want but have no one to read them. And most people don’t go beyond the first page if they find what they want on the first. Regular search engine optimization (SEO) helps your content rank at the top of Google’s searches. You can use free tools like Google Ads or paid ones like Surfer to create content that matches what people search for. With a higher SEO ranking, people searching for your product/service online are more likely to run into your website.
5. Actively Participate in Forums and Blog Comments
Customers trust expertise, which is why you need to showcase yours to potential leads. Take some time to look through different online forums (such as Quora) and blog posts. Find questions pertaining to your industry, and answer them while also advertising your product or service. This works as a sort of give and take. Answering a potential lead’s query does three things:
- It makes you an expert in their eyes, which makes them more likely to purchase your product/service.
- It operates on the principle of reciprocity, meaning, they’ll feel like they owe you for answering their question.
6. Email Offers
To make this work, you’ll need a list of email subscribers. Once you’ve built a solid list, think about sending your potential leads a special email offer. This could be a limited-time discount, a special sale, or access to your product’s bonus features—basically anything that will convert them from leads to paying customers. If you don’t have a heavy list of subscribers, you can always send your email offers to other people’s email lists. Look for someone you’ve networked with and offer them a small cut of the sales for letting you use their list. For example, they can get 5% off every sale you make through the email offer.
Some Factors to Consider
You don’t want to waste time and effort on people who will never be clients. So, consider the following factors before diving into any pool for leads.
1. Demographics
The question you should be asking here is, “What group of people will benefit from my product?” As we stated before, finding the right demographic will take a couple of rounds of advertising. When you find the one that responds best, spend more revenue advertising to that group.
2. Client Behavior
Before implementing any marketing strategy, do your homework on how your leads behave. Ask the following questions:
- Does their work align with what I’m selling?
- Do they perform their work intending to scale their business?
- What’s their history with other vendors?
That last one is especially important if you want to know whether you’ll get paid on time. Studying client behavior helps you narrow down which leads you want to spend more time with.
2. Quality of Leads
While you may generate many leads, you want to focus your energy and resources on high-quality leads. Here’s how to tell if your leads are serious:
- They’re genuinely interested in your product.
- They respond quickly.
- They have the authority (within their company) to buy what you’re selling.
- They remind you of your existing customers.
4. Geography
Depending on the type of product you sell, you want to figure out which geography is most likely to buy from you. For example, you’ll have little to no luck advertising fast-food delivery services to farming towns. Likewise, you’re very likely to generate more leads by advertising to a younger demographic in the city.
Some Useful Pointers
Here are a few pointers to help you with your lead generation strategies.
1. Be Creative
Not every lead is the same, and not everyone responds the same way. You’ll need to figure out what elicits the best response from them. So, it’s important to be original and keep the creative juices flowing.
2. Customer Care is Crucial
Once you’ve converted a lead, take good care of it because it’s now your customer. Retention is sometimes more important than conversion. So keep the clients happy.
3. Don’t Give Up Easily
Here’s the reality: even though you may have all the resources, it’s not going to be easy. You may run into rough patches, bad demographics, and even bad potential clients. However, like anything else, consistency with the right tools and techniques matters. So, don’t go down without a fight.
Conclusion
Now that you’re equipped with the knowledge on how to generate leads for your business, it’s time to think about strategy. What we’ve covered here are just the basics. You’ll have to try (and fail) a few times before figuring out what strategies work best for your business. Focus on the more promising leads because they’re more likely to become your business’s bread and butter. And as you keep strategizing, don’t be afraid to make some tweaks here and there because lead generation is an ever-changing game. Check out our online course on lead generation. Click here.
