The success of any business highly depends on your efficiency in generating quality leads. No matter what type of business you own, if your pipeline is full of the right and quality, your success is definite.
Unfortunately, this is tough for most businesses, and for some, it is hardly a reality. Almost every marketeer finds lead generation challenging and struggles in each step of the selling process. If you want to generate quality leads, you need to craft a strategy that efficiently converts a prospect into paying customer.
Countless businesses fail due to a lack of potential clients and the inability of growing enough leads. For instance, a solar provider needs a constant flow of sales to survive in the fiercely competitive industry. Without exclusive solar leads their business experience a downfall in no time. But with the right lead nurturing tactics, they can translate leads into customers.
If you are reading this post, there are high odds you are experiencing a downward in the sales graph. Don’t worry! We have the unfailing solution for what you are seeking. Keep reading to learn each tactic that improves your conversion rate!
Major challenges of lead generation strategy
As a business owner, you are mindful of how challenging lead generation is. However, if you know all the involved difficulties in lead generation, you will easily craft a strategy that brings results and overcome each without spending resources unnecessarily.
Here are some of the biggest challenges of lead generation:
- Generating a high volume of leads.
- Generating quality leads who would like to invest in your business.
- Measuring and tracking the results of lead generation strategies.
- Reporting the lead generation efforts.
- Dedicate time and resources to lead generation.
Types of lead generation
There are many types of leads that impact the entire lead generation strategy for a business. The marketing pitch highly depends on the level of where your customers are in their buying journey. The major types of lead include:
- MQL (marketing qualified leads): These are the leads who discover your offerings via inbound marketing channels (digital marketing or social media channels). Marketing qualified leads show interest in your products or services but haven’t interacted with your sales team or contacted you through other methods.
- SQL (sales qualified leads): These leads are already researched, examined, and evaluated by your marketing or sales team. SQLs are the people who already have shown enough interest in purchasing your products or services. For example, SQL may signup for the newsletter, and fill out a web form to get more details about the product or business. The main step that you take for SQL is to move them toward conversion.
- PQL (product qualified leads): These are the people who already have experienced your services or used your products. PQLs are one of the most qualified and valuable leads as they can provide their positive feedback on your offerings which highly works in favor of your business. You can also persuade PQLs to signup for premium service or offer incentives to encourage more purchases.
- SQL (service qualified leads): These leads are the people who have contacted or interacted with your customer support team and showed interest in your products or services. For example, they used a freemium account or service and want to upgrade to the premium version. Once learned this interest, the customer representative connects these particular leads to the right salesperson.
- Cold leads: Cold leads are the toughest leads to convert into sales. These are people who are neither familiar with your offerings nor have shown interest in your business. Marketeer faces a lot of challenges in sales conversion when it comes to approaching a cold lead.
- Hot leads: Hot leads are highly qualified leads that are just a few steps away to convert into sales. These are people who are highly interested in your products and services. They might have also received the product or services demo from your sales team end.
- Warm leads: These are the people who are somewhere between cold leads and hot leads. They are aware of what you sell and many other things about your business. These leads read your blogs or watch videos but never contacted you. The key goal of your sales team is to translate warm leads into hot leads.
11 Proven Lead Generation Tactics to Flourish Your Business
Lead generation is the tactic to attract a target audience to your business offerings and convert them into paying customers. This process is implemented via effective marketing campaigns that help you convert a lead into a customer and then further a loyal business relationship.
Rather than reaching out to people on a cold call, you can engage them better on online channels. Showcasing your brand on social media channels will bring fruitful results for your business. The people who will reach out to you after seeing the ad, video, or other content on the online channel are high-quality leads who are actually interested in your products.
Despite many business rewards, lead generation is a difficult task, especially for those who are new to this marketing method. But this tactic is worth learning to grow your business as it lands you maximum customers.
To make your lead generation strategy effective, you need to fulfill three key requisites:
- Offer good experience to prospects.
- Justify the price you have quoted.
- Help you generate high-quality leads.
- Should not look or sound pushy.
Whether you have just started your business or looking for refining old marketing strategies, here are some steps for lead generation to flourish your business.
1. Create insightful and useful content
Offering useful and insightful content that educates and informs your target audience is one of the major marketing strategies to attract new leads. You can add useful content in form of blogs, FAQs, case studies, and eBooks. Quality content projects you as a leader in your industry. This helps you attract leads in multiple ways.
The first benefit that comes from creating and offering useful content to your audience is, your business site becomes more visible on search engines. This way more and more people discover your website and become your customers.
Additionally, you can use quality content as marketing material for outreach. You can also ask for users’ information to access particular content on your site. However, avoid asking for too much information and try making the form simple and relevant. If you ask for too many details, people might not fill up the form, it will lose their interest which would affect your conversion strategy.
2. Pay-per-click marketing campaigns
PPC or pay-per-click is another effective tactic that should be included in your lead generation strategy. Almost every person use search engines to look for product and services they need. If you invest in PPC, Google puts that ad in front of people who are looking for the same products/services that you are offering.
Many business owners have a common misconception that PPC works better for eCommerce only. But this is not true. This tactic is utilized by almost every business nowadays. Companies that offer B2B, financial services, and insurance mostly use this lead generation strategy to gain maximum leads. If you run targeted ad campaigns, you can collect quality leads and convert them into paying customers easily.
Here are a few things that you should consider if you want to invest in Google ads for lead generation.
- Offer a report, whitepaper, or guide in exchange for visitors’ information.
- Since each click on ads cost money, make sure you bid for the correct keyword. Use the finest audit tools to gauge the search campaigns’ performance.
- Make sure you use catchy phrases or words to encourage the audience to purchase or at least see what you have to offer.
- Share the benefits of your offerings and use call-to-actions.
At present, more than 5 billion people use social media out of which 4.6 billion are active users. As a marketeer, you should leverage this platform as you can reach more than 59.7% of the global population. Apart from reaching a large number of people, most social networking sites offer impressive target instrument that helps you reach high-quality leads.
Through social media lead generation strategies, you can avail of the following benefits:
- Improved search results through social media site links.
- Minimize dependency on search engines to make your site discoverable.
- A large number of followers is social media will like and share your content further.
- A clear understanding of what your customers are expecting from your product and services. Additionally, you can work on the shortcomings after group interaction.
- Establishing trust by joining and interacting in communities. You can reach more and more people by building new connections.
You can also share case studies, whitepapers, webinar invitations, discount codes, or other types of incentives on social media. You can create interest in your brand and generate leads as this compels the reader to give their details. Sharing testimonials and positive reviews about your offerings is another method to generate leads via social media. Reviews demonstrate your value and act as social proof that your brand is trustworthy.
4. SEO is crucial
SEO (search engine optimization) is a very useful addition to your lead generation marketing techniques. To utilize SEO to the fullest, you need to be on top of your game. This crucial tool works well with your lead generation strategies. It helps you rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) for various keywords.
If your website ranks higher on search engine results, more and more people will find your offerings. This will also drive huge organic traffic to your site. This way you gain more quality leads and convert them into paying customers.
Here are some SEO lead generation tactics that you should utilize as a business owner.
- Keyword research: This is the foundation of great SEO. This process involves words or phrases that customers use to look for a product online. Once you find them, you can utilize them in your quality content. This will ensure that the target audience will discover your website when they put those queries on various search engines.
- SEO-optimized content: Writing and posting a blog with keyword-optimized content is one of the effective ways to generate more leads via SEO. Consider regularly publishing content with targeted keywords, backlinks, links, and multimedia.
This improves your position on search engine results. You need to format content properly, use subheadings and keywords appropriately, add links, and publish it regularly to achieve the lead generation goal.
- Increase website speed: The quality of search-optimized content is not the sole factor that impacts your ranking. The speed of your website highly matters in its position on search results. The major intent of search engines is to offer people the best user experience. Therefore, they will not suggest your site if it takes longer to load.
Consider making your website mobile responsive, fixing broken or redundant links, using a reliable host, getting rid of unnecessary plugins, and optimizing images to increase the speed of your site.
5. Host webinars
53% of B2B marketers say that webinars help in generating high-quality leads that convert into customers. Webinars provide useful information to the user in exchange for their contact details. Hosting a webinar will not only help you in understanding your target audience’s topic of interest but also nurture sales leads by reaching each of them.
Before incorporating webinars in your lead generation strategy, there are a few things that need to be considered for its success. Firstly, you will be required to conduct detailed research on issues that your target audience is facing or interested in knowing. You can include the problems that they are struggling with or current persistent issues in your industry.
Second, comes the solution offering part. Once you know the issues, you will provide a unique solution through your webinar. This session will provide step-by-step guidance to the stated problem on budgeting or other relevant issues. Lastly, you will add a clickable button or link that allows users easily signup for the webinar.
6. Live chat helps
Live chat is another lead generation strategy that mostly works for every business. When a person visits your website, the content that you have included in your landing pages doesn’t necessarily answer all their queries. So, they quickly need a source to get rapid answers to their questions before opting for the end purchase.
Live chat helps in addressing all the issues and queries your visitor has before the product or service purchase. You can connect with them and capture their interest via live chat. Almost every business site has this feature to engage its users. Many businesses use a chatbot on landing pages. First, it introduces itself and asks the user to pick a topic or issue they are facing or know more about. Then it gives all the relevant answers to their queries.
7. Video marketing is worth trying
Video marketing is a perfect addition to your lead generation strategy and there are many reasons for it. YouTube is also a kind of search engine where people put their intent in the search tab. It has billions of users around the world. With one video you can reach innumerable people at once and show them what you have to offer.
Many people prefer video tutorials, unboxing products, and product presentations more than text content. You can take advantage of this preference. Make easy and informative videos of your offerings and post them on your channel. This way people who don’t like reading long blogs can just play the video and know the uniqueness of your brand.
Here are some factors that make video marketing an efficient addition to your lead generation strategy.
- Add relevant keywords to your video description to make it easily discoverable.
- Include hashtags to make it seeable.
- Create gripping thumbnails for your product videos.
- Add compelling captions to your videos.
8. Email marketing
Email are one of the most preferred lead generation tactics for years because it mostly works. Whether you send a cold outreach mail or monthly newsletter to your potential customer, these are one of the best lead generation methods. Email marketing is among the most cost-effective marketing techniques that are utilized by many marketers.
This lead generation strategy promotes maximum engagement if your content is targeted and customized. Email marketing also offers to track and access opportunities which makes it the favorite promotion method for many brands.
You can also utilize reliable and quality customer relationship management (CRM) to offer useful data, open rate, and analyze subscriber retention and engagement time. This way you can make adjustments in your marketing campaigns to get more positive results for your business.
9. Give better offers
You must have noticed that some top landing pages get 3x to 5x conversions on average. What they are doing unique? If you are not experiencing a good amount of conversion, there is a huge possibility to improve it right now. One of the creative yet workable ways is to provide better offers to your visitors. This brings more results than just the change in font size and style or the button color.
Most software companies provide a free trial on their products. Think, do you offer unique and real value to your prospects? If your conversion rate is 2% or even lower than this, consider doing something drastic like offering a heavy deal. Working on small optimizations will not make any big difference in your conversion rate.
Offer great discounts, free trials, premium content, or other things that compel your visitors. Don’t worry if you are experiencing a low conversion rate. There is a huge room to improve the conversion rate. Incorporate this tactic into your lead generation strategy to get results.
10. Provide solutions to forum questions
Forums like Reddit and Quora receive countless questions from people across the world. If you provide your expert answers strategically, you can bag many leads in no time.
Find a relevant category matching your business niche and start giving solutions in form of answers to people’s problems. Make sure at the end of each answer you have cited a call-to-action to encourage product usage. Tell how your product solves the issues of the users.
Once you start providing free advice to users’ queries, they will interact with you and like to know more about your services or products. As a result, a maximum number of people will know about your offerings which is great for lead generation. This tactic is great for SEO as well.
11. Routine testing
Once you implement various lead generation strategies, your work doesn’t end there. You need to make sure that you test and scrutinize different generation components continuously as guesswork doesn’t work anymore. Routine testing of lead generation strategies helps you take an informed decision. This helps you understand which method is bringing results and which are not.
Components that should be tested regularly are ad content body, headlines and subheadlines, forms, CTAs, and design. Testing allows you to compare the performance of each lead generation strategy. Once you know that a particular strategy is driving more results. You can focus more on it and bring more fruitful outcomes for your business.
Concluding Thoughts
Many marketers find it difficult to generate quality leads. Because it is not easy to score and qualify high-quality leads. However, without enough conversion and new sales, the growth and financial health of a business becomes questionable in this highly competitive market.
Lead generation requires efforts and the right strategies to make new sales happen. All the aforementioned lead generation strategies are proven and bring results if done accurately. It is up to you whether you want to try one or all, you can employ these methods in your marketing campaigns to nurture existing leads and attract new ones.
Always remember, lead generation requires patience as it is a continuing process. You will not get positive results in one night.
However, if you work smartly and put in the needed hard work on this part, you will surely experience the difference soon. Until then, happy hunting!
Author Bio – Aryan Tiwari is a dedicated SEO executive in JoomDev, one of the rapidly growing IT companies. He is passionate about SEO, marketing tactics, and exclusive solar leads. He has helped many solar businesses to gain quality leads in a short period.
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