Before the time of modern-day technology, businesses resorted to drumming up customers through buying lists of names and cold calling them. Today generating leads has evolved using multiple digital channels. Impactful lead generation cannot only increase sales, but also better your chances of expanding your business to a bigger customer base.
Key Takeaways:
- A lead is a new potential customer.
- The focus of lead generation is enticing new customers to your business.
- Today lead generation makes use of technology to prioritise leads and customize business advertising.
Explaining Lead Generation
Lead generation is the means of enticing customers to your business- I think we’ve said that already. The latter is done by piquing their interest with the intention of converting them into a customer. Proven methods to generate leads include blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content. We’ll dive more into a few methods later.
The Impact of Lead Generation
If you play your cards right, someone who has had no intention of buying from you now becomes a valued customer. When a “stranger” develops a genuine interest in your business, the shift from stranger to customer becomes more natural.
Lead Generation Process
Now that we know how lead generation works in getting customers, let’s examine the steps of the lead generation process.
To start, someone randomly finds your business through one of your marketing channels. The most useful of which is the use of websites, blogs, or your social media pages.
After taking an abrupt interest in what you have to offer, you will have to provide a call-to-action (CTA). This is usually an image, button, or message which directs them to a page which captures lead information and encourages sales.
So basically, a visitor clicks on a CTA where they are directed to a landing page. This is followed by providing information to get an offer resulting in a lead.
When you have put all your tactics in place, use your promotional channels to drive traffic and generate leads.
Choosing the most effective channels can be another conundrum for many small business owners.
There are a whole bunch of digital channels you can use to convert causal visitors to regular profitable leads. Let’s go into depth on these and talk about how you can use them.
Content
Influential and engaging content is a proven strategy to direct users to a landing page. More often than not, content is created with the intention of giving visitors valuable and free information. You may add CTAs wherever you want in your content. The more impressive and appealing, the more likely they are to click on the CTA.
By using something as simple as e-mail, you will be able to reach potential leads through existing customers. It would be a lot easier for you to ask them to pass your offers around, since they’ve supported your business before.
Your e-mail needs to be engaging. Think about your own inbox, e-mails tend to be unorganized. This is where using CTAs, persuasive copy and an eye-catching design can be effective in grabbing your subscriber’s attention.
Blog
One of the best things about a blog when you are promoting an offer, is that you can customize to get to the main objective- making money. Let’s say you own an accounting business. If you offer easy and effective ways to prepare financial statements, then you can write a short informative blog. In this post you can offer discounted services like business management and income tax planning. You can use this as a sneaky CTA tactic to entice visitors to use your service and make a sale.
Product Trials
Who doesn’t like free stuff? Giving out small free samples has been recognised as a great way to increase sales of any product. Whether you’re selling software, perfume or a new burger, giving your customers a small sample of your offer will have them coming back for a purchase.
When a potential client is using your product, you can entice them with extra offers- perhaps your very own secret sauce you’ve cooked up with that burger. Remember to include your branding in your free versions. People love talking about good experiences they’ve had from businesses they have supported. Which brings us to our final point.
Referral Marketing
Ah good old word-of-mouth. Referral marketing is useful for lead generation in a different way. This is where you can get your product or service to a wider audience. This age-old approach increases your chances of generating more leads, but through satisfied customers.
Regardless of how you choose to generate leads, the main focus should be to guide users to your website landing page or any online medium to get sales.
Conclusion
Getting a lot of leads is great, but you should not ignore the importance of having the best course of action to make money. You will have to do a lot of research when you want to establish quality leads. It is within your best interest to take care of your leads and provide them the greatest product or service money can buy.
