Lead generation, or the process of attracting and converting prospects to fill a brand’s sales funnel, is one of the most important stages of inbound marketing and sales. It is more effective in ensuring sales as it targets prospects who showed an organic interest in the business and initiated a relationship through filling a form or downloading content.
Because businesses need leads to thrive, marketers are constantly coming up with ways to generate more leads and secure them. Unfortunately, they follow the trends, forgetting about some of the most effective tactics out there. Here are the top ten usually-neglected lead generation techniques which promise businesses the chance to connect with their potential customers and turn them into paying customers.
(1 – 3) Content Marketing
Content is the foundation on which your inbound marketing efforts rest on. Around 90% organizations market with content. After all, it is the fuel to almost all of your marketing campaigns, be they social, email or print. Without high quality content, there is absolutely no way your marketing campaign will get noticed, get viral, and generate leads. Here are a few reasons as to why content marketing is central to lead generation:
- It increases online footprint and direct sales.
- It influences search engine optimization (SEO) through the careful and strategic use of keywords
- It scores approximately three times as many leads as traditional marketing but tends to cost 62% less.
- High quality content is a great opportunity to outdo your competitors.
- It could be the last push customers need towards buying.
1) Blog Consistently
This is a tried and tested strategy and has proven to be extremely effective by marketers for lead generation. Over time, web blogging has experienced drastic changes, what with the blurred lines between blogs and news outlets. This has allowed for a refined way to effectively market via blogging. As per a survey, companies which blog regularly tend to generate 126% more leads compared to those which do not. Despite this, not many businesses update their blogs or do it consistently.
Here are a few more statistics that support the importance of blogging in generating leads:
- A company generates 55% more website visitors by blogging.
- A company generates 97% more inbound links through its blog.
- A company generates 434% more indexed pages if it blogs.
- A company’s blogging frequency is directly and positively linked to its ROI.
- Approximately 43% of marketers generate customers via blogging and 57% of the marketers acquire customers if they blog monthly.
So, now that you understand the value of blogging, it is time for you to start. Your first step should be to build traffic to your blog and get users to follow it. However, your job will not be over until you have your readers on your list. Therefore, you need them to come back for more. Adding and targeting relevant calls-to-action (CTAs) to each of your blog posts is a great way to secure quality leads. Your CTA could be anything – asking readers to subscribe to your blog posts, sign-up for email notifications or follow you on your social media channels.
Keep in mind, though, that it will take some time to show results. Giving up within a month of two is not an option. Having said this, a growing number of businesses is now grasping the importance of running corporate blogs. In fact, around 62% of marketers have their own blogs to attract the right audience and ensure sales.
2) Create Smart and Viral Content
Customers crave reading relevant and informational content from their favorite brands. Crafting smart content is in itself a brilliant way to generate leads. This is because ‘viral content’ will promote itself and, in the process, generate leads, customers and sales for your company.
Basically, viral marketing involves the creation of valuable and quality content that your target audience and promoting it until it catches the eye of users and gets seen by thousands of people. There are three characteristics which viral content shares. Here, let’s take a look at them:
- Positive Outlook: Content that spreads positivity trumps content that relays a negative outlook any time and any day. However…
- High Emotions: Compared to content which invokes no emotional response whatsoever, any content (whether positive or negative) which triggers an emotional overflow among readers and audience tends to go viral in a matter of minutes.
- Practical and Useful: Though it is true that viewers like to be entertained via online content, it does not trigger as much virality as content that users find useful and practical.
More often than not, content goes viral if it flaunts the aforementioned characteristics. Ensure these and you will give your businesses a chance at acquiring and securing lots of quality lead.
3) Go for Evergreen Content
Many marketers focus on the latest when it comes to content. They publish breaking news, the latest data from their industry, and statistics to coax their readers to become leads. However, coming up with this content can be difficult, especially during holidays. Luckily, marketers can strengthen their content marketing strategy with another form of content: evergreen content. Useful for all seasons and flexible enough to be references for years at times, this type of content can boost your lead generation efforts by providing a meaningful content experience. Since it never goes out of style, you can use it to provide valuable information to new prospects. As evergreen content can maximize customer loyalty, you will be able to secure your leads every time you produce an evergreen, informative piece.
(4 – 5) Website Optimization and Landing Pages
Website optimization is the first thing that a business should focus on when trying to perfect its lead generation tactics. It is the place where the magic happens when your audience successfully converts. Apart from being an online shop front, it also helps you capture leads. However, your website needs more than your money; it requires your time and energy if you wish to draw traffic and generate quality leads.
4) Optimize Website Design and Speed
Spending resources to create a website is not enough. You need to take out time to ensure that your website is well optimized for conversion and gaining actual leads. A poorly designed website that takes forever to load is not going to be any good for your business. One quarter of your visitors will abandon your site if it does not load within four seconds, so you may end up losing your visitors before they even get to your offers and content.
The need for speed and relevance should be the top priority of any marketer when designing a website. Fewer media, compressed photos, and well-optimized videos are a few ways you can lessen the load on the homepage and ensure that your site loads quickly. This, in turn, will drive traffic to your site and give you the opportunity to capture leads.
There are a few more things that you need to consider when designing your website:
- Go for a responsive design.
- Include a blog and regularly contribute to it.
- Make sure your site boasts strong SEO functionality.
- Include a brief description on who you are, what you do, and how interested users can contact you.
Remember: your leads are only as good as the website that nurtures them. Not only will your website help boost your lead generation efforts, but it also increases your site’s trust factor and authority.
5) Make Clear and Easy-to-Use Landing Pages
If you are getting tons of traffic on your site but conversions are rare and slow, chances are that your landing pages are ineffective. Therefore, you need to optimize your landing pages for lead generation before they repel more clients. Now we have covered landing pages in our blogs over the past two years, so you can learn more about landing pages, creating them, and optimizing them for lead generation there. However, here are two of the tactics we rate highly and implement for our clients.
- Create A Product Video: Nothing appeals to audiences more than visual content. The human brain tends to process visuals 60,000 times faster than it processes a block of text. Therefore, people are more likely to understand your product through video tutorials. As such, it is best to feature product videos on your landing pages to compel users to take action.
- Keep Forms Short: Asking for more information from users than is actually needed is a sure way to kiss your prospective leads goodbye. So, evaluate your forms and assess what information is necessary and what is useless. Usually, your client’s name, company name, and email address are enough.
At the end, make sure that your CTA is clearly evident and easy to use. It is best that you have one CTA on a single landing page so that users do not find it confusing.
(6 – 7) Social Media
The growing popularity of social channels means that marketers get to benefit from informational abundance when it comes to their target audience. By establishing your online presence across a multitude of social channels – Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. -, you can reach out to your audience and obtain leads easily.
6) Host Contests on Social Media
Churning out 2000-word blog posts every week to generate leads does sound painful. Marketing through social media is a vastly preferred alternative in such a case. Hosting irresistible contests on Facebook is one of the ways you can boost traffic to your site and nurture leads.
7) Use Promotional and Sponsored Content
Promotional tweets is another way to secure leads. Even though they are a form of sponsored content, they appear like a regular tweet on users’ timelines. Just make sure to keep your tweets fun and valuable or otherwise users will not appreciate them, triggering no action other than you getting blocked from their timeline. Linking your sponsored content to a relevant landing page will maximize its potential to generate leads. Also, consider allocating a full time employee to manage your social media. After all, it generates two times the marketing leads of telemarketing, trade shows, PPC, etc.
8) Take into Account Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The best SEO practices are vital for an effective lead generation process as they can help drive organic traffic to your site. SEO basically depends on two factors – content and on-page factors. SEO optimized content means designing a website, blog, landing pages and including fresh and useful content. On the other hand, on-page SEO tends to incorporate relevant keywords in page title, meta description, headlines, etc. As SEO is an ongoing process that demands time, effort and resources, you may be better off outsourcing this task rather than handling it yourself
9) Use Email Marketing
Even though email is almost two and a half decades old, it continues to be considered as the most important digital marketing activity for lead generation. The latest trend in email marketing, which has produced great results for businesses in lead generation, is marketing automation. Marketing automation tools are, in essence, hybrid email marketing tools, which focus on optimization by refining your marketing efforts. On the email front, it connects with your company’s CRM, allowing you to send highly targeted emails to personalized leads.
10) Test, Test, and Test
The most important factor when figuring out the best lead generation tactic for your brand is testing each method to find out which one is best suited for your business. Just like any other factor, the number of leads is a conversion factor which requires continuous improvement. Sure, every company is seeking for a tactic that boasts the highest potential ROI, but it should not be the sole focus. If, for example, your current lead generation tactic is working fine, you can compromise on the small ROI it generates for now and revisit it later.
Every successful business understands the importance of lead generation, allocating a major chunk of its marketing budget as well as time to explore online lead generation methods. Therefore, do not be left behind and make sure to try these tactics to get more leads and, ultimately, more sales.
About The Author
