Wazzup Pilipinas!
A lead is a person or a business interested in the service or product your business is offering to the market. This is the simplest explanation and depending on the industry we would have to add more criteria into this original definition. As a company, you will also have to define the characteristics of a lead, expanding it to cover the specifics of a so-called qualified lead.
According to HubSpot’s research, generating traffic and leads is the number one marketing challenge for companies.
Image source: HubSpot Research
In this article, we will focus on the best strategies to generate leads.
1. Targeting
The first step is to find out your target audience, to find an answer on who is interested in your product or service.
Every company would love to sell to everybody, but that’s almost never the case. You always have to find a niche, big or small, that has a problem which your company could solve. Answer the following questions:
- Who is your audience?
- Which problem are they trying to solve?
- What is the average age of your audience?
- Where are they from?
- What is their profession/job position?
- What are their hobbies and interests? etc.
The more you narrow down your audience, the easier it will be to create effective campaigns to reach out to them.
According to the Harvard Business Review, targeted ads are significantly more effective than non-targeted ads across all audiences.
2. Website conversions
Your website has to be compact and user-friendly on every device. It should be easy for a new visitor to navigate to the most important part of your page – product or service inquiry!
If you visit the websites of the biggest accommodation brokers like Booking or Airbnb, you will notice that the first thing they are offering is to search for your next accommodation. If a new visitor wants to find Support or About us page, they can do that easily, the site is easy to navigate.
The most important asset for those sites is generating good leads. After a lead generation, they give their maximum effort to turn these leads into customers.
3. Landing pages
You’re probably going to promote your business on Facebook and many other channels.
From those channels, your campaigns have to lead users somewhere, where they could convert from leads to customers.
That site will be your landing page and they have to be designed and written to focus on important things only. You have to find a balance between what’s important for your company and what’s important for your customer. Your customer wants a simple design, a clear and precise explanation about the service or product and an easy way to pay. According to research, you only have about 8 seconds of landing page viewing before the customer decides whether they’re in or out.
Your company wants to find out some personal details about the customer and encourage them to buy the product or service. If there`s no chance you can do it by yourself, opt for specially designed tools like Top Essay Writing that can help you create relevant up-to-date content.
You have to find a balance between these two and ask the lowest number of questions possible on the landing page and provide easy checkout. To connect this with our first lead generation strategy, targeting, Design Advisor states that targeting your landing pages correctly can increase conversion rates by up to 300%.
4. Ranking on Google
If your business is not ranked on the first page of Google search results for relevant keywords, then you’re doing something wrong.
If it’s not ranked in the top 3 results, you’re still not giving it your all.
I’ve seen a lot of search results where the company doesn’t show up in the first 5 search results, even when you type in the company name. You have to prevent that from happening and you have to fight with competitors.
Depending on the type of your business and how your business conducts sales, you could use the #1 search result to send your leads to a dedicated landing page or to promote your phone number. When they call your company, your sales agent can finalize the process.
5. Buying Leads
Huge search aggregators have appeared in most of today’s industries.
These supply-demand connectors receive most of the traffic and it’s really hard to compete with them in inbound marketing.
There is a saying “If you can’t beat them, join them”, but in this instance, it’s “If you can’t beat them, buy from them”. Buying leads is a recommended strategy if you have a sales team that can convert those leads by performing outbound calls or e-mails later on.
This is especially recommended for telemarketing. Most of these aggregators have business models based on selling leads to a 3rd party because it’s impossible for them to gain revenue from their visitors.
The most important thing when buying leads is to check the quality of these leads and to check how many competitors are buying those same leads. The best way to measure quality is to test those leads first and measure their conversion rate.
6. Email
If you would perform a research on online marketing courses, you would find that most of them emphasize e-mails and how to collect those from your visitors. The traditional way is to use discounts, gifts and promotions as a way to convince visitors to sign-up to your newsletter.
Image source: Ascend2
The updated approach is to create some form of free content (usually a small book or collection of articles) as your bargain offer for customer email; also known as a content upgrade. In exchange for this exclusive content, users will sign-up to your newsletter list.
7. Content management
This strategy is focused on long-term planning.
You have to establish yourself in your industry as a thought leader by providing a lot of content via blog or Facebook or YouTube in order to gain trust from the audience.
Later on, this will serve as a great tool for inbound marketing because you will have solved one colossal obstacle – gaining the trust of your potential customer. Once they trust you, they will purchase online or reach out to you via e-mail or by calling you to buy your product or service.
According to Marketo, 93% of B2B companies claim that content marketing generates a larger number of leads than traditional marketing efforts.
8. High-quality CRM and Automation
This last step should unite all your efforts and tools into one. You must have a centralized digital system to track and analyze your leads from the moment they entered your system to the final conversion. You have to track your returning customers as well.
Conclusion
Every sales strategy must have a sales cycle explained in detail. Try to answer some of these questions to clearly outline your lead conversion strategy.
- What are our actions when we find a lead?
- Which tools are we going to use to reach out to our leads?
- How often do we follow up with our leads?
The sales cycle must be thoroughly examined and created in such a way that we know exactly what to do in each step and which action to perform, from the moment our lead enters the system till the moment of purchase and everything that happens afterward.
Author’s bio. Daniela McVicker is a blogger and a freelance writer who works closely with B2B and B2C businesses providing blog writing, copywriting, and ghostwriting services. Currently, she blogs for many authoritative sources. When Daniela isn’t writing, she loves to travel, read romance and science fiction, and try new wines.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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