According to SBA data, over one-third of businesses with employees fail within the first two years. While this post will not detail the various reasons a company may fail, it will emphasise one of the most crucial criteria for business success: constant lead creation.
You must learn to generate business leads if you want your venture to scale swiftly and continuously turn a profit.
What Is Lead Generation in Marketing?
In marketing, lead generation is the act of generating actionable client interest in your business’s output. This usually entails a client initiating a conversation or supplying you with their contact information for further follow-up on your company’s products or services.
For instance, a law company may obtain the following to create business leads:
- Form submission from a potential client expressing interest in their services.
- A potential customer calls to schedule a consultation.
- A direct message on social media is requesting their pricing.
- An email from a prospective client is requesting a consultation.
As a result, generating new business leads entails designing a marketing experience that makes it simple for people to interact with your firm. So if you’ve heard of demand generation and are questioning whether you need it vs lead generation – you do, and it’s not worth differentiating them.
Lead generation tactics should always exchange contact, payment information, or an in-person interaction.
Top Lead Generation Examples
A business lead generation strategy will help you convert strangers into paying clients, whether you plan to buy leads or design your lead generation marketing campaign.
Take a look at these proven strategies to generate leads for your organisation before developing your strategy.
1. Direct Engagement
Directly connecting with a potential customer is an excellent way to generate new business if your company sells a high-value product or service billed on a monthly retainer. However, if your revenue strategy is based on low-value, high-volume sales, you should avoid this option.
When you’ve concluded that a prospect is a good fit for your company, you may reach out to them by social media, email, phone, or even in person.
E.g., if you run a lawn care company in Houston and a large commercial property is being built nearby, call the property manager to enquire about serving the finished estate. This is the best example of generating leads in Houston or any other place your local business may service.
2. Use LinkedIn to generate leads
Did you know that the average LinkedIn audience has twice the purchasing power of the average online audience? As a result, LinkedIn B2B marketing is highly successful and can produce very profitable outcomes.
Connecting with relevant industry experts is an excellent method to generate business prospects. Potential connections who seek recommendations for a service you provide could become your next paying client.
Using SM to promote and advertise is also a terrific method to use on LinkedIn if you have the budget. You may also pay for lead generation advertising that contains forms directly within your ads. These advertisements simplify interested users to sign up for your products or services.
Connect with people of your target audience on LinkedIn, comment on their posts, and message them to offer your product or service. Please keep in mind that this tact will only work if their profile and advertisements demonstrate that your services will help them satisfy one of their unmet needs. If this is not the case, your outreach might be misinterpreted as spam, eroding your trustworthiness.
3. Advertisement and Retargeting
Advertising isn’t limited to social media! To promote search engine users, utilise targeted pay-per-click advertising on Google or Bing. This allows you to offer advertising for searches that you already know are highly relevant to your business.
Assume you’re a BMW dealer in Houston looking to increase your auto dealership marketing. You may design advertisements that target terms like “best BMW dealer in Houston” or “new BMW in Houston,” and you can even use a geo-filter to target consumers in the Houston area.
On their initial visit to your website, very few web users convert. When a customer clicks on one of your PPC adverts, you can utilise display retargeting to present visual advertisements for your products on other popular websites.
It may take some time to perfect digital advertising, but it may be one of the most successful strategies to produce leads for your company.
4. Request referrals from existing customers.
Customer recommendations are one of the most traditional lead generation marketing tactics available. If a current customer is pleased with your product or service, ask them to tell their friends about it so that they, too, can benefit.
Customers may be willing to do this for free if the quality of your company’s offerings is high enough, or you might set up an incentive scheme. Give your customers, for example, a percentage off their next monthly retainer price for each client they refer.
Customer referrals are a terrific approach to generating additional leads for your company because they are profitable, and your current customers perform the majority of the effort.
5. Create Guest Blog Posts
Writing guest blogs is an excellent strategy to increase referral business through content marketing and improve your SEO.
Guest posting offers the following marketing advantages:
- Establishes new industry relationships
- Increases your SEO by getting relevant, industry-related backlinks.
- Referral traffic is generated from a suitable audience.
Guest writing for sites relevant to your industry but do not directly compete with you can help you generate leads for your business. E.g., if you own a marketing firm, you can guest blog for local sign firms. As a result, you understand that the audience for sign makers is interested in marketing themselves, and your services serve as a supplement.
Guest posting for local influencers is consistent with local SEO best practices. Writing a guest blog and gaining backlinks from a well-known podcaster in your sector, for example, will help your site rank better in that category.
Ensure the site you’re guest writing for is appropriate for your business and area for best results.
6. Obtain a high ranking in search engines to generate leads.
Ensure your target audience can readily find you when they search for your product/service online. Also, learn how to use SEO and SEM for your website to generate more leads for your company.
Begin by conducting keyword research to understand which terms your target customer searches for before purchasing your goods or service. Then, use SEMrush or the Google Ads Keyword Planner to find search data.
Optimise your page content after you’ve selected the relevant keywords. Ranking organically may be challenging if you sell a highly competitive commodity or service. Hiring an SEO company can be a terrific approach to producing consistent leads if you’re ready to invest.
Before making any financial decisions, learn how to choose an SEO business. Because not every agency produces the same outcomes, it’s critical to understand how to select an ideal firm for your company.
7. Respond to Forum Questions
Answering forum inquiries is an excellent method to demonstrate your subject matter expertise while also laying the groundwork for reciprocity. This approach, when done strategically, can help you find leads in a couple of minutes.
“… The key to applying the Principle of Reciprocity is to be the first to offer and make your gift customised and unexpected.” This quotation from the book Influence at Work describes how being the first to give something that can help you receive something of equal or greater worth.
Use this persuasion technique by answering forum questions on sites like Reddit or Quora. Choose a relevant category to your company and begin answering user inquiries. Make sure to include a call-to-action at the end of your response to use your product or service to assist solve the user’s problem.
Assume you are a law firm that provides family law services. You can join a legal subreddit where users ask specific questions about your company’s services. Spend a few minutes each day looking for questions on which you can provide answers.
If a user inquires about child support, offer a useful response before sending the user to your website and recommending that the user contact you for a consultation. By providing free advice, the user who enquired may feel more obligated to reciprocate by paying you for legal services in the future.
Answering the forum questions is an excellent way to get new company leads, and it can also help with SEO. In our Reddit example, if your child support answer has enough upvotes, your link can positively impact your law firm’s SEO. This synergy can lead to compounding rewards on your lead generation efforts.
8. Present a Free Tool or Lead Generation Magnet
Giving up a free tool is an excellent approach to building business-to-business sales leads. What kind of issue does your product or service address? Can you provide a free product that will assist people without eliminating the necessity for them to purchase from your company finally?
Assume you’re a plastic surgeon in Houston for this scenario. You conclude that users are interested in learning about procedure prices and recuperation durations after polling your Twitter audience and conducting keyword research.
As a result, you decide to create an eBook outlining price ranges, recuperation times, and before and after photo examples for each of the treatments you provide. Next, you make a teaser blog article and then ask people for their names, phone numbers, and email addresses for the details and information you’ve provided.
Your blog article might start generating contact information if you choose the correct topic, target audience, and call to action. In addition, a better degree of alignment between the blog topic, CTA, and offer will result in a higher conversion rate. According to Databox’s blog lead conversion data, the average visit-to-lead conversion rates are the following.
Because the teaser blog article is so valuable, visitors link to your website and sign up for the free eBook. Your guide will assist you in generating leads for your company while also improving your Houston plastic surgery SEO.
What opportunities do you see in your industry? Popular examples include:
- Creating calculators.
- Accumulating original research.
- Providing free guidelines.
- You may even give free consultations to assist your business in developing leads.
9. Interviews with Influencers
Interviewing industry leaders can open several opportunities for you and your company. Not only is this a terrific method to network with and learn from industry experts, but you can also use these interviews to produce effective content.
Video Record, your interview, then make it into a Q&A blog article or a podcast. Framing your discussion in these distinct formats will allow you to use the material better and attract new traffic to your website or social media properties. To boost your business lead generation, consider gating the interviews and requesting contact information.
The influencers will often share the resulting interview throughout their marketing channels, multiplying your reach and ROI.
The influencers will often share the resulting interview throughout their marketing channels, multiplying your reach and ROI.
10. Start networking
Networking rarely results in direct revenue, but it is excellent for cultivating professional prospects. Make an effort to go and attend a networking event that is both local and relevant to your industry. This will help you keep your trip expenses low while capitalizing on easy business victories.
What benefits may you expect from networking? If you come in expecting a return on your investment, you will nearly always be disappointed. So instead, seek out oblique victories.
Perhaps you’ll encounter a complementary firm with which you might collaborate to share leads and broaden your reach. Maybe you meet an influencer who agrees to an interview with you so that you can create a terrific piece of content while also expanding your marketing reach. Networking can also lead to opportunities for your organisation to guest blog.
Networking provides multiple returns on investment, making it one of the best strategies to get leads for your organization.
11. Build an Email Promotion
Lead generation does not always occur due to exposure to a new audience. Your email list, for example, may have unrealised business potential.
If you’ve built a list of email subscribers, consider creating a unique offer. A unique offer or a limited-time discount can quickly turn a passer-by into your next paying customer.
You can also send out customised email promotions to other people’s email lists. You can negotiate an agreement to advertise yourself to their audience if you’re actively networking or partnering with related businesses in your sector. The marketing agency may advise a business promotion in the next email blast from the sign company and reward the sign-maker with 5% of all sales earned by the project. This is a win-win situation for the marketing firm, the sign company, and the delighted new clients.
12. Create Helpful Blog Comments
As a warning, I did not keep the best business lead creation method until last.
As a business owner or marketing executive, make it a point to subscribe to industry journals and even competitor blogs. This can assist you in keeping your finger on the pulse of your competitors and opening doors to be helpful.
If you discover that multiple blog comments on a post have gone unanswered, respond with your insights. In addition, it’s not a terrible idea to put a call to action to some relevant material on your website that will further answer the reader’s question.
When attempting to acquire business leads through blog comments, proceed with caution. Because of their vulnerability to spam, comments on blogs are difficult to make legitimate. Furthermore, your competitors may take offence if you headhunt their target audience.