For 61 percent of marketers, finding leads is their number one challenge. Your company doesn’t have to struggle when it comes to uncovering the best way to generate leads, though. With this comprehensive, expert-vetted list of lead generation strategies, you can start earning qualified leads now.
Keep reading to learn how to find leads online for your business!
1. Find leads by interacting with them one-on-one
While many business buyers become leads with little-to-no help from your team, many companies lose valuable, qualified leads because they don’t provide an opportunity for potential clients to ask questions or receive advice. Take Mark, for example. Mark’s looking for a new time tracking software for his growing team and discovers your website through a quick search on Google.
He can’t find if your program includes billable rates, though, so he contacts your team. He doesn’t hear back, which is why he moves forward with another company. If your fictional company (in this example) included a live chat service, forum, or even a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section, you could have provided Mark with not only immediate assistance but also instant confidence in making your software a top pick for his business.
You can start finding leads by looking at your website. Every day, you probably have several qualified leads browsing your site, but you aren’t providing the information they need at the moment. With a live customer support channel (or even a chatbot), you can connect with them at a critical point of their purchase journey.
Action Item: Audit your website and look for opportunities to provide one-on-one assistance to users.
Further Reading:
2. Market and advertise on social media
While social media may seem like an outlet made for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, it’s also a trusted lead generation hub for business-to-business (B2B) organizations. That’s why, if you’re looking for how to get leads online, you need to invest in a social media marketing and advertising plan. With social media marketing and advertising, your company can start generating leads on:
For B2B companies, Facebook and LinkedIn usually offer the most value when it comes to lead generation. Almost 45 percent of B2B marketers, for example, have earned a client through Facebook. In comparison, LinkedIn generates 80 percent of all B2B social media leads. If you’re new to social media advertising and marketing, think about partnering with an agency, like WebFX, that specializes in these two areas.
They can help you launch an expert-level campaign, preventing your business from wasting funds on a trial-and-error experience.
Action Item: Research the go-to social media platforms of your target market for a potential campaign.
Further Reading:
How to Earn Leads With Social Media
3. Automate select lead generation strategies
A lead generation plan, no matter how simple or complex, can demand a substantial amount of time. Your team needs to develop it, manage it, and assess it on a routine basis. If you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), your marketing department can struggle with lead generation.
That’s where marketing automation software from a top SMB lead generation agency can help. With marketing automation software, your internal marketing and sales teams can automate various processes in your lead generation strategy. For example, if you’re finding leads via webinar sign-ups, you may automate an email drip campaign for those attendees with a tool like EmailMarketingFX.
Or, you may use a marketing automation application, like Buffer, to automate and streamline portions of your social media marketing campaign. For reference, Buffer allows your team to schedule social media posts across platforms in advance, as well as receive notifications for comments. Companies serious about finding leads will invest in a marketing automation suite that includes lead scoring and lead nurturing features.
MarketingCloudFX is an example of this kind of lead generation software. It also includes insightful site recordings, helping you see how leads interact with your website. No matter how your business decides to approach marketing automation software, from adopting a single tool to an entire suite, you can use automation to your advantage.
It’ll save your internal team time and help you generate qualified leads for your sales team. In fact, 80 percent of marketers that use marketing automation software generate more leads.
Action Item: Look at your lead generation strategy and see how automation software could help.
Further Reading:
Why Marketing Automation Should Matter to Your Business
5 Marketing Automation Software Applications for SMBs
7 Clever Marketing Automation Examples to Inspire Your Business
4. Make email marketing a priority for lead generation
If you have experience with lead generation, then you know email marketing is one of the best ways to find leads. Compared to other lead generation strategies, it produces 50 percent more sales. Not to mention, 79 percent of B2B marketers credit it as the most effective channel for demand generation. That’s why email marketing is not only useful for generating leads, but also nurturing them.
For the best results from email marketing, your team should segment your subscriber lists and email campaigns. If you offer multiple services and host a webinar related to Service A, for example, you want to include those attendees in a campaign focused on generating leads for Service A. This level of segmentation can help your team deliver personalized, hyper-targeted emails.
You can use these emails to address buyer concerns, highlight product benefits, and more. These emails can also include tailored calls-to-action (CTAs) related to your specific service. If your company’s new to email marketing, consider email marketing services.
With these services, which often include email design offerings, your business can launch a professional campaign with the expertise of email marketing specialists.
Action Item: Plan a strategy for email marketing or partner with a specialized or full-service agency.
Further Reading:
How to Nurture Leads With Email as a B2B Company
5. Offer exclusive content, tools, or resources
Content is a critical part of finding leads. That’s because almost 50 percent of buyers read three to five pieces of content before they talk with a sales representative. If you want to attract potential clients to your site, as well as convince them to become a lead, you need content.
While a variety of content, from blog posts to infographics, can help your company leverage one of the best ways to generate leads, a lot of businesses already use content marketing to their advantage. You need to get creative to stand out. That’s where exclusive content, tools, and in-depth resources become valuable.
A few examples include:
- A template
- A grading, assessment, or calculation tool
- An online guide
With this kind of content, your business not only drives valuable traffic to your site but also earns qualified leads. That’s because exclusive or gated content requires a user to provide their contact information, like their name and email address. You can use this contact information to create a dedicated email campaign for nurturing leads.
Depending on your content strategy, you may build multiple campaigns to target different users and their varying interests in your product or service line. If your company doesn’t have the internal resources to build a strategy or content in-house, research content marketing services. With content marketing services from WebFX, an expert team creates a custom strategy for your business and coordinates with professional copywriters to develop it.
As almost 90 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, professional content marketing services provide your business with a competitive edge. Even if your industry doesn’t feature a lot of content, a top-notch strategy can help you offer even more value to consumers.
Action Item: Review your site’s content and look for opportunities to create exclusive content.
Further Reading:
Content Marketing for Lead Generation: Everything You Need to Know
6. Design your landing pages for generating leads
A user-friendly landing page is a go-to approach for how to generate leads online. For reference, a landing page is a page a user arrives at when visiting your site. If they find your website from an online ad, they’ll probably enter on a service or product page.
In comparison, if they visit your site from your social media, you’ll probably direct them to your homepage. You want a landing page that’s not only attractive, but also easy-to-use and fast. If that means investing in landing page design services, do it.
Without a top-notch landing page, your company risks turning away valuable leads, which can result in wasted ad spend, missed revenue goals, and more. Investing in the design of your landing pages can have a tremendous impact on your business, especially if the landing pages already drive leads. Studies show, for instance, that investing $1 in the user experience of a page can provide a return on investment (ROI) of $100.
Not to mention, more than 65 percent of B2B businesses use landing pages to acquire leads already. You need a professional-grade landing page to compete. If not, your company can easily lose potential clients to competitors, even if your product or services are the better choices.
If you already have professionally designed landing pages, then focus on A/B testing. With A/B testing, your team can test variations of your landing pages to discover new opportunities. While you can do the traditional test of comparing colors, you can also experiment with form fields, copy, and more.
Action Item: Determine your top landing pages and look for areas of improvement.
Further Reading:
How to Create Landing Pages That Generate Leads
10 Examples of Landing Pages That Deliver
Make finding leads hassle-free
Adopting a multipronged approach to lead generation is the best way to generate leads.
It allows your company to attract and reach leads through multiple channels, from social to email. Plus, it provides your business with a competitive edge against companies focused on only one outlet. If you’re looking to compete with competitors that take a multipronged approach to lead generation, however, professional help is a must.
With more than 7.8 million leads generated for clients in the past five years, WebFX is the trusted partner for lead generation services. Discover how we can help your company earn more leads (and revenue) by contacting us online today!
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