Lead generation strategies are important if you intend to make a profit from a business. The goal of every business is to make a profit and it won’t come if you don’t market your business.
According to startupbonsai, 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation, and that’s quite a lot. This is to show you that the bulk of marketing falls on lead generation.
Growing a business requires implementing strategies that will aid you to achieve your desired results, but if you don’t know the strategies you can use to generate leads for conversion, your desired results may be far away.
If you have wondered how you can generate leads for conversion or get the best from lead generation, you are in the right place. In this article, I will be sharing with you
- The definition of lead generation
- The importance of lead generation to a business
- Lead generation strategies
Meanwhile, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students practical knowledge to generate leads for conversion as one of the curriculums. You will also get to learn other digital marketing strategies that can be used to grow your business.
Lead generation strategies have to do with steps you can take, that would help to generate leads and also convert these leads to paying customers. You will wonder, who is a lead?
Who is a lead?
A lead is a potential buyer who shows some level of interest in purchasing your products or paying for the services you offer. In other words, it is an individual who has shown interest in buying from you.
This interest is expressed by sharing personal details like name, phone number, email address and sometimes social media handle. This information is used to tailor and communicate with the lead.
For a stranger to offer you their name and other details, it shows that they are interested in what you do or what you sell and that is anger you have to leverage on when preparing your sales funnel.
You don’t want them indicating interest and end up losing interest before making the purchasing decision. To get strangers to willingly show interest in your product/services, you need to understand how to generate them.
After you must have generated your leads, you should know what to do with them to get them converted. This is one of the modules in our 90% practical digital marketing course, you will learn how to convert your leads to becoming paying customers and many other digital marketing skills that you will need to grow your business.
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers who are your target audience to interested and prospective buyers or customers. It is also a marketing strategy that has to do with stimulating strangers, attracting them, and converting them to interested customers.
It is a strategy that applies both with digital marketing and traditional marketing but this article is about generating leads in digital marketing. You know, technology has made life easy for business owners and customers alike as business transactions can take place across continents and across the world.
Lead generation strategies are steps that you can implement to generate leads for your business, I want you to know that your leads are not the same thing as your customers, they get converted from being a lead to becoming a prospective customer and end up being a paying customer.
Just like the illustration above, you have random internet users who are within the range of your target audience, you attract them as leads to what you do and then they move down the chain.
In the remaining paragraphs of this article, I will be sharing with you the strategies you can apply to attract these strangers and convert them to interested customers who might end up becoming your paid customers.
Meanwhile, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, you will learn the tools you can use to generate leads for your business and also how to convert these leads to paying customers who will eventually become your customer.
I also want you to see a video from one of our students, who practiced what she learned from our course and made huge sales in her business.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtqzz5UCSPA[/embedyt]
Let’s move on to the strategies as promised in the previous paragraphs of this article.
Lead generation strategies
A lead generation strategy is a mapped-out plan or guidelines that you can follow to generate leads for your business. We can also call them tactics that can be used to attract and captivate the attention of strangers and get them interested in your product or services you offer.
These strategies include but not limited to:
1. Implement chatbots on your website
If you want to use digital marketing to grow your business in a technologically advanced world like ours, you need to have a website for your business. On this website, you can now have the chatbots feature.
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence(AI) program that simulates a conversion or a chat with a user(prospective customer) through messaging applications, websites, mobile applications, or by phone.
The truth is that you won’t be always online to respond to chats or have conversations with internet users who might be your lead and chatbots is a great tool for lead generation.
You can have conversations with prospects as chatbots are available 24/7. All you have to do is to customize them to match your brand personality and the message you want it to share with internet users.
Look at the example below
There is a chatbot with customized messages to engage with prospects and get them to become leads. Source: Jumia
If you are wondering how to build a website for your business, register for our 90% practical digital marketing course. You will learn how to build a website for your business and also how to include the chatbot feature into your website.
2. Use email marketing
Email marketing is the use of emails to market your business through newsletters. Create value-packed newsletters that allow interested users to connect and keep in touch with you.
It allows you to exist in the mind of your prospective customers, catch their attention, convert them to paying customers. You can share your content using email marketing, content like new blog posts, special offers, events, etc.
You will wonder, how can I get the email address of my prospective customers, you can get it by offering a free product, ebook, etc.
You offer a free product or resources, you get their emails in return and build a mailing list for your business. If you want to learn how to use email marketing, register for our 90% practical digital marketing course.
Social media is another tool you can use to generate leads for your business. Every business should have a social media account, it is necessary and very important if you are looking to grow your business online.
After identifying your target audience, you can use keywords that your prospective customers may search for or that might capture their attention and convert them from being just random internet users to your leads.
With social media accounts, you can’t just leave them to chance, create contents that would reflect your brand and what you do. You don’t want to leave them clueless trying to figure out what exactly your brand represents and of course, you want leads from social media.
Engage your followers, make them feel and know that you understand their need and your products is designed to meet their specific needs.
4. Retarget marketing
Also known as remarketing is a form of advertising that can put your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave the website especially if they don’t take the desired action. It is a tool that helps companies to reach users who do not convert.
The way it works is this, Person A visits your website, looks around, and leaves the website without taking the action you want them to either to buy an e-book, register for the course you are selling, buy whatever products you are selling.
You can now set up your advertising campaign to target this person, the ads you are running for your business keeps showing up in their face and then they end up going back to take the desired action.
To use this tool to generate leads for your business, you should have a sound understanding and knowledge of how online advertising works. If you want to learn more about online advertising, register for our 90% practical digital marketing course. You will also learn other digital marketing strategies that you can use to grow a business.
5. Referral reward
This is another strategy that you can use to generate leads for your business. You ask your existing customers to refer other people to you and attach a reward to it. When your customers bring you leads, they either get a discount or other forms of reward.
According to Nielson, 83% of individuals in 60 countries confirmed that they trust recommendations from friends and family. You can leverage this to encourage existing customers to spread the word about your business.
One way to maximize this strategy is to ensure that your priority is your customer’s satisfaction. A satisfied customer will willingly spread the word about your business but a dissatisfied customer may bring bad business for you.
Customers or potential customers are different persons and they have different attitudes and habits, to enjoy your business relationship with them, it is best to have a proper structure in place so they can have an amazing user experience that would propel them to refer their friends and family to your business.
6. Create top-notch content
The content you create reflects your knowledge and your ability, with top-notch content, you are putting yourself out there to be seen as an authority in that industry. Quality content requires a good deal of planning, gathering up resources, and commitment.
These quality contents can give you access to prospective customers who will become leads and get converted to paying customers at the end. These contents can come in various forms like infographics, pictures, blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, videos, etc.
If you want great results, devote your time to creating structures that will give you your desired result. After putting the content together or while planning, you can ask yourself, “if I see this, will I be willing to drop my contact details for this?”, “does this look like something that would captivate a stranger’s attraction”.
For written content, you can read them to yourself and confirm if you can take an action after reading, after all, your potential customers are human like you.
7. Develop a landing page
Have you ever tried clicking on an ad on any social media platform, or even while just strolling through the internet? If you haven’t, it’s time you pay attention to them when you come across them. When you click the link in the ad, you get redirected to a page that looks like a website but it’s not a website.
It’s a landing page, a single webpage designed and developed for the single purpose of converting strangers to becoming leads and then later on to paying customers. A landing page is an initial contact between your business and a prospective customer.
At the beginning of this article, I shared who is a lead and how a random internet user becomes a lead, you can use a landing page to generate leads by including a form or a CTA button(call-to-action).
When an internet user clicks the CTA, they get to do what you want them to do or fill in the form with basic personal information.
A landing page should be mobile responsive and well detailed alongside other features to enable conversion. If you want to learn how to build a landing page for conversion, register for our 90% practical digital marketing course where you will learn how to develop one for yourself or your business from the live project you will be taking up when you register for the course.
Conclusion
In this article, I’m sure you have been able to see and learn how lead generation works and what you can do if you want more leads for your business.
If one strategy does not work, try another and keep trying till you get your desired result.
If you are wondering how to implement these strategies or you need practical knowledge for implementing these strategies, register for our 90% practical digital marketing course where you will get to learn all this and more.
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