Lead generation is a crucial part of any company's sales and marketing strategy. With an effective lead generation process in place, your business will inevitably enjoy growth, not to mention increased customer loyalty.
Lead generation is "the process of creating, maintaining, monitoring, and converting prospect interest." Put another way, it's how your prospects become points of contact, with the ultimate objective of turning those leads into paying customers.
Let's discuss five lead generation tips to implement for your brand and how they can help take your sales and marketing game to the next level.
How Do I Generate More Leads for My Business?
1.) Focus on Quality, not Quantity
The total number of leads you generate isn't nearly as important as the quality of those leads. For example, would you rather have 100 leads that are very unlikely to become paying customers or 50 leads that are very likely to convert?
You want to focus your efforts on quality leads that you can nurture into sales. Using a lead scoring model (e.g., a system that assigns a score to each lead in terms of how likely they are to convert) can prove to be very helpful in prioritizing your leads.
In addition, it’s important to seek out buyer persona look-alikes. Your audience look-alikes have similar characteristics to your current audience, so they may also be interested in your brand. Even more quality leads can be found this way.
One last tip is particularly important: knowing what good quality leads are to your business. Some traits you may look for are product fit, behaviors, interests, and the likelihood to convert. When generating leads, decide what quality criteria you want to find.
2.) Use SEM
SEM refers to paid advertising, also known as pay-per-click ads (PPC). SEM is an excellent channel for attracting leads to your website. With paid search, your ads are displayed at the top of the results page for specific search queries. SEM does cost more than organic SEO (you have to outbid competitors for the keywords you want), but in some cases, it can generate quality leads in a matter of minutes!
3.) Increase Warm Leads with Social Media
Social media content is great for nurturing leads in all stages of your sales funnel. For instance, you can build brand awareness and attract top-of-funnel (TOFU) traffic with paid social ads (e.g., Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and so forth). In addition, you can engage with middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU) consumers via organic social posts, group threads, comments, replies, likes, shares, etc.
4.) Make Content for Every Part of the Funnel
Content is a powerful lead generation tool, especially if it adds value to the customer's journey. When people find your content useful, informative, or entertaining, they'll keep coming back for more. In addition, they'll likely share your content with family, friends, and colleagues, thus expanding your consumer base in the most organic way possible. To put your content to work for you, you must develop content for each sales funnel stage.
While each business is different, this will involve content creation for three distinct phases:
Awareness (TOFU) At this stage, you want to introduce consumers to your brand and help them understand which of their needs your product or service can fill.
Evaluation (MOFU) During this phase, the customer actively researches to find a solution to a specific problem. With that in mind, you want to deliver content that will help them make an informed choice, such as comparison sheets, infographics, case studies, testimonials, etc.
Decision (BOFU) Once the customer is ready to make a purchase decision, your content should transition into items that will encourage them to buy from your brand (e.g., special promotions, discounts, and free trial offers).
5.) A/B Test & Analyze
If you can't measure something, then you can't improve it. That's why A/B testing is an important piece of the puzzle regarding lead generation. You must understand which lead generation tactics are working and which ones could use some improvement.
With that in mind, explore ways to A/B test different aspects of your strategy, such as calls to action, content, web design, and focus keywords. Once you have in mind what works, you can simply double down on your efforts!
Work with an Experienced Agency to Optimize Your Lead Generation Efforts
These five tips can help you take your lead generation strategy to a whole new level of effectiveness. However, what if you don't have the resources or experience to implement these tips on your own? In that case, consider partnering with a reputable, full-service marketing agency like CoxNext.
We leverage a wide range of tools and capabilities to help make each client's vision come true, including advanced analytics, ad creative (both text and video), native advertising, market research, and more. Reach out to our team today to start the conversation. You may be surprised at how big an ROI you'll gain from your lead generation efforts.
