Irrespective of the industry your business operates in or the product/service it offers, it will need qualified leads to sustain in the long run.
A lot has changed over the years, and it includes the way consumers want companies to reach out to them for any product promotion or sales pitches.
Modern-day consumers preferably respond to methods that are personalized and relevant. If you’re still using old lead generation strategies that are no longer delivering excellent results, it’s time you change them.
Lead Generation Strategy: Does Your Business Really Need One?
For the uninitiated, a lead generation strategy is merely a process that helps you get peoples’ contact information that shows interest in your business or offerings in any way.
When you contact a person after he has interacted with any of your lead generation content, it becomes easy to reach out to him regarding your offerings. It makes the complete lead generation process less intrusive and more comfortable for the prospect.
Lead generation is of prime importance for businesses because without qualified leads; there won’t be enough sales and ultimately not enough revenue. When a company nurtures its leads, it increases its chances of successfully converting the prospect into a paying customer. The more leads you acquire, nurture, and convert, the more your revenue will be.
Effective Lead Generation Strategies to Keep Your Funnels Full
Now that you have an answer to the “why” of lead generation, it’s time you focus on the “how.” To ensure your sales funnel is always filled with quality leads, we’ve listed down some effective lead generation strategies that work.
-
Create Gated Content
Marketers have long been using gated content as a bait to make people share their contact details. Gated content can be anything that is useful but generally not accessible to the public for free.
You can use whitepapers, case studies, reports on industry-specific trends, e-books, exhaustive guides, worksheets, or any other resourceful content that tempts the prospect to fill a form in order to get access to the content.
If you’re in a highly competitive niche, be really thoughtful while choosing gated content. To achieve the highest opt-ins, offer content that is not already available for free to your target audience. If your gated content is unique, relevant, and attention-grabbing, it will certainly make this lead generation tactic successful.
Besides long-form content, you can also create short, free courses as gated content because not many organizations go this extra route to obtain their prospects’ contact information.
Once you have created gated content and locked its access behind a form, leverage content marketing to attract higher opt-ins. You can always experiment more by changing the gated content to see what brings you the most sign-ups.
-
Host Online Events
Organizing virtual events, like a webinar, conference, workshop, or seminar for people who expressed their interest in your product/service/online event is an excellent way to acquire and convert quality leads. The best part of this lead generation tactic is it’s cost-effective and works for businesses across different industries.
If you organize a well-planned webinar, you can expect to convert around 40% of the total attendees into highly interested leads post the event. Successful online events manage to keep the audience hooked till the end, and when people are engaged, your chances of converting them remain at an all-time high.
A great way to generate higher sign-ups for your webinar is by including your webinar registration link in your blog posts. If you have been keeping your target audience engaged with your brand via informative blogs, they will be more than happy to attend your webinar to get more value from industry experts.
-
Run Highly-Targeted Paid Campaigns
Running paid ads on social media platforms is one of the most highly effective lead generation strategies that deliver quick results.
What makes these paid campaigns so successful is the option to laser target people based on their interests, location, language, and many other parameters. If you’re a pro at running paid campaigns, you’ll be able to generate significant opt-ins via laser targeting your prospects.
To make these campaigns successful, you should have compelling ad copies, intriguing CTA, eye-grabbing creative, and perfect targeting.
You should also be willing to split test multiple ad sets to find the winning campaign. Once you’ve got the hang of what’s working and what’s not, pause the low-performing ad sets and scale the ones delivering maximum ROI.
While running paid campaigns, always ensure you give the prospects a clear and strong reason to fill the form you’re promoting. Highlight their pain points, offer a solution, and include a great offer.
-
Use Affiliate Marketing
An excellent lead generation method some companies employ is utilizing the Cost Per Lead (CPL) affiliate marketing model. It is an advertising model wherein you can pay an affiliate for every successful sign-up he brings for your campaign. Companies with little resources for lead generation methods should definitely try this tactic.
Experienced affiliate marketers already have a ready followers’ base. They also know how to drive targeted traffic towards a lead generation form. When you can take the help of lead generation experts who know their work, why stress doing everything on your own?
As you only pay for successful sign-ups, you’re saving much of your money that you would have otherwise spent experimenting, trying to make people fill a form.
If you have never used this lead generation strategy before, head to affiliate marketplaces like Maxbounty. Sign-up on these marketplaces as a client to list your requirement, inviting the best applications from interested affiliate marketers.
Once you’ve set things perfectly, the approved affiliates will do the main work, while you’ll only be responsible for paying them for every successful lead.
-
Keep Your Landing Pages Clear, Crisp, & Clutter-free
The quality of your landing pages will decide whether the majority of your lead generation campaigns will be a hit or miss. While it may sound cliché, creating dedicated landing pages for different purposes is of prime importance.
You would not want to confuse your online visitors by exposing them to multiple unorganized elements on a single landing page.
For example, if you have brought traffic to a landing page promising them a worksheet, the landing page should instantly redirect people to the worksheet download link after they have filled the form. Don’t clutter the landing page with your company products/services, as this is not what they intend to see at this point.
The more relevant and clean you keep your landing pages, the higher are the chances of increased sign-ups. You can also consider creating multiple landing pages for split testing with slight to moderate content variations.
Let these landing pages run for a day or two, and then assess which pages are performing the best. Promote the best-performing pages to better results.
Conclusion
You will find endless lead generation strategies on the internet, but it is your responsibility to try, assess, and determine which ones work the best for your business. The more you experiment with your lead generation methods, the sooner you will find the methods that work best for your business.
If you’re just starting your lead generation journey, start by executing the lead generation tips discussed above. These are evergreen methods to generate leads that have always given phenomenal results. So start implementing these strategies today, and let us know which one worked best for you.
For impressive results, keep the webinar content highly informative and relevant to the audience, give them a chance to ask questions, and give them an irresistible offer at the end that they can’t ignore. When you host an online event keeping all these elements in place, you’re sure to achieve your KPI.
