Generating your own leads from the internet is not difficult, you only need to know the right ways of doing it effectively. There are many ways to generate your own leads and the major one is using pay per click advertising. This does not only cost a lot but also very risky if you don’t know how to handle it.
This is an easy to read, simple and instructive book on how to generate your own leads. In this book you will find a step-by-step guide to generating leads that will help increase book sales and optimize your marketing efforts. You will also learn what F.M.A.N is and how to use it and how many F.M.A.N you will need in order to be successful.
Many people suppose that you’re supposed to pay up front for everything. This is not true in the internet world. In truth, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can generate your own leads at a much lower cost than it costs others (especially if you are not just starting out).
Some people are fascinated by how to generate my own leads. It’s the ultimate goal of nearly everyone who is running his or her own business. The truth is a lot of people aren’t sure how to do this. They aren’t even sure how to get started, which means they are missing out on a large number of possible clients and customers. Here’s an overview of creative strategies for generating your own leads.
What Is Lead Generation in Marketing?
Lead generation in marketing is the act of gaining actionable customer interest for your business’s output. This typically involves a customer initiating a conversation or providing you with their contact information for follow-up regarding your business’s products or services.
For example, for a law firm to generate business leads, they might receive:
- A form submission from a potential client that is inquiring about their services.
- A phone call from a potential client to set up a consultation.
- A direct message on social media asking about their rates.
- An email from a potential client who is asking to schedule a consultation.
Thus, part of finding new business leads involves structuring a marketing experience that makes it easy for customers to engage with your company. If you’ve heard about demand gen and are wondering about whether you technically need demand generation vs. lead generation – you need both, and it’s not worth differentiating them at this point.
Your lead generation strategies should always result in the exchange of a prospect’s contact or payment information, or an in-person meeting.
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step of lead generation is identifying your target audience. You can’t successfully reach and sell to your ideal customer if you don’t know exactly who that is. So it’s important to research your audience and come up with a clear picture of who they are, where they live, what they like to do, how much money they make, what their lifestyle and personality are like, etc.
If you don’t already have one, you should also create a comprehensive marketing plan as part of this step.
Pick Your Promotional Methods Wisely
In order to generate leads, you need a promotional plan that will get your products and services in front of members of your target audience. There are a number of ways you can promote your business, and again, you will want to use your marketing plan to identify the most effective methods for your business.
Some marketing ideas include an informational website, a blog, social media, speaking engagements, industry events, current customer referrals, pay per click (PPC) advertising, and traditional advertising.
Create a Sales Funnel
Once you know who you are targeting and have determined how best to reach them, you need to have a plan for collecting contact information. The first part of the process involves funneling all prospects to a standard form or landing page that encourages them to share their contact information, generally in return for a free gift, a coupon, a sample or some other value-added incentive.
At this point, it is vital to have a customer relationship management (CRM) database that will help you keep track of potential customers through the process.
Use an Email Newsletter to Build Relationships
Now that you’re in contact with prospects, it’s time to cultivate those relationships so you can take them from the lead stage through a sale (and eventually a repeat sale!). One of the best ways to create consistent communication with your prospects is through an email newsletter.
While you are planning your email marketing plan, make sure you are aware of and follow regulations that are a part of the CAN-SPAM Act.
Create Your Digital Footprint
Creating your digital footprint is a multifaceted way to generate leads. This includes using social media channels, creating content such as opinion pieces, thought leadership and comments on third-party posts, engaging with the right focus groups through hashtags, upping your credibility through various associations, memberships and connections—the list can be a long one. Draw an action plan and go for it. – Arthi Rabikrisson, Prerna Advisory
Conduct A LinkedIn Lead Program
I think it really depends on the industry you are in and also the speed at which you need to turn leads into sales. For a longer game, I would suggest using content marketing, as this will draw people into your funnel by delivering value, potentially leading to sales in the long term. Otherwise, online is where everything is happening at the moment, so I would look at conducting a LinkedIn lead program.
Create Value-Based, Human-Focused Content
Create value-based, human-focused content in various mediums based on your unique buyer’s journey. Companies spend far too much time being product-focused in their content and not enough time correlating their products with how a client’s problems can be fixed. By taking a value-based approach to content marketing, companies will be able to bridge the trust gap and shorten the sales cycle.
Leverage Social Media to Connect and Engage
Social media provides a number of opportunities for small businesses to create conversations with prospective customers and generate new leads. You can create a Facebook page, Twitter profile, LinkedIn company page, Pinterest account or a YouTube channel to attract and engage your audience, then funnel them through your process to become leads.
Plus, once you have leads in the system, you can use social media to talk to them and find out more about what they need and want. The more positive touchpoints a customer has with your business over time, the more likely he or she will be to trust your brand and eventually purchase from you.
Lead generation should be thought of as a long-term and continuous process. If you get an efficient system in place using the sales lead tips above, you can streamline the lead generation process and increase your opportunities for business growth.
Optimize your web pages for conversions
All your online lead generation efforts must start with your website. It’s no good generating traffic to your site – be it from Google, social media, or word-of-mouth – if those visitors then decide to leave without taking action.
Your website needs to be optimized to persuade individuals to do something – whatever that action may be. When it comes to lead generation, typically you are trying to capture a prospect’s contact information, such as their name, email address, phone number, and other qualifying attributes that will aid your selling process.
How do you do this? Well, as easy as it is to set up a website in this day and age, that doesn’t automatically guarantee that your website will be optimized to collect leads. There are certain best practices that all of the pages on your website should follow in order to maximize the number of leads you gain.
Not an expert?
No worries. There are several tools, such as Leadpages, available that make the creation of high-performing webpages as easy as writing an email. Leadpages enables you to quickly create and publish web pages based on a proven formula of success. Their extensive marketplace and library of page templates help even the biggest novice convert more leads.
TIP: If you are too busy to generate leads, you can always hire an expert or a freelancer on Fiverr.
The kicker? You don’t need to have any design, development, or marketing experience to get great results.
Run a giveaway or contest
A giveaway or contest can generate a ton of email and social leads in a short period of time. It works like this – brands offer a prize in exchange for participants to refer friends, share content and like your social media profiles.
You can get creative with the prize/reward types as well as the actions needed to collect points (sharing, tagging, referring, etc.). Below is an example of the giveaway thank you page and how the prize and points system works. Check out this case study on how to run giveaways.
Directly engage with leads
Direct customer engagement should one of your top priorities.
Most businesses choose to go with in-direct engagement – such as FAQs. This is not the most effective way to engage.
Direct engagement, on the other hand, makes use of live chat, forums and help centers – where customer service representatives are present all the time to make sure every query is handled properly.
More engaged customers results in better word-of-mouth and more leads.
How to get Sales Leads Manually
To generate leads in sales, you need to have some Internet research skills as well. Yes, you need to know the art of generating leads from social networks & search engines. Once you identify the source of leads, you need to manually copy-paste the prospect data from various sources into an Excel file or CRM. It is a time-consuming and tiresome task.
Once you have built the list of qualified prospects, you need to get the business contact information of your prospects. If you are targeting B2B companies, you need to focus on the C-suite executives or decision-makers. Finding business contact information for decision makers is another huge task because you can’t find their contact information easily on the Internet. It again is a tedious task.
But, some salespeople with some Internet research skills try generating their own leads and manage their daily sales activities as well. But, it is very difficult. It takes a heavy toll on sales productivity. It certainly affects any one of their core activities, either selling or lead generation. But, both are important. This is where successful salespeople use lead generation virtual assistants to generate leads in sales. It helps them to automate sales lead generation, save a lot of time and spend more time speaking to the prospects, and close more sales.
Conclusion
Most network marketers have a lot of questions about generating their own leads. One of the biggest problems with generating your own leads is coming up with fun and creative ways to do it. There are many specific ways you can generate leads for your business, but we will focus on some of the most popular visual marketing tools that you can use to get these leads
Generating your own leads is easier and cheaper than you may realise. By utilising some of the vast array of online resources you can turn your business into a little success story.