If you’re looking for the best lead generation strategies out there, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to take a look at the top generating marketing ideas and how you can implement them in your advertising campaigns for higher results.
Are you curious about lead generation best practices 2021? Or about lead generation advertising best practices? Wondering which goal to emphasize, and in which order, on your landing pages? Is there already a place for you to get started with the fundamentals of lead generation today? Answers will be revealed in its entirety after the break.
Did you ever wonder what are the best practices when it comes to lead generation strategies? Well, wonder no more! This article will provide you with an overview of what you should and shouldn’t be doing. The truth is that there are various lead generation strategies any business can apply. In fact, they range from being super complex and sophisticated, to being quite simple and straightforward. Some of these strategies may appeal to your particular situation; others might not. So, as with most things worth knowing about, I’m going to assume that you want some clarity in the matter and share a number of basic ideas with you on lead generation strategies.
There are many unique benefits to using lead generation forms on social media platforms and these features really help us stand out. We’ll be going over some lead generation tips on social media that will help you grow your business.
What are Leads?
In order to understand the topic of lead generation, it’s first crucial to understand what leads are. A lead is defined as a person with an interest in the product or service you’re selling, creating the possibility that they might become a customer.
This interest may be expressed by them interacting with your content or providing you with personal information about themselves.
Set Goals and Make Them SMART
Goal setting is the first step towards a successful lead generation strategy. Goals should be specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, time bound. When goals are smart, every stakeholder involved in the lead generation process will know what steps need to be followed to achieve said goals.
Smart goal setting involves asking yourself the following questions. Note that each of these questions corresponds with each letter in the acronym:
- Specific: What exactly do I want to achieve?
- Measurable: What number do I need to achieve to say that I have reached my goal?
- Agreed: Are sales and marketing teams in agreement?
- Realistic: Do I have access to the necessary finances, human resources and technological capabilities to attain this goal?
- Time bound: By when should I achieve this goal?
Example of a smart goals:
- Generate 1000 new leads in 30 days
Identify Metrics for Lead Generation Success
You need to check how your lead generation efforts are performing. A great way to do this is by tracking metrics, also known as KPIs.
There are so many metrics to consider, but below are some of the most important lead generation metrics:
Organic Traffic
These are people who have discovered your website naturally during their online or offline research
Traffic-to-Lead-Ratio
Despite organic traffic, you will get traffic from different sources such as social media, referrals, paid traffic, among others. Traffic to lead ratio tells you the percentage of all these people actually convert. You want a lot of conversions from all your traffic. If 1000 people are visiting your website per day but only 2 of them convert, it means your website may not be delivering as expected. An audit is the first step towards fixing your lead generation campaign’s low performance.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who get to your site only to leave right away. If you have a low bounce rate, it means that your website is offering a great experience to your audience.
Click Through Rate
This metric lets you now whether your link building, social media and email marketing campaigns are successful. If a link you have posted on a guest blog, social media or email is directing a lot of traffic to your website, that link has a high click through rate and is hence successful. The reverse is true for low click through rates.
Cost Per Lead
This is the total cost you invest in getting a single lead to convert. This includes paid ads, agency fees, cost of in-house resources and automation tools. These costs, tallied against the value brought in by your leads, give you your lead generation ROI.
Your Buyer Persona Should Be Accurate
A buyer persona is an essential part of successful lead generation campaign. A persona helps you to imagine who your client is, and thereby guides you to gain a better understanding of their “what”: problems, aspirations, interests, purchase behaviors, among others.
Figure 1: Image source: Hubspot
When you brand represents an answer to your persona’s “what”, you will have piqued their interest enough for them to fill in your lead forms or contact you.
You can have multiple buyer personas if you offer different products, or even variations of the same product.
Ensure Your Lead Nurturing Content is Buyer-Centric
Yes, the brand is yours. And yes, you shape the direction it takes. But you can never anticipate the client’s needs by taking your own perspective. You need instead, to offer solutions based on the customers’ perspective.
The buyer journey primarily follows these three main stages:
- Awareness stage, where a person discovers they have a problem and start looking around the internet to learn more
- Consideration stage, where they have a decent level of understanding of their problem and want a solution.
- Decision stage, whereby your buyer has identified solutions or brands and now needs to decide the best option to go with.
Your lead generation strategy should focus on these stages, to increase the chances of a buyer choosing your brand.
Plan a Keyword Strategy
When people conduct an internet search, they type in a word or set of words. That is what a keyword is. To plan a keyword strategy, you must first identify a list of relevant keywords. This involves conducting keyword research. To do this, you need to use a seo keyword research tool.
Keyword research is helpful because it tells you what your customers are likely to type when researching about a problem that would lead them to your solution.
If your content and website are keyword optimized, whenever a person conducts a search, they will automatically be directed to your website. This then increases your traffic volume you experience from each search.
Design interactive content
Interactive content engages users, whilst providing them with real value. In return, you get their contact information. Customers are usually willing to give out relevant information if they get something out of it.
Consequently, you can use this information to create a detailed buyer persona and segment them accordingly.
Here’s an example:
Let’s assume you are trying to market an ecommerce makeup store. You could create an effortless product recommendation quiz like this one from Outgrow:
Customers will feel compelled to provide their contact information to find out which makeup set suits them best. The company will also receive other relevant information like their budget, skin type, and so on, which can be used to create personalized targeted emails to help boost sales.
Make use of CRM software
According to Capterra, 53% of top-performing companies are investing in CRM to drive sales productivity. In the modern marketplace, CRM tools are crucial for generating leads. You need to analyze, understand, and plan for market trends and consumer behavior.
Using your CRM software properly involves:
- Customer analytics: CRM analytical tools can retrieve data regarding age, purchasing habits and geographical locations. Use this to modify your outreach approach for generating leads accordingly.
- Social networking: One of the most effective methods for connecting with your clients is through social media. You can post various surveys on social media platforms and store the data in your CRM software.
- Nurturing your leads: Once you have the data, make sure you reach out efficiently. Your CRM’s email marketing software can help you contact the right customers at the right time.
- Integrate your CRM with live chat software: By doing this, you can record and read chat histories and conversations in your CRM tool. With the relevant information at your fingertips, you can serve your customers much more effectively.
Through proper use of sales CRM, you will generate more leads because you connect with your customers in a more professional way.
Encourage online reviews
According to BrightLocal, “88% of respondents confirmed that they trust and will check online reviews before trying something for the first time.” And 68 percent were willing to write a review when asked to.
The second statistic highlights an opportunity to really boost conversions and sales. Encouraging your existing customers to share their experience is the most effective way to enhance your brand image and attract new customers. Employing this strategy encourages long-term customer relationships.
Display your contact number
Even if your customers don’t actually call, including a contact number on your website really helps to create trust and cement your credibility.
In fact, adding a phone number at the top of your page (this is especially true of the homepage) has been proven to increase conversions by up to 53%.
Here’s an example from Zappos, the popular shoe store. As you can see, there’s a phone number at the top of every page.
Your customers can relax in the knowledge that, should they need to, they can call up and talk to someone
Don’t Neglect SEO
Producing a ton of content is great. But that content will get very little traction if you don’t perform SEO. Search engine optimization will help search engine bots to discover and rank your website. You may have great content but if your website is not optimized, people will not discover it. Page SEO is also great if using landing pages as it will ensure you use optimized landing pages for Lead generation.
Meta tags are a great way to make your website discoverable. The main meta tags that you should optimize include:
- Title tags: These influence how content and page titles display on search engines. Limit your titles to 160 characters so that the entire title is visible at a glance.
- Meta description: This is a HTML summary of your webpage. This is crucially important as it influences how your website ranks on the SERPs.
What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of using online-marketing strategies and tactics to identify and attract the people potentially interested in using your products or services. It is also known as online lead generation, or ‘lead gen.’
Once you have people’s attention, the goal is to convert that interest into action, so that some of these people become customers.
The success of any business depends on getting a steady stream of customers through its virtual or physical doors. It’s essential to learn lead generation to attract these customers and grow your business
Conclusion
In an ideal lead generation for B2B environment, your potential customers are at every step of their journey. It is also important to note that lead generation best practices differ for different businesses and industries.
Regardless of the B2B industry segment you are in, it is paramount to understand the different lead generation strategies and put them into practice. With their help, you can produce enough leads that will eventually turn into customers.”