Everyone wants to know how to generate leads for business development. Businesses want to know how to generate leads for their sales team. It’s important to educate yourself on the best way to generate business leads and to protect yourself from scams. If you’re unsure about how to generate business leads, read this article on how to generate sales leads in b2c — or business-to-consumer.
Business development is not simple as you might think it is, at least in the b2c market. You have to go beyond cold calling and follow a process that can provide great results and fast. How To Generate Leads For Business Development will teach you what approach you should use to generate qualified business leads with guaranteed response time.
Any business development manager knows that generating leads for their business is the hardest part of his or her job. Technically, this means that the best-performing business development managers are those who’ve built the most value for themselves, because no one else will buy it until the customers tell them.
In this day and age, there is no business without a strong online presence. While some business still prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, most of us understand the importance of getting online first. While many businesses succeed online by means of SEO, PR, and AdWords, more businesses like to get their leads offline as well.
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.
12 Lead Generation Examples
Whether you plan to buy leads or build your lead generation marketing plan, having a business lead generation strategy in place will help you turn strangers into paying customers.
Before building out your strategy, take a look at the following 12 ways to generate leads for your business.
1. Direct Engagement
If your business sells a high-value product or a service that is billed on a monthly retainer, directly engaging with a potential customer is a great approach to generating new business. If your revenue model operates on low-value high-volume sales, it’s best to rule this option out.
You can reach out to prospects directly through social media, email, by phone, or even in person after establishing that they might be a good fit for your business.
For example, if you run a lawn care company in Houston and there’s a large commercial property being built in the area, call the property manager about servicing the completed estate. This is a great example of how to generate leads in Houston or any other area that your local business may service.
2. Generate Leads on LinkedIn
Did you know that the audience on LinkedIn has 2x the buying power that your average web audience has? B2B marketing using LinkedIn is especially effective, and can yield very profitable results.
Making connections with relevant industry leaders is a great way to generate business opportunities. Potential connections asking for recommendations for a service that you offer could turn into your next paying customer.
Using social media to advertise is also a great way to leverage LinkedIn if you have the budget. You even have the option to pay for lead gen ads that include forms directly within your ads. These ads make it easy for relevant users to sign up for your products or services.
Another way to get business leads on LinkedIn is to connect with members of your target audience, engage with their posts, and message them directly to offer your product or service. Take note that this approach will only work if their profile and posts indicate that your services will help fill one of their unmet needs. If that’s not the case, your outreach could be written off as spam and hurt your credibility.
3. Advertise and Retarget
Social media isn’t the only place to advertise! Use targeted pay-per-click advertising on Google or Bing to market to search engine users. This helps you serve ads for searches you already know are extremely relevant to your business.
Imagine you’re a BMW dealer trying to improve your car dealership marketing in Houston. You can create ads that target phrases like, “best BMW dealer in Houston,” or, “new BMW in Houston,” and even use a geo-filter to target consumers that are searching in the Houston area.
Very few web visitors convert on their first visit to your website. When a user clicks on your PPC ads, you can use display retargeting to show visual advertisements for your products on other popular sites across the web.
Digital advertising can take some time to perfect, but it can be one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your business.
4. Ask for Referrals from Current Customers
Customer referrals are one of the oldest lead generation marketing strategies out there. If your product or service has delighted a current customer, ask them to share their experience with their friends who also might benefit.
The quality of your business’s offerings may be good enough that customers do this for free, or you could set up an incentive system. For example, give your customers a certain percentage off their next monthly retainer fee for every client they refer.
Customer referrals are a great way to get more leads for your business because it’s profitable, and your current customers are doing most of the work.
5. Write Guest Blogs
Writing guest blogs is a great way to generate referral business through content marketing and improve your SEO at the same time.
Guest blogging provides all of the following marketing benefits:
- Forms new industry connections
- Improves your SEO by acquiring meaningful, industry-relevant backlinks
- Generates referral traffic from a relevant audience
You can find leads for your business by guest blogging for sites that are relevant to your industry but don’t directly compete with you. For example, if you’re a marketing company, you can guest blog for sign companies in your area. You know that the sign makers audience is interested in marketing themselves, and your services act as a complement.
Guest blogging for local influencers aligns with local SEO best practices. For example, writing a guest blog and getting backlinks from a popular podcaster in your area will help your site rank more easily in that locality.
For optimal results, make sure the site you’re guest blogging for is relevant to both your industry and location.
6. Rank in search engines to generate leads
When your target audience searches for your product or services online, make sure they can easily find you. Learn how to generate more leads for your business by tapping into SEO and SEM for your website.
Start by doing keyword research to determine what phrases your target audience searches before purchasing your product or service. You can use tools like SEMrush or the Google Ads Keyword Planner to find search data.
Once you’ve identified the right keywords, optimize your page content. If you’re selling a highly competitive good or service, ranking organically might be difficult. Using an SEO company can be a great way to generate consistent leads if you’re willing to invest.
Learn how to choose an SEO company before you make any investment decisions. Not every agency delivers the same results, so it’s important to know how to choose a firm that is right for your business.
7. Answer Forum Questions
Answering forum questions is a great way to prove your subject matter expertise while also setting the stage for reciprocity. If done strategically, this practice can help you find leads in a matter of minutes.
“… The key to using the Principle of Reciprocity is to be the first to give and to ensure that what you give is personalized and unexpected.” This quote from Influence at Work outlines how being the first to give something can help you receive something of equal or greater value.
Put this principle of persuasion into action by answering forum questions on sites like Reddit or Quora. Find a category that is relevant to your business, and start answering user questions. At the end of your answer, make sure to include a call-to-action to use your product or service to help solve the user’s problem.
For example, imagine that you’re a law firm offering family law services. You can subscribe to a legal subreddit where users ask questions specifically about what your business offers. Take a few minutes each day to search for any questions that you can offer some insight.
If a user asks about a child support question, leave a helpful answer and finish by linking to your website and suggesting the user contact you for a consultation. By offering free advice, the user who asked the question may be more compelled to reciprocate by paying you for legal services in the future.
Answering forum questions is a great example of how to generate new business leads, and it can be great for SEO as well. For our Reddit example in particular, if your child support answer gets enough upvotes, your link can have a positive impact on your law firm’s SEO. This kind of synergy can lead to compounding returns on your lead gen efforts.
8. Offer a Free Tool or Lead Generation Magnet
Offering a free tool is a great way to generate business to business sales leads. What type of problem does your product or service solve? Can you offer a free tool that will help users without eliminating the need to eventually purchase from your business?
For this example, imagine that you’re a Houston-based plastic surgeon. After polling your Twitter audience and doing some keyword research, you determine that users are interested in learning about procedure costs and recovery times.
As a result, you decide to compile an eBook that outlines price ranges, recovery time ranges, and before and after photo examples for all of the different procedures that you offer. You write up a teaser blog post and then require people to exchange their name, phone number, and email address for the information you’ve provided.
With the right topic, targeting, and call to action, your blog post can start earning contact information. A higher alignment of the blog topic, CTA, and offer will result in a higher conversion rate. Here are the visit-to-lead conversion rate averages that you can expect according to blog lead conversion data from Databox.
The teaser blog post is so valuable that interested readers are linking to your website and signing up for the free eBook. Your guide will help you get leads for your business and have a positive impact on your Houston plastic surgery SEO at the same time.
What opportunity exists within your industry? Popular examples include building calculators, compiling original research, offering free guides, or even offering free consultations to help generate leads for your business.
9. Influencer Interviews
Interviewing leaders in your industry can open up a lot of doors for you and your business. Not only is this a great way to network and learn from experts within your industry, but you can use these interviews to create powerful content.
Video record your interview, turn it into a Q&A blog post or stage it as a podcast. Framing your interview in these different formats will help you leverage the content and bring interested users to your website or social media properties. You can even consider gating the interviews and requesting contact information to improve your business lead generation.
Many times, the influencers will share the resulting interview across their marketing channels, multiplying your reach and ROI.
10. Start Networking
Networking rarely leads to direct revenue but is great for nurturing professional opportunities. Try to select a networking event that is both local and related to your industry. This will help keep your travel costs low, and ensure that you are capitalizing on easy business wins.
What can you expect to gain from networking? If you walk in with ROI in mind, you’ll almost always be disappointed. Instead, look for oblique wins.
Maybe you’ll meet a complementary business that you can partner with to share leads, expanding your reach. Perhaps you meet an influencer that agrees to interview with you so that you can build a great piece of content and expand your marketing reach at the same time. Networking can even open up guest blogging opportunities for your company.
There are almost always multiple returns on your networking investment, making it one of the best ways to get leads for your business.
11. Create an Email Offer
Lead generation doesn’t always have to stem from exposure to a new audience. You might have untapped business potential in your email lists.
If you’ve built your own list of email subscribers, consider putting together a special offer. A special discount or limited time offer can effectively turn a passive bystander into your next paying customer.
You can also offer special email offers to other people’s email lists. If you’re actively networking or partnering with complementary businesses in your industry, you can structure a deal that lets you promote yourself to their audience.
Recall our previous example of a guest blog partnership between a marketing agency and sign-maker. The marketing agency could suggest a business promotion in the sign company’s next email blast and offer the sign-maker 5% of all sales generated from the initiative. This is a win-win-win situation for the marketing firm, the sign company, and the happy new customers.
12. Create Helpful Blog Comments
As a warning, I did not save the best business lead generation strategy for last.
As a business owner or marketing executive at your company, make it a point to subscribe to industry publications and even competitor blogs. This can help you keep a finger on the pulse of your competition, and open up opportunities to be helpful.
If you notice that readers have left several blog comments on a post that haven’t been answered, offer your personal insights in response. It’s not a bad idea to include a call to action to some relevant information on your website that will further address the reader’s question.
Tread lightly when trying to generate business leads through blog comments. Comments on blogs are difficult to pull off genuinely because of their susceptibility to spam. Also, your competitors may not take kindly to you headhunting their audience.
13. Comment on other blogs
Writing comments on blogs can be helpful in getting your name out there and eventually generating leads. Be helpful and generous with your comments and people will want to see what you have to offer.
14. Start to guest blog
Guest blogging can be helpful for lead generation but only when the following aspects are properly implemented:
- Articles have relevant information for the audience.
- You send people back to an appropriate landing page on your site
- The post possesses unique information
- You actively promote the post to leverage social proof
- The site you choose to blog for is well respected by your audience
15. Don’t forget your signature
Make your email signature effective by embedding a link that redirects the reader to relevant content. With the help of link integration, the chance of maximum web traffic flow towards your content will be higher.
If you implement HTML coding in your emails, make sure to test it on all the platforms to make sure that everything is working fine.
16. Create a game app
Depending on your audience, but many statistics suggest that people spend more time on game apps rather than reading blogs. Seeing people are active, it may be possible to use a game app to bring leads to your business. But, it can only be possible, if you build a creative game that can directly shift the web traffic towards your business.
This can be quite an expensive adventure especially if you are offering the app for free – but it will definitely add a unique element to your marketing efforts.
17. Participate in forums
Forums are the perfect place to get to know your customers more intimately. The better you know your customers, the easier it is to contact them with a potential offer.
Be active on forums, share your views with the members and answer their questions.
18. Interview influencers
Reach out to influencers who your customers respect and interview them for your blog or social channels.
Keep it as simple as possible by asking short/sharp questions, and then ask them to share the final product.
Your potential customers will see this as proof of your credibility and increase your chance of attracting new leads.
19. Share videos on YouTube
YouTube is not just a video hosting service, it’s a massive search engine. It is more popular than any other social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.
As compared to other social networking platforms, all the posts remain there for a very long time. Thus, this is the best channel for sending referral web traffic in the long-term.
This platform enables the you to create and maintain your own channel where you can share videos regarding particular events, imperative tutorials and other things. This will help you standout from your competitors and attract more leads to your business.
20. Offer a free software tool on your site
If you can offer an easy-to-use software tool on your site, for free, it will build trust with your audience.
One example is the website analyzer available on Neil Patel’s blog Quick Sprout. Or for another example, check out Agorapulse’s free social media marketing tools for Facebook and Twitter:
More trust inevitably means more leads.
21. Add a Quiz to your blog
Posting a quiz to your blog can make your content engaging and draw more attention from an online audience. In fact, it can easily entice the readers to share their feedback about your blog and article. This will also help you establish a stronger relationship with your audience and get more leads in the long term.
There is a free tool called QuickBox that helps you create a quiz in a few easy steps and publish it on your blog.
Guest author: Ritu Singh is a online marketing specialist at Better Graph. Her contribution to informative blog and article articulating seamless strategy in terms of deploying effective SEO, bringing leads and managing online reputation is being praised by various SEO experts and marketer from all around the world.
Websites you can use to learn more about free leads
Nowadays, there are many websites explicitly designed to help you get more free leads for your business. But when you discover a new lead, you often need a little more information before targeting them with marketing material effectively.
The sites in this section can be a great resource if you want to learn more about the free leads you uncover
VoilaNorbert
VoilaNorbert is a basic tool that does one thing very well – and that’s to help you find anyone’s email address. All you need to get started is their name. Simply type it into the search box, and the platform will do the rest.
The cool thing about VoilaNorbert is the site offers 50 free lead searches per month, so you can use it without paying a dime. Then, if you find you’re getting a lot of value out of VoilaNorbert, you can sign up for an affordable plan to get more lead searches each month.
Whitepages
Whitepages is an online search tool trusted by more than 30 million people every month. You can do a name search, reverse phone search, address search, or reverse address search. That means, pretty much whatever piece of information you have on a potential lead, you can use it to learn more about them with Whitepages.
BeenVerified
BeenVerified is a tool that’s pretty similar to Whitepages but also lets you input different information to learn more about a potential free lead.
The main difference between BeenVerified and Whitepages is that BeenVerified has a broader search functionality. So if you’ve tried Whitepages and aren’t getting the results you want, BeenVerified could be a solution.
AnyWho
AnyWho is a service that helps you find leads’ phone numbers. It’s a really useful tool if you already have a lead’s first and last name. Input that information into a search box and get the lead’s phone number.
But if you don’t have a lead’s basic information yet, AnyWho won’t be very useful. In that case, you’ll need to circle back to it once you’ve done a little more research.
LeadLander
LeadLander can also help you generate more free leads. We’re currently offering a free 14-day trial of our website visitor tracking software. You can use this to:
- Discover new leads visiting your website
- Receive real-time alerts for existing leads
- Learn which pages a lead is visiting most often
- Discover how leads are getting to your website
With this intel, it not only becomes easier to find new leads, but it also becomes easier to turn them into paying customers. You can sign up for our risk-free trial to learn more.
Conclusion
Business development has the ability to drive top and bottom line growth for businesses. As more businesses begin to embrace a strategic approach to business development, it is critical that business leaders understand how to track and measure their marketing, sales and product development efforts.
To grow your business, you need to generate leads. While you may assume generating leads is difficult, it’s actually not too hard. There are many methods available that you can use for generating leads for your business development efforts.