Generating business leads is an important part in promoting your business or brand. You may have considered generating leads by asking your loyal clients to refer you to their network or team members. However, it’s time for you to look for more cost effective and easier methods of generating business leads.
As a marketer to the software company, generating qualified leads that are ready to buy your product is one of the most important tasks you have. You can put together a great marketing campaign, but if you don’t have qualified leads, it will not result in new sales for your company. A great way to get these qualified leads is to learn where they hang out online and then reach out to them from there. In this post, we are going to walk through some of the best ways to generate more qualified leads without a lot of cost.
One of the most important ways to keep your business growing is to generate new leads. As you start out on your own, you might think it will be hard to find new clients who don’t know you yet. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, there are lots of easy ways for you to get leads for your new business.
Businesses these days are searching the Internet to find info on how they can improve their business and/or operations. Buying corporate software is one way to do this. Though, before most companies will buy your software, you’ll need to obtain client leads and convince them that your product is what they need.
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.
21 Smart Ways to Generate More Leads for Your Business
1. 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.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Leadpages here.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Deploy outbound & inbound marketing
According to the stats, outbound marketing is still more effective than inbound marketing. But, it doesn’t mean that you forget about inbound marketing. Look to deploy both approaches in a balanced manner as this will be helpful in generating leads and eventually your business.
From an inbound perspective – personalize your email communication and get active in online communities by regularly sharing informative content, as well as solving common customer problems. This will help you establish healthy relationships with your customers and build more leads.
5. Invest in new technology
New technology sets the trend in the market. For example, smartphones are trending all over the world. Subsequently, most people access their mail or browse websites through smartphones or tablets; this shows that the you should invest in making your marketing efforts compatible with these devices, allowing you to reach the maximum amount of customers.
In a nutshell, you should keep an eye on emerging technology and channels through which you can get more leads for your business.
6. Find leads on Twitter
Twitter is not only a social networking website, but also a source of potential leads for your company. With the help of Followerwonk, you can analyze aspects such as; information about followers, at what time your followers tweet, etc., so that you can reach the audience that is associated with your niche.
Followerwonk helps you find influencers and connect with them. It also has a great interface.
7. Develop & optimize informative content
It is undeniable that content can be a great source of web traffic – which will result in more leads. But it needs to be informative and appeal to your target audience.
High-quality content can be an asset for you as it attracts traffic to your website well beyond its publish date. Try to include images, video and infographics to increase share counts and engagement.
Tip: For video content, use InVideo to create stunning professional-level videos in minutes with pre-made templates.
8. Make your Tweets sing
If possible, include images with your Tweets, they have a way of making things more interesting and engaging to your customers.
Plus, use hashtags so your content is easier to find. The more often you are found, the more leads you will get.
9. Tap into databases
Data.Com is a huge database where you can find potential leads for your business. It maintains a list of companies with accurate contact information, so that in minimum time you can identify relevant leads.
As Data.com provides an extensive set of data instantly, it can contribute around a 25% increase in sales.
10. Market through LinkedIn
As we all know, LinkedIn is a business-centric social networking website. It can prove to be a great platform for bringing new clients to your business too. LinkedIn also allows users to publish content to an already engaged audience.
11. Automate your marketing
What about a tool for getting more leads?
Drip is an application that offers marketing automation through the form of a well-designed popup, email marketing and more. You can collect the information of your prospective customers and turn them into genuine leads on autopilot.
Another lead generation task you should consider automating is your social media marketing. For example, Jeff Bullas uses social media management tool Agorapulse to automate his Twitter activity.
The process includes these key steps.
Step 1: Create the appropriate queuing categories in Agorapulse
Step 2: Create the time slots to be spread through the day
Step 3: Add content to your content queues!
Read the Agorapulse “Jeff Bullas Case Study: Tweeting Evergreen Content on a Massive Scale” to find out more about his entire strategy!
12. Answer a question on Quora
Quora is a Question & Answer based social networking site with millions of people from different demographics posting daily questions. If you answer enough questions of users, they will spot your profile and most likely check out your website.
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.
Low-cost options for advertising online
As you’ve read above, there are many ways you can advertise your company and its products without paying a dime.
While these strategies work, paying to run ads is still effective because it helps you reach people who might not otherwise see your content.
That’s why we’ve included this section. It covers four low-cost options for paid online advertising. You can advertise on these sites without breaking your budget.
Amazon Ads
If you sell a physical product, Amazon ads are perhaps the most cost-effective way to get it in front of more people. The cost per click for these rarely goes above $0.35 – one of the best rates of any platform.
On top of that, people go to Amazon because they already want to make a purchase. The same isn’t true on many other platforms you might pay to advertise on.
That means with Amazon ads you’re accessing a group of highly motivated buyers at a highly affordable price point. PSA: This strategy might not work if you sell a digital good like software.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads can also be affordable to run. The average cost per click on the platform is $1.76. But that cost varies based on the industry you’re in and the specific audience you’re targeting.
For example, the average cost per click on Facebook for an education company is just $1.06. That means you may be able to run ads on Facebook at a competitive price point.
Plus, Facebook has the largest active user base of any social media network. That doesn’t just mean you have a bigger potential pool to target with your ads; it means you can get more specific about defining your ideal ad audience.
Google Banner Ads
Google Banner ads are another cost-effective way to expand your marketing reach. These banners are run on ad-enabled websites, including most sites you visit. A Google banner ad’s average cost per click is under $0.58.
Google Shopping Ads
Google Shopping ads are great for selling physical products like clothes, pet supplies, and outdoor gear.
These advertisements pop up when you perform a Google search and click on the “shopping” tab on the results page. When you pay for a Google Shopping ad, your product goes up to the top of that page.
This strategy lets you reach a motivated group of buyers at an affordable price. The average cost per click for Google Shopping ads is just $0.66 – but your exact CPC will depend on your industry and your keyword bidding strategy.
Conclusion
Lead generation is a sales process for businesses to attract customers, but it’s also the top marketing tool for individuals who want to develop a new career or build their personal brand. Since everyone in the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries is looking for ways to generate business leads, many companies focus on lead generation as an essential part of a comprehensive marketing strategy.
In the start-up world, generating leads through targeted B2B marketing can be hard when you are up against big names with deeper pockets. However, there are ways to effectively generate software leads for your company without spending a lot of money