Lead generation is a primary and vital focus for a company’s success. Unfortunately, at times, many spend a lot of money producing and later chasing low-quality, unqualified leads. Since funneling high-quality leads to the sales team is so critical to success, why do so many companies still waste resources producing low-quality leads? How can you change your tactics, so your leads are quality leads?
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The Best Strategies to Generate More Leads
Finding the perfect lead generation strategy for your business isn’t easy. There are many to choose from, and one that works for another company might not work for yours.
You’ll want to consider your industry, size, and what you hope to accomplish when determining the best strategy for you.
Craft Better Content
The primary method for bringing in brand-new leads is to offer valuable material that talks to your target market. This material can be anything from blogging to case research studies to FAQs. By addressing typical concerns and placing your brand name as an idea leader, you’ll bring in brand-new consumers in several methods.
Your site will be more browsable and visible. Whether paid social media advertisements or providing gated material downloads, it’s hard to draw in an audience without terrific material.
Material marketing is extremely efficient at lead generation when you do it right. Usually, it creates three times as many potential customers as outgoing marketing techniques (like cold calling), costing 62% less than other techniques. Make sure you have an easy-to-fill-out form or direct clients to landing pages to record their contact details!
Content marketing is a must for any lead generation strategy. It allows you to increase your search presence and draw in potential customers—as long as your content is optimized, high-quality, and unique. The more of this content you produce, the more search engines will reward you.
Use Retargeting
Many visitors to your site aren’t going to end up being leads right away– and that’s all right; retargeting can help. You can target numerous different aspects with paid advertising, but with retargeting, you can ensure that the people seeing your ads are ones who’ve visited your site recently.
Retargeted ads are almost identical to other paid ads, except they tend to offer discounts and promotions, fostering a sense of urgency.
Both retargeted and introductory advertisements provide some success. However, the typical click-through rate (CTR) for a lot of ads is 0.07%, while the typical CTR for retargeting advertisements is 10x greater (0.7%).
Take Advantage of Review Sites
No matter what market you’re in, there are review websites that cater to your prospective clients. Take the time to react to feedback, motivate your supporters to leave favorable evaluations, and work with these websites to provide fast responses. As a result, you can enhance the efficiency of this lead channel.
Websites like G2 and Capterra allow people to leave feedback about your business that all of your potential customers can see. Brands should interact with these sites, responding to reviews and encouraging loyal advocates to leave their own feedback. One-third of customers take online reviews into account when making a buying decision.
Implement Live Chat
Live chat is an excellent method to create leads on your site. In a Kissmetrics study asking about the effect of live chat on the purchasing experience, 63% stated they are more likely to return to a site that uses live chat, while 38% stated they had actually made their purchase due to the chat session itself.
With chatbots, lead generation becomes automatic — chat pop-ups trigger at impactful times to give potential customers more information and answer their questions.
Don’t Forget SEO
Enhancing your site to be discovered by search engines may not feel like the most attractive lead generation method. However, it’s exceptionally efficient. Even if you’re focused on producing practical material and other types of lead magnets, including a little SEO effort, can greatly reward how many individuals visit your site and discover that material.
According to BrightEdge, SEO is the form of marketing that drives the most traffic. SEO consists of many factors, including keyword research, using backlinks to obtain authority, and making your site friendly and readable to search engines.
Most search users don’t go past the first page (or even the first few results) when looking for information, making it difficult for businesses to get their sites in front of potential customers.
So, search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be a top lead generation strategy, especially for B2B companies. However, understanding and crafting a perfect SEO lead generation strategy isn’t always easy. Utilizing the tools included with your website builder and keeping visibility top of mind are the first steps.
Your entire website should:
- Provide accurate information that’s relevant to your audience
- Offer answers to questions often asked in your industry
- Contain content that is clear, concise, and easy to digest
Fortunately, learning SEO yourself is free. Unfortunately, if your business is in an extremely competitive market, working with an SEO expert is likely the only way to get your page to the top. However, for most businesses, investing in SEO content marketing should be enough to gain an advantage.
Develop a Referral Program
Clients who like your brand are a terrific source of high-value leads. These programs motivate clients to refer their buddies through click-to-share links, well-timed asks, and discount rates or cash back for every brand-new client they refer.
Social network Today discovered that 78% of B2B online marketers accomplish great or exceptional quality leads from recommendations. In addition, over half of those same online marketers discover that recommendation programs provide a lower cost-per-lead than other channels.
Word-of-mouth marketing is still an important resource—especially for lead generation. In addition, the way people spread the word about events and businesses has changed drastically, with social media platforms leading to even more successful marketing.
Creating an incentive-based referral program can help generate leads for your business. For example, you can create referral codes for clients and prospects, and offer new clients and their referrers a discount on their next purchase.
It’s particularly useful for generating online leads for your company—customers can easily send their friends a referral code through various platforms.
Talk With New Contacts
Though numerous individuals have declared its death, email is still an exceptionally reliable lead generation method. 42% of companies think email marketing is their most reliable lead generation channel.
Running a lead generation campaign using email marketing typically looks like this:
- Offer a free download to get a lead’s contact information.
- Send them a welcome email.
- Nurture them slowly with a drip campaign, showing off the value of your product.
Offer Free Resources
Just 4% of site visitors are all set to buy when they very first land on your site. So make sure you have a clear path to support those leads into potential customers for your paid item.
For the other 96%, give them something valuable when they’re browsing to leave a good impression and hopefully turn them into a future customer. Free resources and tools like ROI calculators can attract leads looking for specific answers.
Make Multimedia Content
Online interactions are shifting from mainly text to other types of media like videos, infographics, webinars, whitepapers, ebooks, etc. Multimedia content can help generate leads and nurture prospects when done correctly.
90% of clients state they utilize video to make purchasing choices, and 64% of consumers state they’re more likely to buy after seeing a video. 87% of online marketers who work with video state it’s increased traffic to their site and increased sales.
Host Free Webinars
Regarding top-of-the-funnel lead generation techniques, over half of online marketers state that webinars produce the most top-quality leads. It makes sense because a webinar deals with particular details in exchange for attention and contact information. Not only will you understand what subjects are crucial to this audience, but you’ll likewise have the ability to call them to support your brand-new leads in the future.
Ultimately, like with any marketing strategy, finding the best easy to generate more leads will probably involve trial and error.
With that in mind, let’s discuss some of the best lead generation strategies that might work for your business:
Broadcast advertising
Targeting your niche audience with broadcast advertising—like podcasts—has become increasingly popular. Most content creators need advertisers, meaning you can turn listeners into solid leads (often with better chances than radio ads). Because podcasts focus on specific themes and people choose which ones to listen to, you can get a good idea of what they will find relevant and interesting.
If you can find podcasts that speak to your target audience—focus your lead generation strategy there. By working with those podcasts and getting them to run your ads, you can potentially drive masses of customers to your store or website.
You can even combine this strategy with the first one and offer podcast listeners referral codes to get discounts on their purchases.
Use Direct Mail (The Right Way)
Direct mail isn’t outdated for lead generation—as long as you take a new approach, it can be an unusually successful strategy.
Don’t offer unsolicited coupons with generic labels, instead:
- Send compelling brochures and flyers featuring valuable offers
- Aim for smaller, tuned-in audiences
- Use data-driven referral codes
Being selective with your direct mail campaigns allows you to invest more in what you send out and offer better discounts or coupons to get new leads to take the first step. However, don’t think of direct mail as your final step to getting a new customer—think about it as a way to get someone to give you a call or visit your website.
Optimize Your Website
Back in the day, only digitally-focused businesses, entertainment companies, and tech organizations had to impress customers with compelling websites. However, these days every business needs an elegant website designed with speed and efficiency in mind.
Your website should show visitors who you are, what you do, why you do it, and compel them to take action (e.g., make a purchase). Think about what you want people to do after they visit and how you can get them to do it.
Setting up various calls to action throughout your website is an excellent way to direct people to certain pages—this can be to contact you, view your locations, or browse your products. You can also lead them to discount pages designed for first-time customers.
Rethink Your Deals and Discounts
Promotions and sales are great ways to incentivize someone to make a purchase, but if your business isn’t already well known, it’s unlikely to work well.
However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. For example, you could try working with sites like Groupon that bring your business promotions in front of millions of people and use them as a lead generation strategy.
You might also want to look into forming a partnership with complementary businesses that have established customers. Although your margins might not be the greatest using these strategies, it’s a fairly easy way to get your items in front of more customers—something that might not be in your budget.
In addition, by offering many customers these promotions, you can hopefully not only convert those people into leads but into loyal customers.
Related: Learn More About Content Marketing
Common Mistakes When Creating a Lead Generation Strategy
In your desperation, you begin buying email lists. Unfortunately, when you purchase email data for lead generation, you are relying on someone else’s estimation of what kind of leads you are looking for. You are also running the risk of polluting your email deliverability and IP address reputation. If you deliver to potential leads that have never heard of your company, you are likely to get marked as spam. In short, there is no quality email list you can buy.
High-quality leads are obtained organically through conversations and relationships with your target audience.
Instead, you need to ensure that your email lists are composed of potential customers who opt-in to receive your content. You can gain email addresses by offering a valuable exchange, like a white paper, case study, or admittance to a high-quality webinar.
Your content is one-size-fits-all
In other words, you are creating content that doesn’t address the nuanced buying process. If every call to action says something like view demo or call us for an appointment, you are missing your audience that may be at an earlier stage of the process. You can build credibility by creating informative content that demonstrates your depth of understanding of the challenges your audience faces. Still, you should also indicate that you understand the purchasing decision process. Instead of asking your audience to buy or demo, invite them to read a blog or white paper on a related topic or view an infographic on the same topic.
You are not using blogs to create leads
Many marketers write informative, high-quality blogs and then miss the opportunity to convert their readers into leads. Don’t forget to make a call to action a foundational piece of your blog writing. Invite your readers to visit you on social media, take a virtual tour of your location, or attend a free webinar. If all you are doing is providing an informational reading for your target audience, you are not capturing the potential of your blogs for sales growth.
While you are at it, don’t forget to maximize your blog’s effectiveness. You can link previous blogs to your current one when you’re mentioning that topic. Use a previous blog in a call to action, inviting your audience to read another entry.
You are treating all web pages the same
Certain pages of your website will get more traffic than others. Your homepage, contact us page, and certain landing pages are where your target audience is likely to visit. You should be creating calls to action right on those pages so that if a potential buyer visits there, they are invited to take the next step. That could include reading a white paper, viewing a demo, or viewing a video with customer testimonials.
Social media isn’t getting enough attention
Social media isn’t the answer to everything in today’s marketing landscape, but if you are not getting a lot of leads, you may be underutilizing it.
Don’t simply post content and hope it gets attention. Ask a question to get a conversation going in the comments, post a free offer, or access valuable information. If something has worked well in the past, pair it with new content and use it again. Many marketers waste opportunities with social media because they aren’t proactive enough and too quickly assume that their target audience just doesn’t hang out on social media.
You are not using telemarketing
One of the best tools for lead generation, telemarketing is a reliable way to build your list of qualified leads. A simple telemarketing conversation gives you access to a wealth of information:
- What are the challenges and needs of the business?
- Is there a project or a plan to address these issues?
- Who are the parties (decision-makers and influencers) involved in the decision-making process?
- How can they best be reached?
- What is the timeline, and where are they in the buying cycle?
- Are there any challenges or hesitations involved in their decision?
- What information do they need to make a decision?
- Is there a budget in place?
- What is the best next step?
There is no substitute for the valuable information and benefits you reap from one on one communication. Highly qualified leads come from a conversation where a relationship between the potential buyer and your company is developed.
Best Practices for Your Lead Generation Strategy
As a member of the competitive B2B marketing landscape, you know that your formula has to change with the needs of your clients. Change and flexibility are extremely important in building a strong business model. However, there are a handful of lead generation methods used by marketers today that have been around for years. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Stay Customer-Centric
No matter what changes around us, there will always be a need to remain completely focused on the customer. Companies continually push themselves to develop the best products and services available to one-up their competitors. However, these products and services should be driven by customer wants/needs and not by an urge to be extravagant at the expense of the customer.
Thought Leadership Shows the Best ROI
To realize total engagement of your target audience, focus on content that has value and provokes a sense of thought leadership. This takes some proactive approaches that include active listening and total engagement with the target market. When you accomplish this, you’ll create a marketing method that creates a buzz through word of mouth. You’ll also see your costs related to customer support operations drop significantly.
Seek Out Social Sharing Opportunities
There is nothing wrong with giving something to the people who engage in what you are doing. For instance, having your target audience share the information you’ve placed in front of them should be a goal of yours. To help promote this goal, reward those who do a good deal of sharing. Incentives, a small gift, and e-books are all excellent rewards for taking part in spreading the word about your company. If the blog you created for your company isn’t getting the attention it deserves, promoting a social sharing scenario could be the answer for you.
Optimize Your Channels
Look deep into your data and find out what channels your target market prefers. When you know what channel is most influential within a certain demographic, you’ll know where you are going to reach them most effectively. When you nail this down, you’ll be on the path that leads to a shorter sales cycle.
Lead Profiling Should Stay Progressive
Your goal should be to take every opportunity to further your relationship with your lead, which means you need to ask the right questions to help this relationship grow. There are situations where you’ll come in contact with your leads; make sure you are using these opportunities to ask new questions and avoid repeat questions that do nothing to advance the conversation.
Partner With a Quality Lead Development Company
When you partner with a company like Blue Valley Telemarketing, you’re on board with a company that knows all about lead development and the various techniques that drive excellent results. Quality control and assurances, new business development, event marketing, customer development, marketing research, publisher services, lead generation, lead enhancement, and qualification services are where we excel. Contact us today and get started on a campaign that will produce results.
Related: See How Telemarketing Can Help Your Business
Best Lead Generation Strategies Wrap Up
Sales representatives know that to keep their portfolios growing and the business progresses, they must invest time in outbound sales. But many sales teams see a gap between their success and the lead generation results from marketing teams.
Take a look at some stats that sum up common frustrations around lead generation from sales teams like yours:
- They’re stumbling through sales calls, with 42% reporting that they don’t have enough information when making the first call.
- Their efforts feel hollow, and 52% call their attempts “ineffective.”
- There’s a disconnect: while reps feel ineffective, decision-makers are ready to listen. Of surveyed executives, 75% said they were interested in attending an event or scheduling a meeting following a cold call or email.
- Even marketers know that sales teams are not optimally equipped for executing conversions, with only 16% saying that outbound practices offer quality leads for sales teams.
There’s a difference between the efforts that marketing teams are trying to put in and the lead generation results that sales teams receive. The shift in recent years to digital methods means that marketing messages are getting lost in a lot of online “noise.”
Lead Generation: Where (and When) to Go
In B2B marketing, it’s often wise to focus social media marketing on LinkedIn. It is generally geared toward business concerns and has good analytic tools that help you refine your marketing strategy and reach your potential buyers.
Related: LinkedIn’s New Restrictions: A Benefit for Lead Generation?
Other marketing channels tend to be reliable lead generation tools, too. However, reaching potential clients through email remains a powerful way to connect with your target audience. Whether you use an email newsletter or other types of email communication can be changed as you get an idea of which methods are most effective.
Make Sure to Measure Results
To get started, you need to take a few leaps and try out various marketing methods. Be sure to measure your results, no matter which marketing you choose and the channels you decide to utilize. You need to know which steps of your strategy produce the best return on investment. Measuring results is a foundational component of any marketing plan.
- What are you measuring? This is an important question to address. Are you looking for click-throughs on your emails or just open rates? Would you like to see comments appearing on your blogs, or are you more interested in counting how many visitors to your blog end up browsing your website?
- What counts as a lead? In any lead generation strategy, you must determine at which point your potential buyer officially becomes a lead in the engagement cycle. This discussion should ideally include your company’s sales manager and key sales team members. For your sales team, considering only those contacts ready for a meeting with a salesperson to be a lead is important.
If you are counting someone that visits your site as a lead, you will have a frustrated sales team if they repeatedly find that your leads are nowhere near deciding to spend money with your company.
Create High-Quality Content With a Consistent Brand Message
You should vary your content in format and topic, but it should be unified by its consistent brand message. Each content piece should answer a question or address a challenge common among your target audience, but it should always have your distinct voice and include a call to action that leads your audience back to your website for more.
Just as important, your content needs to have a high-quality standard. You’ll quickly lose your audience if your topics are too general or if your promise to solve a problem comes up empty. Be sure to publish only content that fits your brand message and will be valuable to your target audience.
Choose Reliable Marketing Channels
Deciding where to publish your content requires careful consideration, but a few ways to think about it may help guide your process. One of the best approaches is to choose one or two traditional and digital marketing channels:
- Traditional: Traditional marketing channels include radio and television marketing and direct mail. It also includes telemarketing. These methods remain reliable ways to reach your target audience, but in the case of radio, television, and direct mail, it may be more difficult to personalize the message and zero in on your target audience. You are more likely going to be forced to broadcast a message across a larger population.
- Digital: Digital marketing channels are social media, email marketing, and posting on your own website. It includes earned content, like shares on social media and links to other useful content. Digital marketing has huge potential for personalization, but the common drawback is its passive nature. You can post online, send out emails and publish blogs, but you are generally forced to sit back and see what happens once you do.
Combining Digital and Traditional Methods for Lead Generation
Choosing only traditional methods or only digital methods can lead to common pitfalls. In the current B2B marketing environment, where social media is a popular choice, many companies are making the mistake of relying too heavily on passive lead generation tools. When companies choose only traditional methods, though, they are likely to miss out on catching the attention of their target audience with a highly personalized message.
Telemarketing: Your Perfect Lead Generation Strategy Partner
Telemarketing is the perfect partner to digital marketing for lead generation: Much of what is involved with digital marketing requires a passive mode. You create high-quality content, post it on social media or send it in an email or newsletter, and then you wait. You wait to see whether your subject line included the right language to encourage click-throughs or if your infographic had the right images to gather momentum on social media. With analytics and refining, you can build digital marketing for effective lead generation, but some of it is a waiting game.
Not so with telemarketing. Digital marketing is a great asset to any growth strategy, but you can maximize the effectiveness of your efforts by pairing your digital marketing with telemarketing. With telemarketing, you get immediate information about whether you are sending content to the decision-maker, as well as whether your contact enjoys receiving white papers or blogs, and whether they like to access them on social media or receive them in an email. The amount of information you can gain in one telephone conversation can augment and improve any data you receive in analytics. Telemarketing is unparalleled for effective lead generation.
Lead generation is critical to your growth, and Blue Valley Telemarketing can help you create a strategy that combines the best of digital marketing with the reliable lead generation that comes with telemarketing. Let’s have a conversation about how telemarketing can boost your lead generation.
Why Outsource Your Lead Generation With Blue Valley Marketing?
One of the best methods of lead generation continues to be telemarketing. Your lead generation telemarketing campaign can be approached like a business plan; you’ll describe your lead generation goals, your audience, details that make your audience special, the pain points, and industry trends. You can build your telemarketing script around these issues.
There is a lot of discussion about whether to go with an on-premise telemarketing solution or outsource to a professional agency. However, the outcome of the discussion is almost always swayed in favor of outsourcing because there are too many advantages, which include scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Top reasons for outsourcing other than cost:
- Nurture relationships:Â Nothing surpasses telemarketing to help you establish relationships. Even if they aren’t ready to convert for this campaign, a nurtured lead will be worth a lot more than it is now.
- Training and Development:Â the telemarketing industry is excellent at changing the landscape around them. Agents get educated in the latest technology as well as communication techniques that attract more business.
- Professionalism:Â an outsourced telemarketer will have more professional abilities on their side than the agents you piece together for an in-house call center.
- Persistence:Â professional telemarketers follow a strict schedule that is efficient and persistent, which means they will find more high-value sales leads.
- Teamwork: Â not only will an outsourced company work as a cohesive unit, but they also team up with clients to ensure that the solutions they deliver are consistent with company standards.
Your lead generation campaign will be exponentially more effective when you understand who your best customer is going to be. This means you’ll need behavioral data on your demographic. When paired with the right telemarketing company, the audience will be targeted correctly.
One of the strengths of telemarketing is the automation involved in the technology telemarketers use today. Not only does this automation connect more targets to the marketers, but it also does it with less cost and more efficiency. But that’s not the biggest strength you’ll find in your lead generation campaign using telemarketing: perhaps the most advantageous aspect of telemarketing is its proactive approach. When marketing professionals can have an actual conversation with the target, the ability to generate leads is much greater than it is through other marketing channels.
For years, Blue Valley Telemarketing has proven to clients that outsourcing lead generation needs are the best choice. What are your lead generation needs? Contact us today, and we’ll tell you how we can assist you.
Last Updated on August 23, 2022 by Ronen Ben-Dror