Lead generation is a top priority for any business, regardless of the industry. With ruthless competition, saturated markets, sluggish economies, and increasingly demanding customers, generating leads has become a constant challenge for most organizations. Add to that technological advances, and marketers and sales teams are forced to grapple with an ever more sophisticated, complex, and constantly changing playing field.
But effectively generating leads shouldn’t be a struggle with the right tools and techniques. Neither should it require big budgets that only a few companies could afford.
Here are seven lead generation techniques to quickly fuel your sales funnel and increase revenue for your business.
Proven Lead Generation Practices to Boost Sales
1. Review your communications
Getting the house in order is the first step for any lead generation strategy. So, reviewing how you communicate with prospective leads through your primary communication channels is crucial. This includes your website, brochures, and other standard platforms and materials.
Do they provide all essential details about your product or service? What first impression do your branding, key messages, and writing style convey? Do they make it easy for prospects to get in touch with you? Does your website offer live chat support and display client testimonials?
Be critical in your review and optimize content to attract and impress your leads.
2. Leverage sales intelligence platforms
Sales intelligence platforms are an excellent tool to gather enriched leads and improve conversions. They can provide you with access to extensive databases of prospective leads. Leadar, for example, boasts of over 110 million US contacts.
These platforms represent a massive opportunity for businesses looking to access verified contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses, of potential clients. Some even offer additional details like industry experience and names of possible work colleagues, allowing you to engage more effectively with prospects.
3. Invest in referral programs
Encouraging happy customers to recommend your products and services is a powerful lead generation strategy for any business.
Incentives such as discounts and giveaways can help prompt existing clients to champion your brand and put in a good word. After all, there’s nothing more convincing than a personal recommendation. And often, these prospects will be warm leads. They’ll already have at least partial knowledge about your product and its benefits, improving your chances of conversion
4. Harness the power of communities
According to recent reports, a staggering 90% of the US population uses social media. The power of social communities is growing. And it has created an excellent opportunity for businesses to generate leads. Professional communities like LinkedIn have become a goldmine for B2B prospecting. Others, such as Facebook, can also give you access to different types of target audiences.
Social influencers play an important role in a lead generation strategy. They already command captive audiences who trust their opinion and advice. So, by partnering with influencers relevant to your product or service, you can effortlessly reach potential leads through brand endorsement.
5. Optimize content for search engines
Today, many people turn to Google to access information about their product and service interests, among other things. So, ensuring your business turns up at the top of those search results is essential to generate leads.
You can adopt several tactics to get the attention of search bots and rank high. These include researching your audience, identifying their search intent, targeting relevant keywords, link building, and updating and optimizing your content.
Of course, optimizing for search engines is a long-term process that requires consistent work. But an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy could help your brand stand out from the digital clutter, drive traffic to your website, and, ultimately, boost sales.
6. Deploy email marketing
Email marketing is another inexpensive strategy that offers great flexibility. This is likely why it has become a vital lead generation method for 81% of small- and medium-sized businesses.
You can use it to send out targeted messages to warm leads and move them along the sales funnel. It can even work as a valuable tool to approach the target audience with cold emailing.
Your email lists could come from newsletter signups, user interactions on your online store, digital ad campaigns, or even random databases that match your customer persona. Once you identify the email list, you then need to profile your prospects, determine what you would like to achieve, and craft crisp short content. Then don’t forget to A/B test your messages and optimize them for improved results.
There are many email automation tools to simplify this process. They could help analyze data to provide insights into your prospective clients and their behavior and allow you to personalize your engagement with leads.
7. Use lead magnets
A lead magnet is a popular tool to identify prospects, build email lists, provide product information, and generate interest.
For example, you can create an eBook detailing how your product helped resolve a critical industry challenge. Then give away a copy to anyone interested in exchange for their email address. Ultimately, it’s a win-win for both you and your prospective leads: they gain access to valuable insights while you get to build an email list.
Similarly, you can use checklists, white papers, research reports, and many other useful and relevant resources as lead magnets for your business.
8. Outsourced
Outsourced lead generation companies have become a popular option for businesses looking to boost their sales. These companies specialize in identifying potential customers and collecting their information for follow-up. One proven lead generation practice that can help improve sales is creating targeted and personalized content. This can be achieved through developing buyer personas and crafting content that speaks to their specific pain points and needs.
Another effective practice is utilizing multiple channels for lead generation, such as email marketing, social media, and paid advertising. Consistent follow-up and nurturing of leads is also crucial for converting them into customers. Outsourcing lead generation can save time and resources, while also ensuring that the process is handled by experienced professionals.
To Conclude
An effective lead generation strategy will have a combination of tactics we’ve discussed in this article. Remember, what’s effective for one business may not be the optimum solution for another. So, it’s important to measure success and adjust your strategy to improve results.
But before you implement these lead generation techniques, ensure you define your audience and set objectives and goals. Also, keep in mind that customer behavior and expectations may change over time. So, approaching lead generation with an open mind and being willing to adopt new strategies is crucial for success. Have a trial-and-error approach and test your CTAs over time, even when you think they deliver sufficient results. Most importantly, prioritize the quality of your leads over quantity.
