Whether you are a small startup business or a multi-million dollar corporation, lead generation is something you will hear time and time again, especially from your management and marketing teams. It is a fundamental part of every single business – the blood in the veins of the organization. However, what does it actually mean, and how do you achieve successful lead generation? Let’s take a look.
What is a lead?
A lead can be anyone who has expressed some sort of desire in your products or services. This lead can come about in many different ways – it can be through a phone call, a visit to physical premises, your social media channels or your website. Digital marketing methods, which direct traffic to your website, improve search engine rankings, and increase web referrals account for almost 95% of leads.
How can you improve your leads and convert them to sales?
Social media
Social media is rapidly increasing in popularity and is used by people of all ages, all over the world, and because of this, it is probably the most widely recognized platform (and one of the cheapest!) to promote your business. Social media marketing has changed from being a way of merely connecting people online to connecting people to the products and services they need and want.
Using lead management software
Getting yourself some lead management software will help you convert leads to sales. It will keep all the data in one place and allow you to identify trends, see what impact your marketing activities are having and which would-be customers might need a little more nurturing to turn them into paying customers.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what helps websites to rank highly on search engines. The better the rank of your website, the higher the chances are of a business website to be visited by a bigger audience and more relevant traffic. More traffic means more leads, and if these leads get converted – well, you are on the right track!
While social media is, as we mentioned above, great for marketing and attracting leads, the everchanging algorithms mean that you can quickly disappear off the radar if you are not careful, so making sure that you have a good, robust website which ranks highly is essential for bringing in and converting leads.
Content
Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page on your website. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information – perhaps in the form of a blog post. You can include a ‘call to action’ – an image, button, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action -anywhere in your content. This may be inline, at the bottom of the post, or even on the side panel. The happier a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page, thus creating a brand new lead.
