You've probably heard that generating leads is a great way to attract new customers and grow your business. But without the right strategy, it can be challenging to know where to start.
How can you easily generate leads? Where are you going to find qualified contacts and nurture? Who are you going to offer your products and services?
Every B2B business needs to generate leads, and it's always best to start with the basics. This is why we're here to show you ways to generate leads without spending a year trying to create an automation software or focus on strategies used by people who already have an established list of leads.
A lead is a potential customer who has shown interest in your business, product, or service. Generating leads is the key to help you grow your sales pipeline and create more opportunities for your company to earn more profit.
But generating leads is not easy, and it takes time, effort, and strategy to do it successfully. So if you're really committed and serious about increasing more sales and generating more leads, here are the smart and proven ways that helped us and other B2B businesses attain exceptional results.
You cannot create a list of leads online, contact them individually, and directly sell your product or service. In fact, that is a pure waste of time, and some leads may even find you annoying.
The best way to do this is to conduct market research either on your own or with the help of a reliable market research company. But, first, you need to find out more information about your target market, including their location, preferences, social status, and other details that can affect their decision-making process.
Doing so will allow you to get a better perspective of your potential customers, which will make it easier for you to come up with an effective lead generation strategy.
If there's a hangout place for potential leads, LinkedIn would be that place. Studies show that about 80% of Business-to-Business (B2B) leads come from LinkedIn.
Most successful marketers and top-sellers spend a few hours on their LinkedIn account, searching for leads in marketing groups with over 20,000 members and even more! However, you have to keep in mind that you could only join these groups if you are considered professional in your niche.
And because people in these groups are highly professionals who come together to talk about business, they can kick you out once you sound like a pesky marketer who is only after their contact information.
But if you really want to check how it goes, remember these three things that can help you maximize the use of LinkedIn to generate leads:
Soon, you may find yourself establishing a high level of interaction and connecting with individual group members resulting in getting leads.
It's your job to make it look like you're offering advice when in fact, you're using the opportunity to promote your business and services.
When we type questions on Google, one of the most popular and reliable websites to show up would be Quora. This is one of the many platforms that allow you to engage with people who share their personal struggles and business problems that you may offer solutions to.
It currently has over 100 million users, which a part of them could potentially be your target audience.
You can start by seeking questions related to your niche. If you have a proposing solution, you might as well answer the existing questions. Over time, this can get noticed by your target market, thus creating brand awareness.
If possible, you can add answers that would gradually refer people to your website, encourage them to get your services, and make a profit from it.
Simple as that, and you are earning money from leads!
Every marketer, entrepreneur, and consumer is just like the rest of us. They have an opinion on their own, and they also want to voice out suggestions that can benefit their businesses and companies.
Most business and employment-oriented online platforms are guarding what they have to talk about. This is because they are usually expected to get pitched or pitch to.
But social media has lowered guard compared to these platforms. For example, a particular marketer might voice his opinion using his Facebook account, or an employee from a well-known company might tweet his views online.
Use these mediums to make an online promotion and find personal insights into your prospects that allow you to influence the decision to produce your products or offer your services.
Our current condition calls for effective phone call marketing. Hence, telemarketing and other forms are proven useful more than ever!
Most companies often discourage telemarketing, such as inbound calls, outbound calls, lead generation, and sales calls. However, marketing statistics show another angle that shows how effective they are today.
Telemarketing communicates to lists of prospects by calling them through telephone or contacting them over the internet to buy products or services. This type of outreach allows your company to note only the 'interested' and high-quality leads and prospecting them as consumers.
However, some callers referred to this as an 'intrusive' way of getting leads. For this reason, it is best to get experienced, and professional telemarketers with practical strategies to apply to the receiver won't have to react violently nor turn down the phone immediately.
Other companies resort to AppointmentSetting.co.uk to connect with hundreds of lead generation and B2B companies that allow them to seek professional telemarketing services.
On the other hand, you can directly contact lead generation companies with a good reputation within the industry.
This is entirely expected for the audience who signed up for your email newsletter or leads you've got from other sources. But, regardless of where it came from, emails have tremendous weight in conveying messages and feelings about brands.
You can create emails the way your audience prefers it, whether that's switching from personalized academic prose or informal letters with emojis, stickers, and GIFs.
Pinching to a more personalized note allows you to emotionally connect with the recipient, thinking you are genuinely interested and concerned in helping them the best way you can.
Moreover, a personalized email has a higher chance of getting a response than a templated one. In fact, personalized email subject lines boost the open rate by as much as 50%, according to a New Yes Lifecycle Marketing report.
Finish off the email using an email signature citing your high-quality headshot, name, role in the company, and link to your website or LinkedIn account.
Once you've made use of LinkedIn, Quora, Social Media, and email campaigns, it's now time for prospects to get redirected to the landing page of your website.
Typically, when leads clicked on a specific keyword search, marketing campaign, or online ads you referred them to, they would be redirected to your landing page. This is often called the 'lead capture page' or the 'destination page,' mainly because it is the first thing that leads will see.
For this reason, your landing page should be designated to attract and provide solutions and value to your visitors. Meanwhile, adding social proofs, live chats, and a call-to-action (CTA) copy or button on your landing pages can increase sales leads.
You can even attach the commonly used feature of an email newsletter, where visitors can leave their name and email address to get access to promos, productions, and other sweet discounts!
If you really want to quickly get hundreds of leads, one of the best ways to do so is by offering a free tool.
Great examples of companies that do just that are Hotjar with their free heat mapping tool and HubSpot with their free Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Your customers are more inclined to test your product than buy it right away. Offering a free tool also gives you the ability to attract high-quality leads into your sales funnel, specifically those who are actively looking for the product or service you're offering.
We even applied this same concept to our website here. So if ever you need help finding the best appointment setting and lead generation companies in the United Kingdom, you can use our service for free.
Our team can connect you with the best partners that fit your needs and preference, and you'll receive quotes from them as soon as possible at no extra cost.
Aha! You found another common piece of advice that you might have seen a hundred times before. But I cannot stress enough how important it is to create compelling quality content for every potential visitor of your website.
Contents and blogs make your website even more valuable! On the contrary, websites without contents look dull and boring. Who wants to avail of something that looks uninteresting?
We might think that people hardly ever read nowadays due to the digital effect of social media and its features that make people just want to scroll down for more photos and videos online.
However, marketers want to ensure how they can rely on a particular company or benefit from a specific product or service that they wish to purchase in the future. This isn't something that a short clip or an infographic can cover in detail.
But writing content is not as easy as journaling. You have to consider various content strategies that aim to grab hooks, make reading enjoyable, relevant to imposing problems, and the exact solution your customers are looking for! We don't want to attract the wrong group of prospects. So instead, aim for content that is only for them.
For instance, if you are a travel agency that aims to connect with travelers, you would want to create a content entitled, "Why do you need a travel agency?" instead of "How to Travel outside the Country?".
This way, you get travelers' attention to source out your services, rather than getting random people's attention who are planning or dreaming of traveling abroad.
High-quality content drives more people to visit your website and generate sales leads or even backlinks from dominant blogs online.
Collecting leads isn't limited to social media, your website, or your LinkedIn profile. One of the best ways to generate leads fast is by paying for advertisements on Google or Bing.
There's no better place to connect with your target market than on Google search pages where people are looking for answers and topics related to your product or service.
Studies show that people who click on ads are 50% more likely to make a purchase, and this is something you can take advantage of if you want to improve your business' lead generation efforts.
Let's say you're an HVAC service provider in Liverpool and you specialize in air conditioning and ventilation. With Google Ads, the advertising platform on Google, you can easily target phrases like "HVAC services Liverpool" or "Liverpool air conditioning repair" and appear on the search results when customers search for those phrases.
You can even target consumers based on their current location and make it so that you only appear to people in the UK or in the city where you offer your service.
Digital advertising isn't that difficult to learn. In fact, you could have a better understanding of current trends in online marketing by simply watching a couple of tutorial videos on YouTube.
Perhaps you often use social media platforms like YouTube or hear podcasts from Apple Music, Spotify, and the likes.
These content channels are one of the most effective tools when you need to generate leads. When prospects come across your channel or station, things may go well for you and your business.
You can take existing content such as a blog post or case study, and adapt it to another platform. For instance, you can convert the idea you've read from blog posts into video content or another way around where videos are adapted into blogs.
Some industries even take analytical and risk-averse case studies and share them through podcasts.
We know how tempting buying leads can be, especially if you're just starting and your sales funnel is empty. However, you can't take away the fact that buying leads is pretty convenient, and in some industries, it can be very cheap.
Once you have your leads, you can start your marketing campaign. But the question is, will it be successful? You can definitely get leads, but the chances of converting them into high-paying customers seem like a tough challenge.
Why is that? It's because these leads "opted in" on a different website, page, or source. They don't have any idea about your product, service, or company. They're not quite sure why they are even on your website in the first place.
Your messages might even get flagged as 'spam' as they never reached out or opted in receiving your company's messages. As a result, this will have severe consequences for your marketing campaign.
If enough email providers marked you as spam, your email account would be sent to the blacklist, and other email providers would be notified. You won't reach any leads until you get off that dreaded list, which can be a complicated task to pull off.
This is one of the main reasons why we only recommend generating your leads and why you should avoid buying leads from third-party sources. Sure, you can fulfill your need of having enough customers to call on, but your overall conversion rate may suffer.
If you'd like to have quality sales leads, it's better to build your list organically.
Generating leads is a crucial part of the B2B marketing industry. But, generating more quality leads is another challenging part, to begin with.
Even if you do have thousands of sales leads piled up that your telemarketers may contact, the possibility of acquiring qualified leads and sustaining them seems a bit worrisome. You have to undergo the circus of fulfilling highs and humbling lows.
So whether you're a newbie who doesn't know where to start contacting prospects or a marketer with few leads on the lists, this article can serve as your stepping stone to generate more leads for your business and even help you improve the lead quality of your lists.
If you want to build your own list of high-quality leads, our team at Appointment Setting UK can connect you with the top telemarketing companies in the country. We can help attract and nurture leads from the start of the buying process until they make a purchase.
You can call us at 020-80599450 to discuss your marketing plans with our representatives, or you can answer our simple test, and we'll do our best to be in touch within the day.