Running a business isn’t a piece of cake. As an entrepreneur, you’ll need to master how you can use your business ingredients the best you can in order to achieve both your business’s short-term and long-term goals. When starting a business, having a well-defined business strategy is always a good start. Without any documented business strategy, your business is bound to fail.
The essence of a business strategy depends upon how well it’s executed. Without it, the business will have no direction. While it’s believed that companies with no business strategies are more susceptible to failure, it’s also important to understand that not every business will have it figured out right from the start. After all, some of the most successful business leaders today also faced their fair share of failures but managed to redeem themselves.
With endless possibilities that you can do with technology, it’s no doubt that all businesses rely on it. Through applying technology seamlessly into your business, you’ll more likely have more people getting interested in your business, which is known as lead generation.
Perhaps, most businesses in this age treat lead generation as the golden standard of business success. One of your main objectives as an organization is to acquire more people who are willing to support and work with you.
In this article, you’ll be exploring the wonders of lead generation, its smallest unit, which is the lead, and how it can revolutionize a business. This will also touch on the basic concepts of how leads are generated. Also, stay tuned for the highlight of this article, which is a list of the best and most effective strategies in lead generation.
Since lead generation is under the category of inbound marketing, contacting people through their mobile phones will be helpful in your endeavor. You can use ringless voicemail services offered by companies such as Drop Cowboy, which will be elaborated later on in this article.
What Is A Lead And Lead Generation?
At first glance, the concept of leads can be quite confusing, but think of it this way: leads are people who will lead themselves into your venture. Basically, a lead is an individual who shows any form, way, or shape of interest to your company, products, services, and solutions. If someone messages your business social media account asking about the price of your product, then, that person is already considered a lead. However, the challenge now is how you can transform this lead into a buying customer.
This is when a lead generation comes into the picture. Lead generation is the process in which businesses strive to attract and convert guests and leads, and have them involved in their operations. A lead isn’t necessarily a customer who’ll eventually purchase from your business, but it can also be a future employee, business partner, investor, or collaborator.
Lead Generation And Conversion: Why They Matter
Why would a business spend their time persuading individuals to do business with them if they only display mere curiosity? The answer to that is simple: showing interest and curiosity is the first step to every relationship. Through making efforts to turn these strangers into your clients, they’ll more likely become one eventually.
As the prospect shows interest and initiates the relationship with your business, there’ll be a more natural and non-intrusive transition from being a lead to a customer. As you convert more strangers into your clients or investors, more opportunities will come knocking at your door.
Here are some of the reasons why lead generation is extremely important in a business:
Increases brand awareness and recognition
Contributes to a higher return on investment (ROI)
Incurs fewer costs compared to other marketing strategies
Increases sales and profit ratio
Expands your customer base and network
Improves presence in the industry
Opens up your business to future opportunities
The Lead Generation Process
Lead generation is an essential stage of the inbound marketing model, which is a business methodology that focuses on attracting customers through tailoring specific content and experiences to them. The first step to generating leads starts once you’ve piqued the interest of an individual.
Here is a simple process as to how lead generation occurs:
Attracting a stranger: In this step, your lead might have accidentally seen your post while scrolling through social media or a printed material near their vicinity.
Converting the stranger into a visitor using keywords, blogs, and social publishing: Is your post engaging enough? Did it have important keywords that can catch a stranger’s interest? If the answers are yes, they’ll more likely visit your social media page or website.
Converting a visitor into a lead: Without any clicks or any valuable actions, your visitor will not officially become a lead. If they decide to interact with your call-to-action (CTA) buttons, they’ll become a lead.
Turning a lead into a customer by closing the deal: After clicking the CTA, the lead will be directed to a landing page where they’ll have to provide their information in exchange for something of value, then, will finally proceed to sign up a form.
Satisfaction will encourage the customer to become a promoter: Lastly, if your customer had an excellent experience with your offers, they’ll have the power to influence other people through different ways, which will be covered later in the discussion.
Strategies To Gain And Convert More Leads
Now that you’re ready to generate some leads, it’s crucial to use as many strategies as you can to reach more people. As such, here are the strategies that you can employ to gain more leads for your business:
Use Ringless Voicemails
Since a large portion of the world’s population today uses smartphones in their daily lives, you can take advantage of this by incorporating ringless voicemail technology into your marketing and lead generation strategies. A ringless voicemail technology is a cloud-based software system that allows your business to send pre-recorded messages to prospects. The use of automated operators in your marketing can enhance work efficiency and productivity, instead of relying on live agents to do all the work.
Moreover, using ringless voicemail is a non-invasive method of contacting potential customers who are busy with their lives If they’re interested in your brand, they can simply hit the call back button. Thanks to ringless voicemails, you can achieve a call back conversation ratio of 20% or more as prospects either answer your calls or call back your company after a missed call.
Engage In Mass Text Messaging
Aside from ringless voicemails, you can also send basic messages to your leads’ inboxes using a mass text app or software. Mass text messaging has always been an advantageous strategy used by industries, such as real estate, talent acquisition, advertising, and event management. SMS lead generation messages are usually composed of links, codes, contact information, and more to make them more appealing and engaging.
Additionally, you can integrate ringless voicemails and mass text messaging systems into your existing customer relationship management (CRM) system for a smoother workflow, and better storage and use of lead information.
Optimize And Enhance Your Website
Your website is at the forefront of your business, so you must take good care of it to build positive impressions from both your leads and customers. Website optimization is crucial in giving your visitors an excellent, successful experience before leaving your website.
When optimizing your website, you’ll have to take two steps. First, you need to identify the purpose of the lead is visiting your website. Are they going to make a purchase? Search information? Check reviews? This way, you can design and optimize the website to cater to such needs.
Secondly, identify your key performance indicators (KPI) that you should track to determine if you’re meeting your goals, then, decide which to test, change, or fix. Listed below are a few of the crucial KPIs that you should be tracking:
Keyword ranking increases
Bounce rates
Leads and conversions
Organic sessions
Average session duration
Top exit pages
Page load time
Write Guest Blog Posts For Various Websites
Websites publish blog posts with hyperlinks to other websites, which help in increasing their ranking on search engines. Through collaborating with a website, you can increase your chances of gaining leads through writing a guest post on their platform, then, hyperlinking your own brand, product, or service into that article. In short, it’s a win-win situation for both of you.
As more people engage with that blog post, more conversions can be generated, thus, reducing costs, as well as increasing the ROI. However, guest posting isn’t that easy, and it will also depend on the standards of the publisher.
Here are some tips for effective guest blogging:
Choose a unique topic that had less coverage in the past.
Pick the right website to collaborate with; make sure it’s connected to your industry.
Ensure that your content has the right tone and pitch.
Refrain from writing big chunks of text as readers find them off-putting.
Respond to the comments and replies.
Hosts Giveaways And Contests
Giving away discounts and gifts are effective social media marketing strategies that have stood the test of time. Who would say no to free items, especially if they only need to like your posts and follow your account to get them? Through running giveaways and contests packed with prizes, you can increase your followers and subscribers in social media, increase awareness about your brand, and increase social media engagement.
To further increase the benefits of hosting a giveaway or contest, you can add additional rules, such as sharing the post on their profiles and tagging a few friends in the comments section. This way, your post can even reach more people like a domino effect.
Implement Referral Programs
Marketing is, indeed powerful as it can attract people into getting to know your brand, products, and services better. Once you’ve made a successful transaction with a customer, you can take advantage of the situation to gain more leads through referral marketing. Customers won’t be put into a disadvantage in this case because it’s also a win-win situation: they can bag discounts and promos for every referral, while you’ll be able to convert more leads.
Moreover, another effective way is to offer both rewards to the referrer and the referred. For instance, the referrer will receive a 50% discount if the referred person will purchase something from the store; the latter will also get a 50% discount. The more people the referrer refers, then, the more rewards they can earn, thus, pushing them to refer people diligently.
Create Email And Newsletter Offers
Like sending a message to one’s phone inbox, this strategy will involve sending electronic mails and newsletters to email inboxes. Since email has become the standard inbox for various transactions and operations, people tend to check their emails several times a day, increasing the possibilities of you getting seen and read by leads if you decide to incorporate email marketing into your venture.
The first step to an email marketing relationship with leads is to collect their email addresses. You’ll frequently notice this in almost all sites today, wherein a window will pop-up asking you to type your email address to receive more updates and news about a particular brand. You can also customize your system by sending trigger emails that are sent whenever a person makes a specific action, like filling out an order form or checking out their cart.
But, take note that your leads have the right to stop following your brand if they don’t want to receive your emails anymore, so make sure to make it easy for them to unsubscribe. Typically, people can stop subscribing to a brand by clicking an unsubscribe button below the email, or directly sending an email to the company that they wish to unfollow.
Final Takeaway:
The success of your business heavily relies on customer engagement and satisfaction. As a business owner, you have to find simple yet effective ways to lead prospects into your venture, without overspending your resources. Fortunately, lead generation is exactly the solution to that, and you can start with it today by following the strategies discussed in this article.
Last but most importantly, keep in mind that these aren’t one-size-fits-all strategies, so you’ll have to apply your own creativity, as well as consider your needs and other pertinent factors to achieve lead generation success.
