Sales is like the fuel that keeps your business running.
To keep your sales tank full, you need to work on how you can attract visitors to your business and how to convert them into leads. You’ll have to make a couple of choices. What marketing activities to choose? Should you hire an outsourcing agency or let your marketing team handle it?
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Continue and learn how to boost your lead acquisition process so your business could reach stars!
If sales is the fuel for your business, lead generation is the fuel for sales.
Long story short, lead generation is the process of attracting people to your business by making them naturally interested in your product or service.
A smart inbound marketing strategy tailored to your potential customer will help you find new prospective customers and keep your pipeline full of qualified leads.
Hard to believe?
Surprised with the numbers? The real question is how to turn these opportunities into leads.
Some of the lead generation marketing strategies will be easier to implement, and some will need putting more effort, time and know-how.
There are different ways of handling lead generation activities. You may keep your whole marketing in-house and use your own team’s resources. You can also hire a lead generation company that will help you drive traffic to your website and gain some qualified leads.
No matter what solution will you choose, there’s a particular idea behind all the best lead generation tactics. To understand it you’ll need to take a moment and try stepping into the regular customer’s shoes.
For many years customers were bombed with old school marketing activities—tv and press ads, cold calls and billboards. Overwhelmed by the amount of selling messages, they started to ignore them.
The process of selling and buying has changed, and there’s no going back. The customer prefers to find the service or a product on his own. Pushing him to buy something would instead turn him off.
How do you attract and convert strangers into leads? You need to provide them with enough helpful goodies they need. Try wondering what your potential customers’ questions are and how your company can help them get the answers.
Use the empathy to find the pains and desires of your potential customer. Let your marketing and sales team analyze the profile of your customers. Then create a marketing persona – a generalized representation of your dream customer.
A deep understanding of your business personas is critical for developing a right content strategy tailored to your audience. Giving your customers answers to their questions, you’ll make them initiate the contact by themselves. It’s much more natural way to start a deep relationship with a chance to convert.
Try answering these questions for a good understanding of your customers’ situation.
Answer those to put yourself on the right track to create the content that will attract the visitors to your website. And make them want to stay in touch with your company for a bit longer.
There are many examples of content that companies use to drive traffic to their website. Some of them are interesting blog posts, white papers, ebooks, infographics, webinars and reports.
In exchange for the valuable content, use Call-to-Action and contact forms to ask your visitors to leave their email address. If they consider the piece of content worth it, they’ll be happy to do it.
What’s in it for you? His contacts land in your CRM and he’s ready to join your marketing conversion funnel. For the next weeks, you’ll nurture him with more useful content and warm him up on the path to eventually buying.
Investing in the valuable content will always pay off – with a good promotion strategy your potential customers will find them and take an interest in your company on their own.
Generating answers and solutions that solve their problems, you bring them closer to become your leads. Fueling them you fuel yourself.
I’m sure that the general concept behind the lead generation is clear now. Now, before you plan your activities, you have to answer two questions carefully. Who are your users? Which marketing activities will attract them to your website and make them want more?
Only with that knowledge you’ll be able to plan your activities on proper channels.
Here’s a couple of lead generation tactics that will help you drive the traffic to your website and get lots of valuable leads:
Provide your potential customers with the information they’re looking for.
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Grow your network and let others promote your value to their customers.
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Make use of every customer touch point opportunity and promote your brand across the web.
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Solve your customers’ issues in the real-time and get their contact details via pre-chat survey.
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Get personal with your prospects by messaging them directly into their mailbox.
Learn moreCurious how these activities may look in practice? We have a great blog post with the examples of great lead generation strategies used by some companies.
We’ve prepared a stack of goodies for a complete lead generation process
Adding lots of new tasks to your marketing Trello doesn’t freak you out? Go for trying the in-house approach. Be aware though: you’ll need a lot of work hours to cover the research, analysis, strategy planning and execution. If time is not the luxury you can afford, you can always give your sales team external support.
No matter if you’re a startup or a business veteran. Sometimes a little help from a lead generation company may be exactly what your business needs to get the right traction.
Needing help with building a contact base, pumping your SEO, executing a content strategy or taking care of your live chat support? They’ll be thrilled to do it for you. However, you need to prepare yourself to spend some, sometimes serious, budget on their services. Lead generation companies that create quality leads can be quite expensive.
What solution is best for your business?
Ask yourself a few questions. How do I generate leads now? What is the value I can offer to my customers? Next, think what you can do or improve to make your leads fly.
Want to know how to turn your website into a lead generation machine?
Do it on your ownDon’t want to engage your team in some marketing tasks? You can always trust one of lead generation companies.
They will work their best to find new ways to attract a user, build a relationship and then—turn him into a lead for your business.
Hire a pro companyLead generation companies offer a variety of services aimed to help you find more customers. Do you know what area you might be needing help with? It’s time to prepare your brief and start looking for the best partner that will help you grow your business.
How do you find one? Start with asking your friends and professional network on Linkedin. You can also browse the Internet in search for recommendations. It’s always a good idea to check business service recommendation websites like Clutch.co. Basing on portfolio and customer reviews, they put market leaders in one place, where you can find your partner.
For the busiest of you we compiled some of our trusted companies into a list:
Lead generation is a tricky part that requires lots of creativity, but your efforts definitely can’t stop there.
Make sure, that each of your leads gets the best customer service possible. There’s nothing like mouth-to-mouth recommendations of your happy customers. It is a perfectly natural and effort-free way to gain new leads.
Want to make sure you’re making best out of your customer support? Consider training your team, so that they could create the best experience for your customers.
Set-up LiveChat to engage your visitors in real-time conversations, capture leads and close more sales
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