by Harsh Agrawal
Republished from Shout Me Loud, May 25, 2017
No business can survive without attracting leads.
It does not matter whether your business is online or offline, if you’re not generating quality leads, that business will definitely suffer.
This is one area of marketing that most people often find challenging.
Research carried out by the B2B Tech Marketing Community shows that: “The primary challenge B2B marketers often face is generating quality leads.”
You might have tried several lead generation tactics before, but none have worked for you.
And believe me, it’s hard. But the problem isn’t that you can’t do it.
The problem lies in your strategy.
However, remember it’s not only generating leads; you need to attract quality and targeted leads.
If you’re just focusing on generating any lead, sooner or later you will find out you’ve wasted your time and effort.
It’s just like struggling to fetch water from a river and then pouring the water into a pot with a lot of holes. I’m sure you know what the outcome will be.
Don’t do this. You need to be smart.
Done? Ok, let’s proceed…
7 Lead Generation Strategies That Have Proven To Work For Smart Marketers
1. Write Insanely Kick-Ass Content
As a marketer, one of the most important things you should be fond of is writing.
It is through writing that most people will get to know you, which often results in them trusting you and becoming your loyal follower.
You might be wondering where the cliché “Content is king” comes from.
- It comes from the truth.
The 2016 content preferences survey report by DemandGen states that: “51% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago.”
It’s no wonder that 75% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing according to Curata.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to start serving your audience half-baked, mediocre content just because you’ve heard that content is king.
This would be you shooting yourself in the foot.
The type of content I’m talking about here is the content that is interesting, compelling, intriguing, and helpful.
It’s the type of content that will make your readers start looking for your subscription form without you asking them to. I’m talking about the type of content that will open doors and land you clients.
LinkedIn’s Technology Marketing Community shows that: “The top three goals of good content marketing are: Lead Generation (59%); Thought Leadership/Market Education (43%); Brand Awareness (40%).”
Notice that lead generation is the most important thing on this list with 59%. This shows how effective content marketing is for lead generation.
Remember, when you create excellent content, it has the potential to go viral and get seen by many people, eventually funnelling more leads that you can send out to your autoresponder.
However, for this strategy to work well, you should have your own blog.
It’ll interest you to know that 62 percent of marketers have their own blog. This is so they can attract their audience who will potentially end up becoming paying customers.
The screenshot below says it all:
As you can see, a lot of marketers are using blogs as a tool for lead generation. It’s one of the most effective lead generation tactics on the internet.
The first step is to attract them as strangers using blogs, keywords, and social media.
Then, you need to convert them by compelling them to give you their email address.
Once you’ve achieved these first two steps, you just have to start earning their trust and loyalty by sending them helpful emails.
Once you’ve achieved that, selling them on something becomes pretty easy.
Overall, you must learn how to create useful content as it is key to attracting high-quality leads.
Therefore, if you haven’t been serious with your content marketing, you need to start getting serious now.
2. Create A Good Optin Offer/Incentive
When it comes to using this method to capture leads, the success of it depends on the quality of what you’re giving away.
You don’t want to create an offer that people can easily found elsewhere; you need to give away something of great value.
It needs to be an incentive that your readers will be happy to get even if they didn’t know they wanted it.
For instance, one of the most popular lead generation offers on the internet today is free eBooks.
This has helped a lot of people exponentially grow their email list with minimal effort, just by giving away eBooks as an opt-in incentive on their landing pages.
According to Price Water House Cooper’s industry forecast, the total revenue from eBook sales worldwide are expected to reach nearly $8.7 billion in 2018.
If you calculate that accurately, that’s a whopping increase of about 3000 percent from 2008. That’s not all; the United States alone is expected to reach about 112 million eBook readers by 2020.
What do you say to that? Crazy, right?
There are a lot of opportunities in this growing market.
Even though you’re not creating your opt-in eBook for sale, it should give more value than the ones that are for sale in the marketplace.
You don’t want to sound like “yet another guru blogger”; instead, you want readers to be nodding their heads in awe and agreement while reading your book.
It’s not only eBooks which you can giveaway; there are many other types of incentives that have proven to work for people.
ou can give away high-quality video courses, webinar recordings, blogging tools, etc. There are so many things you can give away in exchange for people’s email.
Just make your giveaways as valuable and relevant as possible.
For detailed reading:
Top 7 Content Upgrade Ideas To Get Targeted Email Subscribers
The Evergreen Guide to Mastering Content Upgrades and How It Can Benefit Your Blog
How To Create A Checklist In PDF Format For Content Upgrades
3. Focus On Inbound Marketing
In case you don’t know, inbound marketing is where you should be putting most of your time.
You can forget about outbound marketing.
According to HubSpot: “Most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing.”
Inbound marketing is the process of creating quality content that is designed to appeal to your customers/clients.
Instead of going out and hunting for customers, they will be coming to you to get whatever it is you’re offering.
It’s all about attracting customers to your doorstep. This is the type of marketing that has worked and is still working for the most successful people today.
Once you form the habit of creating great content that gives a lot of value to your prospective customers, they’ll be so impressed that not only will you build up a sizable list, you’ll have a base that is more than happy to share your great content with their friends.
Over the years, outbound marketing has totally lost its value.
People are inundated with different types of outbound marketing today (cold calling, email blasts, etc.).
It has never become more difficult to get quality leads from outbound marketing.
The screenshots below says it all:
Similarly, HubSpot states that inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into their own marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads do.
Bottom line: If you’re not yet focusing on inbound marketing, you need to start if you truly want to generate quality leads.
4. Host A Webinar
If you want to generate an avalanche of warm and targeted leads, then you need to consider hosting a webinar in your industry. Just like the eBook system I mentioned above, the success of a webinar will depend on what it offers.
A webinar, when done well, will give you more quality leads than you can ever handle; however, the webinar must provide something of massive value before people will speedily give you their contact details.
If you want to generate good leads with a webinar, you should ask some qualifying questions on the webinar sign up page.
This will enable you to know exactly what your attendees want. You can’t host a successful webinar without addressing people’s pressing problems.
This pre-webinar survey will be very helpful in identifying peoples pain points.
5. Share Real Life Case Studies
Still thinking of what lead generation strategy to use?
Share some real life case studies.
Let me tell you, one of the most powerful triggers that gets me to follow a particular marketer is a case study, and I bet you’re the same way too.
People like reading/listening to case studies because it drives them to take action to get a similar result.
A survey conducted by eMarketer in 2013 proved that: “62.6 percent of U.S. agency executives generated targeted leads using client case studies posted on the company’s website.”
’ve never seen any other type of blog post draw a crowd quite like case studies; if you’ve been on the internet for a long time, you’ve also noticed this.
Take Pat Flynn for example:
His monthly income report gets the highest number of comments and shares than any of his other blog posts.
Why is this?
Because people are tired of the generic how-to-do-this, how-to-do-that type of article. People want practical tips and proof that something is working.
The case study doesn’t even need to be from you. You can do some research and find something that might be interesting to your readers.
The point is to ensure it’s relevant and actionable.
If you want to lead people to your funnel, you need let them know that you can be real with them. Show them some tangible proof that what you’re talking about is working.
Then, they’ll happy become your customers.
Here are few case studies that you can read right now:
- From £0 to £11,000+ Per Month E-Commerce Link Building Case Study
- The Effect of Date Stamps on Blog Traffic [Case Study]
- How I Built A Micro-Niche Site Earning $174/Month from AdSense
6. Make Your Optin Resources Irresistible
Another way of generating an inflow of targeted leads is to build up different opt-in resources.
You can simply create different versions of a blog post and turn it into an incentive.
For example, you can publish a blog post on a particular topic; then, you can then create an audio and/or video version of that same post.
That’s not all… worksheets, checklists, and PDF versions of a post also work like magic.
All these can be given out on the blog post as an opt-in offer.
The point here is that you need to make sure that everything you give out is so, so, so good.
The better it is, the more people will want it.
Then, they’ll become hooked to you.
7. Have Your Opt-In Forms Visibly Scattered All Over Your Site
Once you’re done with the 6th step, the last thing you need to do is make your opt-in forms visibly scattered all over your site.
When it comes to lead generation, one thing is to have a well-designed opt-in form offering valuable incentives, and another thing is for your audience to see it.
If they can’t see it, there’s no way they’ll be able to opt-in.
Therefore, it is important your forms are placed in strategic places on your website so they don’t have to look for it to subscribe.
There are many places you can display forms, including your sidebar, after posts, in the blog header, as pop-ups, and as a featured box.
Just make them as visible and enticing as possible so they will be easily seen and able to convert really well.
The Best Lead Generation Techniques
When it comes to lead generation, you have to experiment.
Visit other people’s websites and see what they’re doing. Test out these techniques on your site and see what the result is.
If it’s successful, then rinse and repeat. If not, ditch the strategy and try something else.
There are so many lead generation strategies that have worked for so many people in the past.
It’s important to remember that there’s no magical way of generating lots of leads.
But you can start from the 7 lead generation strategies I just shared with you here. Pick one of them and start testing, and I bet you will be surprised at the outcome.
If you know of any other good lead generation strategy that I didn’t mention here, please share it with us in the comments section! Let me know what’s working for you!
For further reading:
- Top 7 WordPress Plugins To Get More Email Subscribers
- 9 Social Media and Email Marketing Power-Ups for Better Conversions
- OptinMonster Review: Lead Generation Plugin For Smart Bloggers