A lead is a person or organization that is interested in your product in some way. Their interest might just be budding or they might have already fixated on your product. But depending on their position in the sales funnel, strategies are developed and implemented.
What Is Lead Generation
Lead generation is collecting information about the individuals that have shown interest in your products or services. This includes dropping them into the sales funnel to turn them into paying customers.
Lead generation isn’t about spamming individuals with cold calls but luring them into your funnel by getting consensual information about them in the form of contact forms, offers, and trials.
Suppose that you created a social media giveaway that requires the interested parties to leave their contact information. That way, it’s not as evasive as calling someone out of the blue. Once they’ve submitted their information, they’ll already be expecting you to reach out.
Let’s discuss lead generation strategies that you can exploit to get ahead of your competitors.
- Opt-In Content
How can you practice the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing and still generate leads? With opt-in content. Opt-in content is downloadable content that your users can access upon filling a form with their latest information. They usually are notified about leaving the correct information because the content will be sent to the email address.
Creating an opt-in form is one of the most effective passive arrangements of lead generation that guarantees success if your content or product is relevant and helpful.
Placement of the opt-in forms is absolutely crucial for the interested personnel to leave their information. If you place the form too high, they’ll consider it spam. If the placement is too low, they might not even reach it.
Multiple forms can be effective in certain cases. But having too many of them is detrimental. Always be considerate about your audience and don’t let the forms get in their way while navigating through the content.
While designing the forms, try experimenting with the structure, color, and writings for them to be most effective. Sometimes a little difference between “you” and “me” in the submission button can have a huge impact.
- Lead Capture App
Generating leads and transforming them into prospects are two distinct things. Although we keep interchanging the terms frequently, there’s no reason to believe that they are the same. A lead turns into a prospect when they have crawled down the funnel a bit and are in agreement with the sales team about their purchase.
A lead capture app lets you manage your leads that are already in your sales funnel. Lead capture apps are specifically designed software that helps your sales teams to access the latest conversations and status of a lead. By staying updated about the prospect, you can make more informed decisions without spamming the prospect.
Lead capture apps are also quite effective for email marketing campaigns. The centralized apps can remind you to follow-up with certain clients and remind you to drop them from campaigns after the sale is achieved.
The metrics that lead capture apps offer are also quite comprehensible and can be used to fine tune lead generation strategies even more.
- Paid Ads
Lead generation ads are ads that are used to collect data from individuals that are interested in your product or have been using similar products. As the objective of the ads are to collect information and not sales, typically these ads are way cheaper and easier to create.
The major benefit for using paid ads for lead generation is that you don’t need to have a website. Most often than not, social media platforms give you the liberty to create your own forms within the ads to collect information. This way you can also survey the market and start calling the leads even before the website is complete.
Paid ads are targeted towards the intereded personnel only. It isn’t guaranteed that only the best leads will be attracted, but the majority of them can potentially be transformed into prospects if your ad content is good and your product shows promise.
- Content Testing
Subtle changes in your website content can make huge differences in lead generation. But deciding what to change can be challenging. A/B testing can prove to be effective in that scenario.
A/B testing is strategically tweaking some aspects of your website to show the different versions to different demographics. But don’t make massive changes in your content in a go. You might end up improving one part and worsening another.
Keep track of the changes to see if those are effective. And then implement other changes to the latest version.
- Offer Discounted Products
Free trials and limited-time discounts are a great way to hook your prospects to your product. When trying to avail of the trials, make sure to gather their information by making them log in to your portal.
Your leads who have fallen out of the funnel can also be tucked in with digital coupons. While personalized marketing campaigns are costly, you can spread the word about your discount through email campaigns.
You can post coupons on social media with an expiration date. You’d soon be swamped with followers fighting to avail your discounts. Make great use of those followers and generate as many leads as possible.
- Leverage Chatbots
Apart from making your forms accessible, you can leverage chatbots to generate leads for you. Chatbots are AI-powered components of your website that can answer audience queries. The bots direct those conversations to your marketing team and if anyone is available, they can take over. Even if a representative isn’t available, the chatbots notify your visitors to leave their email addresses. Opening door for more discussion.
- Create Online Surveys
Online surveys are a great way to generate leads for your next product. If you already have a substantial presence in the market, try engaging your followers to participate in a survey that gives them the opportunity to win cashback or something. Try to reach as many individuals as possible and make sure to include personal information to participate.
The Bottom Line
Lead generation is the first step towards building a successful digital marketing campaign. Without enough leads, you are only left to work with SEO and paid ads. Which either can be time consuming or expensive. The best lead generation strategies include opt-in content, lead capturing apps, ads, content testing, and chatbots. You can also make use of surveys and discount coupons to lure your leads in.
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