“Content is the fuel for your lead generation efforts.”-  Dayna Rothman

If you’re looking to generate leads for your business, then the above quote pretty much summarizes what you have to do to get going. Create good content. While that’s the start, we’re not going to leave you high and dry in terms of what strategy you can deploy for lead generation.

In fact, we’d recommend you check out our previous article covering the basics of lead generation before you proceed to read this one.

Moving on, while quality content is at the core of any marketing strategy, including lead generation. Before we go any further, let’s first cover how lead generation works.

The Lead Generation Process

To acquire a lead, any effort you put into lead generation goes through 4 steps:

First Step: Content Discovery

Before anything else, a consumer must find you. To discover you, the consumer discovers your content shared on various marketing channels. This could be your blog, social media, or even your website.

Second Step: Call to Action

When the consumer engages with your content, they click on the call-to-action (CTA) that you’ve wisely placed within your content to encourage them to act in a favorable manner. This could be clicking on an image, button, or any link that you’ve placed for them.

Third Step: Landing Page

This is where your consumer gets to know of the offering you are making. That’s where they make the decision whether or not they’re interested in whatever you’re trying to offer them. Now, this offer could be a downloadable piece of content, a template, a sign-up for a course, or a subscription to some more content.

Source: Hubspot

Fourth Step: Information Sharing

As a part of the deal, to get your offering, the consumer shares their personal information through a form. If they take the bargain and fill your form, you’ve got a lead to pursue. Once you have their deals, you target them with more sales content and convert them into your customers.

That being said, your lead generation process ends once you’ve got the personal information a.k.a the form has been filled. Your lead is now a sales prospect.

By now, you’d have figured out what the most crucial part of the entire process is, right? Yes, it’s the first step. The first step is literally convincing a stranger to be interested in something that they weren’t bothered about at all.

Don’t fret, it’s not as taxing as it feels right now. In fact, there are some white hat, conventional ways to generate leads for your business that would totally work if done right.

Ways to Generate Leads For Your Business

Email Marketing

Emails are your best companions when it comes to lead generation. People are more likely to act on an email than any other communication channel that you may use. There’s a high possibility that they know about your brand or offering and are more likely to share their contact information.

The catch here is that your email copy and design should be compelling enough to make them take that action. Here’s our quick guide on writing effective emails that can help.

Social Media

Your next aid for lead generation is social media. In today’s day and age, where 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers actively use social media, it’s the best place to reach people for your brand.

First of all, social media channels are now designed to enable you to reach out to an audience that’s relevant to your brand. Not just that, all platforms come with analysis to help you target people better.

Secondly, social media is very intuitive. Everyone is aware of how to swipe up on stories on Instagram or how to fill forms on LinkedIn. That way, there’s a higher chance they’d click on your CTA.

Event Hosting

Source: My Marketing

Unlike social media and emails, not many businesses are able to harness the potential of events (virtual or otherwise) in generating leads. You can organize a meetup or a webinar and generate a lot for leads by adding a form with details for registration. Events not only help you build a connection with the audience but also make sure that you get quality leads. For instance, if you are a recruitment firm for software engineers and you host a webinar about “How to crack engineering interviews at leading tech companies?”, you know for a fact that engineers, especially those looking for a job would register for the event. That way, you get the exact prospect you need for your business.

Blog

Not just for lead generation, your blog is crucial for any and every content marketing effort. Coming back to lead generation, you can add blog articles that talk about your offering in detail and then add a CTA to avail the offering. Hubspot does a great job in this. You’d find that all their blog posts would either link to an ebook they want you to download, a course they want you to take or a video they want you to watch. Using these, they add a form between you and the action you want to take and get your personal information.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising comes in handy when you want to broaden your base and reach a wider audience. When it comes to advertising, you can run ads on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), as well as on search engines (Google, Bing). In addition to this, you also have the option of setting up retargeting ads where people who’ve visited your website but have not acted upon the CTA (shared their contact information) are shown ads on the browser. These people are more likely to convert.

However, the key to advertising is messaging. You have to be very clear and direct with these ads–tell them the exact offering, only then the people would convert, and you can get the worth of the money you spend.

Referral

One of the most organic ways to generate leads is to use word-of-mouth. If you put in a referral system where your existing users can refer you, and get a reward, you’re likely to get good quality leads and faster.

Source: eConsultancy

However, it is important that you build a good flow for the referral. If referring to a new prospect is too cumbersome for your users, they’d probably prefer not to.

What Does It All Boil Down to

While each of these channels that you use to attract prospects is crucial, it all boils down to the landing page which has the form where you’d collect the personal information to generate a lead. First of all, there should be a direct connection between the channel collateral (social post, blog article, email), and the landing page in terms of the messaging. You can’t have a social post talking about healthy living habits and then lead to a landing page that tells people to take care of their health by buying insurance. That does not work.

Secondly, your landing page should always have a clear CTA (which would be the form) from the very beginning. That way, the interested person has an exact idea of the action they need to take.

In the end

Always remember that while there are all these ways to generate leads, don’t go about executing them all at once. Try one or two ways to generate leads and check results. Only put efforts into the channels that are reaping results for your business. Hope this article helps get you rolling on lead generation.