Let’s face it, without leads, your business – may it be of any scale, will probably fail. To survive in a highly competitive market, your business needs a consistent stream of qualified leads, resulting in steady customer growth. But how do you effectively reach your target audience? How can you ensure that people who visit your website are actually interested in your product or service?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 85 percent of B2B marketers identified lead generation as their most important content marketing goal. Therefore, an end-to-end lead generation strategy can help attract and nurture interested prospects, and convert them into future customers.
Let’s dig deep into some of the most effective lead generation strategies that can help you boost reach and skyrocket conversions.
Use Gated Content
By gating content, you can ensure that your audience can access an informational asset on your website, such as a whitepaper or an eBook, by filling out a registration form. This enables you to collect data related to your audience, which helps:
- Attract high-quality visitors as most likely, people genuinely interested in reading the content piece would make an effort to fill out the form.
- Build valuable relationships with them by knowing more about their tastes and preferences.
- Segment your leads based on the information acquired through the forms and cater to them accordingly.
Plainly, gated content can improve your reach and lead conversion rates by several folds. Interested in trying out gated content for lead generation? However, to use this technique effectively, it is important to ensure that you’re creating high-quality content for gating.
Host a Webinar
According to a survey by ON24, 76 percent of marketers said that webinars enable them to generate more leads. It is no surprise that conducting a webinar can be a compelling way of amplifying reach, strengthening bonds with existing customers, and generating new leads. Here are a few reasons why you should include webinars in your lead generation plan:
- Webinars allow you to surpass the geographical barriers as participants can attend your webinar from any corner of the world.
- You can establish authority and build credibility among the target audience by creating webinars around relevant topics that address customer pain points.
- Webinars provide you with a great opportunity to qualify leads via in-webinar polls and questions or follow up surveys.
- Most webinar hosting platforms allow you to record them, which can be later used as gated content on your website or for email marketing purposes.
Needless to say that the ability to reach a massive audience makes webinars a powerful way of generating high-quality leads.
Create an Information-Rich Newsletter
Another popular way of using content as a lead magnet is to create a value-packed newsletter. Your company’s newsletter can include information regarding new blog posts, product updates, upcoming events, or special discount offers. This does not only allow you to stay relevant in the minds of prospects but also helps in sharing product promotions, driving leads further down the purchase funnel.
Nevertheless, it is a known fact that internet users are already bombarded with tons of offers and promotions. Thus, to make the audience sign up for your newsletter, the key is to make it informative and not sales-driven.
Provide a Free Trial
Offering free trials is one of the oldest yet significant lead generation methods, commonly used in the B2B market. It involves providing a free trial of your product to leads that fill out a form for a given period. This not only makes your prospects accustomed with your product but also helps them compare it first-hand with the other available options in the market.
According to the founder and COO at Notejoy, Ada Chen Rekhi, the free trial conversion rates can range from 1-10 percent to as high as 40-50 percent. So how do you make your free trial marketing tactic work?
- Offer a product free trial without asking for credit card information to reduce friction.
- Remind the leads when their free trial is expiring to ensure that they’ve tested all the available features of the product.
- Provide a discount if they purchase the product before the trial expires to build good relationships.
Add a Website Live Chat Feature
A survey by Kissmetrics reveals that 38 percent of online customers made their purchase because of the live chat session. A website live chat is one of the simplest yet most essential lead generation techniques, often used by businesses. This is because it allows you to reach out to your website visitors and communicate with them in real-time.
However, to make live chat your ultimate lead generation hack, below are a few tips:
- Add your name and picture to the live chat window for personalization.
- Use data gained from the live chat’s analytics to enhance the customer experience.
- Offer incentives, such as coupons or discounts for a convincing live chat session.
Leverage SEO
SEO is an evergreen marketing technique that can help drive traffic to your website, resulting in lead generation for your business. To begin with this tactic, you need to optimize your website’s content for SEO, define your target audience, identify relevant keywords, and keep an eye on your SERP rankings.
The power of SEO can be used to level up all types of businesses. For example, if you are a financial advisor or a consultant in the same field, you can opt for strategies pertaining to SEO for financial advisors. This will enable you to get found by prospective clients and rank above your competition.
Utilize Email Marketing
Communication channels have modernized over time, with the advent and proliferation of social media platforms. However, email marketing still remains one of the most effective ways of reaching out to the target audience. But we know that customers receive billions of emails daily, so how do you make your emails stand out? How do you ensure that you’re generating leads for your business via emails?
Apart from writing a killer subject line and nailing the preview text, it is important to add personalization to email marketing campaigns. For instance, you can add content in your emails based on the audience’s interests to improve the reach, click-through rates, and conversions.
Wrapping Up
In today’s competitive landscape, generating a continual stream of leads is not something that can happen overnight. Hence, if you want to boost your reach and conversion rates, the key is to experiment and identify which combination of strategies stated above work for your business. This is because every business is unique, and what works for your company might not work for another company.
