8 Tips for Boosting Your Lead Generation

Generating leads is the first step in turning someone into a loyal customer. Despite its straightforward nature, not everyone can get their head around how to generate leads. There are variables to consider like demographics, visibility, cost of promotion, and intuition that determine how effective your campaign will turn out.

You will need good landing pages, an attractive website that’s easy to use, a strong social media presence, quality content to share with your viewers, and a method of obtaining personal information so you can begin to form a relationship.

You’ll also need to boost your visibility, which you can do through search engine optimization, as well as use your content in different formats for maximum exposure. Once you understand how these building blocks contribute to your turnover and develop a lead generation strategy, you should have much better luck with your leads.

Here are eight tips to boost your lead generation so you can get real bites when you cast your line.

1. Create Buyer Personas

You can’t get leads, if you don’t know who you want your leads to be. This is why it is important to think about your demographics and create buyer personas and customer profiles.

‍You need to know how old your client base is, their gender, what social media platforms they use, where they work (especially if you are a B2B marketer), what their pain points are, etc. You discover these metrics through audience research, which can be conducted through channels like Google Analytics or surveys on your website.

This information is collated into an imaginary person (or people, you may have more than one persona) with their own likes and dislikes, who is your buyer persona.

But how do buyer personas help you in lead generation? Your buyer personas can help you decide on what lead generation strategy you want to use, and what platforms to use (for example, Facebook caters to an older demographic than Instagram).

2. Have a High Quality Landing Page

A landing page is the place you’ll do a lot of your lead generation. This page is where leads are sent from ads or links on your social media pages or blog. It has one of two goals: sales or lead generation.

A good landing page, which is not always connected to the rest of your website, includes a “call-to-action” and very little else (lack of clutter increases conversions). The call-to-action will exhort the visitor to either buy now (sales) or sign up to an email list (lead generation), which will later lead to a sale (the lead generation funnel).

Leads are lured to the landing page with promises of free content, software or deals: this is great for you, but you need to deliver on your promises if you want your landing page to work, which means good content and decent deals. (But more on that later).

Your landing page needs to be specific, well-designed and optimized for mobile (especially for those coming from social media).

3. Build an Intuitive Website

Your website itself is, of course, a source of lead generation, but only if it’s well designed: nobody wants to dig through an entire website to find a single piece of information on a product or service. Make it easy for your potential customers to learn about your brand by building a website that’s intuitive.

The layout should make sense, with visible navigation bars and links to your social media platforms. There should be a contact page with your phone number, email address, and the location of your headquarters.

Again, keep in mind that just having a website isn’t enough without versions that are optimized for mobile devices. People are far more likely to carry their phones and tablets around with them than their laptops.

Make it as easy as possible for people to find the appropriate information whether they’re using your desktop or mobile website. Your leads will be more effective if viewers can find what they’re looking for, so don’t frustrate them with a poorly built website.

Don’t worry if you’re not so savvy when it comes to web design. There are plenty of free or cheap website building tools and resources that you can use to create a website that welcomes people rather than turning them away. Take a look at your budget and choose the best option for your needs.

4. Create a Mailing List

Email lists and email marketing can be quite beneficial, especially for growing brands. If you don’t have many leads to start with, it’ll take longer for your posts to get exposure. If you already have a client base, on the other hand, you have a foundation of followers who will share your content to other potential customers.

So how do you get those first few email addresses to add to your list? Whatever you do, don’t buy leads—not only does this make your brand look bad, it could relegate you forever to spam inboxes or even on an email blacklist.

Instead, try offering something for free in exchange for leads’ email addresses. If leads can get valuable content (good options include ebooks, white papers, freemium, etc.) just by signing up to your mailing list, they will. How do your leads find out about this free stuff? Maybe on your blog, or through a landing page connected to your social media.

Either way, free content costs your leads nothing and you both win: they get free promos during their first interaction with your brand and you’ll have them on your list and can update them about future specials.

Once you have built your email list, creating an email schedule will help you decide how often you should send emails out to your customers. Some businesses send out updates based on a timeline, like once a week or once a month. Others prefer to write emails only when something new and exciting is going on. Keep an eye on your calendar so you don’t overcrowd your leads’ inboxes. One way of making scheduling email easy is to use apps to help with your email marketing schedule.

Emails need to be interesting. The most obvious way to keep it interesting is to not inundate your leads with endless emails. However, there are other things you can do, such as sending out an email newsletter, which prevents your emails from becoming spam.

5. Focus on Quality Content

By now, we have determined that content is key to your lead generation strategy and getting leads onto your landing pages and email list. A good content marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to generate leads.

But you need to be careful of content oversaturation. This happens when you make a lot of lower quality content rather than a smaller amount of higher quality content. The last thing you want is for your target audience to feel like you’re being too spammy.

This is not to say you shouldn’t post frequently; on the contrary, it helps to schedule your posts in advance so you have them ready to publish by using an app that automates your content calendar. Exactly how frequently you should post depends on the size of your business and its audience as well as the nature of your industry. Post frequently enough that your leads won’t forget about you, but not so much that they’re annoyed by you.

Another really important part of quality content is your content has to contain information that your customers actually need (which is why you need your buyer personas).

You also shouldn’t post the same type of content—it’s no longer just enough to write blog posts, you need to produce other content forms like videos and infographics. Diversify your content!

When you’re able to strike the balance between all of these factors, you’ll notice more traffic heading to your promoted material. Viewers will see that you care about the quality of your posts. They’ll recognize that you’re not begging for attention, you actually have something worth sharing. This makes it easier to trust your brand and entertain your offer. It also helps with brand awareness, as potential customers see that you are trustworthy and have industry knowledge.

6. Make the Most of Social Media

You can’t do lead generation or lead generation marketing these days without utilizing social media, networking sites, and forums. Having a strong presence on multiple platforms will not only help you generate leads, but also improve your brand awareness.

For e-commerce brands, the best platforms for lead generation are Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram; the power of livestreaming on each of these platforms can’t be overlooked. Depending on your demographics, other social media platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, or Pinterest might be useful, too.

Lead generation on social media only works if you have a good social media marketing strategy. Content is again important—if you produce high quality content, you can share this on social media platforms and create lead generation that way.

Apart from content, you need to interact with potential customers on social media. This includes posting interactive content, seeking user-generated content and replying to all comments and hashtags. However, there are some specific tips for different platforms that you should take on board…

Facebook:

Attracting new direct and indirect leads via your business page on Facebook is an important part of marketing in today’s online world. Some of the best tips for Facebook lead generation include:

• Adding a call-to-action (“sign up”) button at the top of your page, that takes potential customers to your landing page.
• Share offers that take customers to a landing page. (You can also do this by putting links in image captions). Adding UTM codes to these can help you track metrics from these links.
• Share high performing blog posts and other content.
• Post videos: videos are favored by Facebook’s algorithm, so you can generate more leads through video content.
• Buy Facebook lead ads, which are Facebook ads specific to lead generation. (Make sure you don’t scare away potential leads with complicated lead generation forms).

Instagram:

Instagram is a very important platform, especially for the younger demographic. It’s particularly useful for B2C marketing but B2B marketers shouldn’t discount Instagram lead generation. Here are some tips for Instagram lead generation:

• Put a link to your landing page in your bio. (You can then refer leads back to this link with the hashtag #linkinbio).
• Add an action button: just like with Facebook, you can add an action button on your Instagram to take viewers to your landing page.
• Use Instagram Stories: Instagram stories are a very popular form of content and, unlike other Instagram content, you can add special “swipe up” links to them.
• Use Instagram lead advertisements (which are similar to Facebook lead ads).

However, what do you do about producing different types of content for all these mediums? You can...

7. Repurpose and Diversify Your Content

While it’s not smart to spam your leads with too much content at once, repurposing your content in different forms is. (Remember what we said earlier about using different only content types!)

‍When you make a blog post that does really well, take note and think about what else you can do with the content. A blog could easily be turned into a video, a podcast, or an infographic. Since people absorb information in different ways, this can have a favorable effect on your lead generation marketing.

When you re-release content using a different medium, consider varying the specific platform you use. You could post a blog on your website and share it to Facebook or post a video of the same content on YouTube or Instagram. This way you maximize the chances of people seeing your high-grade content, and you lead them closer to your business.

8. Use SEO

Of course, none of these tips will work if not enough people see your content. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO aims to make your page as visible as possible, manipulating popular search engines’ algorithms so your business shows up higher in the search results. Part of this is using specific keywords and links in the right places to improve your SEO ranking and make your website more visible.

‍It should be noted that there’s more to calculating an SEO ranking than the content you post. You also need to think about how competitive your field is, how long your site has been up, and what types of links you use in your articles. You can also use your social media accounts to direct traffic to your page and improve your ranking.

What many people don’t realize is that misuse of SEO practices will harm your ranking and make you less likely to be found based on your search terms. When you put too many links in an article or overuse keywords, you lose points with the big search engines people will use to find what you have to offer. Get to know your SEO and use it properly to generate better leads.

Conclusion

Generating good leads isn’t always easy, especially when you’re just starting out. Fortunately, the above tips are tried and true. You can’t get far these days without a quality website, a strong social media presence and well-written content that is optimized for search engines. Always go quality over quantity but know your timeline, offer free promos in exchange for email addresses, and use your content in any way you can to get it out there.

Of course, you may also feel that this is the time to get in touch with a lead generation specialist, in which Seller’s Choice may have the solution for you.