There are two ways to go about generating new leads. Your first option is to purchase the contact information of potential buyers. Your second is to generate a creative, indirect sales technique to help bring in qualified leads.
In this article, we’ll discuss top lead generation strategies to help you maximize your business’ sale. Successfully implementing these strategies can help you find organic, qualified leads that are superior to purchased ones.
What Is a Qualified Lead?
Qualified leads are leads that tick all the boxes on your brand’s qualifying assessment list. It’s important to first identify what a qualified lead looks like to your brand. In other words, you can’t determine a qualified lead until you know your brand’s lead qualifying factors.
Qualified leads hold great power; pursuing them can help make your brand, but ignoring them can break it. Such leads are extremely valuable to not just your company but competitors, too. In fact, many brands compete to secure qualified leads. Losing qualified leads to a market competitor puts your brand at significant risk. If you lose too many leads, your company could lose its current market standing
Find Qualified Leads with Outbound and Inbound Lead Generation
Outbound lead generation focuses on drawing prospects in through ads, emails, and cold calls. While many potential buyers like to research brands on their own before committing to them, outbound lead generation is still effective because it helps potential buyers identify pain points they may not have known they had.
On the other hand, inbound lead generation focuses on content creation and catchy campaigns to appeal to consumers. The aim is to draw potential qualified leads to the brand’s website and secure them as clients. Inbound lead generation prioritizes SEO and quality content generation.
Employing the right search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and posting informative blogs can help your website rank higher on search engines, like Google. Plus, if customers like what they see or read, they’re more likely to engage with your brand further. Eventually, they may turn into qualified leads and even permanent clients.
Would you rather have 100 okay leads OR 20 qualified leads?
The answer is pretty unanimous, but getting to the latter isn’t always clear. Plus, there’s a strong, more difficult question that lingers on everyone’s mind.
This guide shares four step-by-step tactics that will ensure you’re pursuing the right leads that will help you to hit your business goals. These smarter strategies mean better conversions because you are having stronger conversations with the right people. Download now to get started today!
Top Lead Generation Tips
Now that we’ve differentiated between outbound and inbound leads, let’s move onto the next step—lead generation.
Here are some top lead generation tips to help you find qualified outbound and inbound leads:
Come Up With High-Quality Content
If digital marketing is the fire, then quality content is the fuel. You cannot possibly generate qualified inbound leads without supplying them with captivating content relevant to their interests. Naturally, only qualified leads will find your brand’s content interesting – that’s why they chose to interact with it in the first place.
If you’re advertising on social media, the digital content your team comes up with will influence how many interactions your post gets. For example, this post could be a short advertisement, include a link to a brand-related survey, or encourage viewers to visit your website. Either way, if the content is poor, don’t expect to get a substantial number of interactions by potential SQLs.
Quality content can help convince prospects to share personal information, like their interests and location, with your marketing team. Many brands achieve this by curating catchy posts linking back to a product-related survey.
For example, a car company might create a fun survey to help people discover what car matches their personality best. In that way, the company gains access to the leads’ common interests and can tailor their product to match market demands.
If you fail to provide sensible, high-quality content, potential inbound SQLs will scroll right past your post. They may even encounter better alternatives from competing brands. It would be a shame to lose your potential clients to a competitor. So, to avoid this, encourage your sales team to curate content that’s relevant, attractive, and memorable.
Format Your Content for Mobile Users
It’s no secret that most online marketing campaigns are viewed through mobile phones. Laptops are usually reserved for professional or academic work, and their users seldom contribute to social media interactions.
To enhance user experience and generate more leads, focus on creating content that’s tailored for comfortably mobile viewing. Compromising on content accessibility defeats the effort behind developing quality content in the first place.
Practice Search Engine Optimization
Boosting website viewership is a key step within the lead generation process. In fact, this is a primary focus of inbound lead generation.
Once you guide prospects to visit your site, you’ll find it much easier to differentiate between SQLs and regular leads. This is because you can comfortably monitor lead interactions and behavior through your website and ultimately target clients with the best sales potential.
However, potential inbound leads aren’t going to visit your website if they can’t find it in the first place. Remember, SQLs will click on the most relevant web search results when looking to invest in a specific product or service. So if your website ranks well on popular search engines, like Google or Bing, there’s a higher chance of the SQL discovering your brand.
However, when it comes to search engine ranking, there is fierce competition between relevant product websites from across the globe. Ifyou want your website to rank well, you’ll need to adopt high-concerting SEO techniques.
Successful SEO practices will encourage site traffic. As a result, you’ll likely generate more SQLs and ultimately sell more products. Popular SEO methods include:
- Using high-ranking keywords within website text
- Generating paid promotional ads on Google
- Including Google preview text snippets
- Launching a blog your target market is interested in
- Regularly posting new content
- Updating old content
- Employing backlinks
Harness the Power of Social Media
There’s a higher chance of pulling in quality inbound leads if your content (and brand) receives maximum exposure. It’s essential to launch brand pages on all popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
You can also try generating outbound leads through social media. LinkedIn is an excellent tool for this purpose. LinkedIn’s Gen Forms contains an excellent and highly accessible user interface that makes it easier for potential SQLs to fill the form.
If that app’s users agree to share their information with you, you’ll receive enough content to find SQLs from any leads that have interacted with your survey.
LinkedIn will only show your ad to a specific, tailored target audience. In other words, you get to decide who sees your post. In that manner, you can comfortably reach out to potential outbound leads. Additionally, LinkedIn’s InMail feature lets you reach out to individual prospects through their inboxes. This is another great feature that facilitates lead generation.
Facebook has a similar feature to LinkedIn’s Gen Forms called Facebook Lead Ads. These ads are customized to enhance user experience for leads consuming content through their mobile phones. Ads containing forms can help collect valuable lead information, simplifying the qualified lead generation process.
Facebook and LinkedIn’s ad forms cost significantly less than other popular data-gathering techniques. This has made them popular choices amongst digital marketing experts and lead generation sales teams.
Key Takeaways
Finding leads that meet your ideal customer criteria can be a struggle. However, with a leading email marketing partner, they can be made easier. At Sapper Consulting, we help B2B companies maximize their email marketing efforts to generate leads and convert leads into loyal customer. When you’re ready to get the most out of your lead generation and email marketing efforts, contact the marketing specialists at Sapper Consulting!
