An organization undergoes a digital transformation when it utilizes digital technologies for most or all of its business processes. The most noticeable change brought on is how the business communicates or interacts with its clients. By employing digital solutions, many B2B companies reap excellent rewards such as boosted sales, improved customer happiness index, and better lead generation strategies.
It is an undeniable fact that lead generation has a direct impact on accelerating the growth of any B2B business. With a robust lead generation process, a business can experience increased sales within a few months.
What is Lead Generation and Why is It Important?
- Lead generation is defined as the process by which a business identifies, attracts, and transforms online users into prospects, thus creating new sales opportunities. The lead generation process utilizes several online channels and strategies such as email campaigns, paid social media ads, and offering downloadable content via a landing page.
Leads can be considered the lifeblood of a business. A business that does not invest in an effective lead generation strategy begins to suffer as sales decline. Many lead generation strategies are available, and it can be challenging to know which is the best fit for your business.
- An effective lead generation strategy is correlated with the business's marketing strategy. First, a business needs to have an understanding of its clients’ needs and wants adequately. This information can then be used to easily convert leads into prospective clients.
As a business owner, your primary objective is to generate high quantity and high-quality leads. By utilizing an effective lead generation strategy, you can rest assured that your business's pipeline will be full of prospective clients even while you sleep. Therefore, lead generation should be considered a top priority task for all marketers and businesses.
Below are some easy-to-follow and effective tactics that will improve your business's lead generation process.
Top 10 Digital Strategies for Increased Lead Generation
1) Optimize Your Website And Use Call To Actions (CTAs)
- For a business to achieve credibility and increased sales opportunities, it needs to have a robust online presence. A well-designed and updated website is the most important component of a company's digital presence.
Just two decades ago, only digitally-focused businesses, tech, and media companies owned a website. This trend has since changed.
- A website's core function is to inform internet users why your business exists, what it offers, and why the customers should care about it. An effective website, coupled with lead generation strategies, motivates users to take action that helps generate sales for the business.
A call to action (CTA) is a design, message, or prompt that motivates prospective customers to take any action that usually ends with the business making a sale and generating a profit. Your end goal decides what type of CTA you should use for your website.
- To elaborate, if you want customers to visit your physical store, the CTA should redirect them to the "location" or "contact us" page. Alternatively, if you want to motivate a purchase, the CTA should redirect the customers to specific product pages. For example, most websites display a discount landing page for first-time visitors and shoppers. This is also a type of CTA.
The CTA should be accompanied by clear and easy-to-understand instructions. If the instructions aren't clear, the business risks confusing the customer, resulting in no action being taken. Therefore, it is imperative to have a clear CTA throughout your marketing & promotional material, including your social media pages, website, and content.
2) Create A Landing Page
- Many businesses often overlook a major lead generation strategy, which is creating a dedicated landing page for a CTA. This landing page can have a special offer for visitors and should differ from the homepage of the business's website. A compelling CTA will send visitors to this dedicated landing page instead of confusing them on the website.
An ineffective CTA is less likely to grab visitors' attention and motivate them to accept the offer. As a result, the offer becomes less valuable, and there is a reduction in website traffic conversion.
- For a business to succeed, customers must select your business's offerings over your competitors. This is possible only via a compelling CTA and lead generation strategy.
3) Utilize Email Marketing
- Emails are one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and are still relevant in today's day and age. According to one study, email marketing has a potential ROI of 4400%!. This means that for every $1 spent, a business can earn up to $44. Email marketing allows a business to reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers at the mere push of a button.
Email marketing, if done correctly, rewards the business with growth in sales and revenue. The first step in an effective email marketing strategy is to build a subscriber list. The easiest way to do this is to place sign-up and subscribe forms on various pages of the website.
- Some companies sell email lists. However, it is advisable to stay away from such lists, as sending emails arbitrarily won't spark consumer interest. Doing so may result in your sent emails getting deleted or even spammed.
The sign-up form enables you to build an organic subscriber mailing list. These people have voluntarily signed up for or “opted-in to” your email campaigns and are more likely to respond to your CTAs. A healthy email marketing strategy requires you to stay in touch with your customers by sending them weekly updates about new products, services, or offers of interest.
- The first few campaigns will allow you to figure out what kind of content your subscriber list enjoys and responds best to. Thus, you can fine-tune future campaigns for higher lead generation and conversion.
According to a leading marketing survey, almost 61% of consumers enjoy weekly promotional emails. This means, a business that employs an effective email marketing strategy can better communicate with consumers. In addition, this helps the business capitalize on the immense opportunity to convert subscribers into clients.
4) Create Helpful & Informative Content
- Another critical strategy for attracting new leads to your business is to create helpful content. This content can be a blog, an FAQ section, or even case studies. If your content helps answer common queries and enhances knowledge, then your brand is positioned as a thought leader by customers. This positioning helps in lead generation and conversion in several ways.
Firstly, the increased traffic results in better discoverability and higher rankings within search engines. When searching for something, users are less likely to browse more than a few search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Once users arrive at your website, they will stick around as long as they have access to content that interests them. A business can use content as a tool for advertising and outreach. Without excellent content, it is nearly impossible to attract an audience.
A carefully developed and implemented content marketing strategy enables the business to gather many leads. By some estimates, content marketing generates three times as many leads as other marketing strategies, such as cold calling.
In addition, content marketing is about 62% cheaper; thus, businesses can spend their budget more efficiently.
For example, Klaus, a customer service quality assurance (QA) platform, creates detailed e-books that help managers set up QA programs. Their well-designed landing pages collect the user's contact information before allowing them to download the e-book.
5) Use SEO To Improve Website's Ranking
- Optimizing your website to enhance its discoverability by search engines might not sound like a glamorous lead generation strategy, but it works. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which website owners attempt to improve the ranking of their websites in the Search Engine Results Pages.
They do this by using specific keywords, posting readable and helpful content, and integrating a system of backlinks. SEO should be at the heart of your lead generation strategy, even if your main focus is content development and the creation of lead magnets. SEO is the number one factor that differentiates a successful online business from an unsuccessful one. BrightEdge found that SEO drives 1,000% more traffic than other forms of marketing, such as organic social media.
- A business may select one of many automation tools for managing and optimizing the customer experience across their digital channels, especially for their website. Simple, an automation platform for customer solutions, optimizes its content so that it shows up first when potential customers look for help improving response times. When readers click through to their website, they can learn more about the benefits of Simple and talk to their sales team.
6) Use A Referral Program
Having a customer base that loves your products/services can be the source of high-value yields. Research indicates that word of mouth (WoM) helps drive sales for first-time customers. Through a referral program, your existing loyal customers will refer your product/service to their friends and family. Upon a successful sign-up or purchase, the referee can earn a reward in the shape of discount vouchers or cash-backs.
Social Media Today found that 78% of B2B marketers achieve good or excellent quality leads from referrals. In addition, more than half of these referrals are at a lower Cost-per-Lead than other channels for the business.
- Wealthsimple, a financial management platform, actively uses a referral program to gain high-quality leads from existing customers. As soon as a current customer deposits funds into their savings account, they are greeted with a referral request pop-up. Upon completing the referral program, existing and new customers receive a bonus, while the company gets a new lead!
7) Offer Free Webinars
- It is no secret that hosting webinars is the best way to generate high-quality leads. Most leading marketers agree and emphasize using such a strategy for top-of-the-funnel lead generation. A webinar is an online seminar that is usually free to attend. It offers specific information in exchange for attention and contact information.
By hosting webinars and checking attendance rates, you can better understand your customer's interests. This valuable information can help you design better marketing strategies aimed at lead conversions and increasing sales.
- You Need A Budget (YNAB) regularly hosts webinars and workshops that aim to educate people on budget management. Although the information might seem general, it is tied closely with their mobile app. Their mobile app helps people record their income and expenses, thus aiding in budget management. Potential leads attend their webinar and are converted into customers when they complete the CTA and download their app.
8) Post Exclusive Content As A Blog
- Regularly posting new content on your blog keeps your website fresh and updated and builds up its visibility for Google's keyword searches. When visitors find relevant, engaging, and updated content and information on your blog, it establishes trust in your brand. Blogging nurtures leads and builds credibility as a subject matter expert.
A research survey concluded that over 55% of marketers consider blogging as one of the top marketing priorities for inbound leads. Blogging increases the chance of a positive ROI by at least 13 times. 70% of leading marketers say they actively invest in content marketing for their businesses.
- Creating and posting exclusive content for customers is perhaps the most common customer marketing strategy. According to HubSpot's recent Benchmark report, companies that blog six to eight times a month double their lead volume. This further proves the importance of blogging as a crucial channel for lead generation.
In every blog post, you should include hyperlinks to other pages on your website within the copy of the post and a prominent call-to-action.
9) Keep Social Media Platforms Updated
- In addition to the website, customers gauge the credibility of a business by viewing its social media pages. If the social media has regular posts and updates, it will give the brand a positive image. In the B2B context, LinkedIn is considered very important. Regularly posting and sharing on LinkedIn increases brand visibility, as well as boosts LinkedIn's Social Scrolling Index.
Only Post Content Relevant To The Customer:
A business can significantly increase its social media followers and fan base by posting valuable content to its potential customers. First, a business must research and understand who their customers are. With this knowledge, relevant posts and information can be shared, boosting the business's online audience.
- Social media is all about two-way communication. It bridges the gap between the business and the consumer. Businesses that invest in communicating with, and listening to, their customers become more successful than those that only post messages and updates. Sometimes, a business needs to post content that aligns with its audience's interests, even if it has nothing to do with the business itself.
10) Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most popular lead generation strategies. Paid advertisements that are based on specific keywords are displayed on the search engine's results page to motivate customers to click and visit the business's website. The business gets charged for each click on the ad.
Keyword research is essential for a successful PPC campaign. It is important to know which keywords are used by your target audience so that they can be linked to the PPC campaign and contribute to increased website traffic.
How Does PPC Generate New Leads?
- When designing a PPC campaign, advertisers bid on keywords. The advertiser only pays when a user clicks on the link. By selecting a high-performing and relevant keyword, the business will receive high traffic to its website.
When selecting keywords, attention should be paid to long-tail keywords. These may not be as expensive as other keywords, and can get you the results you seek.
- Your bid, along with your quality score, will determine the placement of each ad. As a result, your ads can start attracting traffic as soon as you launch your campaign.
How Can Your Business Benefit From PPC?
- PPC is a tried and tested method for lead generation. By utilizing an effective PPC campaign, a business can increase the volume of interested and prospective customers to its website. PPC visitors are 50% more likely to buy your product or service than visitors from an organic search source.
PPC ads are considered effective because they allow a business to target its ads to a specific online audience. Users that use certain keywords while searching online are more likely to convert into customers than users conducting a general internet search.
We hope our insights on lead generation tactics help to expand your customer base, and bring in more relevant and high-converting leads.