How would you like to have so many leads, you need to hire more people to hire more?
About 61% of marketers say that lead generation is their top challenge. There are a lot of steps in online lead generation that get overlooked. Getting these steps aligned can mean a higher close rate, a happier sales team, and more revenue for your business.
Read on to learn the top online lead generation tips so you can get high-quality leads and close them.
1. Target the Right Leads
What’s the biggest complaint that you get from your sales team? That the leads they have are garbage. They’re not interested or they’re not even ready to close.
It could be that the sales team loves to complain. It could also be that your lead generation campaigns have brought in the wrong people.
Create a buyer persona for the person you are trying to reach. For example, you may be selling a knife mill to spice and herb sellers. You want to fully understand their challenges, how they search for knife mills online, and how you can reach them.
You want to know more about them, such as their position, their budget, and how your knife mill is uniquely positioned to meet their needs.
After you do that, you’ll want to audit your past lead generation campaigns and note what worked and what didn’t work.
2. Map a Campaign
Lead generation isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. You and your sales team may be focused on getting leads to close as soon as possible. In most cases, only about 25% of leads are ready to buy.
That number is even smaller if a lead is unfamiliar with your company. You need to build a complete lea nurturing campaign to move someone from somewhat interested in your brand to ready to sign up.
A lead nurturing campaign can be done through automated emails, retargeting, or through your sales team. The most effective and efficient way is through email marketing. Your sales team can contact them later in the cycle to close them.
You need to map out the entire campaign, from how someone gets to your site, to the landing page they see, and how they become a lead. You then want to map out other steps, like a lead nurturing campaign through to close.
3. Give People a Reason to Sign Up
You’re going to invest a lot of money on lead generation tactics. You want to make sure that you can convert those visitors to leads.
One way to do that is to offer something that’s helpful to your target audience and introduces your company to them.
You do have to be careful with free content. You want to make sure that it’s incredibly valuable. At the same time, you don’t want to attract people who only want free stuff. A webinar and a demonstration of your product are good tools to offer.
4. Design Your Landing Page
One major error that marketers make when they are generating leads is that they drive traffic to the home page of the website, only to find that visitors leave.
You have to have a landing page set up to capture those leads. You’ll offer your lead magnet and collect names and email addresses of people who visit your site and are interested.
When you design your landing page, there are a few things to keep in mind. You have to have a bold call to action. Using the example of a knife mill machine, you can say “find out more.”
You want your page to be very simple. You need a big headline, a little bit of text, and image, and a call to action. You also want to have testimonials and information about your company to build trust with your new leads.
5. Drive Traffic to Landing Page
The most important part of your campaign is to drive traffic to your site. You can do that through blogging, SEO, pay-per-click campaigns, and social media.
You can also use a combination of tactics. It largely depends on your audience and where they are online.
For a B2B audience, you can use LinkedIn and pay-per-click ads. That will help you drive traffic to your site quickly. You can follow that up with search engine optimization, which can capture leads throughout the buying cycle.
6. Measure Results
How will you know your online lead generation campaign was a success? That’s why measuring your campaign is so important. You want to set goals for your campaign and pick your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Some of the common KPIs used in online lead generation are landing page traffic, landing page conversions, lead appointments, leads to sales, cost per lead and revenue generated.
7. Test and Adjust
When you look at your KPIs, you might find that one area is strong, while others are weak. For example, you may have a lot of traffic, they’re just not converting. You can then test and adjust your landing page.
Lead generation has many steps and you always want to look at each step. You can always test and tweak to make improvements, even if you think your campaign is getting good results.
Online Lead Generation Is a Long Campaign
If you want to be successful in online lead generation, you need to change your mentality. You need to take a high-level approach to make sure that you’re attracting the right leads to your business.
That requires understanding their needs and mapping out their entire journey. You’ll want to make sure that the leads you hand off to sales are ready to close, and you can use lead nurturing to develop relationships with prospects.
That will make your team much more efficient and you’ll be able to close more leads with less effort. That means you have a more profitable business.
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