A successful lead generation strategy not only generates quality leads on a continual basis, but also targets the right potential customers who are most likely to benefit from your service or product.
A variety of tactics
Your lead generation strategy should involve a number of different tactics, including but not limited to:
- Free advertising
- Paid advertising
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Word of mouth
- Email marketing
- Off line advertising
Free advertising
Adverts can be placed on sites such as Craigslist.com, Gumtree.com and Ebay.com to name just a few. Although for some categories of advertising there is a charge involved, there are ways round this. (Subscribe to my video channel to see how).
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising has the added benefit of being able to leverage upwards should your campaign prove effective. This can’t be done as quickly and easily with the Free advertising methods listed. Although if you can find one let me know! Once you have defined a target audience for your paid advert and you are getting opt-ins and sales, simply increase your budget to reach more potential customers. Make sure you are targeting the right customers – more on this later.
Content Marketing
Creating your own product related articles and videos is a great way to communicate and offer value to potential customers. From these you can offer an opt-in for your email list by giving away something of value to your visitors. Content marketing is a good staple activity for internet marketers to do on a daily basis. It is low cost and can be effective over the long term. However this kind of marketing takes much longer than paid advertising.
Social Media
Social Media should form a part of your lead generation strategy and you should share new content on the various platforms to get your message to as many people as possible. Some platforms also offer paid advertising which you can use in conjunction with your content marketing campaign – (Facebook for example).
Word of mouth
Don’t neglect word of mouth advertising. If you are forgetting to talk about your business with people you are regularly speaking to you may be missing an opportunity.
Email Marketing
Although list building refers directly to email marketing, it is worth mentioning that you should be also building a relationship with this list. Email regularly to your existing list with valuable content in order to build trust. Some customers may have been on a list for years before they buy.
Off line advertising
Off line advertising with things such as business cards and flyers is also another way to communicate your message to potential customers.
Zoning in on your ideal client
Defining your target audience is hugely important because the content you will be writing will be for them, the adverts you are creating are being read by them and the videos you are creating are also for that particular audience. Unless you define your target audience you may be talking to the wrong people in your content and marketing campaign. It also means you can target with demographics much more effectively with paid advertising through platforms like Google Adwords and Facebook. With Google you are targeting your ideal customers keywords and with Facebook you can target things like their interests, geographical area, age and various other insights.
So what is a successful lead generation strategy? Obviously one which creates many leads and of course ultimately sales. Leads are no good unless they become sales. Quality is far better than quantity in the case. You may get thousands of leads who simply want your ‘freeby’ and unsubscribe as soon as they have it! You should ideally qualify a lead before they opt in. Qualify leads by explaining what they are getting before they opt in. You can also target your audience with specifics which fit your ideal customer before they are shown a landing page.
Of course you need a working sales funnel set-up in order to build a list of subscribers which you can turn into sales. You can get an “all the bells and whistles” sales funnel up and running and learn more about internet marketing here.