How to Generate More Sales Qualified Leads
Lead generation is the key concern of the marketing and sales teams, and it is imperative to not only generate leads, but sales qualified leads. The digital marketing eco space is certainly a great place to generate leads. But before even collecting the leads the question arises why would anyone give their contact details and other information. It won’t be certainly for you to contact them and sell them your products and services.
To generate leads what becomes more important is to create a sustainable and a subtle relationship with your prospects and get their details in return. This happens when you become reliable in the eyes of your prospects through the exchange of information and thought leadership. Search Engine Optimization strategies can also generate enough leads as well. Let’s see some of the creative and innovative ways of generating leads that the experts have cited.
Streamline your SEO Strategies
The SEO strategy adopted should be aimed at generating leads or finding the prospects organically who are ready to buy. For a business functioning locally, addressing the local customers should be a priority and for that local SEO is of utmost importance. Efforts for local SEO would include a focus on local keywords, local directory listing, and good reviews from customers along with other SEO measures. The persona of the target audience has to be developed, and a fair knowledge of the audience is also an imperative for creating successful lead generating campaigns. Knowing the competitors with the strategies they employ is also important and employing those strategies can also help if they are coupled with a properly planned approach towards lead generation. Choose the right and most effective keywords that are used by your target audience and use the keywords sparingly with one in every 100 to 150 words. Keep in mind to avoid content that doesn’t appeal to the target persona as they are no good in generating leads.
Give Away Free Content
Directly asking the visitors to give you their contact details may be futile, but asking for their name and email address in exchange for something useful is a more viable option. Give the visitors what they are looking for. If they are looking for decorating or painting their house, give them a guide to decorate their house. In exchange for that, you can well ask their name and email address. The company name in many cases is not required as the company email address has the company name itself. In addition to this, all that you have to do is include a small checkbox for them to tick which asks permission for you to contact them for a free consultation. Bingo, there you go. Your lead is ready for you to contact.
Create Content that Interest Visitors
Studying the competitors, their strategy and the content they use is one of the ways to supersede them. It is not only important to look out for ways to just stand apart from competition but also find out what your visitors want and are probably looking for. Furnish them what they are looking for in the form of information. It is not a wise choice to have the same free eBook for all the visitors. Every kind of content is unique, and segmentation of prospects can be well done based on the content they are reading. Supply your visitors with appropriate content by grouping their needs and give them the material that would suit their needs and wants depending on their buying cycle. This is sure to not only generate a large number of leads but increase the number of qualified leads and conversion rate as well.
Use the Right Social Media
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and the list is endless. Out of these which social media platforms should you use! Of course, the ones that generate the most number of leads and converts more. Find out the persona of your target customers and match the social networks that mostly consists more of your target audience. Run campaigns and post blogs in all of them and then compare the number of leads generated from each of them. Also, compare the conversion rate of the leads from each. Invest more time and resources on the social media which fetches the most number of leads and conversion rates.
Tweak the “thank you” Pages
Collecting the contact details and lead information in bits and pieces is a smarter way of generating and qualifying leads. Once the visitors land up on the “thank you” page, it is a great idea to qualify the lead and ask for qualifying questions. On the “thank you” page you can ask questions like their designation or the size of their company which would help you to qualify the lead and segment them accordingly. Once these leads are segmented, it is important to have a strategy in place to treat these leads and follow them up along the marketing funnel.
The visitors and the prospects can be tagged based on the topic of the blog posts they have read, the eBook they have downloaded, the “thank you” pages they have seen, etc. Segment the prospects and visitors and tailor your message every time to different groups of prospects. This is sure to help in decreasing the sales cycle and is the right way to nurture your leads according to their needs.
Host Online Webinars
Gaining a considerable number of qualified leads become comparatively easy if online webinars are hosted. Not only webinars are a way of generating leads, but they are a great way to position your brand as a thought leader as you share your knowledge and expertise with the prospects and potential customers.
To test the interest and the inclination of the participants hold a great webinar with interested prospects in more than one episode which would also help in qualifying the leads as well. This will give you the scope to understand the prospects’ inclination to purchase and will present you the opportunity to develop better relations with them as well. The webinars you conduct keeps your viewers engaged, and when they come back for more, they prove themselves as even more qualified. The best practice is to give some resources free to the participants at the end of the webinar and ask them to register with their contact details or sign up for the newsletter.
The primary goal of every digital marketing campaign is to generate leads, and the well-planned ones result in more qualified leads with higher conversion rate. You can employ some or all of these inexpensive techniques to source more leads as your campaign grows. This will help you in filling the pipeline with more qualified leads and help you in shortening the sales cycle as well as you start nurturing these leads and make them more sales-ready.