Whatever business you are in, getting leads for your business will be of primary importance. Without leads, you can’t make sales and generate any customers. Without any customers you don’t have a business, at least you won’t have one for long anyway!
Lead generation is therefore one of if not the most important thing to focus on to grow your business. There’s lots of ways to generate leads. You can grow a business through word of mouth, you can use organic marketing such as social media marketing and through using SEO (search engine optimisation).
However, organic marketing and word of mouth aren’t as controllable as paid advertising. With organic marketing, you must rely on the algorithm to rank your content. Or on people finding your links through your social media following. But what if the person you want isn’t on social media that day? Or if Google doesn’t rank your content? You could spend a huge amount of time plugging your business on social media and attempting to rank your website for nothing!
And word of mouth advertising, although free, is totally out of the bounds of your control. You can provide a high quality service to generate good will, and even operate a referral program (rewarding your customers for referrals) but beyond that word of mouth isn’t a strategy you can easily control.
Get Leads For My Business – A Scalable Strategy
A scalable strategy is what you really want to use for a business. To grow a business you need to be able to consistently pull in the types of customers who will buy. To do this quickly you can use paid advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, or Microsoft Ads, running either text ads or video ads (on YouTube for example). By running ads and sending highly qualified visitors to a landing page, you can quickly build an email list of subscribers to whom you can provide some kind of value through your emails.
Use an email autoresponder to collect emails from a landing page and follow up with automated messages which provide information useful to your subscribers. Promote your product or service through these emails. With highly qualified leads (who want or need what you’re selling), you have a good chance of turning a lead into a sale. Particularly if you target your ads towards the right audience.
So for example, if you run a coffee shop in a certain city, and your typical customers are parents over the age of 35 with kids, that’s who you target in your advertising. You could target your specific area code and those people who fit the target demographic of your perfect customer. This is also known as the customer avatar. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf. Offer discount codes and offers to encourage your subscribers to visit your shop.
Get Leads For My Business – Test & Measure
Most businesses will try out paid advertising for a while and then quit, having spent too much money without getting a solid (or any) return. That’s because they haven’t run an advert which works for them immediately. But have some patience grasshopper! By testing and measuring different ads, and trying out different audiences, you will figure out who is most likely to buy and how to target them specifically so as not to waste ad budget.
Make sure you track everything and spend some time initially on the customer avatar worksheet pdf to “zone” in on who is most likely to buy before you even run an advert. This will save you a huge amount of advertising budget, getting clear about your target audience before you even spend any money.
Follow up with regular emails, informing your subscribers (who opt in to your offer from a landing page) of your offer. This is known as email marketing and it’s incredibly effective once you find the right audience and of course you effectively communicate the value of your offer.
Get Leads For My Business – Having A Congruent Marketing Message
A congruent marketing message is vital to use this kind of lead generating system. If, for example, you are targeting your adverts towards a specific search query, make sure to use that same language in your marketing copy (landing page etc.).
For example, I offer a course for beginners in affiliate marketing. So if I targeted a search query of “affiliate marketing for beginners” to show my advert for those specific queries, I will also use that same terminology in my landing page, and throughout my email follow up messages. If I used even a slightly different term, such as “online business” instead, it could throw off 30-40% of visitors who might bounce immediately from the landing page.
They are looking for “affiliate marketing for beginners” so if I suddenly started talking about “online business” many of my visitors might believe they have found the wrong information, and click away without having taken any action. This will cost me money in marketing budget without having collected any leads. So having a congruent message throughout your marketing copy is paramount for keeping your cost per lead at a minimum and ensuring a more efficient marketing campaign.
Split Testing Landing Pages
A landing page is a page specifically built to collect email subscribers. A landing page is much better at doing this efficiently because there’s much less confusion on a landing page than a generic website. On a website, there’s many pages to click through and browse. As such, most visitors become overwhelmed with information and leave without having taken any action from a website – often never to return. But a landing page is different. On a landing page there’s an offer of some kind – a freebie giveaway, such as an ebook or a free course. Plus, there’s only two options on a landing page – sign up or leave the page.
This means more people will “convert” into leads on a page specifically built to collect leads. Landing pages are also known as “squeeze” pages because they “squeeze” the subscribers information out of them!
By split testing different landing pages, you can learn which one/s will perform the best, giving you the lowest cost per lead from your marketing budget.
The Follow Up
Many marketers will follow up with their leads every day, but this will depend on your particular business and the offer you use to entice someone to enter their details. By keeping in regular contact with your leads through email automation, you can build a longer term relationship with them which helps build trust. Most online consumers will need several touch points with a service before they make a decision to buy – often between 6 and 8 interactions with a business before purchasing.
The mistake many marketers make is to try and make the sale immediately. The opportunity to build trust through providing some kind of value is then lost. By providing value through your email marketing messages , you can develop relationships on which business can be made.
This is why you can find many courses and ebooks online for free. These freebie “giveaways” are used as lead magnets to help build trust online in order to sell products later.
The process of generating leads online is a powerful one once you get it working. It’s a skill which when mastered will allow you to always be employable and even build a business from scratch without any products or a service of your own to sell. To learn more about starting a from scratch online business using lead generation checkout this free video.