If you have time and not much money, here are four lead generation strategies that will get you qualified leads when used together. If you are patient and consistent in their use, you will get the leads you need to be successful.
The following four lead generation tactics require a lot of time but not much money. Instead of using marketing strategies that rely on advertising, trade shows, telemarketing, email blasts, etc. that can cost a lot of money, you will let your potential leads come to you instead.
How? The how is by using four fundamental lead generation strategies. Actually these strategies will work for other kinds of online business objectives as well because they are fundamental to good Internet marketing. The four strategies you will use for online lead generation are:
- Conversion Optimization
- Search Engine Optimization
- Publishing interesting, valued and relevant content
- Using social media to both amplify content and engage prospects
The people at HubSpot have coined a phrase for getting prospects to find you. They call it “Inbound Marketing” and the phrase is being increasingly used when it comes to lead generation. HubSpot’s definition for Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers. They describe Inbound Marketing as having three components: Content, Search Engine Optimization, and Social Media (strategies 2 - 4 above).
I absolutely agree that, over time, these three strategies will generate qualified traffic to your website or landing pages. My view is that without ways to get them to take the action you want once they get there (conversion), the traffic is in large part wasted. Remember your objective is not to generate traffic to your site, but to generate leads!
You might want to read my thoughts on this issue in the post below.
So What?...A Question that Needs to Be Part of Your Marketing Vocabulary
Conversion Optimization: Conversion optimization describes a set of best practices to maximize the possibility that visitors to your site will take the action you favor. For lead generation, the most favored action for first time visitors is getting them to provide their name and/or email address in return for access to your blog, white papers, EBooks, Webinars, etc.
Conversion Optimization is simply using the elements that make up your website or landing page in ways that others have shown to increase the likelihood that visitors will take the action you want. We measure “conversion” as a rate. It’s the percentage of visitors that take the action.
Mobile Optimization is also important. Given the shift by consumers to mobile devices, optimizing a website or landing page for mobile device users is also a strategy that should be part of your conversion optimization efforts.
Conversion optimization is an on-going process. The process involves testing the various elements on the site to measure the impact of change to the conversion rate. Changing things like the Offer, Headlines, Navigation Scheme, Usability Factors, Calls to Action (CTA), Graphics, Type Font, Color Scheme, Page Placement, Type Size, Incentives, etc. can dramatically affect the conversion rate. The only way to find out is through an on-going series of tests to create a site over time that maximizes the conversion rate. Below are some related posts on this subject.
Website Conversion Optimization: Are You Really Doing It?
You Need a Quality Website to Create Trust in Visitors’ Minds
Website Usability: Do You Understand the Concept?
Conversion Optimization: Is Your Website a Business Center?
Website Optimization: How Important Is It to You?
Marketing on the Web Begins with the Website
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): As the name implies, search engine optimization (SEO) is designing your site to maximize the likelihood that search engines will both find it and index the content on it. The goal is to rank high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for the keywords you desire. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to make the results more relevant for those searching. An example of this is Google’s recent announcement that is giving Google+ posts more prominence in search engine results.
Basic search engine optimization for a website involves creating a good navigation scheme that makes the content easily accessible to both visitors and search engine crawlers. There is a whole list of best practices to optimize your website or landing pages, including optimizing Page Titles, Meta tags, Internal Links, good content with keyword placement, rich media, site speed, etc.
The other major factor is what is termed “link building.” Search Engines measure “trust” by the number of quality inbound links to it. The more inbound links from reputable sites on the Web, the more search engines believe the site itself is reputable. These links are major influencers in determining rankings. Below are additional related posts dealing with search engine optimization.
SEO/SEM: Where You Rank Impacts Click Through Rates (CTRs)
Search Engine Optimization: Is It Part of Your Equation for Web site Success?
Publishing Good Content: A business blog is a great vehicle for publishing great content and, over time, generating a lot of traffic to a website. While blogs are used by businesses for brand building and thought leadership, they can also function as a lead generation machine. A blog with good content that is both interesting and relevant to its readers can do all of these functions very well. Compelling content that is useful to prospects will be found by them.
Depending on your frequency of publishing good content that is indexed by search engines, it will take some time to build an audience big enough to provide the number of leads you set as your goal.
Turning those reading your blog into leads is a matter of creating persuasive offers and really good calls to action (conversion optimization). Below are some related posts on publishing good online content.
How Usable is Your Website Content?
Web Headlines: Do Yours Match Research Findings?
Website Content Optimization Can be Frustrating
Website Duplicate Content Poorly Understood
Using Social Media: Social Media is a key component of lead generation. It magnifies the influence of your content. The goal of course is to get readers of your content to share it with other people in their social media networks. Better yet is to get these social media networks to comment on the content. Content that is shared and talked about is perceived as more authentic and is even more likely to attract qualified prospects to your website or landing page.
Another use of social media is increasing your brand’s importance over the web. Social media should be used to help develop a stronger brand presence through brand mentions, brand awareness, branded search queries, etc. Publishing high-quality and engaging web content plays a big role in building a strong brand presence for your site.
Your primary goal with using social media is simple. It is to stay connected with existing customers and generate new leads and customers. The way you do that is publishing super content, becoming members of relevant social media communities and participating in their discussions and becoming an active member of the blogosphere for the subject matter that will, over time, attract more leads to your site. Below are some related posts on social media.
Your Facebook Page: What Can You Do to Make It Better and Does It Really Matter?
Social Media Marketing: Do You Know How?
Social Media: Where Do You Begin?
Which Social Media Sites are Best for Your Business?
Is Your Company Using Social Media Effectively?
What Metrics Tell Us: In 2010, HubSpot did an analysis of lead generation best practices used by over 1,400 small and medium-sized businesses. The results demonstrated that four key factors have a significant positive impact on lead generation. The HubSpot report lists four factors as having a significant positive impact on leads:
- Your number of indexed pages in Google: Those organizations with more than several hundred pages experienced a significant increase in the rate of lead generation.
- The number of keywords for which you rank in Google’s’ top 100 results: Once you achieve top 100 rankings for a significant (in the teens) number of keywords, lead growth is positively impacted. The more keywords for which you rank in the Google’s top 100, the more leads you will generate.
- Publishing and growing your blog: Sites with blogs generate 68 percent more leads than sites without one. Lead generation can be impacted once as few as 24-51 articles are published on a site. The more good articles you publish the more leads generated.
- Using Twitter and growing your followers: B2C organizations using Twitter generated two times more leads than those without a Twitter user account. The more twitter followers you have up to about 500 followers, the more leads you will garner. It seems that once followers grow beyond 500, you are probably getting non-qualified followers so the positive correlation stops about 500 followers.
Be Patient and Consistent: The strategies outlined in this article take time and lots of it. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a lot of money. The faster you publish excellent and relevant content, the faster you will get results. Make sure you publish at regular intervals. The minimum should be one article or blog post per week. More frequent is much better and will allow you to attain your goals faster. However, do not sacrifice interesting and engaging content to publish more content. Quality trumps quantity in today’s world. Expect to publish close to 50 articles before you see any impact. After reaching that initial target your leads will grow as your archive of good articles grows into the hundreds.
AdWords: If you have a budget and want to jump start your lead generation campaign then you can add a Fifth Strategy to your efforts: AdWords. Search engine “keyword” advertising is a way to show up on the first page of search engine results pages long before you get there through organic search engine rankings. Just remember to customize ads and landing pages to the keyword search string used by search engine users. If they search for “Schwinn bicycle parts”, the ad and landing page should be consistent and quickly show that they are in the right place for “Schwinn bicycle parts” as opposed to bicycle sales or bicycle events, etc. Aligning search keywords with persuasive ads and landing pages is important to conversion.
Analytics (Metrics): If something is important, it needs to be measured. Tracking how you are doing over time will allow you to make adjustments to your tactics. Analytics are essential. I would urge you to select metrics that allow you to know if you are making progress on the strategies outlined above.
While the number of leads and how many of them become customers are the key metrics, it is important to know if you are making progress on the strategies that will create the leads in the first place. There are a lot of tools you can use to measure your progress. Select what works for you and use the data to make changes to your lead generation campaign to make it more effective.
