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The goal at the heart of every online marketing strategy is to generate more leads. You might have a list of other secondary goals, such as growing your social media audience or increasing email engagement, but the end goal will always remain the same. You want more leads that you can turn into customers.
What is a lead?
A lead is any person who expresses interest in your company. In order for you to identify and follow up with leads, you need to have a system (or systems) in place that allow you visitors to express interest in your offering.
This could include offering a free ebook in exchange for an email address, or it could be as simple as including a call to action in your blog posts. This information can then be used to build your relationship with this customer.
Imagine you supply specialist farm equipment. You create a whitepaper on new technology in the agriculture industry. In order to access the white paper, website visitors must share some details such as their email address, phone number and details about the company they represent.
Rather than cold calling multiple businesses and starting the pitch process from scratch, you have a pre-qualified list of leads that are already familiar with your company.
Here are just some of the lead generation methods we recommend.
Market your successes
Your current customers offer a huge opportunity to showcase what you are capable of. By turning their positive words and reviews into a marketing tool, this could be just the thing needed to turn a warm lead into a customer.
What exactly would this process look like? One of the simplest ways to achieve this is to send customer success stories to warm prospects in the form of a case study. Case studies help prospective customers to imagine the kind of results they can expect.
Imagine you are looking for a construction company to build an extension on your home. You approach three different companies for a quote and happily hand over your email address. Two respond with a quote for the work, but one sends a collection of case studies of similar work alongside their quote. Which one would you choose?
Marketing your past work is one way to build trust throughout the customer journey. We recently shared other ways to build trust at every stage in the customer journey here.
Create better landing pages
Landing pages are not only great for creating compelling offers, they can also transform your pay per click advertising. Rather than directing leads to an existing page on your website, create bespoke landing pages for your campaigns.
Once you start sending traffic to your landing pages, the real work begins. Landing pages offer the perfect opportunity to test your content and message. You should always be refining your landing pages based on user experience data. Tools like Hotjar can help you to understand how people interact with your landing pages and how you can improve them.
Upgrade your email marketing
Once you’ve convinced people to sign up to your email marketing list, half of the work is done. The next step is to reach them at the right time with a compelling marketing message. You could choose to drip feed them information about your company, or you might send them a limited time offer.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to market to your business, yet many companies shy away from developing a comprehensive strategy. Segmenting your audience, delivering a personalised message and scheduling follow up emails should all be a key part of your lead generation strategy.
In this article, we share our tips for improving your email click through rate.
Add a CTA to your blogs
Blogs are about more than just sharing company news or boosting your SEO. When implemented correctly, a blogging strategy can help you to bring in qualified leads through search engines. By publishing information related to the things your customers really care about, you can build your company website into a comprehensive resource.
Visitors might first turn to you for advice. But when the time comes to make a purchasing decision, they will already be familiar with your company. This is where a powerful call to action can come in useful. If a visitor makes it to the end of your blog post, you could encourage them to sign up to your mailing list. This will allow you to send them content and offers in the future.
Implement lead scoring
An often neglected step in the lead generation process is lead scoring. This is often where sales and marketing fall out of step. While your marketing team might believe that every lead that comes through their marketing channels is worth a punt, your sales team might see this in a different light. Lead scoring can help to bring some unity to your sales and marketing teams.
You can look at things like demographics, social interactions, website behaviour and email marketing interaction. You can also assign negative scores to spammy behaviour. You can also adjust your lead scoring based on different personas. Hubspot allows you to manage your leads and assign scores based on popular actions.
If you’re ready to transform your lead generation processes, get in touch with Auburn today. We’ve only scratched the surface of some of the lead generation tools we use to help our clients get ahead.