An Entrepreneur’s Guide for Creating a Successful Lead Generation Strategy

Imagine opening a new store on the corner of your street, you have invested your time, money, and effort into this business hoping that it will make you good returns. However, people still don’t know about your new venture, you begin thinking of ways that you could mass-collectively tell people about your fancy new shop, in order to, save time and money…

Now let’s assume that your new store is located on the internet, amidst the countless websites and other businesses that are emerging and you want to spread the word that you have a new business, what is the best way for you to do so, you ask?

Generating a steady stream of new leads and developing your pipeline is a vital part of building a successful company. Nevertheless, this can be a daunting process. A lead is traditionally a person who has shown interest in the services or products of your company and has provided valuable information about themselves as a potential consumer, such as the employer, industry and job function of the customer. Lead generation seeks to initiate action on account of a potential customer.

For example, your company could create an e-book to serve as a lead ‘magnet’ or capture the attention of your users in-exchange for some demographical, psychological, or lifestyle information that you can store on your database for later use. This user would now be called a lead; the aim of a good lead generation campaign is to produce as many “qualified leads” as possible – or leads that suit the established target customers that your company pursues.

Now that you understand why having a marketing database of leads is essential in your pursuit of sales and revenues, here are the four main components needed in generating leads.

The Four Components of Generating Leads

Lead Magnets

In a nutshell, lead magnets are a relevant payoff offering an item of interest or value to the prospect in return for their contact and personal details.

The goal of the lead magnet is to attract the maximize amount of potential customers to your online presence to create brand or product awareness, reach, and database for your company.

Here’s the good news: Lead magnets don’t have to be long. Or complex. You don’t need hours and hours of work as well. In fact, a long and complex lead magnet could convert poorly as your potential customers also have other matters to attend to.

The perfect lead magnet will offer enormous value within five minutes of the opt-in. This is, of course, “the rule of thumb”.

According to Ryan Deiss, of Digital Marketer, the key rule to remember is this: To create a lead magnet, choose a specific problem with a specific solution for a specific segment of your market.

Examples of lead magnets could be PDFs, tutorial videos, e-books, articles, software trials, coupons, discount codes, and other valuable material.

This is why selling lead magnets is important; they are the perfect bridge for prospective buyers who have never heard of your brand to send you their contact information such as their email addresses in exchange for educational or valuable material.

Lead Capture

There is an ugly truth and it’s this: The majority of visitors to a website do not convert.

However, businesses still have a chance to capitalize on site traffic by developing a method of lead capture that essentially works. A lead capture form asks a viewer to submit their email address before they can see your locked content. It lets you gather leads directly into your database. You can monitor who accesses your content, and how they communicate with it by adding a lead capture form.

There are a lot of tools out there to help in creating and organizing your database. HubSpot offers a suite of free plans. Nimble and Pardot are also some of the known CRM tools.

Some of the key tips is to make sure that your form runs as smooth and easily as possible as your user-experience is one of the main takeaways that users gather when interacting with your website.

Lead Qualification

The third component to generating leads is lead qualification. Why do you need to qualify your leads? Well, old school salespeople will tell you that the main part of any sales journey is the art of concluding a deal. However, just as critical is the way you open it up. A winning recipe for securing new accounts is to pursue only the most viable prospects with the need and purchasing power to buy your product.

During the inbound marketing stage the first step of the lead qualification occurs. At this stage, the marketing team at your company captures leas via site visits, email subscriptions, or social media, then decides whether the lead fits the profile of the your company ideal customer profile.

Lead qualification is important because it will save you time, energy, and resources as it occurs very early in the pipeline. If your lead doesn’t meet the criteria of a qualified prospect then you can easily disqualify them from being pursued any further and move on to the next potential prospect.

Lead Segmentation

To understand and know the value of lead segmentation, you’ll need to understand what it is and how it works. By segmenting your leads, you are basically creating divisions and subdivisions of your contacts into smaller groups with similar features. Lead segmentation is a smart way to build smaller clusters of people in the sales and marketing funnel, who have common tastes and preferences.

There are two different types of segmentation: Explicit and Implicit.

Explicit segmentation is used when the consumer gives information about themselves through forms, discussions, and other types of information exchanges.

Implicit segmentation is based on information and data gathered on the consumer through their actions and behaviors. These deductions will help you create segmentations that will further narrow down your potential leads.

The best strategy to use is a mixture of both types of segmentation which is the most desirable technique because the truth is, people are complex and tracking their behavioral habits along with simple demographic details paints a full picture of what they really want from you.

Using Lead Generation Strategies to Promote Growth for Your Business

Real quick—before we venture further into which strategies that you should adapt to grow and promote your business, let’s do a quick review of the necessary terminology:

A lead is simply someone who has in some way shown an interest in your business. Since this person has engaged the website of your company and has given you permission to contact them (usually by email, but often over the phone), they have now entered your sales funnel (more on sales funnels coming soon).

Accordingly, lead generation — often shortened to ‘lead gen’—is simply the process of filling your sales funnel with people interested in your business. Anything that gets someone to give you permission to contact them, or to comment on them, is a tactic of lead generation.

One way you can generate leads is by creating a free, downloadable PDF guide that interests your target audience. Since the people who wish to read the guide are required to submit their contact information, this piece of content serves as a mechanism for lead generation. Quite simply, it is a way of helping people while filling their funnel with leads at the same time.

Any successful business understands that consumers develop relationships based on the level of expertise and trust that a company shows. Although online marketing will continue to grow, here are three validated lead generation strategies which are currently working for professional services firms.

Creating Opt-In Opportunities and Gated-Content

In order to gain information on your leads, you’ll need to offer something of value that would interest your target audience. PDFs, e-books, webinars, free demo and trials can all be used as content that can attract potential leads.

Some of your potential consumers will want to subscribe to your newsletter which is a great way to make sure your target audience stay updated with your product or service updates as well as company updates.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B organizations use content marketing such as answering questions on Quora, which is a great platform that includes 300 million monthly users. Creating awareness using your brand or company name by answering questions related to your niche is very important when collecting leads as well as establishing your SEO.

The placement of gated-content and opt-ins will also enormously affect your conversions; therefore, make sure to add your pop-ups or forms at good locations on your users’ journeys.

Create User-Friendly and Clear Landing Pages

A landing page is defined as a web-page that prospects get redirected to that offers the customers resources such as an e-book or a webinar page, in return for their simple contact details. These pages strive to generate leads while further bringing prospects into the customer funnel.

An example of when a landing page is particularly effective, for example, is if a business wants to sell an AI product that helps salespeople. Founders could build a landing page that provides audiences with a free video on how to use AI in the sales field. In exchange for the valuable information, interested audiences can give their contact information.

Lyft’s landing page is a great example of the company highlighting the main reason of why drivers would sign-up to using Lyft: Working independently.

Using Re-Marketing to Capture Lost Leads

What is re-marketing? Re-marketing helps you to tag visitors to the site and get right in front of them while they go about their business across the internet, check their inbox, watch YouTube, google search and even hang out on Facebook.

It helps turn abandoners into leads, which is massive, given that 97% of people would leave without converting on your landing page. Re-marketing amplifies the impact of all the other start-up marketing practices (such as content marketing, social media marketing, etc.) by bringing back your leads to your page.

Let’s Summarize Everything

If you want to grow and grow fast, you’ll need to adapt one or more lead generation strategy in order to capture leads and promote growth. Understanding and organizing your leads is the first step in your success journey of online marketing.

Now that you understand that cornerstones of lead generation, you can now create a robust marketing plan for building preference in the marketplace by creating opt-in opportunities or gated-content to capture your prospect’s attention and then use their contact information to add them to your funnels.

You could also create easy landing pages that deliver your message clearly to your audience. Easy-to-navigate landing pages can help users easily find what they’re looking for as well as relate to your website which is important in attracting the target audience of your business.

Last but not least, if and when your leads don’t convert, you can re-market your website in order to increase conversions and hook onto abandoners.

Lead generation ideas can be difficult to come through, unless you are in the habit of brainstorming regularly. Implementation can also take a lot of time and energy, but if you’re willing to stick to the plan, you’ll be able to increase sales and generate more leads for your company.