Your company needs to grow and to grow you need new customers.
To get new customers you need to generate new leads, all the time.
Therefore lead generation is a critical element to your business success.
Did you know that 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge?
Lead generation quite simply is the process and technique of attracting, engaging and converting prospects into leads for your business.
There’s a catch though, seeing that you’re reading about lead gen here, we approach driving leads with a very particular lens, that being inbound marketing.
What is inbound marketing?
In short….
Lead generation activities fall within the attract and engage stages of the inbound methodology. This context allows us to understand what activities are needed to convert these visitors into great sales qualified leads (SQLs).
With that context let’s take a look at 5 tactics you can use to boost your inbound lead generation activities today;
1. A content strategy that’s on point:
As someone passionate about content, this is where you’ll find me. Creating meaningful and purposeful content, then distributing it to the right audience, to hopefully take our organic reach to new heights, to get mad blog views, and as a result pull in all kinds of leads that generate new business for us.
But, it's not as easy as writing, publishing and scheduling your content.
You need a cohesive content strategy to tie all of your marketing efforts together.
Again, I will refer back to the hallowed inbound methodology, in which we strategically map out content according to our buyer’s journey in the following way: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. We will endeavour to create multiple pieces of content to address our buyer persona’s pain points all along that journey.
Typically in the Awareness stage, we will create content in the form of eGuides, eBooks, how to videos and infographics. These content types are normally (not all of them are) gated behind a landing page with a form on it.
Your content strategy should encompass everything from topic cluster research which will help inform your persona’s search intent to your competitor research. You can then begin the process of tailoring your content to those needs.
Your CTA positioning across your business website needs to create seamless conversion paths that lead to well thought out and structured landing pages.
Did you know that companies with 15 or more landing pages see a 55% increase in leads and companies with more than 40 landing pages get 12 times more leads?
Then we enter our engage phase: this is where we aim to create strategic conversations to further move those leads to become happy customers that sing their praises for your business.
Your content strategy needs to be well aligned with all of your marketing efforts from social media, to paid media to the direction of your blog content to the structure of your landing pages, forms, emails and any live chat and bot functions you may have. A cohesive content strategy that’s on point will absolutely generate leads for your business.
2. Blogging always wins:
The thing about blogging is, it always works.
Not sure you agree? Let me show you why it really does:
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Generate 67% more leads.
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Generate 55% more website visitors.
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Generate 97% more inbound links.
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Generate 434% more indexed pages.
Here’s what you can do to make sure that blogging really does work for you:
Your blogging needs to be consistent and cohesive with your overall content strategy. It needs to be high-quality, informative content that addresses the needs and pain points of your persona, but is also clear in highlighting the value that your brand is able to provide.
An optimised blog is the perfect tactic for generating leads.
Your blogging strategy will be aligned with your overall content and SEO strategy. This will give your blog a wider search presence as you know what your persona is searching for so you’re filling that information gap with your blog. Each blog you write is another indexed page on Google which will aid your organic traffic goals.
Apart from indexed pages on Google, you will have strategically placed CTA’s in the sidebar, as a pop-up or even at the bottom of your blog article, thus providing your reader with a seamless conversion path toward becoming a lead.
The quality of your content, the structure of your blogs and strategic placement and wording of your CTA’s is all up to your creativity, but experiment and analyse which placements work best, which CTA’s convert more, which landing pages convert more or less, then optimise and realign your strategy to include these insights.
I hope this has inspired you to get back on the blogging train.
3. Let’s get social:
Social media is extremely dynamic and fast-paced. There are two ways that you should be tackling social media for lead gen:
1. Organic, but intentional social media engagement:
Social media is used to distribute your content from blogs to gated content offers to free trials to social media competitions.
But social media should also be used to join a multitude of groups and forums, particularly where your persona is hanging out. The purpose of joining these groups is to authentically engage in relevant conversations, to become a thought leader in your niche. It also provides the opportunity to share content in these places, as well as the opportunity to directly connect with your persona and take your conversations to a more intentional level.
Social media should also be leveraged to run contests and competitions. Depending on your campaign strategy and goals you can promote brand awareness, social growth and well you guessed it, drive more relevant leads.
2. Then there’s paid social media:
Across the popular social media sites: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter many marketers, us included, will use paid media to generate leads.
Why?
You get to create custom audiences based on a multitude of different attributes which then, based on your budget, have the ability to reach your persona. In a very dense digital space, this can be a crucial tactic for generating leads as well as creating brand awareness and promoting social media growth and engagement.
4. Your ad strategy shouldn’t run in a silo:
Running PPC campaigns across multiple paid advertising platforms requires you to bid on a range of keywords, depending on your industry you will have varying ranges of difficulty. It goes without saying that extensive keyword research is essential to ensuring your brand reaches the right audience.
What are all those efforts worth if they don’t align with your brand, your content and your SEO strategy?
You risk putting your brand in a position where a user journey is disjointed and possibly confusing causing a prospect to bounce off your page rather than find the answers they’re looking for and becoming a lead for your business.
5. Email a.k.a lead nurturing:
Email is a great tactic. Often defined as the most effective lead gen tactic. When used correctly of course. It means you have the opportunity to engage with prospects who have already shown interest in your product or service.
They will have provided you with their email address through the filling in of a form on your website, thereby opting in to receive communication from your brand.
You’re in. The key now is to put these powers to their best possible use. Your trust needs to be earned.
The key is to make sure your emails are personal, well thought out and highlight a value proposition that’s closely aligned to your prospects needs, wants and desires.
How do you do that?
You can create an email sequence that offers your prospects a clear path to head down. You will need to use language that's all about them and their needs. You will have access to some basic information based on the form that they’ve already filled out, so that makes things a little easier.
You need to offer them something that they want and you need to clearly indicate where and how they can receive this.
Analyse and optimise
These tactics, are just that, they’re tactics used to generate more leads for your business and your clients.
The thing is how do you know if these tactics are working (or not working) if you’re not analysing them?
Your approach to all of your marketing efforts needs to be data-driven. These data-driven insights will arm you with the information you need to continue driving those high-quality leads, but it also has the ability to inform what may be in need of some improvement.
That way you are able to refine your tactics, which will inform your strategy, but also provide you with insights about what and what doesn’t make your buyer persona tick.
Key Takeaways
Coming up with new ideas to effectively drive leads can be tricky.
Some of the above tactics you may already be using, but to truly know whether your tactics are effective in driving leads, you need to test out your different campaigns to see what is working and what may need some optimisation.
The one thing I find myself constantly learning is just that. As a marketer, the only way to be successful in what you do is to learn but to also implement just as fast.
So go on, you’ll never know how successful your lead gen campaigns can be unless you get started.
Are you ready to get your agency on the path towards ultimate growth? Why not download our 121 Digital Marketing Growth Hacks Guide. It's FREE - you won't be sorry!
