Roughly one-third of businesses with employees close within their initial two years, according to SBA data. Though this article won’t delve into the myriad reasons a business may fail, it will underscore a crucial factor for business success: consistent lead generation.
To scale your venture rapidly and ensure a steady profit, mastering the art of acquiring business leads is imperative.
What Is Lead Generation in Marketing?
Lead generation in marketing entails garnering actionable customer interest in your business’s offerings. Typically, this involves customers initiating a conversation or providing their contact information for further discussion regarding your products or services.
For instance, a law firm seeking business leads might receive:
- Form submissions from potential clients inquiring about their services.
- Phone calls from potential clients scheduling consultations.
- Direct messages on social media inquiring about their rates.
- Emails from potential clients seeking consultation scheduling.
Thus, part of securing new business leads involves structuring a marketing approach that facilitates easy customer engagement with your company. If you’ve come across terms like demand generation and wonder whether you need demand generation vs. lead generation – you require both, and distinguishing between them at this stage isn’t necessary.
Your lead generation strategies should invariably result in the exchange of a prospect’s contact or payment information, or an in-person meeting.
12 Lead Generation Examples
Whether you intend to purchase leads or develop your lead generation marketing plan, having a strategy in place is essential for converting strangers into paying customers.
Enhance your revenue and expand your business today with these 26 lead generation techniques. Download your free eBook now!
Before constructing your strategy, examine the following 12 methods to generate leads for your business.
Direct Engagement
Directly engaging with potential customers is an excellent approach to generating new business, particularly if your business sells high-value products or services billed on a monthly retainer. For businesses operating on low-value, high-volume sales, this option might not be suitable.
You can reach out to prospects directly through social media, email, phone calls, or even in-person interactions after confirming they might be a good fit for your business.
For instance, if you operate a lawn care company in Houston and notice a large commercial property being built in the area, you could contact the property manager to discuss servicing the completed estate. This exemplifies how to generate leads in Houston or any other area your local business may serve.
Generate Leads on LinkedIn
Did you know that the audience on LinkedIn possesses twice the buying power of your average web audience? B2B marketing using LinkedIn is especially effective and can yield profitable results.
Establishing connections with relevant industry leaders is an excellent way to create business opportunities. Potential connections seeking recommendations for services you offer could potentially become your next paying customer.
Social media advertising is also an effective way to leverage LinkedIn if you have the budget. You can even opt for lead gen ads that feature forms directly within your ads, making it easy for relevant users to sign up for your products or services.
Another method to acquire business leads on LinkedIn is by connecting with members of your target audience, engaging with their posts, and messaging them directly to offer your product or service. However, this approach only works if their profile and posts indicate that your services can fulfill one of their unmet needs. Otherwise, your outreach could be perceived as spam and undermine your credibility.
Advertise and Retarget
Social media isn’t the sole advertising platform! Utilize targeted pay-per-click advertising on Google or Bing to market to search engine users. This enables you to display ads for searches already known to be highly relevant to your business.
For instance, imagine you’re a BMW dealer aiming to enhance your car dealership marketing in Houston. You can create ads targeting phrases like “best BMW dealer in Houston” or “new BMW in Houston,” and utilize a geo-filter to target consumers searching in the Houston area.
It’s rare for web visitors to convert on their initial website visit. Once a user clicks on your PPC ads, you can utilize display retargeting to display visual ads for your products on other popular websites across the web.
While digital advertising may take time to refine, it can be one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your business.
Ask for Referrals from Current Customers
Customer referrals are among the oldest lead generation marketing strategies. If your product or service has impressed a current customer, consider asking them to share their experience with friends who might also benefit.
Your business’s offering may be compelling enough for customers to provide referrals voluntarily, or you could implement an incentive system. For instance, offer customers a percentage off their next monthly retainer fee for each client they refer.
Customer referrals are effective for acquiring more leads because they’re profitable, and your current customers are doing most of the legwork.
Write Guest Blogs
Guest blogging is a valuable method for generating referral business through content marketing while simultaneously improving your SEO.
Guest blogging offers several marketing benefits:
- Establishes new industry connections
- Enhances your SEO by acquiring meaningful, industry-relevant backlinks
- Generates referral traffic from a relevant audience
You can find leads for your business by guest blogging for sites relevant to your industry but not direct competitors. For instance, if you operate a marketing company, consider guest blogging for sign companies in your area. Sign makers’ audience is interested in marketing, making your services complementary.
Guest blogging for local influencers aligns with local SEO best practices. For instance, guest blogging and acquiring backlinks from a popular local podcaster will improve your site’s ranking in that locality.
For optimal results, ensure the site you’re guest blogging for is relevant to both your industry and location.
Rank in Search Engines to Generate Leads
Ensure your target audience can easily find you when searching for your product or services online. Utilize SEO and SEM for your website to learn how to generate more leads for your business.
Start by conducting keyword research to identify phrases your target audience searches before purchasing your product or service. Tools like SEMrush or Google Ads Keyword Planner can provide valuable search data.
Once you’ve identified the right keywords, optimize your page content. If you’re selling a highly competitive product or service, ranking organically may be challenging. Hiring an SEO company can generate consistent leads, provided you’re willing to invest.
Before making any investment decisions, learn how to choose an SEO company. Not all agencies deliver the same results, so select one that aligns with your business needs.
Answer Forum Questions
Answering forum questions is a great way to prove your subject matter expertise while also setting the stage for reciprocity. If done strategically, this practice can help you find leads in a matter of minutes.
“… The key to using the Principle of Reciprocity is to be the first to give and to ensure that what you give is personalized and unexpected.” This quote from Influence at Work outlines how being the first to give something can help you receive something of equal or greater value.
Put this principle of persuasion into action by answering forum questions on sites like Reddit or Quora. Find a category that is relevant to your business, and start answering user questions. At the end of your answer, make sure to include a call-to-action to use your product or service to help solve the user’s problem.
For example, imagine that you’re a law firm offering family law services. You can subscribe to a legal subreddit where users ask questions specifically about what your business offers. Take a few minutes each day to search for any questions that you can offer some insight.
If a user asks about a child support question, leave a helpful answer and finish by linking to your website and suggesting the user contact you for a consultation. By offering free advice, the user who asked the question may be more compelled to reciprocate by paying you for legal services in the future.
Answering forum questions is a great example of how to generate new business leads, and it can be great for SEO as well. For our Reddit example in particular, if your child support answer gets enough upvotes, your link can have a positive impact on your law firm’s SEO. This kind of synergy can lead to compounding returns on your lead gen efforts.
Offer a Free Tool or Lead Generation Magnet
Offering a free tool is a great way to generate business to business sales leads. What type of problem does your product or service solve? Can you offer a free tool that will help users without eliminating the need to eventually purchase from your business?
For this example, imagine that you’re a Houston-based plastic surgeon. After polling your Twitter audience and doing some keyword research, you determine that users are interested in learning about procedure costs and recovery times.
As a result, you decide to compile an eBook that outlines price ranges, recovery time ranges, and before and after photo examples for all of the different procedures that you offer. You write up a teaser blog post and then require people to exchange their name, phone number, and email address for the information you’ve provided.
With the right topic, targeting, and call to action, your blog post can start earning contact information. A higher alignment of the blog topic, CTA, and offer will result in a higher conversion rate. Here are the visit-to-lead conversion rate averages that you can expect according to blog lead conversion data from Databox.
Influencer Interviews
Interviewing leaders in your industry can open up a lot of doors for you and your business. Not only is this a great way to network and learn from experts within your industry, but you can use these interviews to create powerful content.
Video record your interview, turn it into a Q&A blog post or stage it as a podcast. Framing your interview in these different formats will help you leverage the content and bring interested users to your website or social media properties. You can even consider gating the interviews and requesting contact information to improve your business lead generation.
Many times, the influencers will share the resulting interview across their marketing channels, multiplying your reach and ROI.
Start Networking
Networking rarely leads to direct revenue but is great for nurturing professional opportunities. Try to select a networking event that is both local and related to your industry. This will help keep your travel costs low, and ensure that you are capitalizing on easy business wins.
What can you expect to gain from networking? If you walk in with ROI in mind, you’ll almost always be disappointed. Instead, look for oblique wins.
Maybe you’ll meet a complementary business that you can partner with to share leads, expanding your reach. Perhaps you meet an influencer that agrees to interview with you so that you can build a great piece of content and expand your marketing reach at the same time. Networking can even open up guest blogging opportunities for your company.
There are almost always multiple returns on your networking investment, making it one of the best ways to get leads for your business.
Create an Email Offer
Lead generation doesn’t always have to stem from exposure to a new audience. You might have untapped business potential in your email lists.
If you’ve built your own list of email subscribers, consider putting together a special offer. A special discount or limited time offer can effectively turn a passive bystander into your next paying customer.
You can also offer special email offers to other people’s email lists. If you’re actively networking or partnering with complementary businesses in your industry, you can structure a deal that lets you promote yourself to their audience.
Recall our previous example of a guest blog partnership between a marketing agency and sign-maker. The marketing agency could suggest a business promotion in the sign company’s next email blast and offer the sign-maker 5% of all sales generated from the initiative. This is a win-win-win situation for the marketing firm, the sign company, and the happy new customers.
Create Helpful Blog Comments
As a warning, I did not save the best business lead generation strategy for last.
As a business owner or marketing executive at your company, make it a point to subscribe to industry publications and even competitor blogs. This can help you keep a finger on the pulse of your competition, and open up opportunities to be helpful.
If you notice that readers have left several blog comments on a post that haven’t been answered, offer your personal insights in response. It’s not a bad idea to include a call to action to some relevant information on your website that will further address the reader’s question.
Tread lightly when trying to generate business leads through blog comments. Comments on blogs are difficult to pull off genuinely because of their susceptibility to spam. Also, your competitors may not take kindly to you headhunting their audience.
