Note: This lead generation strategies guest post is from Mark Cirillo, Content and PR Manager at LeadsBridge, a lead generation and Facebook Ads platform.
Are you spending lots of money to generate leads for your business?
It can be very expensive to generate quality leads. In a survey by GetApp Lab on lead generation challenges, 11.7 percent of respondents revealed that budget (i.e. lack of money) is one of their biggest challenges.
This is why, in the 2017 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey, most companies planned to increase their lead generation budget in 2017 between 1 percent and 10 percent.
But what if I told you that you don’t have to break the bank to attract valuable leads to your business.
In this blog post, you will learn how to use four effective and inexpensive lead generation strategies to generate high-quality leads for your business
Every business owner and marketer wants to get traffic to their websites. But, realistically, not all website visitors will convert to customers on their first visit.
They are probably checking out your website or considering the quality and effectiveness of your offer. They need time to trust your business.
In this scenario, you need to build a relationship with them and you can do that through email marketing.
Email marketing is an effective lead generation strategy–hence why it has an ROI of $38.
Not only that, it’s 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. A 2017 Ascend study also revealed that 45 percent of respondents believe that creating content and marketing it via email is the one of the most effective online tactics used for lead generation.
As effective as email marketing is, it cannot work without email addresses of your subscribers. One way to get their email addresses is by using a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is a free resource you offer to your website visitors to entice them to give you their email addresses. A lead magnet serves as a bribe to make your audience give you their email addresses voluntarily. The effectiveness of your success depends on the value of your lead magnet.
A good lead magnet should excite your visitors. They should be eager to get whatever you’re offering–whether it’s an e-Book, year-end report, or an infographic.
The content you offer should be useful and valuable to them. It should offer a promise and provide solutions for your target audience’s pain points.
Here’s an example of high-converting lead magnet.
This lead magnet from Hubspot’s Website Grader allows website visitors to grade the performance of their website based on the site’s SEO, mobile responsiveness, and security, then it advises visitors on what to do next.
While this page appears to be very simple, there are some deliberate tactics that make this lead magnet effective. For one, the lead form is very simple and only asks for your website and email address. Asking for additional personal and contact information may turn away potential leads.
Also, note how the headline asks a question that piques a visitor’s interest and encourages the visitor to “Get Your Answer” by filling out the form.
Here are a few tips to help you create a conversion-focused lead magnet.
A webinar is a tried and true lead generation strategy for businesses.
According to a survey carried out by Readytalk, 62 percent of all B2B marketers use webinars to prospect or nurture leads, 49 percent said 20-40 percent of webinar registrants turned into qualified leads and webinars average a 42 percent registrant to attendee conversion.
It is a great way to generate a lot of subscribers. Not only that, these leads are of higher quality. Leads generated from webinars are more engaged and ready to take any desired action.
According to a survey carried out on the best way to generate engaged and qualified leads, it was discovered that 62 percent of the businesses surveyed chose webinars as one of the best ways to generate engaged leads.
With webinars, you have the opportunity to reach prospects from all across the world. Thus, helping you to expand your customer base and reduce the cost per lead.
Below are five ways you can run a standard and successful webinar to generate high quality and converting leads for your business.
Knowing your webinar audience is very important to your lead generation success. Create a buyer persona for them so you can effectively target them.
Here, you are targeting audience who are probably in the awareness stage of your sales funnel. This is the stage that they know their problems but may not know how to solve them. The onus lies on you to create content to educate them about their pain points and provide solutions to them. It is pertinent to warm them up and tell them your story.
There are different types of webinar such as a question & answer webinar, master-class webinar or a demo webinar. You need to choose the best format to deliver your message and to solve the audiences’ pain points. The question and answer webinar addresses audience questions and provides answers to it. The master class webinars are educational. They address audience pain points and provide actionable solutions. The demo webinar type is common among companies that sell software. They show their audience how to use their product or services.
It is time to create content for your webinar. Write an attention-grabbing introduction. Share your business story to help you build trust, rapport, and credibility with your audience. Give them actionable content that shows them how to solve their problems. Add an actionable call to action that induces urgency.
There are several platforms you can use to deliver your webinar such as Gotowebinar, Zoom, Meetingburner, Webinarjam, etc. Select the best one for your presentation. Most of them have a free trial; make use of it to discover the best platform for your audience.
This is a very important aspect of this strategy. If you want to generate high quality leads for your webinar, you will have to promote it at the right place to the right audience. You can start by sending email blasts to your list, include it in your newsletters, blog posts, social media updates, etc. You can also use Facebook ads to generate awareness for your webinar.
The goal of setting up a product demo on your website is to be able to turn your website visitors into trial users or leads, and later convert them into paying customers.
Why do 75 percent of SaaS companies provide free trial for their website visitors?
Creating a product demo will enable you to allow prospective customers to test your product before they buy it. This will lead to more lead qualification and lower customer acquisition cost.
Here’s how to get more leads for your business using the demo strategy.
Promoting your free demo will enable you to generate a massive amount of leads for your business. You can do this by placing calls-to-action to request a demo on your website, landing pages, and social media ads.
Some SaaS companies prefer to ask users to supply their credit card details before they can view the demo, while others prefer not to ask.
However, it is more effective to allow visitors view your demo without requesting their credit card details. A study carried out by Totango revealed that trial signups and trial conversions were more successful when trial users were not asked for credit card information during the signup process.
In order to increase your lead generation effort with product demo, you need to use fewer forms. Your form should require fewer details. You can use only one form field to request for your users’ name instead of asking for their address and telephone numbers.
Kissmetrics carried out an analysis on the highest converting websites and discovered that most of them used short signup forms. You don’t need many details to convert your audience.
You need a clear call to action to entice your website visitors to sign up for your free demo or trials. Your submit button should not read “submit”. Instead, it should tell your website visitors what will happen when they sign up. You can use phrases like, “Get a free trial”, “Start free trial”, or “Get a free 30-day trial”.
Content marketing is still king, and it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to generate high-quality leads.
According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing and it generates three times as many leads. This is why 89 percent of B2B marketers are using content marketing.
You can attract leads with valuable and informative content. Below are five ways you can generate leads from content marketing:
A content upgrade is a lead magnet that can help you to convert more visitors into leads. All you need is to add them to your blog posts.
You can embed the lead boxes continuously in your blog posts. Brian Dean of Backlinko.com used it and increased his conversion rate from .54 percent to 4.83 percent.
What kind of content can you use? Here are a few ideas, just to name a few:
Guest posting is another way you can get cheap and qualified leads for your business. You are simply placing your blog posts or content on established websites. Before you write a guest post, make sure you know the audience you want to reach and where they hang out. Research popular blogs in your niche, search for relevant topics and create valuable posts for your audience.
Target long-tail keywords to rank for on search engines. It is easier to rank for long-tail keywords ranging from 3-5 words than shorter keywords (1-2 words). According to Moz blog, long tail keywords comprise up to 70 percent of all search traffic.
Use long-tail keywords to write a targeted article of at least 500-1000 words. For better results, publish high-quality content regularly. This will help you to generate organic traffic and leads.
What other inexpensive lead generation strategies are you using for your business? Chat with me on Twitter @Marc0Cirill0.
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