You know how crucial it is to create leads, and more importantly, qualified leads. When you increase leads, you increase brand awareness and interest in your products or services. To do this, you need to nurture your potential leads through the marketing funnel and move them into the sales pipeline.
We all know that lead generation strategies create solid relationships and loyal customers for a long time. This article breaks down the most effective lead generation strategies to help you attract and convert qualified prospects.
What Is a Lead Generation Strategy?
Simply put, a lead generation strategy is a collection of tactics that attract interested prospects and turn them into qualified leads. The goal is to encourage a potential customer who shows interest in your brand by taking some sort of action. This action provides you with their contact details, implying that they may want to purchase or learn more about a product or service.
B2C and B2B lead generation strategies include these four components:
- Lead capture – Collecting information from a lead. This might be the lead’s name and contact information or possibly relevant details about the lead or their organization (ex., Business name, position in the company, number of employees).
- Lead magnet – Incentives used to drive prospects to become new leads.
- Lead qualification – The process uses a lead’s information and determines the likelihood that they’ll buy.
- Lead segmentation – The process of grouping leads based on their information, habits, and activities (things like job title, lead magnet they responded to, pages they visit on your site).
Each of these components is necessary to qualify leads and turn them into buyers. Let’s take a look at the lead generation strategies that will take a browser to a buyer.
Chatbot Conversations
Your marketing and sales teams may not always have the time to dedicate to lead generation. Chatbots help you generate leads and build rapport with prospects. They’re available 24/7 and can function as an automated extension of your marketing and sales team. With a chatbot, you can tailor it to answer common questions people ask, provide web pages or articles based on the questions.
If the person asks a question that isn’t programmed in, you can have the bot collect their contact information to someone who can answer the question, giving a timeline of when they will get back to them. The customization potential helps you collect information and interact with customers to start a conversation.
Gated Content
Content that is only made accessible to users after filling out a form is called gated content. This online content download is effective because it provides value for free, attracting high-quality leads. After all, they’re interested in topics related to your brand and products or services. Some examples of gated content are:
- Whitepapers
- eBooks
- Guides
- Reports
- Courses
- Worksheets
- Online tools
Providing something of value for free gets the prospect into your marketing funnel. From there, you can add them into an email sequence, ask for additional information, and you can follow up with more items of value like webinars, free demos, and more.
Newsletters
A newsletter uses content as a lead magnet, encouraging interested prospects to connect and stay engaged with your brand. Regular and targeted content provided by a newsletter keeps you in front of the prospect. Even if they don’t take action immediately, the newsletter should contain information they can come back to later when they are interested in a new product or service. You can encourage them to continue interacting by providing promotions and services that drive prospects down the sales funnel. Some of the most effective newsletter content is:
- Blog posts
- Updates about products or services
- Special offers
- Upcoming Events
- Webinars
- Additional reading from thought leaders and industry experts
Providing extra value to prospects via your newsletter helps keep them engaged and helps qualify them as leads when they respond to your newsletter.
Use Your Website To Promote A Lead Magnet
No matter your lead magnet, highlighting it on your homepage helps encourage a prospect to take action. On-site funnels to segment your audience help resonate with a prospect’s needs and interests. You can promote a lead magnet on your site by:
- Highlight it on your homepage as a call to action
- Promote lead magnets at the end of blog posts
- Integrate lead magnets on each page of your site
- Create a lead generation pop-up (Helpful Tip: Use these sparingly as they may annoy prospects and actually drive them away from your site)
- Create a library of resources with gated content
Creating lead magnet promotions on your website lets you get double the exposure when you combine it with a blog post or landing page. Send a link to those pages through your newsletter, and it gets more people engaged and looking at your products or services.
Retarget Ads
If you’ve ever visited a website and then seen an ad for the same brand a few hours later, you’ve seen retargeting in action. Retargeting allows you to reconnect with audiences who engaged with your brand somehow but didn’t complete the buying process. Through Google display or social ads, you can show ads to people who engage with you online. It may take a few times to see your ads before they take action, but retargeting is a strategic way to continue inviting and guiding customers down the sales funnel.
Create Your Own Lead Generation Strategy
It may not take a genius to implement this strategy, but it does take time. Let Selworthy help you create a lead generation strategy that brings qualified leads to your sales team and provides you the time you need to grow your business. We are a HubSpot Gold Certified Agency Partner. We have the expertise to help.
At Selworthy, we understand how challenging it can be to balance marketing, sales, and managing your business. Contact us today to get started! Let us take marketing off your plate so you can rest easy knowing that a strategy is in place to bring leads to your door.
Our experts are ready to help you turn your content strategy into a plan that will capture your audience’s attention and create prospects into customers.
