Gone are the days of door-to-door sales, where lead generation meant making an immediate sale. In the digital world, lead generation is a part of the inbound marketing and sales strategy. Brands identify qualified leads, those who are interested in their product, from the people who visit their websites.
For example, suppose your brand is an influencer marketplace. Jessica, a small ecommerce owner interested in influencer marketing, finds your page while researching how to choose the right influencer. As she reads your article, a small opt-in pops up:
“We teach you exactly how to use influencer marketing for your ecommerce brand. Click here for our ebook on the 5 top tools we use to find the right influencers.”
Jessica, who is unfamiliar with influencers and would likely use a marketplace to find the right one, clicks. She’s directed to a landing page where she provides her email address to receive the e-book, and agrees to receive more relevant messages from your brand.
This e-book serves as a lead magnet, allowing you to generate a lead. A lead magnet is a marketer’s incentive to encourage individuals to provide their data, typically an email address.
Have you ever completed a personality quiz only to have to enter your email address to receive your responses? That’s a lead magnet.
A lead is a potential customer who may not be ready to buy but is a targeted audience that needs or has an interest in what you offer.
Over the years, lead generation tactics have evolved from door-to-door sales to telemarketing to gated content and e-books. Below, we present proven lead generation strategies your brand can use.
Loyalty programs offer numerous benefits: they boost customer retention, cultivate leads, and reduce customer churn rates. Additionally, they incentivize new customers to provide their email address in exchange for the perks of being a loyal customer.
Moreover, loyalty programs allow you to monitor vital data on purchasing behavior, average order value, average customer spend, percentage of return customers, and other metrics that can benefit your brand, in addition to their lead generation potential.
The loyal customers you acquire through these programs are also more likely to share your brand with friends and family than a one-time, new customer.
In a Salesforce Survey, 57% of 7,000 consumers would share their data for personalized offers or recommendations, and CMOs believe it’s the future of content marketing. Personalized content is now expected by most consumers and essential for high conversion rates.
To achieve this, you can analyze user behavior, such as time spent on your page or scrolling, to understand their digital body language. Then, use that data to set up behavioral triggers and send custom lead magnet content to users who exhibit certain behaviors.
Your brand’s blog can be a lead generation machine, with several ways to turn blog posts into lead magnets. Blogging is a great way to rank on search engines, and brands that use it receive 97% more links to their site than those that don’t.
One way to turn blog posts into lead magnets is to include a pop-up opt-in form related to the topic of the post. For example, we could include a pop-up that says “Want to know our secret of how we got 1000 leads in under a week?” and take you to a landing page where you give us your email in exchange for the secret.
Another way is to have a Hello Bar at the top of the blog page with a CTA that encourages readers to sign up or give their email address.
You can offer a few free blog posts and give the big secret as a final lead magnet in exchange for email addresses. This works only if the first few posts are of high quality. Encourage current readers to share your blog posts by rewarding them for engagement and including a call-to-action in all posts.
Appear beyond your blog and social media. Providing expert answers to inquiries on platforms such as Quora can garner thousands of views for your brand. By answering questions thoroughly and including a link to your lead magnet ebook or newsletter, you can display your proficiency. Another way to enhance your online presence and exhibit your expertise is by becoming a prolific guest blogger on respected blogs in your niche, such as Entrepreneur, Forbes, and others.
Lead generation is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We suggest experimenting with all of these techniques to optimize the potential number of leads that you can generate and cultivate.
