Constant lead generation is vital for business growth. Thus, small businesses need to find long-term, sustainable lead generation strategies to achieve their business goals and objectives.
While there are proven methods to generate leads organically, an effective lead generation strategy requires you to invest time and money.
For instance, you’ll need cash to create quality marketing content, train your marketing team, or hire marketing experts. If you can’t meet the cost out of pocket, you can access small business loans from a reputable fintech lender to fund your lead generation campaigns.
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What is a lead generation strategy?
A lead is known as a potential customer who has expressed interest in your products or services. Therefore, lead generation is attracting prospects through various marketing channels aiming to nurture them to become paying customers.
Key factors to start a lead generation campaign
Before you jump headfirst into a lead generation campaign, there are key factors you should consider to ensure that you’re set up for success from the get to. They include:
Understand your customer
Research your customer and gain insight into their behavior, interest, motivations, age, gender, location, contact preferences, type of content they interact with online, pain points, income level, and more.
Once you understand your prospective customer, you’ll be able to choose the right marketing channels and run campaigns that drive high contact rates and engagement.
Set your goals and objective
What are you trying to achieve with your lead generation efforts? Are you looking for quick fixes to your revenue shortfalls, or do you want to find a long-term, sustainable method of generating leads?
Whatever your goals are, make sure that you make them SMART. For instance, you may want to increase sales revenue by 30% over the next three months or improve the conversion rate by 20% in 2 months.
Once you’ve clear business goals and objectives, you can choose the best lead generation method to help you achieve those goals.
Competitor analysis
Never ignore what the competition is up to. Study their lead generation strategies and understand what they are doing right or wrong. Then use that knowledge to refine your strategy by integrating their best practices with the missed opportunities in their strategy.
Knowledge and experience
To drive quality leads, you’ll need to have a certain level of expertise, use the right approach, tactics, and consider all the legal aspects. Otherwise, you’ll be putting money into an ineffective campaign.
So, do you or your team have the knowledge and experience required to run successful lead generation campaigns using the strategy you are considering?
It helps to learn about the strategy or outsourcing from the experts. You may have to make an upfront investment to train your team or pay a marketing expert, but you can cover such costs with small business loans.
Budget
What’s the maximum investment you’re willing to make to support your lead generation strategy? Make sure you allocate a sufficient budget. Otherwise, your plan may result in a lack of leads and poor ROI.
If you don’t have enough cash flow, you can obtain some small business loans from a reputable online lender to fund your lead generation strategy and spread the cost over 24-60 months.
Top best 5 lead generations ideas to apply in your small business
Implement an SEO Strategy
Nowadays, consumers talk to search engines first before speaking to humans, and over half of all shoppers are discovering new products and brands via search engines.
So make sure that you optimize your website for SEO and speed. That way, more leads will land on your website when searching for businesses and products related to yours.
Content marketing
Besides SEO, content marketing is one of the most influential and sustainable organic lead generation strategies that you can use.
Have a blog section on your website where you post unique, keywords-focused articles answering questions or problems your target customers are asking.
Offer free trials
Offering a free version of your product with the most basic features is a great lead generation strategy. Once the customer has entered your marketing funnel through a freemium, you can nurture them and convert them into paying customers by encouraging them to upgrade to a premium version for more features.
Run paid ads
Running Google Ads and social media ads are great low-cost lead generation strategies to potential net customers and direct them to your site to sign up to your email list or a landing page where they can make a purchase.
Create a targeted landing page
Where will your customers land after clicking an ad or a link on social media? Have a well-designed landing page optimized for conversions with a clear call to action so that your leads won’t get confused on the following steps to take.
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