Your business is as successful as your lead generation strategy. Essentially, customers are the lifeline of any business. Having an effective customer acquisition and retention strategy can place your business on a path of perpetual success. In other words, lead generation is essential for your business growth.

What is Lead Generation?

A lead is a prospect who has shown interest in your business, either by submitting their details through a form or making an inquiry about your products or services. Lead generation, therefore, is the process of attracting web surfers and converting them into interested prospects.

There are various channels and ways of capturing leads. But the ultimate intent is to have a prospect submit their details, which you can then use to reach them and nurture them down the sales funnel to conversion.

According to Think With Google, 53% of customers conduct online research before buying to ensure they’re making the right choice. What does this mean for you? Your potential customers are constantly scouring the web for information about the products or services you offer.

This means you already have a potential online market. All you ought to do is develop strategies to capture qualified leads and get them on the sales pipeline.

Lead Generation Strategies

Generally, there are online and offline lead generation strategies that you can set up to create a constant flow of prospects. However, in this post, we focus on digital marketing strategies. There are various of them, but here are our top six picks.

Optimizing Your Website

Optimizing your website enhances its discoverability and indexing by search engines. An optimized website also provides a smooth user experience, which in return boosts rankability. Usually, a website that offers a poor user experience has a high bounce rate. On the contrary, when users have a better experience, they stay longer on the site. As a result, search engines assume your content is valuable, hence index the site more.

Once you have your website optimized for high ranking, you should place a lead magnet strategically on each page to net visitors into your sales funnels. This could be a pop-up or a sidebar widget with an exciting offer – free trial, webinar invitation, gift, newsletter sign up, etc.

Thanks to advancements in marketing technology, it’s now possible to target leads based on their interests. Instead of serving the same offer to every visitor who comes to your website, you can now have multiple lead pages with customized offers based on the specific interest of each visitor. This allows you to append an offer on each web page or post based on relevancy, thereby capturing the most qualified leads.

Creating Gated Content

Content marketing is the pillar of digital marketing. Producing regular high-value content can help boost your brand image immensely. Besides positioning yourself as an industry thought leader, it enables you to win your audience’s trust, making it easy to convert them.

Creating gated content is an effective way of capturing qualified leads. This involves locking up some content (e-books, guides, white papers, courses, etc.) and requesting visitors to complete a free sign-up to unlock it. Besides, as they interact with your site, you’re able to track their behavior, which helps you customize the most relevant (beneficial) offers to them.

Optimizing for Local SEO

Perhaps, this is the most potent way of marketing local businesses online. According to statistics, 46% of all Google searches are local-oriented. Besides, 86% of consumers search for local businesses online. This shows how many prospects are up for grabs online.

However, to capture the leads, you need to optimize your online visibility for local SEO. Among other things, you should set up and optimize your Google My Business profile, manage your NAPs (Name, Address, Phone), create local content, among other tactics.

In a nutshell, optimizing for local SEO raises your chances of showing up on the map pack and the organic first-page results for all relevant local searches. Once you show up on local queries leading to a click, you can then count on your optimized website to net the leads.

Leveraging Paid Advertising

Paid advertising remains one of the most effective marketing tools for reaching broader audiences and increasing conversions. Recent advancements in marketing technology have increased the efficiency of paid advertising campaigns thanks to powerful targeting tools.

Whether you opt for social media ads or paid search, there are tools to help you target the ads to the most relevant audience. This optimizes your advertising budget as only prospects who are highly likely to be interested in your products or services see the ads.

Optimizing Your Social Media Presence

Social media presents a ripe marketing opportunity for businesses to net high-quality leads. Statistics indicate that more than 50% of social browsers use it to search for products. Optimizing your social presence with relevant brand content raises the chances of being discovered by users searching for your products and services.

Besides, by optimizing your social profiles, you keep your brand constantly in front of your followers, whom you can woo and nurture to conversion. For example, you can set up a Facebook profile funnel or a Facebook sales funnel to direct your followers to a lead magnet. Again, doing regular posts with brand-related keywords can help you feature in relevant searches.

But overall, the secret to succeeding in social media marketing is identifying your most ideal channels (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) and concentrating your efforts on the ones that drive the highest brand engagement.

Honing Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to hold the trophy for digital marketing. Despite the success of other lead generation strategies, email’s return on investment (ROI) still remains the highest, estimated at 4400%. Perhaps, the success can be attested to its powerful relationship-building model. Unlike social, where followers may or may not catch up with all your updates, email provides a systematic way of following up with prospects as all messages are delivered to their inbox.

Generally, once a lead submits their information, it sends a signal that they wouldn’t mind interacting with your brand further. This opens a window for you to build their trust and hopefully convince them to buy from you. You can begin nurturing the relationship by sending them newsletters with valuable information or freebies. If they continue showing interest in your brand, then you can send them special offers, product announcements, etc. Once they convert, you can continue cultivating the relationship by emailing them thank you notes, review requests, related products, up-sells, etc.

Conclusion

In summary, every business requires a solid lead generation strategy to keep the customers flowing in. Digital marketing has opened up different channels that you can exploit to capture qualified leads and nurture them to conversion. From website optimization to local SEO, social, email, and paid advertising, you have powerful tools to help you rock digital lead generation.

Should you need help rolling out your digital marketing strategy, Ad Edge Digital Marketing has got your back. Contact us today, and let’s assist you to win more leads.