Everybody wants leads – there’s no denying it. They drive your business forward. Without leads, who would marketers nurture until they’re ready to talk to sales? Who would sales turn in to customers?
Because of the importance of leads, marketing teams spend a lot of time creating new ideas to generate them. But sometimes it can be difficult to know what will work. Here are some ideas to increase your lead flow.
1. Consistently Blogging
By now, most marketers know consistent blogging is effective because it helps drive and convert traffic on your website. Writing one blog per month that your readers don’t relate to won’t encourage them to read or return. To be truly effective in creating leads, you must blog regularly every month, focusing on quality content with relevant CTAs.
If your bandwidth can’t keep up with native blogging, try reaching out to well-known names in your industry for guest blogs. You can also work with a professional copywriter who has experience in your industry. With a regular blog schedule - native or not - your blog's views will increase. More views could result in more long-term leads.
Read More: How to Make Every Department a Marketing Department
2. Email Marketing
Like blogging, email remains a heavyweight in the world of marketing. Unfortunately, sending an email every few months won’t have much impact. An email campaign such as a weekly newsletter, or nurture campaign performs better. The elements of your email are important to consider, too. Write strong body content that steers your reader to take action. Make sure your CTA is ultra-clear. Your design, subject line, and pre-text can aid in this, too.
Sometimes you have to think beyond the design and copy to generate leads. According to digital expert Neil Patel, sending your emails to the correct audience through segmentation generates higher conversion rates. The more value you provide - from design, content, to segmentation - the better.
Also read: 8 Ways to Make Your Email More Engaging
3. Social Media
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone without at least one social media account. That's why you should consider using social media in your lead generation efforts.
Social media allows for more engaging and interactive methods. So, generating leads through it can be engaging and interactive as well. One method to collect leads across is to run a contest or sweepstakes. Your followers can enter by retweeting, sharing, liking, or following your brand. Their prize could be an extended trial of your product or branded merchandise. No matter the prize, you've gathered their information.
Hosting a live video or webinar on social media is another lead-generating idea. You can open the video to a wide audience then direct viewers to offers, gated content, or contests during the video. After, you can follow-up with anyone who engaged with your offers. Because they already expressed interest, this simple follow-up could to a warm lead for your sales team.
Also read: Using HubSpot’s Social Media Tool to Reach Strangers, Prospects and Customers
4. Pop-Ups
While some marketers don’t frequently use pop-ups, we’ve seen it work significantly well for one of our clients. Squadron, a modeling kit company, installed a pop-up asking users to sign up for their newsletter and almost 90% of those who saw it filled it out - generating over 9,000 leads. The form only required them to enter their email address, and featured a simple design.
Also read: How We Helped Squadron Generate Over 9,000 New Leads
If you’re going to use pop-ups, make the design appealing and easy to exit. The copy should be relevant to the page of the website they’re visiting. Try offering them something exclusive in the pop-up, like a catalog that Squadron offered, to engage them further. If the pop-up is relevant to their interests and not overwhelming, they’re an effective way to collect leads.
5. Gated Content
Putting your most valuable, premium content behind a gate is a powerful lead generation tool. Things such as eBooks, infographics, guides, or checklists are all examples of content that should require someone to fill out a form to download.
Gated content can help produce more quality leads than other lead generation methods. Why is it so effective? Generally, only truly interested people will provide their information for your content. If your content is powerful enough, those people will be more likely to continue engaging with your company.
6. Social and Google Ads
To extend your brand and content awareness - and collect more leads - try using paid aids. For example, Facebook conversion ads gather customer information in exchange for a piece of content.
Likewise, you can promote one of your company’s tweets that link to a landing page with gated content. Pay Per Click (PPC) ads increase your exposure to people already searching for keywords relevant to your business. And with Google Display Ads, you can place banner image ads on websites related to yours, or sites you know your audience visits. With good copy and visuals, people will likely convert to leads. Squadron used their best content (strong copy and designs) in a Facebook ad that generated 750 new contacts. Their Google ads resulted in 132,000 impressions that resulted in 80 conversions.
The pressure to generate new leads can be stressful. Now that you have some new ideas – or we've reminded you of what works – you can start creating new leads for your company. If you want additional help with your lead generation ideas, we can offer support at LyntonWeb.
