Leads are the lifeblood of any business, but they’re also notoriously difficult to attract. Around 61% of marketing leaders say that traffic and lead generation is one of their most significant challenges.
Leads are the individuals or businesses that express interest in whatever you’re selling. Lead generation is the art of detecting those individuals, and collecting their contact details, so you’re able to nurture each lead into a dedicated customer.
Lead generation campaigns can be simple, low-tech strategies, like networking or cold calling, or they can include various digital tools such as landing pages and popups.
While there are many ways to attract leads to your business, finding the time to create comprehensive campaigns isn’t always easy.
Plus, with so many companies now competing for the attention of similar audiences in the digital world, it can be hard to make your message stand out.
9 Top Tips for Better Lead Generation
Although effective lead generation can be difficult to master, it’s worth the effort. Studies show that companies who actively pursue lead generation campaigns have revenues up to 133% higher than those who don’t.
The good news for business leaders struggling with lead generation, is there are various ways you can boost your chances of success.
1. Create Offers for Visitors in Each Stage
One of the mistakes we often see companies making with lead generation campaigns, is failing to think about the current “awareness” stage of each lead. Catering to different “awareness stages” will help you create more effective lead generation tools. For instance:
- Problem unaware: Some customers are completely unaware they have an issue that needs to be addressed. At this stage, your focus should be on educating them. Creating content like explanatory videos, or articles optimized for search engines can help.
- Problem aware: Some people have an awareness of their problem, but they don’t know how to look for a viable solution. At this stage, it’s helpful to show your customers how you can assist them, with insights into the benefits and capabilities of your product or service.
- Product aware: Certain customers may already be aware of the products that can solve their problems, but they don’t know which is best. Comparison articles and case studies make excellent tools for boosting lead generation here.
- Most aware: These prospects are aware of their problem, the solutions, and even your brand. This is when you can take advantage of irresistible offers on your website to convert them into leads, such as free downloads or tools.
2. Use a Variety of Different Channels
When it comes to top tips for lead generation, most marketers focus on sharing ideas to improve the quality of your landing pages and pop-ups. While your website is an excellent channel for your lead generation campaign, it’s only one option.
Remember, you can also generate leads in a variety of other ways. Social media campaigns can help you showcase your products to specific customers, with targeted, paid advertisements. You can also use organic social media to attract followers, which eventually turn into leads.
Influencer marketing is another option, allowing you to leverage the credibility of an existing thought leader. You can even use guest blogs and PPC advertising to drive more traffic to your landing pages and the forms you use to collect customer details.
3. Implement the Right Tools
Technology is a great resource for business growth. When it comes to lead generation campaigns, there are a bunch of great resources that can help you collect more contacts for your email list, and even improve the quality of your leads. For instance you can use:
- AI tools to repurpose content into social media captions, snippets for emails, and even design more compelling landing pages for your audience.
- Automation tools to nurture leads with organic social media posts, and attract attention to your website and offers.
- Analytical tools like Google Analytics to track your website traffic and customer behaviors. This can help you define which of your lead gen campaigns are working.
- SEO research tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to help boost your presence on the search engines, and analyze the campaigns of your competitors.
- Social monitoring tools to examine what customers are saying about your brand, detect sentiment, and collect user-generated content (like reviews) for social proof.
4. Refine your Targeting Strategy
If you’re looking for tips for lead generation, the chances are you want to increase the number of leads you ad to your pipeline. There’s nothing wrong with craving “more leads”. After all, more contacts in your email list means more people you can potentially convert.
However, it’s important to remember that quality is more important than quantity. 10,000 leads who simply give you their contact details because they want to access your lead magnet, but have no intention of buying anything from you won’t help your business grow.
That’s why it’s so important to ensure you’re targeting the right people. Tailor your lead magnet to the needs of your target audience. Use keywords in your landing pages that resonate with your target audience, and use targeting tools on social media when sharing ads.
5. Upgrade your Landing Pages
Your landing pages will be one of the most important resources in your lead generation campaign. It’s where you’ll convince your customers to share their contact details with you (unless you’re relying exclusively on pop-ups). A great virtual agent can help you optimize your landing page with:
- Eye-catching headlines that showcase product/service benefits
- A well-positioned form and CTA that drives action from visitors
- Images and videos that showcase what you’re offering
- High-quality content that emphasizes the benefits of the offer
- Landing page design that eliminates unnecessary distractions (like links and menus)
One particularly effective way to improve the impact of your landing pages is to go beyond text-based copy. According to heat map studies, images capture more attention on a webpage than text, which could reduce your bounce rate, and lead to more conversions.
6. Create More Awesome Content
When you’re investing in improving your lead generation strategy, it’s easy to focus on things like your landing pages, and how well they convert. But don’t underestimate the importance of creating content that attracts customers to your website in the first place.
As mentioned above, you need to be able to engage your audience through every “awareness” stage, to ensure they want to connect with your brand. There are plenty of ways to do this. Creating blogs and articles is a fantastic way to show thought leadership and improve your visibility on the search engines, particularly if you show experience, expertise, and authority.
Implementing social media strategies is a fantastic way to nurture your audience and build relationships with potential leads. You can even use other forms of media, such as podcasts and videos, to connect with a wider range of customers.
An added bonus? If your content is awesome, people will be more likely to share it, increasing your reach to new leads, with minimal effort.
7. Don’t Overlook your CTAs
Your CTAs (Calls to Action) might be a small part of your lead generation strategy, but they have a huge impact on how many prospects you’re actually going to convert. Make sure you’re clear about what you’re offering in your CTA language. Don’t just create a button that says, “Click here”, design one that says, “Download your free guide for X”.
Make sure your CTAs are easy to see (placed above the fold), and contrast with your site’s color scheme. Plus, ensure you’re using these CTAs in all the right places. While you need a CTA on your landing page, you can also use them on other pages, like your blog posts and home pages.
You can even create pop-ups that instantly grab a customer’s attention when they’re scrolling through your website. One bonus tip, when you’re creating your CTAs, connect them to a simple form. Don’t ask your customers for tons of personal information before they can access your lead magnet.
8. Upgrade Your Offers
Lead magnets are a big deal. Most of the time, unless you’re offering a particularly amazing product, customers won’t just give you their contact details. They need to be enticed to do so with the promise of something valuable, like a free download, or access to a webinar.
So, how do you make sure you’re offering the kind of things your customers really want? Extensive research into your target audience and their pain points and goals will help. So will looking at the offers provided by your competitors.
It’s also worth thinking about how you can personalize your offers to different groups of consumers. Creating different landing pages and lead magnets to appeal to specific customer groups can help you convert more prospects. Plus, it’s great for A/B testing.
9. A/B Test Everything
Last, but not least – the most obvious of our top tips for lead generation campaigns. Test everything! Everything you do to generate leads can be tweaked and tested to help boost your conversion rates. Experiment with different CTA buttons, different offers, and even unique ways to capture the attention of your leads on different channels.
Comprehensive testing will show you exactly which campaigns and strategies are having the biggest impact on your lead generation efforts. This can help to save you money, and improve your chances of connecting with more relevant leads in the future.
Don’t have time to conduct extensive tests? Ask your virtual assistant to do the work for you and report on their findings.
Optimize Your Lead Generation Campaigns
Lead generation is tough. It’s something you can’t just focus on once and then forget about. You need to be constantly experimenting with new strategies to ensure you’re getting the best results. Fortunately, the tips above should give you the insights you need to start optimizing your results.
If you need a little extra help, reach out today to find out how a virtual assistant can help build and optimize your lead generation strategy.