Phone calls are great. You look forward to them.
Let’s say that it’s your birthday. You can’t wait for your parents’ and close friends’ contact information and a picture of their face to pop up on your phone screen so that they can wish you the happiest of birthdays.
Or maybe you are a business owner. You are waiting for your business partner to give you a call and tell you all about a fantastic new opportunity the two of you have been waiting for.
Perhaps you won’t get to spend the upcoming holidays with your family. So imagine your excitement when the rest of your family calls you to spend a virtual Thanksgiving or Christmas together.
But now, let’s flip the script. It’s your birthday. And instead of a long-awaited call from your loved one, you get a pesky sales rep taking up your time. They are calling about some new ridiculous product you have never heard of in a half-hearted attempt to generate more local leads.
Um– no thank you?
Today, we’re going to talk about how you can avoid that same issue coming from your end as a business professional. We are going to show you how to get leads so you can win every time.
How to Start Getting Leads?
How to Start Getting Leads?You are an integral part of a one-of-a-kind business. This means you need to take advantage of lead generation services in some way or another. But regardless of how unique your company is, you are one of many lead generation companies. And a common bad practice of the rest of them? Not knowing all the details of what leads are.
So before you ask about how to get leads, you have to ask yourself what leads are in the first place.
Leads, or business leads, are those who express interest in your business, its products, or its services. They can express that interest in any number of ways.
Outbound leads are when you resort to tactics like cold-calling and cold-emailing to communicate with your potential customers. Inbound leads are when they reach out to you because they heard about or saw your brand somehow and now want to do business with you.
So as far as how to get leads, how do you start?
There are steps that your leads follow for lead generation.
First, a site visitor will discover one of your brand’s pages. This could be a blog, an FAQ page, social media or more. Any of your internal sites or pages apply here. They start to learn more about your business in this step.
Second, the site visitor clicks on your call-to-action (CTA). Your CTA is what drives them to the action you want them to take. It could be a link to opt in to an email newsletter from your marketing team, a webinar sign-up page or anything else.
Third, the CTA brings them to a landing page. This landing page is where the site visitor inputs their contact information to receive an offer from your business. And just like that, they become a lead. But you cannot turn these online leads into paying customers without the right strategy and best practices. More on that below.
How Can You Generate New Leads in Sales?
So you are a key player in the sales game. Local businesses need to generate small business leads. Large ones need to do the same. No matter the size of your business, you can’t get around that fact.
Above, we talked about how your leads put in work. But how can you show up for them? How to get leads largely depends on the effort you make.
You have to rely on your marketing department. You want to drive traffic to your lead generation website and various pages in the first place.
Here, your content holds a lot of weight. You want it to drive visitors to your sites. To do that, you need it to be effective.
What you provide in your content is free to them and offers valuable information for their benefit. Those CTAs we talked about earlier can show up almost anywhere in your content, but it also has to make sense. If your content is effective, site visitors will not be able to help but click on your CTA. And there you will have it: a lead, right where you want them to be.
Those are just the basics, though. Below, we have 11 lead generation tips to help you navigate the idea of how to get leads.
11 Lead Generation Tips and Tricks That Are Proven to Be Effective
Are you a marketer with a corporate sales company? Or are you looking for a solid local lead generation business strategy?
Likewise, you may be ready to reevaluate your current strategy. Sometimes, our existing ones are not effective anymore. Maybe they never were.
You will find that among the 11 of the following tips and tricks, we have several that will apply to you. That’s regardless of your company size or individual situation. Le
t’s get right into it.
1. Direct Engagement With Your Potential Customer
Listen up if your business offers high-value products or services. To be specific, we mean that you bill your clients on monthly retainers due to your product’s or service’s value.
If your business falls under that category, you want to take part in direct engagement with your potential customers. But if you rely on high-volume sales for low-value products or services, this is not the strategy for you.
Assuming that you operate under the former revenue model, there are a handful of ways you can directly engage your customers.
Once you decide that your lead is a good match for your business, you can contact your prospects through:
- Social media
- Phone calls
- Emails
- Face-to-face conversations
Always be sure to contact the right person in charge too.
2. Facebook Lead Generation
Lead generation on Facebook is a budget-friendly and results-heavy approach to the problem of how to get leads. If the idea of landing pages doesn’t sit right with your customers, you can bypass it with Facebook lead generation campaigns. Facebook will direct your potential customers to a simple form they can fill out.
To create your instant form, you need a Facebook Ads Manager account. The steps after that are easy for you to follow. Click here for an easy-to-read guide on how to create a lead ad.
3. Twitter Lead Generation
You might have heard about Twitter ads. If so, you have heard about their rumored low ROI and limited reach. That doesn’t have to be the case if you know how to optimize your Twitter lead generation campaign.
As always, how to get leads on Twitter depends on how well you know and can engage your audience. And we have the answers with these six simple steps to Twitter lead gen optimization.
4. PPC Lead Generation
Pay-per-click (PPC) uses keywords and other SEO principles to bring leads your way. You have to pay a small fee every time a visitor clicks on one of your ads. But the ROI speaks for itself.
When consumers look up information about a topic, they are looking for a product or service that can serve as a solution to their specific needs. If you have it, you do not want to miss out on an opportunity to generate a lead then convert them to a paying customer.
You need to entice them with your offers and make sure you are using the right keywords. For more on proven PPC lead generation strategies, click here.
5. LinkedIn Lead Generation
Business professionals love LinkedIn for high-quality leads. More importantly, we are talking about high-quality leads that convert.
LinkedIn has been around longer than Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And it shows no signs of going anywhere. Using the platform for lead generation has plenty of benefits. There is low cost per conversion, high conversion rates from the jump, and works like a charm with B2B sales.
6. Ask for Referrals
Customer referrals contribute to the traditional value of word-of-mouth marketing. And in this case, traditional doesn’t mean “old” or “ineffective.” It’s the polar opposite, in fact. Buyers today value knowing if a product or service that interests them has worked for others like them.
Reach out to your satisfied customers for their success stories with your brand. They are often willing to help out at no cost to you. If not, you can offer an incentive like a discount that comes with every referral they provide.
7. Guest Blog Posts
Guest blogs are another way to take advantage of referrals. You also get to hone your SEO skills while you write guest blog posts.
You will get professional networking opportunities among your industry and drive more traffic to your site. The best part is that the traffic you will drive to your pages comes from a pool of buyers who are already shopping with similar businesses. That is to say, they want to buy what you are selling.
Of course, you will want to rule out guest blogging for your direct competitors with this approach. Opt for a company where both of you will benefit from this arrangement.
8. Take Advantage of SEO on Your Websites
What do you find from your keyword research? How can you optimize your pages’ content to align with those keywords?
Accomplish those two steps. Then, you will have a better chance at moving up in search engine results organically.
9. Offer Free Tools
Everyone is a sucker for free trials. In general, anything “free” is something that piques collective interest in your brand and establishes your business as a trustworthy industry expert.
Only offer free tools that will not end up hurting your revenue. In all likelihood, you cannot give away a free, high-value product with every purchase. You want your free offer to contribute to your overarching goal of driving revenue. But you want it to leave your leads wanting more from you. In other words, you want them to still come back to purchase from your business.
10. Send Emails
10. Send Emails Consider looking at who is on your existing email list. You can always find new opportunities with current leads there.
What kind of email content will interest your audience instead of spamming their inbox? A limited-time offer or relevant newsletter is a couple of your options here.
11. Rely on Your Network
There are tons of networking events and opportunities out there. A lot of them come at a limited cost to you with an impressive ROI.
These opportunities are a basic way to form lasting professional relationships and extend your marketing reach all the while.
Conclusion
“Find that lead!”
“Why aren’t you generating enough leads?”
“Is your sales team following up on leads and turning them into loyal customers?”
Sound familiar? Those are three demands that you hear a lot in the sales environment. And though they are valid demands, they are a source of stress for almost everyone on your team. That includes you.
With the help of Selling Revolution, they don’t have to be such a stressor. We can turn your responses to those questions and demands into a source of pride.
Our experts at Selling Revolution can increase your leads, but we can also make sure they are quality leads every time. We can recruit top talent for your team who will know how to convert leads and follow sales best practices for your organization’s benefit. And if you need to improve your sales training for existing reps, we can help you out there too.