Learning to stand out in a noisy crowd can be tricky, but here are five sure-fire ways to increase leads for your business.
If you’ve been to a fruit and vegetable market lately, you’ll know that one of the joys of the experience is the pure theatre of it.
Vendors yelling out to passers-by the price of tomatoes, maybe shouting a compliment to get your attention, or if you’re lucky, offering you a strawberry so you can experience how wonderfully fresh they are.
While the shouting and spruiking undoubtedly adds to the character and charm of the market, make no mistake, it is a marketing technique designed to have you shopping at one stall, rather than the competitor down the aisle.
Lead generation gets a whole lot trickier when you’re marketing online. Shouting at your computer doesn’t work, and you’re not just competing with another stall, you’re one business among hundreds in your city alone that are also marketing online.
The good news is that while we don’t have a strawberry to offer you, we have got five sure-fire ways to increase lead generation for your business.
1. Master your SEO
The internet is a vast place, full of competitors who offer similar products and services and produce similar marketing content to generate leads.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is what gets you found and makes you stand out from the crowd.
Effective SEO is driven by a lot of a tech, including title tags and metadata descriptions, but its core is distinctively customer focused.
To understand which keywords will bring the best results requires an understanding of what your customers are searching for and how they search for it. Successful SEO strategies focus SEO tools on these key understandings.
Of course, ranking highly in search results is not a win in itself; what you really want is clicks, and to do this, you need to address the very fundamental questions of marketing.
Ask yourself: What is the issue or problem being experienced by the lead, how can we resolve it, and why we are the best company to do that?
Refining your SEO to answer these questions will quickly put you clicks ahead of the pack.
2. Create a landing page that converts
Landing pages are proving particularly effective in lead generation for the simple reason that they are highly targeted and outcome focused.
Landing pages are webpages that sit outside of your website and have one very specific purpose – that might be to sell tickets to an event, promote a particular product, or request a quote.
To be super-effective, though, that landing page must tick all the boxes.
Firstly, it must have a singular, clear ask that is immediately clear to the viewer. Then, every word and image must support that goal and nothing else.
Finally, forms or purchase pathways must be seamless and intuitive to improve your conversion rate.
3. Advertise and retarget
One of the most effective ways to create new quality leads and convert them to sales is via retargeting, a method used by marketers to grab the attention of leads and then massage them through the sales funnel.
Lead generation focuses on the very top of the funnel, at the awareness and interest stage. Potential leads may have clicked on an ad, for example, but never followed through with the purchase.
Retargeting uses cookies to gather information to continue to advertise that product, even when the customer has left the website.
Have you ever clicked on an ad for a gorgeous pair of boots, only to have the boots appear in ads on other websites? Chances are, those ads will promote a further discount or special offer, to get you across the line.
The genius of retargeting is that it hits people who have already expressed some interest in your business and its offerings.
4. Run an email newsletter campaign
It may seem strange in this increasingly digital age that an old marketing favourite like email is still kicking goals. Email marketing is a great lead generation tool, but you need to know a few things.
Personalisation is essential, and we’re not talking about simply inserting the lead’s name. Automated email campaigns use information about that person to target their particular needs and incentivise them to make a purchase.
Email automation can be set up to send out an email to a lead who has clicked on a particular product and offer them a discount on that same product at point of sale.
While some email campaigns focus on particular products or services, others change with the needs of the leads, generating ongoing sales. For example, newly pregnant women might sign up for alerts about how their baby is developing throughout gestation (think: Week 11 – your baby’s hands are fully formed and they can form a fist!). Email marketing is then able to target according to the changing needs of mum and bubs, and continue on as the baby is born and grows.
5. Ask for referrals from current customers
No amount of fancy tech or eye-catching advertising can replace the value of a simple referral from someone you trust.
That’s why many companies offer discounts when you get a friend to sign up or purchase, using a unique code.
Referral marketing is particularly effective because it can have a snowball effect, with little input from you. You refer someone and receive a discount, and then they refer someone and receive a discount, and so on and so on.
Call in the marketing experts
Of course, these five tips are a great way to get the ball rolling, but the most effective digital marketing strategies are those that use every tool in the online marketing toolbox to super charge lead generation and convert to sales.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne, and are industry leaders in developing and implementing digital marketing strategies.
To find out how we can help your business, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or send us a note via the contact form below.