Take Your Lead Generation To The Next Level

Lead Generation for Your Business Online

Having an online presence for your business is a necessary part of marketing in the world today. The methods of reaching potential buyers online are far different from offline methods but in many ways highly effective and cost efficient.

Here is a look at two methods of lead generation online for your business and how to nurture those leads to bring in more sales!

Email capture and lead nurturing

Email seems almost a prehistoric means of communication now that we have social media and instant messaging apps but it remains the most powerful way to connect with existing customers and potential leads.

According to ExactTarget, “For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment.” For marketers, email is easily the best way to invest your budget.

Using customer segmentation and action triggers, you may create sophisticated email drip campaigns to provide buyers with timely information and gradually move them along the sales funnel.

This helps reinforce brand awareness and enables you to recapture otherwise lost value from clients who require multiple touch points before eventually making a final purchase.

Strategic partnerships

As a company grows, marketing is tasked to drive new customers at scale. Entrepreneurs lacking a generous advertising budget should invest energy and time into strategic partnerships with companies that share the same ideals and have similar, but not overlapping, customers. For example, a clothing retailer can access thousands of new customers by collaborating with a footwear brand. They have opportunities for cross-promotional marketing or exclusive marketing campaigns where both businesses are featured prominently.
– via Entrepreneur

Getting Noticed Online

Starting a new business or taking your offline business online for the first time involves new methods and strategies. Hearing from someone who has done it before can be invaluable.

In the excerpt below we see how one entrepreneur got visitors, leads and buyers even before his product launched.

Pre-launch

It’s all about the momentum you build up before you launch. Create a pre-launch page as early as possible. The page should describe what problem you’re solving, explain what you do at a high level and collect email addresses. With Content Marketer, I created a launch page 4 months before the product was live.

Start blogging about your industry and talk about your product/service. I recommend starting a company blog as early as possible because it’s hard to keep people excited about a prelaunch page. Our blog is about our industry (content marketing), but I’m also advocating our cause (outreach & content promotion). I also commented on a ton of blog posts related to the problem I was solving and answered questions on Quora, which brings in 10-15 visitors a day back to my prelaunch page. It doesn’t seem like much, but blogging and talking about my product for 3 months brought in about 1500 people who requested an invite.

Leverage social networks/bookmarking sites/communities. Since my tool is in the broader Marketing category I talked about it on communities such as inbound.org, growthhacker.com and various slack groups for marketers/startups. With this, I was able to reach hundreds and engage in a meaningful conversation (which is key).

Early promoters

I let a 250 people into my beta version and stayed in close communication with those beta users. From there about 12 promotors emerged. These promoters loved the idea and the product, so they blogged about it. Nothing better than social proof before your product is even ready.

Potential customers have not yet heard of your company, how do you attract those leads? Can you describe to us what is your ultimate growth technique and how can we implement that for our own companies?

Start blogging early, comment on other relevant blogs in your industry, build relationships and answer questions on Quora. The underlying recommendation here is to establish yourself as an industry leader. If you can afford it invest in PR. If you can double down on blogging.
– via Inbound Rocket

What methods of lead generation do you currently use?