The COVID-19 has heavily affected every small, medium, and large company with more than 9,000+ new cases every day worldwide. Because when this pandemic stops, there are no definitive forecasts, entrepreneurs are searching for strategies for lead generation to preserve business continuity at this time of crisis.
Leads are in general, the introduction of the interest of a client in any of your goods or services. You will cultivate the leads and turn them into long-term loyal customers by making constant, strategized efforts.
You have to select all the best channels to communicate with the right audience and convince them to become active ambassadors of your business similar to a fisherman who narrowly spreads the net on all four corners of the water body.
In this blog, we have explained how lead generation activities will contribute to your business growth during unprecedented times. Also, we have compiled various types of lead generation techniques that will bring fruitful outcomes.
How Lead Generation works?
You have to create good exposure on those channels after finding the right channels to stay in contact with your audience. For instance, nowadays most individuals consume social media. Think of the various ways to advertise the organization on social networks.
Your next goal should be to obtain your visitors’ contact details once you receive traffic to your website. Like you can ask your guests to include their email ID to access gated content such as case studies, e-books, webinars, etc.
The lead generation concept can be carried out in two methods, inbound and outbound, depending on the platform you prefer.
Our in-depth understanding helped us to compile the best channels to generate leads online & offline. To explore how you can make the best use of each platform, keep reading.
What is inbound Lead Generation?
Inbound lead generation is an efficient method in which you pull your target audience through useful content and efficient SEO practices into your market.
Effective ways of Generating Inbound Leads
Here we have mentioned a few inbound result-driving techniques that lead to your sales funnel through which you can capture efficiency.
Blogs
You don’t need to force the audience into your company through blogs, instead, they will voluntarily be invited to work with you. Any post that is heavily written about addressing user issues never fails to draw the attention of the reader.
There are chances that when readers are happy with your answers/solutions, they can look out to meet you!
Therefore, blog content marketing is a budget-friendly strategy from which you can boost traffic and contribute to your website.
Visuals
People usually fall in love with animated graphics, aesthetic pictures, and other elements that are visually appealing. In certain cases, the audience is not interested in obtaining information from posts.
This is where the scene is penetrated by visuals. Visuals such as maps, graphics, infographics, videos, etc. improve readership by 80%. There are better chances to represent your thoughts and inform your prospects by creating eye-catchy visuals.
Case Studies
In general, potential customers decided to work with a company that effectively addresses the customers’ pain points. Case studies are an important source of promotion in which you can explain how the major and minor problems encountered by your customers have been treated and resolved.
They will trust your brand as potential leads go through your case studies and decide to work with you to take advantage of your goods and services. Try therefore to write more case studies to expose to your prospects your valuable work.
Also, if you need to get more information about the methods and techniques we use, we have written a lot of case studies, then check our case study page.
Webinars
No doubt, webinars are a powerful magnet through which prospective leads can be drawn to become part of your business. A webinar is the best way of producing high-quality leads, 73 percent of B2B marketers and sales leaders claim. When it comes to webinars, a promotion at the right time through the correct channels helps you achieve your goals for the webinar.
If you arrange a webinar correctly at least 3 weeks in advance and do the right promotion, it will be easier. This is because about 54% of webinar registration takes place at least eight days before the event, and 46% of registration takes place within a week of the event.
In reality, through his webinars, Neil Patel, the king of digital marketing, created 518,399 visitors and 16,394 leads to his website.
You can get customer contact information by sharing your experiences via webinars, and communicate with your customers to push leads to your sales funnel.
Video Funnels
If you look from the shoes of the consumers in today’s fast-paced world, it is really bitter for customers to read the long product details or dig deep into your service website. If you want to open the audience’s minds and engage them with your brand, then the keys are videos!
In addition, videos are a win-win ingredient. Consumers and advertisers alike have strong enthusiasm for videos. Consumers like videos, as video material is digestible, entertaining, and engaging. On the other side, because they have a big return on investment (ROI), marketers love videos.
More than 79 percent of internet users have a YouTube account of their own. The YouTube platform is optimised by top-leading digital marketing experts. On his YouTube channel, for example, Brian Dean, the SEO expert, has more than 367K+ subscribers.
You can push your YouTube subscribers to your email list through consistent efforts and smart strategies, and inspire them to leverage your goods and services. Click on the link if you’d like to visit our YouTube channel.
Ebooks
All the knowledge about a subject through small content such as blogs, infographics, etc is possibly a daunting challenge to cover.
One of the content marketing practises by which you can illustrate a subject in depth is e-books. It’s an undeniable fact that an e-book can only be written by experts with in-depth knowledge of a specific topic. So the consumer will trust you as a well-experienced brand in the industry when you publish e-books.
Podcasts
Podcasts have become an important part of everyday life, and people prefer to listen to podcasts without interrupting their normal activities while doing their daily chores. Up to a third of American adults between the ages of 25 and 34 are podcast listeners, according to Music Oomph.
There are about 80 million business pages on Facebook, but there are just 700,000 podcasts on the air. Podcasts only have less competition compared to other content marketing channels and allow you to quickly gain attention among a small crowd of competitors.
Plus, since mobile-friendly podcasts can be built, it stretches a broad path to reach the mobile audience. Clearly, about 69% of podcast listeners are on their mobile devices.
Podcasts serve as an interactive marketing feature that enables hosts, similar to a conventional radio show, to build surveys, respond to questions, and attend audio calls. You can raise the level of engagement of your listeners through podcasts and create a loyal following.
Social Media
Surprisingly, most individuals use social media to follow a brand. Therefore it is a wise move to generate an inbound lead to your company via social media.
Here’s a famous Birchbox beauty brand that utilises Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. They post colourful product photos and invite the public to try their samples at no cost. If you like it you can purchase one after consuming the stuff, paying the actual cost.
SEO
All the efforts you put on blogs, social media posts, infographics, podcasts, and others could go in vain without an active SEO practise. There are chances for you to achieve better rankings on SERPs only when you optimise your content according to the guidelines and algorithms.
Runner’s World, for example, optimised its content according to Google guidelines and was able to spot organic rankings and snippets featured.
What are Outbound Lead generation techniques?
Outbound lead generation refers to the strategic method of reaching the target audience through successful billboards for ads, emails, phone calls, etc.
Effective Ways of generating Outbound Lead Generation
Cold Email
A cost-effective and high ROI outbound marketing strategy is cold email. Ambition, a sales performance management software company, may for example, get 73 new leads from a cold email campaign out of 572 total prospects.
Justin McGill was able to expand his company to $30k MRR/month by sending the audience cold emails. Also with their mobile app cold email campaign, Crazy Eye marketing received open rates of 50 percent and response rates of 10 percent.
These B2B accomplishments show that cold emails are a great outbound lead magnet that can drive the efficiency of your sales funnel.
Direct Email
Direct mail requires the delivery of a piece of physical mail via mail service providers to the clients or prospects.
Ulta Cosmetics, a beauty franchise in the United States for example, has agreed to increase its customer retention. It launched a direct mail campaign for this which included aggressive prices and a new weekly voucher for taking in and redeeming prospects.
This resulted in 82% of both Ulta Beauty and their top competitor customers being motivated, citing that Ulta’s regular discounts and points system kept them coming back.
Direct mail marketing is one of the great methods of lead generation from which you can physically meet clients. You will also have the full influence on who receives your letter, at what time it should be sent, and how many individuals you should meet.
Trade Shows
A trade show is an event where companies meet to learn, find goods to purchase and promote their own products and services in the same industry.
Aqua Paw attended the Global Pet Expo here to increase awareness of their new product and probably create ties within the pet industry. Aqua Paw won the New Product Showcase Winner’s award at this trade show, which again helped raise awareness of their brand.
As trade shows are open only to registered audiences, reputable representatives of the organisation or members of the press, you will meet the audience and have a productive conversation.
It’s easy to introduce paid ads where you can set up a campaign on your favourite ad network and only pay when someone clicks your ad. Some of the biggest advertisement channels that you can use to drive loads of traffic back to your website are Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Uber, for instance, pays for ads across social media sites and across several web pages. If you visit a travel-related website or a travel blog, Uber’s paid ads can be found on those platforms.
Over to You – Choose the Best Lead Generation Approach that Captures Quality Leads to Your Sales Funnel
To push future leads into your sales funnel, we have discussed possible inbound and outbound lead generation approaches. Now it’s all your part to choose the right ones based on the requirements and goals of your company.
Lead generation is the initial phase you take to expand your company’s growth. Lead generation is the mechanism by which your goods and services are stimulated by the desires of your future audience.