Grow Your Audience and Boost Your Profits: 7 Steps to Lead Generation
Are you ready and waiting to serve your clients, but they are not beating down your door as you expected? Are you struggling to figure out lead generation and do not know where to start?
No matter where you are in your business, lead generation is the essential thing for generating clients. It takes a little bit more research and thought than many people realize.
If your lead generation process looks like throwing spaghetti at a wall instead, keep reading to learn how to make lead generation a road map to turning people into customers.
1. Understand the Lead Process
To truly master the lead generation process, you need to learn how leads can turn into profits. In general, there are five steps to converting a lead into a sale:
- Lead generation
- Lead qualification
- Lead scoring
- Lead nurturing
- Lead conversation
In lead generation, you work to discover who you can turn from people in your atmosphere into paying customers. Once you have selected your leads, you can then see if they qualify for your services. The leads who do not qualify will get discarded, and the ones who do move onto the next step: scoring.
You score your leads based on how valuable they are to your business or the ones more likely to make a sale. Those who are higher up on that list are the ones you should focus on nurturing through developed relationships until they’re ready to buy what you are selling.
Once they buy, you can consider that a lead converted.
Okay, there is the process for lead conversion. Now how do we use this information to generate more leads?
2. Introduce Yourself to Your Ideal Customer
Every business has an ideal customer, and “anyone between the ages of 18 and 65” is not for anyone. To truly nail your lead generation, you need to be able to pinpoint who your perfect customer is.
You will want to know how old they are, where they work, and what money they have to spend extras at the end of the month. You will want to know where they shop, how they spend their money, and where they like to talk about the things they love.
It would be best to find out where they get their information, where their social media is, and how exactly your products can help change their lives.
A helpful exercise is to create one perfect customer, give them a name, an age, and every other detail you can manage. Once you have that information, tailor your lead generation process to that customer specifically. Once you know who your brand is reaching out to, you will be able to get better results.
3. Decide How You Will Generate Leads
There are no shortages in different ways to generate leads. Please do not choose to go with all of them, pick two or three and get very, very good at them. If you start, you would be wise to test a few marketing channels to see which ones grow your business the best before you commit.
Some of the best lead generation channels you can choose from are:
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Community building
- Speaking engagements
- Traditional advertisement
- Trade shows
According to Forbes, email marketing is still the best way to generate leads. You can automate the process to make it all the easier to reach out and grab your customers and study the things that make them turn from leads into sales.
4. Tailor Your Content Format
It is impossible to stress this enough: content is the most crucial part of lead generation. Not every kind of content works for every stage in the buying process. Broad content works for making people aware of your brand, but if you want to turn that into sales, you need to personalize your content.
For people considering your product or service, create content that demonstrates why yours is the best. Let them evaluate what you have, so they have the chance to chose you.
For those at the decision stage in the buying process, offer consultations, live demos, or free trials.
5. Offer Your Clients Something They Need
Next, you need to offer your potential clients a reason to turn into a lead. Figure out what they need and find a way to provide that to them in exchange for the data you need from them.
Whatever you choose needs to align with their interests and values, and it has to solve a problem. Give them a taste of why you and your business are the best options for solving other problems in the future.
6. Master Your Landing Page
Even the most perfect lead magnets will start to repel instead of attract if you have not figured out the way to master your landing page.
Make sure the design has a high impact on your potential leads and that it matches your brand and brand promise. It should be engaging without being distracting.
Your copy also needs to clearly outline your offer’s benefits and provide the social proof that you can provide solutions.
7. Track Your Performance
The last step in lead generation is to track your performance. Track everything. Every piece of information, even the smallest detail, can help you discover what lead generation tactic does not work and which one is a gold mine of information and conversion.
A few things to keep an eye on are:
- Click-through rate
- Conversation rate
- Time to convert
- Return on investment
A click-through rate measures how your call to action performs, while a conversion rate tells you how many of your leads are performing specific actions. Time to convert lets you know how long it takes for a lead to make a purchase, and your return on investment, or ROI, tells you if the money you are spending on lead generation is worth the sale.
From Lead Generation to Lead Conversion
There is nothing easy about lead generation and understanding what it takes to turn a viewer into a paying customer. Still, it is an essential part of growing a business to its full potential. Once you figure out a plan for generating leads and tracking them through the entire lead system, you will unlock your business’s full potential.
If you are itching to learn more about how to kick off your next project, contact us today.
eGlobal Web Solutions specializes in marketing your business via the digital marketplace. We use search engine optimization, social and review promotion, and Email marketing for all types of businesses from local to global. We utilize various digital marketing techniques to increase your internet presence, optimize your traffic, and generate new business.