You can boil down the success of any business to two main elements: the quality of its products and its ability at lead generation. Without effective lead generation on an ongoing basis, your business will not last very long. Online, you will find many ways implementing quality lead generation; some forms of lead generation are low in cost whilst others are relatively high in cost. You need to also analyze the competition, because remember, for any given niche you won’t be the only one focusing on lead generation to capture high quality prospects; you have to stand out from the crowd when implementing lead generation so that the potential customers choose you over your competition.
Lead generation is much more than simply getting traffic to your website, because let’s face it, a visitor can simply take a look at your website and leave never to return again. A lead captured through high quality lead generation methods on the other hand is a prospect that you have some details on that you can market your products to, and in online terms, this means getting their e-mail. So in order for effective lead generation to take place, you need a way of capturing the e-mails of the traffic that enters your website, and this is usually done though lead magnets, which you can find out about by reading the article called, “How to Develop a Strategic Lead Magnet”.
You can gain additional information to improve the quality of your lead generation campaigns, such as what their interests and hobbies are, and what problems they might have in relation to your niche, and even their home address or telephone number. The more information you are able to capture through the lead generation process, the more you have to work with in terms of being able to market to that lead.
Lead Generation Through SEO
Search engine optimization is the process of setting up your website in a way that it improves your search engine rankings and is a vital part of quality lead generation. The work that is required isn’t limited to your website, because you also need to do external work such as build high quality links pointing to your website with the relevant anchor text. The search engines provide a long term stream of traffic that can be cheap if you can do most of the work yourself. However, most business owners are too busy working on their business and do not have the time for SEO, which is why there exists many different SEO services out there. These require an investment, but if they manage to get you to the tops spot of some decent keywords then the payoff could be huge. You could end up getting a large stream of traffic on a daily basis, and the increase in sales will make the cost of investment look insignificant.
PPC is Perfect for Lead Generation
Pay Per Click is a great tool for effective lead generation, especially if you need a lot of them in a short period of time. This type of lead generation strategy involves entering a program such as Google Adwords, where you create an ad and it will be placed around the search engine’s search results. Then for every click that your ad receives when running your lead generation campaign, you have to pay a fee; the trick is to keep the cost of each click low enough to make the cost worth it. The price of each click in your lead generation campaign will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword and how high up the page you are trying to get your ad published, the higher you want it the more money you will have to pay. The art of PPC involves coming up with a set of keywords that people have overlooked and you can make use of in order to get some relatively cheap clicks. However, keep in mind that for any PPC lead generation campaign to be really effect, those keywords must also attract “buying” prospects.
Measuring the ROI in PPC campaigns is crucial because if you don’t keep an eye on them you could lose a lot of money. You can set daily limits on your campaigns, which means that after a certain amount of clicks have been generated the ads will not be shown anymore, this is so that you can manage your budget to a greater degree of flexibility.
Social Media
Increasingly social media is rising in popularity and the large streams of traffic that move around on those websites can be utilized to great effect. Set up a professional looking profile that represents what your business is all about and then proceed to post interesting and helpful updates. If your content is good you will gain a following very quickly, and if you manage to post content that can go viral then that can do wonders for your lead generation efforts. The trick is to get the potential leads off the social media website and onto your own website, but do not rush this stage because if you do it too aggressively then you might come across as too salesy.
Lead Generation Companies
The techniques for generating leads in this article take a lot of time and discipline to figure out; if you want the professionals to do it then you will need to hire a lead generation service. Such companies take a look at what your website is about, and then figure out a marketing strategy that aims to bring in the best type of leads possible, and these are ones that have a high chance of converting.
There are many lead generation businesses out there that promise you the world, but deliver you very little; you must be careful not to end up with one like that. Before choosing a company take the time to investigate what they are all about. Read some background information on them, such as how long they have been operating, and what their previous clients are saying about them. A good quality online service of any kind will have a reputation which can be found on the forums and social media websites. The more background reading that you do the better your understating of the company will be.
It is a great idea to come up with a handful of high quality lead generation services, and then as you delve deeper into what they are about you can narrow down your list until you have one left. If you liked the information on lead generation presented in this article and would like more of the same, then download our “Small Business Marketing Made Easy Guide”.
