Are you up-to-date on various strategies for lead generation in digital marketing?
You must be aware of most of the lead generation strategies. This brings me to my next set of questions: Do you or your team generate high-quality leads? Do you miss out on the valuable opportunity to connect with your prospect? Are you and your team able to make a significant contribution to the sales pipeline?
91% of marketers say lead generation is the most critical goal in the company’s long-term success.
Well, need not worry. I have compiled a list of strategies to help you and your team overcome all the hurdles and contribute significantly to your company’s growth.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting potential customers who have expressed an interest in a company’s products or services. The primary objective of lead generation is to initiate and nurture consumer interest, capturing their contact information and other relevant data to convert them into paying customers. This information is often shared internally through digital marketing reports.
What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?
Lead generation in digital marketing uses online strategies and channels to identify and attract potential customers interested in a company’s products or services.
Image source: Hubspot
It involves reaching out to people or businesses through digital means such as websites, social media, email, and online advertising to generate interest to collect contact information and nurture these prospects to turn them into paying customers. Employing a digital marketing agency can significantly enhance this process by leveraging their expertise and resources.
To explain in simple terms, lead generation in digital marketing is like fishing for customers online, but instead of using bait, we make use of catchy ads and cute animal videos to lure them into our digital net – once we have got them in, we can work our magic to turn them into happy customers!
What makes digital marketing an effective tool for lead generation?
Meet Sarah, a savvy digital marketer on a mission to increase her company’s sales by generating leads through digital marketing. She knew digital marketing would help her reach potential customers in today’s tech-savvy world.
Sarah decided to get into the world of digital marketing and understand how it could help with effective lead generation. On her journey, her colleague Dan stepped in to help her out.
Dan explained to Sarah that digital marketing is like a fishing net that would help her catch her fish, i.e., leads. Dan explained that she could throw her net as far and wide as in a big ocean.
Sarah was a little skeptical about identifying the right prospects. But Dan assured Sarah that digital marketing has the option to know the prospect’s intent about your product. Dan explained that you can know when your prospects click on the ads, visit your website, go to any particular webpage, etc.
Dan also explained to her that with the help of social media and pay-per-click advertising, she could engage with her leads much faster and more efficiently.
Sarah also learned that the digital marketing platform was not too expensive to try and find the best strategy for her. With the help of robust analytics and tracking tools, Sarah could measure the outcome very effectively since there was no guesswork involved. It’s essential to understand where your traffic comes from. By utilizing analytics, you can create an analysis report to determine the sources of your audience.
With all the information, Sarah is now set to start her journey in digital marketing.
How do we create lead-generation strategies in digital marketing?
Sarah and her colleague, Tanya, were determined to make the most out of digital marketing for lead generation. Their first task was to set a goal and objective that could include leads per month or a higher conversion rate.
Sarah and Tanya started by understanding their target audience. They spent much time researching and gathering information about their audience’s preferences, pain points, behavior, etc.
While deciding about the best tool for digital marketing, they were a bit confused but decided on a mix of tools like content marketing, social media, email marketing, SEO, etc.
Now, let’s understand what tools and strategies Sarah and Tanya started to work on.
Top Digital Marketing Lead Generation Strategies
Sarah and Tanya started exploring different lead generation strategies in digital marketing. Let’s check them out one by one.
Sales Engagement Outreach
While experimenting with different strategies, they realized that reaching out to potential clients through multiple channels was one of the top strategies for lead generation in digital marketing. Collaborating with the best digital marketing agencies in Dubai further solidified their approach, ensuring a comprehensive and targeted outreach to their desired audience.
Sarah and Tanya started engaging with prospects via multiple channels such as LinkedIn, WhatsApp, messages and even calls. This helped them to increase their brand’s visibility and capture the interest of their prospects.
While exploring the opportunities through different channels, they gathered enough data to help them identify the most effective channels. They also realized that using multiple channels would reduce the dependency on a single channel.
SmartReach.io is a sales engagement platform that provides multiple channels including email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, SMS and calls for cold outreach. The tasks that can be performed by LinkedIn are profile view, send connect request, send message and send Inmail.
Email Marketing
The next lead generation strategy, which Sarah and Tanya were very well aware of, was email marketing, as it is one of the most used communication channels.
But this time, they invested a lot of time in understanding how to get the emailing right to help generate more quality leads.
Since their company had recently subscribed to a new and improved cold email software, they started exploring the tool before launching any campaigns.
Approximately 78% of businesses turn to email marketing as their primary choice for initiating lead generation. Sarah and Tanya decided to get it done this time, and they also had access to this beautiful cold email software.
While exploring the cold email software, they realized that its automation feature helped with over half of their task, leaving them enough time to concentrate on other tasks. The automated tasks include sending emails as per the day and time set, automated follow-ups, auto-replies, categorization of prospects and non-prospect responses, reply sentiments, and many more.
Blogging
Sarah and Tanya were very well aware that blogs, when written with valuable content and optimized for SEO, can help to generate substantial traffic. This can help Sarah and Tanya to convert the traffic into a good number of quality leads.
So they changed their strategy to write blogs, where instead of focusing only on opinions, they started mentioning experiences, practical solutions, case studies, etc. These tactics helped improve user trust of the website boosting strong E-E-A-T in the eyes of Google. Within a substantial period of time, they were able to see the result.
Creating blogs with valuable content and optimizing them for SEO with keyword stuffing and SaaS link building increases the chances of generating substantial traffic. The generated traffic has the potential to be converted into valuable leads for your business.
Web Page Optimization
It is known that a website is the main source of traffic and leads. Sarah and Tanya understood the importance of having a well-maintained website, so they optimized it and made it more user-friendly.
They made sure to eliminate errors, lag time, and complex interfaces, as they had the potential to drive the traffic away. For this activity, they used different tools that helped them to understand how and where to make the changes.
Sarah also added testimonials and social proof to the website so that it would help to build trust among the visitors. She also placed clear call-to-action buttons in the relevant places. There were no unnecessary pop-ups that were interrupting the user experience.
Sarah found that Google’s search console was one of the most useful tools. Under the Core Web Vitals section, they could figure out the sections in the website that must be optimized.
Optimize your Mobile Traffic
Being well aware of the mobile traffic, Sarah and Tanya started with the mobile performance as they knew that Google prioritized mobile performance, and they couldn’t afford to lag behind.
The duo worked on the strategy to ensure that the mobile site had a clean interface, easy to navigate, clear CTA, and flawless functionality.
Tanya was aware that Google follows the mobile-first indexing approach, so she took care that the full-screen pop-ups, chatbots, and irrelevant CTAs didn’t show up, hampering the user experience.
Google Ads
Sarah performed her research on Google Ads and realized that it is one of the most powerful tools that has the potential to convert incoming traffic to leads. They focused on the three – T’s of search-based web engine ads – Targeting, Tracking, and Time.
Tanya made sure that the ads were finely tuned with their target audience, which would help the potential visitors to convert. As per a study, around 11% of marketers believe that paid advertisements help in generating leads.
Personalizing Your Content
The next lead generation strategy that Sarah and Tanya focus on is personalizing their content. Personalization is one of the critical aspects that would make the user feel as if the content was intended directly to them, so the chances of their engagement increase.
They started writing content that was targeted at CEOs, directors, business heads, etc. Tanya started customizing the communication and identifying their needs and objectives, this process would increase the chance of conversion.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing has become a central pillar of their lead generation strategy. The duo adopted different strategies for various social media platforms like Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, etc., considering target segmentation and other parameters.
Sarah was aware that social media is the present and future of lead generation strategies. Social media, other than generating leads, helps engage with the clients, develop the brand, maximize sales, and increase traffic.
For example, for businesses in the food and hospitality sector, a unique way to engage potential customers via social media is by leveraging an online menu maker like Wepik. With this tool, you can create and share eye-catching and professional-looking menus, offering a visual delight that can entice potential customers to explore your offerings further.
66% of marketers produce leads through social media with just six hours of weekly social media marketing.
Gratifications or Giveaways
Sarah explored that giveaways can also be one of the strategies that would help generate quality leads. They engaged with their visitors via contests or free giveaways.
This helped Sarah to generate a decent amount of leads. Gratifying users with products or services in digital marketing could be a good way to attract traffic, as everyone likes gratifications.
You can also share these giveaways on social media profiles like Facebook, Instagram, and more. Also, get IG followers from reliable sites to share your offer with a wider audience.
Marketing or Brand Partnerships
Tanya researched and identified the brands with a broader audience and stronger connections. She realized that developing a partnership with these brands would benefit her company and help a lot with lead generation.
Sarah and Tanya started working on building partnerships with these brands and took advantage of their presence in building their potential client base.
Cold Outreach
Sarah and Tanya understood the power of effective cold outreach. They meticulously crafted user personas, conducted extensive research, and emphasised personalization in their approach. Recognizing the importance of finding emails and reaching out to generate leads, they prioritised building trust and reliability in their communications. They were mindful that each message sent to a stranger needed to convey a sense of trustworthiness and confidentiality.
The cold outreach tool which they were using was SmartReach.io. They explored different features of the tool and were very impressed with it. Features such as personalization, email validation, prospect management, workflow management, email automation, follow-ups, etc. helped Sarah and Tanya to achieve their desired target.
The utilization of marketing automation software has the potential to boost qualified leads by up to 451%
Content Marketing
Content marketing remained at the core of their lead generation efforts. They attracted relevant visitors by generating high-quality and valuable content customized to their audience’s interests and demands.
Sarah knew that the users who consumed high-quality content would appreciate and sign up for their company’s newsletter created using email newsletter software, which would ultimately help with lead generation.
As per research, content marketing drives 3x more leads as compared to traditional marketing at less than half of the cost.
Sarah and Tanya got some high-value reports and content done and started offering as a lead magnet. They put up a form where the visitors had to provide their contact details in return for the report. This strategy also helped them to get a good number of leads.
Search Engine Optimization
After working on all the lead generation strategies, Sarah and Tanya knew the importance of search engine optimization. They also knew that an SEO-optimized website has great potential to attract huge organic traffic.
For every online business, it is essential to stay on top of the search engine results. As per research by Backlinko, the #1 result has a CTR of 27.6% and has 10x more chances of converting than the #10 result.
Tanya started optimizing the website and the landing pages as SEO-optimized webpages would rank higher in the search engine result page and that would help reach the target audience.
Tanya made a list of items she had to ensure while getting the content SEO-optimized.
- Ensuring that the landing page fulfills the intent of the search query
- Having keywords in the meta title and meta description
- Including relevant internal links in the content
- A thorough keyword research
- Building quality backlinks
A/B Testing
Now Sarah and Tanya’s next step was to take data-based decision-making. They incorporated the A/B testing into their lead generation strategy and collected data. They tested with variations of headlines, images, copy, and even lead generation forms.
They created two versions where 50% of the traffic was diverted to the 1st version, and the remaining 50% was shifted to the 2nd version. After a certain period of time, they compared the data from both versions and took the decision accordingly.
Best Practices for Lead Generation Strategies
Audience Research
Begin with comprehensive audience research. Understand your ideal customers’ needs, pain points, and preferences. Customize your lead generation approach as per your target audience.
Quality Over Quantity
Low-quality leads can lead to the sales team’s waste of time and efficiency. Concentrate on nurturing high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into revenue, even if it means narrowing your audience.
Data usage
Collect and handle data responsibly. Ensure compliance with legal regulations while also building trust with your audience. Only request necessary data and transparently communicate how you intend to use it.
Analyze Data
Don’t just collect data; analyze it comprehensively. By scaling your lead capture data analysis, you can gain deeper insights into your target audience’s behaviors and preferences.
Measure your Result
Pay close attention to the conversion rate – the percentage of visitors who become leads. This metric provides valuable insights into the success of your efforts.
Conclusion
Now that we’ve discussed the best possible ways to generate leads for your business, it is important to have follow-up mechanisms, sales pitches/templates, and sales offer in place.
SmartReach.io is a sales engagement platform that specializes in effective cold outreach campaigns. Its unique selling point is its exceptional deliverability. The platform offers a range of features, including personalization, spintax, shared inbox, sales engagement outreach across various channels, AI to generate email content based on specific inputs, and many more features.
Together these features would help in increasing the number of sales-qualified leads.
SmartReach.io is a platform that helps businesses increase lead conversion ratio and decrease sales cycle length.
Try SmartReach.io for free and see how we can help you grow your business.
