How to generate quality leads for your business
The number one question business owners, sales execs, and enterprise marketers ask us is, “How do I generate leads online?”
It’s an important question. Sometimes online marketing can feel like you’re talking to no one. Sending content out into the ether hoping it will strike a chord with a prospective customer, but unsure if your efforts are really paying off. With intentional digital marketing strategies and consistent high-quality content, you can improve your inbound marketing and generate effective leads. Read on to learn how you can generate leads through online marketing.
How does your business get noticed online?
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of turning your website into a lead generation machine, let’s discuss why digital marketing is so important to your lead generation tactics.
Before someone searches for a product or a solution, they’ll likely conduct a bit of research on the problem they’re experiencing. First, they’ll turn to their trusty friend, Google. They search for something like “How do I generate more leads for my product webinars?” and an entire world of possibilities opens up to them. They’re presented with articles, videos, and infographics, and get a glimpse into how other people are solving the same problem.
If your company specializes in lead generation for webinars, but you aren’t consistently creating content and showing off your expertise with digital marketing, you won’t show up in their search results. Simply put, you are opting out of being on their shortlist of solutions.
To get noticed online, you need to be online.
In marketing, the rule of seven explains that someone needs to see your business and brand seven times before they will even remember your name. In today’s digital world, many marketers say it takes double that for a prospect to remember your company.
There are several tools you can use to be noticed online by your ideal customers:
- Content marketing (including blogs, videos, and podcasts)
- Consistent branding and messaging
- Social media marketing
- Paid media and advertising
- Email marketing
To get started, you’ll need to understand how to incorporate all of these marketing tools into an integrated strategy.
Why you need to take an integrated marketing approach to lead generation
Lead generation is not a one-size-fits-all affair. It takes an integrated marketing campaign to be successful. An integrated marketing campaign builds a unified experience for your audience. It pulls content marketing, advertising, sales, social media, email marketing, and media relations toward a single goal – cohesion.
No matter how many marketing strategies and tactics you use, you want your brand and your offer to be clear and consistent across all channels. Consistency builds trust. When people see consistent branding across multiple channels, they move from knowing your company to liking your brand to trusting your business.
Every successful lead generation campaign should be multi-channel and integrated to be effective. Your buyer profile will give you a clear idea of who your customer is and how they spend their time online. This profile equips you with the insights to create a more targeted campaign that performs better, so it’s worth working with an expert to create one.
But a buyer profile is not foolproof—people are still people, complex and layered. Some prefer Twitter over LinkedIn or articles over videos. An integrated marketing campaign accounts for these differences by using multiple types of media (e.g. videos, articles, infographics, podcasts) and various channels (e.g. social media, digital ads, email, blogs, traditional media.)
When a prospect sees consistent messaging through multiple channels and media, they know what to expect and can begin to trust you. They go through a journey that builds the “Know, Like, Trust” factor for your brand.
Know
First, they get to know you. Maybe a follower liked your post and it showed up on your prospect’s feed. The person clicked through and read your article. Your article was a hit, jam-packed with engaging and useful information so they followed you on social media. That’s great news! But this relationship is just getting started.
Like
Now that your prospect is following you, it’s important to offer them content that delights and engages them. Does your brand resonate with this person? Does your offer appeal to them? Just because they know you, doesn’t mean that they like you.
This is where strategic branding comes into play. From the beginning, your messaging, brand personality, visuals, and everything in between need to appeal to your ideal customer. You can learn more about this in the section on Branding & Messaging.
Trust
After your prospect decides that like what you have to offer, it’s time to earn their trust. They’ve read your emails and listened to a few podcasts where your brand’s mentioned. Because you deliver an on-brand message, strategically placed yourself in front of them online, and offer consistent value, you’ve stood out as an expert in your arena.
Now the prospect has shifted from casually encountering your brand to actively seeking out your brand for information. They trust your business to solve their problem.
Inbound marketing tactics for lead generation
Inbound marketing is a lead generation philosophy that flips the traditional business dynamic of chasing customers on its head. Rather than pursue your prospects (think robocalls or pop-up advertisements), inbound marketing is about being there when your customer needs you.
Your prospect has a problem. They head to Google to find an answer. They come across your content which gives them a solution. As a result, they come directly to you for future problems.
Content marketing, email nurturing, social media, targeted advertising, and authority marketing are all examples of inbound marketing that aim to educate and solve problems.
Inbound Lead Generation System
- Attract: A visitor finds your website via an article, video, social media post, email, or other marketing channels.
- Convert: A visitor clicks on your CTA, where you offer a content upgrade. This CTA button or link takes them to a landing page with a form to convert (expect 1% to 4% of visitors to convert).
- Nurture: You add the newly converted leads to an email nurture campaign and begin scoring them.
- Close: You identify your most qualified leads. These are the people engaging with our content the most, and the best candidates to forward to the sales team to close the deal.
Set-up a Lead Generation Campaign
Content marketing
At the center of an effective inbound marketing strategy is content. Content marketing drives SEO, email marketing, social media, and brand messaging. Remember: Inbound marketing is about positioning your brand as helpful to your target audience, so they seek you out for answers and eventually become customers.
You want your ideal customers to find you through a quick Google search. If they aren’t, it’s because of a lack of content. At Aimtal, we create educational and impactful content in the form of guides, eBooks, blog posts, videos and more for our clients.
Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Types of content marketing
There are different types of content—Video, visual, written, social media, and email content are just a few examples. When you’re developing your content, the most important classification is whether it is traffic-generating content or lead-generating.
Traffic-generating content typically drives visitors to your site and helps your brand build awareness.
Lead-generating content helps your brand convert views and visitors into potential customers. It is valuable enough that a visitor is willing to exchange their email or other contact information to access it.
When creating and distributing lead-generating content, don’t think about it as a single asset. Think about it as part of the larger, integrated marketing campaign. Your lead-generating content needs to work in conjunction with content clusters and social media. It also needs a ready-to-go nurture campaign that follows visitors from their initial interaction with the content to their conversion.
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