How to Generate Leads – Best Lead Generation Techniques for Online Marketing

What is a Lead?

In simple words, lead is a contact information of a person who may be interested in buying your products or services. Every person who buys products and services is a lead for different businesses and every business generate leads. There are different types of leads which will be discussed here briefly:

• Cold Leads: are persons who don’t know about your company but they have the tendency to buy your products or services. They are the targeted buyers who can buy your products or services.
• Warm Leads: are persons who are familiar with your company. They may know your company from social media marketing or they read your blog and like your products or services and shown their interest in buying your products or services. Cold leads can be converted into warm leads by follow ups.
• Qualified Leads: are persons who are ready to buy your products or services. They may contact you by submitting contact form or commenting on your products in social media or have asked for more information about your products or services or they simply want to place order. You just need to provide their contact information to your sales team so they can close the deal and convert the qualified leads into customers.

How to Generate Leads?

Lead generation is the most important task for any marketing team. Leads can be generated through different sources, but in all cases you have to offer freebies or some valuable stuff to the potential customers and then you get their contact information in return. You can conduct a survey to ask user opinion about your products or services and ask the users to sign up to your newsletter.

There are many other ways to collect contact information of potential buyers which we will discuss here. Many businesses get free or paid ready made Business Leads or Buy Targeted Email List and reach their potential buyers via email marketing. The basic idea is to collect contact information of prospects. We will discuss different lead generation techniques here, so let’s go.

Email Marketing

You can start email marketing and offer your readers some valuable stuff for free. These freebies or free stuff are know as Lead Magnets. In return you get their name and email ids by newsletter sign ups. Now you can send them weekly newsletter with different offers. This is the most effective way to generate business leads which converts but most of the people don’t know how all this works. I will try to explain here briefly and you can ask any questions in the comments section. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a website landing page where users can signup to your newsletter (if you have no website yet then buy a domain & hosting, install WordPress in it and setup MailChimp plugin for newsletter signups. If you need help regarding website development, you can contact Speedeonic.)
2. Bring users on your website by social media marketing, YouTube or email marketing etc.
3. Offer them some valuable free stuff to download for example free ebook, course or template etc…
4. Before sharing download link, ask visitors to sign up for your newsletter. These are your potential buyers who are interested in your products or services and some of theme will buy your products or services in the future.

Social Media Marketing

Just like email marketing, share some valuable information on your social media or offer free stuff to download, for example; offer free eBook or free course etc. People really like the free stuff. Interested users will ask you for more information, they will hit like button or write comments on your post. These likes and comments are your potential leads. Now you have to decide whether you want them to join your Facebook group or like your business page or you want them to sing up to newsletter on your website.

Once they take the desired action, give them the free stuff to download. You can have plenty of page likes and group members whom you can offer your products and services whenever your like. They will always be in touch with you whenever you add new posts. I will recommend you to join multiple Facebook and Linked groups, participate actively and share informative posts there but don’t spam. Facebook groups are the most powerful communities on internet.

Paid Ad Campaigns

If you have enough budget for marketing then paid ad campaigns are very effective in generating business leads. If you are planning to start google ad campaign then there is a good news, Google offers $70 free ad credit for its new users. It will help you to get started with your first ad campaign. The basic idea is to drive targeted traffic to your website where user can signup for newsletter.

Facebook ads also offer a very useful feature for capturing leads. This feature can be enabled while creating Facebook ad, you can ask users to fill up a simple form where you can collect user’s name, phone number, email, address or whatever information you need. Mostly these are qualified leads and your sales team can reach the potential buyer to make the deal.

There are many other social media channels which offer paid ads and drive traffic to your website. Among them Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn are the most prominent.

Content Marketing

Blog Posts

Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate business leads. If you can write good articles or creative content on any topic then you can easily generate leads for your business. Write informative articles and add link back to your website and ask your readers to sign up for newsletter on your website. Only the interested users will sign up and they are your targeted audience, just engage them with more useful content or follow up emails.

YouTube Videos

Interesting videos are the best way to bring users on your website. Just like writing good blog posts, create good vlogs about your business, create informative videos, video tutorials or video courses and engage your visitors. You can generate leads by taking your visitors to your website or you can ask them to subscribe to your channel. Your YouTube subscribers are your leads and your videos keep them engaged, so keep creating new videos and show them whatever you want and even sell your products and services.

Infographics & Slideshows

Create information based graphics and share on social media and image sharing websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, Slideshare etc. There are many other websites which offer their users to share infographic, slideshows, animated graphics, video clips and pdf files. Just upload the infographics and add a link back to your Lead Magnet where users can signup to your newsletter and get their rewards.

Why your Business need Leads?

Companies are setup to earn profits and profit can be made only by selling products or services to people. These people who buy products or services were business leads which are converted into sales. Sales are the most important part of the business, without sales no business can survive and without leads there are no sales. This rule may not apply on the small retail shops in the streets because they have walking customers. But most of the businesses which offer products and services to specific audience, need to generate leads. Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising to generate leads and make sales. If you are not generating leads for your business then you are not doing business because every business need customers who buy their products and services otherwise no business can survive.

How to use the Business Leads

Most of the businesses use ready made business leads databases for telemarketing and email marketing. Ready made business leads may be in the form of an excel sheet containing 1000s of leads per row. They send cold emails or make calls and ask the person if he/she is interested in their products or services or not. Interested person’s contact information is stored as potential lead and they are sent further emails and calls in the future. Many leads are get converted into sales after the second or third emails or calls. Businesses also use these b2b lead databases for bulk email marketing. If you use ready made email lists for marketing then use email marketing services from professionals and luckily there are some online companies which offer email marketing services for purchased email lists.

How to Send Bulk Emails to Targeted Leads

Sending email from gmail or hotmail is free and easy but it is recommended to send emails using your company domain (info@yourcompany.com). If you don’t have any company domain name then you should buy a domain name and get an email account. If you are new to email marketing then I will recommend you to use services of email marketing companies. There are many bulk email marketing services out there but some of the best and free are Elastic Email and Mail Kitchen. You can also get an smtp hosting server to send unlimited emails but it needs some technical knowledge.

Before sending emails make sure that you are not going to spam and follow these practices:

• Write your subject line very carefully. It is the most important part of the email because only the attractive subject line compels the recipient to open the email. Always check your subject line in this tool before sending emails.
• Do not use spam words in the email message otherwise your email will land in the Spam folder. Some of spam words; offer, free, earn, discount, purchase etc. Always check your email spam score using this website  www.mail-tester.com
• Use only one or two images in the email message
• Use your main website url. Do not use url shortner nor long urls
• Write your signature in the email message. Mention your contact details
• Add unsubscribe link at the bottom or write a text to allow the recipient to unsubscribe if he/she wants.

Using the above discussed Lead Generation Techniques, you can easily generate leads for almost any business. You can generate leads for real estate business, insurance business, technology companies and many other type of businesses. If you like this posts, please share it and do comments.

Thank you