In the perfect world, business would grow year-on-year generating steady sales, healthy revenues, bottom lines, and garnering paying customers. But this business utopia isn’t a reality yet! Because markets are changing, dynamics are changing, and the customer is changing!
Every business needs one thing to thrive – good customers. Good customers are those that buy from you and continue to buy from you through the entire life cycle. And acquiring this customer is not entirely easy or always inexpensive. One of the biggest challenges faced by almost 80% of B2B or B2C businesses is – acquiring the right customer.
We’ve encountered sales teams chasing leads from every corner of the earth. We’ve had entrepreneurs, start-ups, and organizations asking us for an effective lead generation strategy that will churn customers through the business cycle. And each time our teams convey the same message. It is not one strategy or anyone leads generation tactic that will rope in customers for your business.
The average cost of customer acquisition is different for every industry and is as low as $7 in the Travel industry to as high as $315 in Telecom. This makes effective lead generation campaigns key to revenue, growth and good customers for small businesses.
Reports indicate that 60% of consumers research everything online, even basic daily essentials. Costs? Product review? Experience? Availability? Where to buy? How to use? Who used it? JUST GOOGLE IT! Chances are your priced lead and customer is at this moment researching your product, service or business online.
This means your business needs an efficient and productive digital marketing strategy for lead generation!
Your business also needs a dedicated team that drives an effective lead generation strategy and works towards maximizing several lead generation tactics. Being a digital marketing agency, we understand the nuances of an effective digital marketing strategy to generate leads. We understand that no one business model is the same. Therefore, the need to customize lead generation strategies from one business to another.
Customers today are widespread and inundated with information and advertising messages online. As your digital partners, our teams of professional’s work on sourcing qualified leads for your business amidst this chaos. Each team is proficient in different online lead generation tactics; creating an efficient lead generation strategy for your business.
Lead Generation for Small Businesses are a little different though.
Lead generation campaigns for every business are different. In the sense that, small businesses have smaller budgets, and the size of the businesses aren’t always able to handle large volumes. The lead generation marketing campaign ideas need to generate enough attention and attract customers, help build the brand, drive awareness and interest, and finally ensure conversions. All these seem like a mammoth task, especially when budgets are tight. But here’s where Mindstorm can help! A hybrid digital agency, we’d love to share some of the best lead generation campaign ideas and lead generation strategies for small businesses.
But first, what is a lead generation campaign?
A lead generation campaign is a combination of several tactics and lead generation ideas to attract the right customers, generate interest in products, drive engagement and help convert into a sale. The key being acquiring the right customer to convert into a sale. And with more and more customers shopping, working, and living the digital life, lead generation campaigns digitally are very efficient. From ad campaigns on various social media to email marketing, website and Google AdWords, a good lead generation campaign is the right mix of all elements.
In fact, the most effective lead generation campaign is a collaborative effort of several lead generation tactics, done over a sustained period of time.
And for small businesses this mix becomes crucial to ensure maximum use of the marketing budgets. Every lead generation tactic and idea must be customised to the nature of your business, size of your business, competitors of your business and target market. Let’s look at a few lead generation marketing campaign ideas that small businesses can implement immediately.
How do you start creating an effective digital marketing strategy for lead generation?
First, we define the target audience and build a digital roadmap. Together, with the sales and marketing teams, we define who is a qualified lead. With defined parameters of the target customers, we set out a list of objectives for lead generation. The customer life cycle and buying journey of your product or service determine these objectives. It could range from new visitors to your business website, to mobile app downloads or engaging customers after-sale, encouraging repeat purchases, and more.
But the main objective of any digital marketing strategy still stands – generate new leads that can be converted into a customer!
Most lead generation strategies start out with a digital road map and a few major objectives:
- Generate traffic to the business website. This creates brand awareness about your product, service and idea among the target audience defined.
- Convert this traffic into leads. Ensuring all those website visitors on your website want to purchase your product or avail your service. This defines them as potential and qualified leads.
- Convert these leads to final customers. Encouraging a buying action and closing the deal online.
Depending on which objective we define, a comprehensive mix of effective lead generation tactics are implemented to achieve business objectives.
Let’s look at some of the best lead generation ideas under each objective that we can implement as your digital marketing agency today.
Generate traffic to the business website. Reaching your target audience online.
1) Build mobile friendly websites –
The first thing every business must absolutely have is a website. Your website is your key lead generation marketing campaign idea. It is the first impression to your audiences and your audience is busy on their mobile phones.
Design your website to ensure that the experience is user-friendly. Your customers have immediate access to your star products and should understand what you offer and what you do. Optimise the call – to- action efficiently and at every step for users on your website.
Clean design, easy navigation and quick speed is a basic checklist for a mobile friendly website.
2) SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) –
Your website must have an ongoing SEO exercise which makes your website visible to Google! A few basics to ensure your website is generating leads through SEO are:
- using the right keywords,
- good content about your business,
- and optimizing your website pages.
A good SEO effort on your website becomes your long-term lead generation campaign. It is a strategic exercise to deliver quality online content that your target audience is looking for, thus diverting traffic to your website. So, a small business dealing in fabrics must talk about the latest fashions and fabrics and ensure that trending fabric names are part of the product descriptions. Blogs and videos about different fabrics should also be included as part of the website.
3) Social Media Paid Ads Campaigns –
As a social media marketing agency, we advocate keeping a set media budget for social media paid campaigns. Facebook allows businesses to run targeted lead generation ads to a defined audience. Instagram and story ads, LinkedIn ads and twitter lead generation card allows your business to reach a wider audience. Just define your ad campaign objectives, set the budgets and your audiences to target. And get ready to generate leads across Facebook and Instagram.
4) Google Ads –
Google is a rich lead platform since the world is searching on Google. Google offers businesses to run targeted ads to a predefined set of audiences with well-defined objectives. As performance marketers, we recommend a healthy mix of what Google has to offer. A mix of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns, Pay-Per-Click Campaigns, and Google Display advertising to drive customers to your website. Convert this traffic into leads. Giving your target audience a taste of your business. And it’s a perfect lead generation campaign idea for small businesses too. Google let’s you pick your budgets, customise your audiences – so if you’re a local business, you can keep testing ads in your area and attract customers within that space.
5) Lead Magnets –
Lead magnets are an excellent lead generation tool. The idea is to offer website visitors (potential leads) a small bit of your business offering in return for their information (email address, number). Businesses can use this information to follow up with the lead and qualify them or convert the customer. This could be free information such as – free e-books, consultation sessions, free research excerpt. It could also be a free experience such as – free trials, free demos, webinars and more. But once they’ve signed up, where do you drive them to?
6) Landing Page –
You drive them to a landing page. A landing page is a custom-design web page to capture leads from your Google Ads, social media ads and lead magnets. This web page is NOT the same as your main business website. Every landing page is different, simply because you must create a landing page for each offering. If you have more than one product line, each product line must have a dedicated landing page/ Landing pages are an effective digital marketing tool to capture potential customers and leads into your sales funnel. Design your landing page to showcase 3 – 4 key highlights of your business or product. Offer a reliable CTA on the page. This ensures your potential customers are engaged with your landing page and want to know more. Individual landing pages boost lead generation campaign efforts manifold. You can track the ROI of your paid campaigns and you can further segment your customer with forms.
7) Retargeting to the audiences –
With smart lead magnets and structured landing pages, businesses have now captured potential leads. Drive these leads to purchase or download or choose your business by targeted marketing messages. Google retargeting allows businesses to reconnect with potential customers with recall advertising messages. Ask us how to create an interesting retargeting campaign, so that your website visitor never forgets you! Convert these leads to final customers.
8) Tripwire –
A trip wire is a discount or low-priced, one-time offer that helps your customers take one more step to try out your product. Think of it as a sample – potential customers test your product and you get a chance to connect and convert them. Use a lead magnet to drive your potential lead to your landing page and convert them to customers with an interesting tripwire. Such as – Book this $99 spa-session at only $10!
9) Email Marketing –
Email marketing is an effective tool in lead generation campaigns for small businesses. With contact information of several potential leads, businesses can run interesting and systematic email marketing campaigns. You could do educational and informational emails to sales-driven emails to your potential customers. Personalising emails and customising it to target a certain segment would further enhance your lead generation efforts. This is called marketing automation and you can read all about it here – Marketing Automation is More Than Sending Emails
10) Content Marketing-
To be the best, businesses need to sound the best. This is where content marketing plays a big role in shaping what your business means online. Customers have a lot of information available online and that information influences buying behavior. Customers love reading blogs with tips and tricks, how-to guides about products, watching DIY videos and such. Businesses that offer engaging content on their websites and social media, establish themselves as experts in the industry. High- quality content will drive your lead generation campaign efforts to success. Your content should answer questions simply and clearly helping the user instantly. Consider collaborating with online magazines and portals that are relevant and active in your domains. Co-created content is more likely to reach a digitally active audience, thus helping boost lead generation campaigns.
An effective digital marketing strategy for lead generation cannot be a one-time effort. Garnering high-quality leads is a mix and match of strategies, tactics and budgets – there is no standard strategy template of success. Some start-up businesses may need more digital marketing budgets; whereas some may need to be driven by content marketing.
We’d love to help your business generate leads with digital marketing solutions. Give us a shout at – aniketh@minstorm.in
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