Consumers' buying behaviors have changed immensely over the last couple of years. With a more progressive approach, they are now hard to sway using the old-fashioned flashy ads. According to a report, consumers spend 57% of their time searching online for products before visiting any shop. With this in mind, businesses and specifically startups, need to modernize their lead generation strategies. This article will explain what lead generation is and put together useful strategies that will work out for startups.
Lead Generation at a Glance:
In layman's terms, lead generation is the process of contacting prospects who demonstrates their interest in our business and converting them to potential buyers. Companies have a well-defined sales funnel, which they tend to fill through leads. For a successful conversion, knowing the buying behavior and sales journey of prospects is essential. The term lead generation is incomplete without knowing lead magnets and demand generation. Let's solve the puzzle.
i) Lead Magnets:
Companies offer a lead magnet to make prospects in exchange for their email or mobile phone number. Magnets are used for data collection in lead generation and carry utmost importance. Without a proper magnet, enterprises will end up capturing zero to less qualified leads.
ii) Demand Generation:
As the terminology suggests, demand generation is all about increasing demand for your products and services. It's a systematic, lengthy but effective procedure that often spans the entire marketing department. Demand generation acts as a bridge between sales and marketing to achieve business goals.
What Makes a Good Lead Generation Strategy?
How can you generate quality leads if your strategy does not reflect the essential attributes? A good lead generation strategy will focus more on customer value rather than generating more leads. Let's dive into the attributes of a good lead generation strategy without further ado.
Provides value to customers: The best way to give your customer value is by generating quality content. Be it an explainer video, a blog post, or an article, whatever you post, focus on the value your customer will get from it.
Seamless customer experience: A good strategy will improve the customer experience for the new and current audience base. Lead generation is positively correlated with customer experience since it will act as bait. The more focused the customer experience, the better the lead generation.
10 Best Lead Generation Strategies for Startups:
Companies need to modernize their approaches towards customer attraction since they are not easily swayed these days. For a new player like a startup, lead generation is not less than hill climbing. Without effective tactics and strategies in place, small and new businesses could quickly get off the track. Let's jump into some of the effective lead generation strategies without any further delay!
1. Have a Clear Buyer Persona:
The first step in catching your lead is to know what their interests are. Do you have a clear idea of your prospect's pain points? How would you convince someone to buy your story if you don't know their buying behavior? A buyer persona is a gateway to getting concrete insights into the buyer's interests, purchasing behaviors, and aspirations. Speak enough of their interests, and they will be ready to buy your brand.
2. Broadcast Niche Ads:
Should you find what your audience will find interesting and relevant, you can win the ads game. People don't have enough time to read, watch or listen to what does not concern them. Broadcasting ads that would best speak to your prospects. Use your lead generation strategy to attract more visitors to your website.
Here is a bonus tip: Create video content on "HOW to" to be more customized in approach. Only those viewers will watch your videos which could be your potential buyers.
3. Offer Lead Magnets:
Get your content creators to work because now is the time they can win the game for you. A lead magnet is a piece of content that acts as bait to catch new fish. As a startup, you need to focus on this strategy since it has a greater chance to work out. It has never been easy to make a visitor submit their data without talking to them in-person. What to use for winning the game? A lead magnet is all you need. As a startup business, it could be and should be a bit complicated for you. But don't panic! You can hire the services of expert lead generation companies in Dubai. An expert hand will make the hard road easy.
4. Build Exemplary Landing Pages:
For the first time, a lead will come with wobbly legs to your website since they are scared and in an easy-to-leave mood. A little prick will make them run for the hills. What makes them stick and scrolling is the quality of your landing page. They have no trust in your brand, neither do they are convinced yet. Your landing page will be a tool you can use to make them buy your story. The best you can do is design a dedicated landing page with useful content and gently guide them towards CTA.
5. Be Sure to Optimize Your Website:
There has been a great misconception that SEO is not necessary if your content is high-quality. Here is the answer: No matter how good your content is, your target audience will never see it if the search bots can't find it. Speaking of lead generation, search engine optimization can be a magnet in itself. What makes a website optimized? Well, the factors could be numerous, but we will discuss the most prominent ones here. These are:
i) Mobile Friendliness:
62% of smartphone owners are using it to surf the internet. Well, what's in it for you? Shouldn't your website be mobile-friendly? Of course, it should be. A responsive website will get you more leads even if your business is in its infancy. A bonus tip here is to use click-to-call links so that the prospects can directly get in touch with you.
ii) Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Just like any other well-established entity, you would want your infant business to rank high on SERPs. It sounds like a fantasy, but it is doable. The tool is SEO. Excel it and see your website to the top ranking. What to focus on in SEO to generate quick results? Well, there is no shortcut, but you can focus on the following terms.
Title Tags: Sends a signal to the search engine about displaying your article's title or page on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The length of title tags should be no more than 58 characters.
Meta Description: Meta description tags are crucial determinants in deciding your website listing on search engine results pages. It's additionally one of the critical factors that web indexes use to decide your website's posting on the result pages. A key takeaway is to keep the length up to 158 characters to better comply with Google's standards.
6. Be Active on Social Media:
Does a handful of followers on social platforms excite you? Of course, it does. But the thing here is these followers never come easy. You need to invest time and money to earn them. As a matter of first importance, you may put resources into paid social media ads that are genuinely economical and, for the most part, goes farther than organic posts. To this point, web-based media stages like Facebook and Instagram permit you to target a niche audience with targeted ads. As a startup, you can capitalize on this opportunity to boost your lead generation process.
7. Incentivize Referrals:
Word-of-mouth strategy has long been in place, and businesses are still cashing from it. It was perceived that technology would throw this tactic out of the window, but it is still useful. Customer referral programs are the modern-day tools most brands are using to advertise and sell their story. With that said, you have a more excellent opportunity for a lead generation here since you can generate incentive-based referral codes for the customers. Allow the new prospects to get a discount on their first purchase, and you will see the leads jumping in through the window.
8. Create Downloadable Content:
What about getting prospect's information in exchange for knowledge? The idea sounds great! That's why it is on my strategies list. Educating customers is nothing but brand awareness. Why not do it? Create some top-notch knowledge-rich content in PDF form and post it on your landing page. Prospects will download it in return for their emails. Be it a blank paper or an eBook, the idea is going to pay you some cash.
9. Call to Potential Prospects:
Once you have the prospects' data, you can reach them out via direct calling. Don't call with wobbly legs or with the fear that you will spoil the opportunity. If put right, the strategy is a win-win. A call at the right time can bring extravagant results for your startup business. Did the term "right time" troubled you? You need not worry! Call center companies in Dubai can help you out.
Key takeaway: Try not to sell on the very first call. Pitch your ideas at a time when you see the lead is ready to buy your story.
10. Don't Forget to Remarket:
There are 97% chances that the prospects will quit your landing page without considering your brand. Isn't it alarming? What to do next? No need to worry when you have a tool like remarketing in the arsenal. You can go crossways with prospects who have previously interacted with your business. Remind them that you can better serve their needs. There are greater chances that they will consider your call.
Better Lead Generation Takes Robust Strategies and Planning!
There is no shortcut to success, but what if I tell you there is? It will help if you focus on your lead generation strategies to develop and develop quickly. Implement more robust strategies like those we've prescribed above to get whatever the number of qualified leads could reasonably be expected into your sales funnel.
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