Does Your Lead Generation Pass the Test? Ideas You Can Apply to Your Strategy Today

Lead generation: while for some it can sound like nothing but a buzzword, this is where the money lies. There are so many ways and methods marketers can use and test out to generate leads that it can become troublesome or they may get lost. How to wisely plan your strategy for lead generation?

What are leads?

Before we start, let’s identify what leads are. Leads usually are the other name for potential customers who already got into your sales funnel or are really close to doing so. Leads can be collected in the form of contact details, including only a phone number or e-mail, however – the more you know, the better!

How to get prepared for lead generation?

There are a couple of things you should use to power up your lead gen activity even before you actually start it. First of all, doublecheck if you don’t keep making mistakes below:

• If your website is not RWD (Responsive Web Design), and it looks worse than terrible on mobile devices, you can miss a lot of business boats and lose leads. The first impression matters the most, and if you put your audience off, chances are that they will never come back.
• Check if your website loads quickly enough. That is another factor that can eliminate your potential clients from buying or signing up. Page speed can be disturbed by e.g. heavy WordPress plugins.
• If you are into e-commerce and your leads are simply purchases, test all of your payment options. It can turn out that the reason why your clients abandoned carts was a faulty payment option.
• Lead generation requires creativity from marketers and patience from the sales department. You simply need to be ready and aware that serious and intensive lead generation activities may increase interest and customer service efforts. Is your team fully prepared for such a case?

Where to get leads from? Lead generation ideas

You can try both outbound and inbound marketing, however, we are going to focus on smart, inbound techniques you can apply to your strategy even today. Would you try?

Social media

Social media platforms give quite a few opportunities for successful lead generation. First of all, thanks to paid campaigns’ options and targetting possibilities (you’ll read more about it below), you can test a few audiences and reach a few target groups at the same time with different, personalized messages. Facebook itself offers Lead Ads format that can be used to scrap leads directly on the platform, however, you can use more options.

Be where your audience is! If they are active on a specific platform, you should do nothing but jump on the bandwagon and join some discussions on those platforms. They can be led in groups or events, but you should be there.

Also, social media can play a crucial role in content distribution. If you use it wisely and regularly, you can win a lot and reach your desired audience effectively. Look on the other side as well: if you spend so long on creating a piece of content, why wouldn’t you like to make the most of it? Use different forms of communication: videos (you can make free ones in Recast.studio or Lumen5!) or simple graphics (Librestock delivers the best free stock photos, Canva can help with templates). You can also use native features of social media platforms and make, for instance, a slideshow with some music background on Facebook. It literally takes 10 seconds!

If you distribute other publishers’ content add pixels to them via RocketLink. Therefore, you can reach everyone who has clicked links that you share, by social media ads on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and even Quora.

Content marketing

Creating content is great for lead generation as it allows you to attract potential customers on each and every step of their customer journey, or even before it. The lead generation process can happen anytime. However, gated content seems to be even better as it indicates a particular moment to catch the lead.

What is gated content? It is simply a kind of content that the user can get familiar with only after making a particular action. Examples are social media share or leaving an e-mail address (that can be used for business purposes or newsletters afterward – check a very intuitive MailChimp).

Covering the lead generation topic we can’t forget about useful tools that can make the process easier and exceedingly user-friendly. Our favorite tool is Typeform which allows creating beautiful forms and surveys to collect feedback and leads. They also have beautiful job application templates.

Making the most of gated content is a win-win situation: the user gets a valuable piece of content (it can be a short e-book, infographics, checklist or whitepaper, just to name a few ideas), and the brand gets a valuable lead. Everyone is happy.

No content? No problem!

Do you have no content or nothing really valuable (yet)? Make the most of external content and add own retargeting pixels, call-to-action overlays or pop-ups on third-party websites. You don’t believe it is doable? Give RocketLink a try.  

E-mail marketing

Old, good e-mail marketing! Can it be more than a pile of spam? Of course, it can! With a nicely divided database and segments that could get personalized messages, you can count on better results and a higher open rate. To manage a set of successful and effective e-mail marketing activities, remember about a few things:

• use ONLY those e-mails that you acquired legally, where the user marked all check-boxes. Don’t buy some suspicious databases with e-mail addresses that may not even exist any longer, or at all.
• try to make your database clear, transparent and segmented. No mercy – remove some records that are not active or who have never been, replace them with those who made any action.
• a catchy subject is a key to success, but you need to provide value to keep your audience interested and engaged for longer. A special offer? Some exclusive content? Try to offer them something that you would be carried away with.
• keep it short, sweet and simple (3 x S).
• GOLDEN TIP: think outside-the-box while building a subscriber base – thanks to RocketLink you can add a pop-up to the links you share to grab readers’ attention and ask for an e-mail address.
  

Of course, there are many more ways to give a lead generation a try or to improve what you already manage – we are going to cover some more ways in our next blog posts. We strongly encourage you to test lead generation solutions out but don’t let them work on their own. You need to analyze your performance on a regular basis to see if you already hit the jackpot or you need to look further for your goldmine. Good luck!