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Best Lead Generation Techniques to Make More Sales
In marketing, it’s usually easy to miss the moon for the stars sometimes.
Marketers waste lots of time looking at metrics like impressions, click-through rates, and so on, that the campaign’s ultimate goal can become unclear. For most businesses, that means generating new sales leads.
Generating new leads is the major problem that business owners face today. No business can flourish without making sales.
According to Content Marketing Institute, “85% of B2B marketers confirmed that lead generation is their most vital content marketing goal.”
“Leads are the metric we rely on as marketers. Because leads mean money,” according to Kipp Bodnar.
An average site has a sales conversion rate of 1% — 2%. It only shows that on most websites, over 95% of visitors don’t purchase anything (especially on their first visit). Which makes more sense to capture leads (emails) instead of trying to sell them right away.
If you want to have a successful business, then you need high-quality leads and lots of them.
To put it succinctly, nothing happens in a business without good leads. No leads – No sales – No profits – No nothing.
This is why, according to Oracle, 66% of organizations’ goals are focused on generating leads.
Today I will show you seven proven lead generation techniques that’ll help you generate more leads. Though there are hundreds of lead generation methods, no need to confuse you with so many points.
That being said, let’s get started:
A good lead generation methodology needs a credible social presence.
Social media is undeniably going to play a significant role in your lead-generation efforts. If you haven’t optimized your LinkedIn and other social media profiles to display your best qualities, you’ve got to do that now.
Typically, if leads are researching you, they’ll often judge you by your profile. It’s sad, but it’s a fact.
On your LinkedIn profile, follow this checklist and ensure you tick all the boxes:
- Headline: Show your thought leadership such as expertise, awards, and accomplishments.
- Cover photo: Show your expertise in a visual form such as logos of publications you’ve featured in.
- Profile picture: People often digest images before words. You want to get a professional, smiling headshot.
- Bio: Once you’ve attracted them using the “social proofs” above, they’ll be reading your bio. Here, describe the specific problem you solve, and how you do it.
- Recommendations: Ask your clients or co-workers to write about the value you bring to their business or job.
As you can see in the image above, Neal Schaffer has done the following:
- Has a clear, smiling, and professional headshot
- Showcased his book using a cover photo (authority)
- Lists his expertise in his headline (social media keynote speaker, educator, etc.)
This does not apply to LinkedIn alone, you also want to create a compelling Facebook and Twitter profile.
2. Create a Blogging Strategy
Blogging is one of the best lead-generation strategies online. According to HubSpot, “companies that blog 6 to 8 times each month can double their lead volume.”
Managing a blog is a great way to attract the right people to your business. Regrettably, most companies lack consistent content calendars.
Most people often start on the wrong foot by not creating an effective blogging strategy.
To generate more leads, start by creating an effective content strategy, which will compel you to think through every step of the process.
You can start by answering the 3 questions below:
- Who’s your target audience?
- How will you attract and convert them?
- What’s your lead magnet?
According to Marketing Charts, blog posts, video content, research reports, social media content, infographics, webinars, and case studies are the highest-converting types of content.
Be consistent with your chosen content strategy and create an avenue to collect leads by answering the questions above…problem solved.
3. Build a personal brand (website)
From a branding perspective, having your website can boost and accelerate your long-term career goals.
A website will act as your professional hub – the platform for all your content and credibility.
The benefits of owning a website cannot be overemphasized in this industry, you simply will not achieve a lot without it.
Now, here’s the best part…
…Building one doesn’t have to be a daunting task and requires little to no technical skills.
For example, a platform like Wix provides a simple drag-and-drop user interface, enabling you to build a professional website without having to learn code.
However, I would recommend creating a self-hosted website using WordPress as it comes with a bunch of awesome themes and plugins to give your website the perfect look and functionalities.
But if you don’t have the budget for a self-hosted site at the moment, pick from any of these free website builders.
To demonstrate credibility, your website should have:
- A homepage – to demonstrate expertise and include a call-to-action
- A blog page – to create and showcase content that solves your prospect’s pains
Here’s an example of a good-looking homepage from Jon Morrow:
Notice the clean design, with a simple and single call-to-action so the visitor will know exactly what to do. It also includes a professional picture of Noah himself, according to VWO “photos of people can boost conversion rate by 48%.”
From this homepage, Noah’s goal is to build his email list (leads). What you have on your homepage will depend on your individual goals.
If your goal is to boost credibility, include logos of companies or publications you’ve worked with as you can see below on the IM Views blog:
4. Optimize your landing pages
Landing pages are the perfect channels to convert regular visitors into leads if not customers:
But to bring them down your sales funnel, you must ensure that your landing page is written and designed in the best way possible.
A good landing page is one where you have a specific and clear call to action. There is a single goal, one reason someone visits that page.
Because of that specific goal, it is obvious to your page’s visitors the action you want them to take while there.
This goal will help you achieve your desired result, which in this case is generating a lead or making a sale. Now, review your landing page, decide how many call-to-actions (CTA) you have, and get rid of the lower-priority CTAs.
Here’s an example of a well-designed landing page from the Smart Passive Income blog:
Aside from that, you also want to determine what your potential customer wants. Once you’ve figured that out and tied it to a high-converting landing page, you’ll continuously generate leads.
Most importantly, you need to use a landing page you’re most comfortable using. For example, you cannot go wrong with any of the landing page plugins here if your website is powered by WordPress.
Finally, generating leads will always be easier if your attention is more focused on syncing your landing page with other marketing strategies.
5. Blog Commenting
Do you know you can gain quality leads via effective blog commenting practice?
Blog commenting, when done correctly, can help you generate an avalanche of leads that’ll trust you and always buy what you recommend or pay for your services.
If you’re not convinced yet, maybe the case studies below will do the magic:
Neil Patel generated a whopping $25,000 after leaving about 249 engaging comments on other blogs. He also got a speaking gig from one lead.
That’s not all, Sujan Patel also gained 513 marketing leads to his startup by commenting on relevant blogs on his niche.
Remember that not all comments are equal, Neil Patel saw more success when he commented on industry-leading blogs.
Now, you want to avoid these 8 mistakes if you wish to generate leads via blog commenting.
While commenting on blogs, ensure they have high authority as you don’t want to waste your time on low-authority blogs that may not drive traffic back to your site.
6. Effective Guest Posting
Guest posting on other people’s sites is also another effective way to generate high-quality leads.
Sharon Hurley saw close to a 1000% boost in traffic from guest posting. Now, if you have an optimized landing page, you can easily convert this traffic to leads.
Before Jon Morrow launched his blog a few years ago, he started guest posting on other industry-leading blogs like copyblogger.com and problogger.com and generated close to 13,000 email subscribers before he launched his blog officially.
Ideally, one successful guest post can gain you thousands of leads depending on the authority of the website you are guest posting on.
The idea is to approach high-quality websites in your niche and pitch them for guest posting. You can easily find these blogs on Google by using certain search quarries like:
- Your Keyword “guest post”
- Your Keyword “guest article”
- Your Keyword “write for us”
- Your Keyword “contributing writer”
- Etc.
You can learn more about guest posting from Brian Dean who has also generated thousands of targeted visitors via this lead generation method:
7. Run a Survey
The majority of B2B professionals out there are keen to see what challenges they share with others.
So instead of the regular cold email, try surveying your prospective customers. To them, you’ll look like someone collecting insights and data on the industry.
You’ll also be able to generate lots of valuable insights on your buyer personas, and you can segment each respondent based on their responses, letting you identify where your solution can serve them best.
Tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform will help you to easily carry out the surveys.
Additionally, using an incentive will help you to boost your response rate. You can simply offer to give them access to the insights you gathered before they go “public.”
This will build an element of exclusivity while also providing you with new valuable content for your website.
Conclusion
To build a profitable business, you must learn how to continuously build more leads. With the seven lead generation techniques here, you’ll no longer have a problem generating more online leads.
Furthermore, you don’t have to start with all of them, just pick any of the strategies and fly with it. I’ve used most of the lead generation methods here, and they work like a charm.
But regardless of what method you’re choosing, HubSpot discovered that 54% more quality leads are generated by inbound strategies than by traditional paid marketing. This means that you must give top priority to creating the right content.