For certain industries where product demonstration is key to sales, offline marketing such as trade shows or events presents as an important opportunity to generate leads. Offline marketing strategies allow sales staff to identify customers’ buying potential and thus determine which leads to follow up closely. While offline marketing is important, online marketing has become the go-to platform for many professional service firms. Online marketing efforts are easy to measure, and often less expensive. Although marketing strategies that deliver the greatest impact use a combination of online and offline techniques, having leads generated online and sent to your inbox using available technology is a more effective way at getting new clients, while you direct your time elsewhere.
Content Marketing
Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. This can include interviews, whitepapers, case studies, checklist etc. The key to leveraging useful, free information, is making sure that the material will provide some type of value for your target audience. For example, if you are an art gallery owner and is trying to reach out to art buyers who are interested in a specific type of art, you can create a series of interview with the artists you promote. And in order to retain leads, you can provide viewers the opportunity to ask the artist a question through a feedback form.
Blog
Blogging is part of content marketing and consistently has led to B2B marketers generating 67% more leads than marketers who do not. Before you launch your new blog, it is important to determine your customer profile. You might want to write down information like their professions, their hobbies, their demographics, and patterns of online activities. Once you determine those, your blog content should be highly relevant to these profiles. For example, if you are selling online security software, you could write your blog post on a checklist to make your website more secure.
Social Media
Also a sub-category of content marketing, social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLS on Twitter. Social media also allows you to easily measure your online efforts through engagement rate, fan reach etc. You can also promote your offers on your social posts and include a call-to-action in your caption.
80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the initial encounter. Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use Call-to-Actions that have compelling copy and an eye-catching design to grab your subscriber’s attention.
Ads and Retargeting
The sole purpose of an ad is to get people to take an action. Retargeting converts window-shoppers into buyers. Generally, 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store. Retargeting brings back the other 98%. Retargeting works by keeping track of people who visit your site online. Retargeting generates greater online sales by keeping your brand front and centre and bringing “window shoppers” back when they’re ready to buy. Every time your customer sees your retargeting ads, your brand gains traction and more recognition.
Referral Marketing
Referral, or word-of-mouth, marketing is useful for lead generation in a different way. The ultimate goal is to create a ripple effect. The key metric and performance indicator to measure success is the Net Promotor Score. It measures the likelihood of people recommendation your products or service to family and/or friends. Recommendation from family and friends remain the most credible form of advertising. An example brand that really aced this form of marketing is OnePlus when launching their product on the market late 2014. With the market saturated by big, established players such as Apple and Samsung, OnePlus faced severe competition and approached their launch with an invite-only sales. This means people can only purchase the phone if they had received an invite; these were distributed through contests or people who already bought a OnePlus phone.
Whatever channel you use for referral, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page where you can collect leads effectively.
Using content marketing to generate leads can be an easy way to increase your return on investment and greatly expand your client base. Approach it just like you would any other advertising endeavor: set aside a reasonable budget to test it and see if it works for your business. The key to being successful in lead generation is to brush up on your sales and marketing skills so that the leads you receive convert at a high sales rate.
Although building the relationship organically is always better, if you find yourself in want of new business, lead generation can be an exceptional way to profit and expand.