What’s the main priority for marketers and small business owners? It’s not business advertising. It’s lead generation.
About 75% of marketers say that generating web traffic is important for business growth. Yet, 79% of marketers say that getting quality leads is the priority for 2021.
If you want to grow your business, lead generation is the key activity to make it happen.
Why is lead generation important? Keep reading to find how why it’s critical to your business and how to generate high-quality leads.
1. Higher Close Rate
How much time do you spend talking to prospects that seem to waste your time? Lead generation focuses on qualifying and disqualifying leads.
That important step ensures that you and your sales team focus on talking to the leads that have the need and the budget to buy.
2. You Have a Sales System
One of the mistakes that marketers make is that they focus on activities that generate interest, but there’s not a process to move people through the sales funnel.
With a lead generation strategy, you have a system to move prospects through each step of the sales process.
That makes a difference in social media marketing activities because your posts have a purpose, and you can have each post end with a call to action that aligns with that purpose.
What’s even better is that you can use a lead generation company to do it all for you. That saves time because you have a system that already works.
3. You Don’t Have to Panic If You Lose a Customer
What would happen to your business if you lost your biggest customer? Would you be able to replace that customer quickly, or would you panic because of lost revenue?
Lead generation keeps your pipeline constantly full. You’ll have prospects in your pipeline that are close to buying now and you’ll be able to replace clients.
4. Increase Brand Awareness
When you’re actively generating leads, you’re reaching out to prospects on a large scale. These top of the funnel activities puts your brand front and center.
You’re expanding your reach to a broad audience, which is bound to increase your brand awareness. As you move prospects through the sales process, prospects are likely to share your content. That expands your reach even further.
Lead Generation Tips
OK, you know why lead generation is important if you want to grow your business. The trick is generating leads that are high-quality.
You can generate leads to your business that don’t end up buying because they aren’t a good fit for your business.
How can you get around that? You need to qualify leads. You should learn about your ideal client and find out what they can spend on your services and the problems they want to solve when they buy from you.
Before you do anything, come up with a list of qualifying questions for your clients. This is going to vary by industry.
A gym or personal trainer’s qualifying questions are going to revolve around weight loss goals and how much a prospective client is willing to spend.
A real estate agent’s questions can ask if clients plan to buy or sell. You can ask when the prospective client plans to buy or sell, too.
Landscapers qualify clients by learning about the client’s needs. One prospective client might need someone to cut the lawn, while another needs someone to
Map Your Lead Nurturing Funnel
Most clients aren’t ready to buy from you immediately. That’s why you need to have a way to manage your leads and nurture them until they’re ready to make a purchase.
An example of a lead nurturing funnel starts with driving traffic to your website. Once a prospect is at your website, they’ll fill out a form.
The form gives them access to something of value to them. It can be an e-book, a free course, webinar, or a free consultation.
You can have prospective leads enter contact information. Depending on your business, you can just collect email or ask for a phone number.
Don’t forget to have a privacy policy to comply with data and privacy laws like GDPR and California’s Consumer Privacy Act.
Once you have the contact information, you’ll want to contact your leads immediately. If someone signs up to get an e-book or a free course, you should send them an email immediately with the promised materials.
You can create an automated email sequence. Ideally, you want to have leads take the next step in the sales process.
If you collected a phone number, you should follow up with leads within 24 hours. If someone signed up for a free consultation, call them immediately.
You also want to have methods for following up with your leads in place. You can reach out to them directly or keep them on your newsletter list.
Choose Your Top of the Funnel Activities
The top of funnel activities are the ones that you choose to get people interested in your product or service.
There are a number of ways to get traffic to your website and into your funnel. Social media marketing is often used to generate brand awareness and drive traffic.
You can use Facebook to generate leads, either through organic posts, a Facebook group, or Facebook ads.
Which social media networks should you use?
It depends on your business and your audience. If your audience is on Facebook and Instagram, you should have a presence there. B2B businesses have a lot of success on LinkedIn.
If you have a blog, SEO and paid search ads can be great tools to use to drive traffic to your site. You may need to experiment and test different strategies to find the ones that work best for you.
Lead Generation Grows Your Business
If you’re like any business owner or marketer, you need to find ways to grow your business. The best way to do that is to focus on generating leads for your business.
Lead generation activities can build a loyal following and make your sales team very efficient. You’re bound to grow your business in ways that you never imagined.
Be sure to check out the other business and digital marketing articles on this site.
