An effective lead generation strategy ensures that your business pipeline is full of people that are interested in what you have to offer—the more leads you have, the more sales you can make.
But consumer behaviors and habits are always changing. For instance, while your business once found cold emailing to be effective for generating leads, your potential customers/clients might be looking for something different now.
So, are you ready to freshen up your lead generation strategy?
Here’s how to improve your lead generation strategy in 2020.
Create Buyer Personas
First things first: If you haven’t done so already, you need to create buyer personas if you want to improve your lead generation strategy this year. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. They typically include information like demographics, goals, motivations, pain points, trusted resources, and more based on data from your existing customers and market research.
Creating detailed buyer personas will help you better understand your target audience, how to market to them, and how to turn them into customers. You can easily create a buyer persona using free resources like Digital Marketer’s Customer Avatar Worksheet or Xtensio’s User Persona Creator. Once you know your ideal customers inside and out, it’s time to start attracting and capturing leads.
Offer High Value Content
In today’s digital world, one of the most effective ways to attract new leads is with high value content. In fact, according to Demand Metric, content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing. So, it’s important that your business comes up with a solid content marketing strategy.
There are 2 primary different types of content that you should be focusing on:
- Content that drives traffic to your site
- Content that generates leads
Content that drives traffic to your site can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. Then, you can turn those new website visitors into leads by offering content like webinars, free trials, eBooks, guides, and more in exchange for a user’s email address. These types of content are generally referred to as lead magnets.
Be sure to study your buyer personas to determine what type of valuable content your audience will be interested in and promote your content across numerous different channels in order to reach as many users as possible.
Add an Exit-Intent Popup to Your Site
Chances are, many people will visit your website and not return again for a very long time—they might even never return again. That means that you’ve lost that potential lead forever. But by adding an exit-intent popup to your site, you can turn those abandoning website visitors into leads.
An exit-intent popup is able to track when a user is about to leave your website and send them a targeted message at exactly the right time. For example, when a user is about to leave, an exit-intent popup can be displayed that says something like “Hey, don’t go! Sign up for our email list to get 10% your first purchase.” A popup like this will capture the attention of your website visitors and encourage them to give you their email address.
Aside from offering a discount, you can also use exit-intent popups to promote your lead magnets. Offering a valuable lead magnet like an eBook via your exit-intent popup is a great way to capture more leads on your website.
Step Up Your Social Media Marketing
Did you know you can use social media to generate new leads for your business? Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are super popular with a ton of people. So, if your ideal customers are on social media, your company needs to be there too. Be sure to step up your social media marketing by being active on social media.
To get more leads on social media you can:
- Share links to your lead magnets
- Run giveaways
- Host a webinar or live video
- Use social media listening tools
Not only can you reach a large number of potential leads on social media, but you can also target the exact type of ideal customer you’re looking for by using social media ads. With social media ads you can target users by specific demographics like location, age, gender, interests, and much more. This means that you can get your ads in front of the people who’re most likely to become your customers.
Implement Live Chat
You’ve probably heard that implementing live chat on your website is a great way to improve customer service. But, live chat is also an effective strategy for gathering more leads.
When a user visits your website, they’re going to have questions they need to get answers to in order to make a purchase-decision. And with live chat, the user can get their queries answered instantly. Aside from answering questions from website visitors, you can also use live chat to recommend certain content and products, schedule appointments, and more. At the end of the conversation, you can ask the user to provide basic contact details like their email address so that you can follow up with them.
In addition, live chat is a great way to collect customer feedback. Collecting customer feedback will help you learn more about your customers and you can use these insights to boost your lead generation strategy even more.
Use Lead Scoring
Once you start collecting all of these new leads, you need to figure out which leads are most ready to buy. If you aren’t able to determine which of your leads are the hottest, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time with people that just wanted your lead magnet and have no intention of buying. To find out which leads you should be focusing on the most, you need to use lead scoring.
Lead scoring is the process of ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness. You can assign points to attributes like job title and actions like downloading a lead magnet, registering for a webinar, signing up for a free trial, etc. The more points a lead has, the more likely they are to buy. Creating a lead scoring system will help you focus on the right leads so that you can skyrocket conversions.
Over to You
These are just a few effective lead strategies you can use. But with these simple tips for improving your lead generation strategy, your business will be able to collect more leads this year than ever before. Get ready to gather more quality leads and boost your sales in 2020.
