With so many options for lead generation, it leaves many people confused and getting less than desirable results because they are all over the place instead of focusing on what is working for them.
However, in this blog post, I will share with you some of my favourites, as well as some tips for using them to get optimal results.
While these may not all work for you, it always helps to give them a try. Your business and niche is an important factor in how well lead generation tools will work.
So let’s jump straight in:
1: LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a much-underutilised source of high-quality leads. Most of the reason for this is because people do not understand how to use the platform to generate leads that convert.
If you are an amateur on LinkedIn, you may send unsolicited links and get blocked from your contacts or even reported to LinkedIn for practices they do not condone. So, what? Is it worth learning LinkedIn?
Let’s see what these stats tell us:
Obviously, this is a place you want to be generating leads, and it is worth learning how to do so or have an agency that will help you do the work.
With over 450 million members, Linkedin holds some true power. This means that as far as your lead generation goes, there could be a near-endless source to prospects to reach out to. Linkedin has become so much more than a place for new graduates to network and try to find some meaningful employment.
Linkedin does have some great protective measures in place for its users as well, so that means while doing outreach, there are some factors to consider to avoid being spammy.
A few crucial points include:
- Make purposeful connections, don’t just connect with everyone and anyone
- Be careful about how many people you add a day-adding too many can get you flagged
- Stagger and plan out how many people you will message each day-again, too many messages is spammy
- Personalise your messages and don’t just send links to your business and product
On top of all of these points, your Linkedin lead generation is only as effective as your own profile is. This means that your own profile needs to be fully optimised. This optimization helps establish yourself as an expert in your field and tie a face to the name that is sending messages. For your profile a few things to include…but are not limited to…are:
- Have an attractive cover photo
- Have a centred profile picture with a smile
- Include emojis through descriptions
- Fill out your “about me” section with as much detail as you can and include contact info or notable links
- Be sure to add your work history with descriptions
- Add your education, certifications, etc.
- Get recommendations from those in your network that know you
Between having a bespoke profile and having an outreach plan, you will be able to take hold of the power that Linkedin has for lead generation.
If you are looking for further tips on improving your Linkedin profile to get better leads, check out this great how-to video on how to make your Linkedin profile the best possible by our founder Deepak.
2: Lead Capture Pages
Lead capture pages allow you to catch your potential customer in your web of marketing.
What are lead capture pages?
Lead capture pages are a one-page website with minimal information – this is to avoid distracting the potential customer viewing. It is designed to push people towards fulfilling the desired CTA, such as putting their email address into the opt-in form.
Lead capture page success varies a great deal. This is factored by the design and functionality of the landing page, industry niche, and other marketing and lead generation efforts. Some niches have found that by having an attractive landing page, their overall conversion rate has increased by about 35%.
This means you will now have them on a list where you can go on to use the next tool I am going to recommend.
LeadPages is a company that specializes in lead capture pages; it is beginner-friendly and has pre-designed templates that can be customised to your business needs.
LeadPages is Pearl Lemon’s preferred platform to use to build landing pages to help increase overall conversions.
The easy user interface allows our team members to make highly effective lead capture pages without any coding knowledge. This platform allows you to customise buttons, embed videos or other media, and stick to brand colors and images.
Successful landing pages and lead capture pages are moving away from being an optional component to your digital marketing scheme and are now much more of a requirement to keep in a constant flow of leads and in turn sales and conversions.
3: Email Marketing
Once you’ve captured people into your web, you can use a service such as GetResponse or Aweber to market to them over and over again.
Even in 2020, email marketing is STILL one of the most effective marketing and outreach techniques to bring in leads.
Make sure you understand how to do email marketing really well; otherwise, you could suffer from low open rates and high unsubscribe rates. If this happens, your efforts will not yield the results that you are looking for.
Your email outreach must be beyond bespoke. In fact, 78% of email users will unsubscribe to email newsletters do to spammy behavior or mass influxes of messages. With this staggering statistic, it means you must know what you are doing and have the experience to make the proper executions.
A few of these points may include but are far from limited to:
- Create short and snappy subject lines.
- Personalize your emails.
- Make use of images, gifs, and other fun components to break up the text.
- Don’t send massive paragraphs, make digestible content in shorter bursts.
- Use statistics and emotion when able.
- Identify the problem and solution for the recipient.
4: Live Chats
There are plenty of live chat tools out there. They are, for the most part, easy to set up and install on your site and maintain. In fact, close to 80% of businesses employ the use of chatbots on their sites.
Live chats allow visitors to engage with the site and get through standard questions while direct on-page without navigating through the site further for questions. Chatbots can also be set up to conduct surveys and collect various information while engaging with other visitors.
Live chats, like Drift, also allow for emails and other contact information to be captured. Before a chat is started, a prompt is pushed for the name, email, and business, so if a retargeting campaign is needed, there is a contact list to reach out to.
5: Power to the Popups
Popups can be a HIGHLY effective tool for your lead generation efforts.
Popups, like chatbots, can be easily set up and embedded on your website. Popups can be set to capture most sets of information for your leads. This means you can get their name, email, company, and phone number if needed that will be saved into one large lead list to retarget.
The big benefit here is that popups can also allow for a chance to give a free or added bonus to the site visitor. The trade-off is a free download or access to some documents in exchange for providing their contact information.
There is no standard success rate for popups. This varies by niche and design of your popup. Some top-performing popups can get click-through rates of around 10%. Although this is not huge, that is a 10% click-through rate you weren’t getting before.
So there we are folks, those are just a few of my favourite tools for lead generation – I hope my insight into this handful of tools were useful to you and your business.
All in all, there is no single way to best generate leads for your business. There are countless tools and tips out there that aim at allowing you to keep your company afloat. At the end of the day, find what works best for you and your business and run with that. If you are still unsure of the best route, an option is to reach out to an expert agency, like Pearl Lemon, that specialises in lead generation and what your company needs.
My London based digital marketing agency, Pearl Lemon is made up of a team of SEO and lead generation experts who strive to help businesses to achieve their digital growth goals.
We make sure email deliverability, copy, targeting, and LinkedIn approaches are spot on, and we adjust as we learn, which is all critical to the success of lead generation.
If your business is in need of more leads – let us build your pipeline for you!
Check out our page on lead generation.
Then let’s have a chat!
Also, be sure to follow us on Quora – there we regularly post tips and tricks on how you can digitally grow your business!