Lead Generation – List Building Profit or Loss?

4 Easy Steps To Boost Your Lead Generation for Profitable Sales

Lead generation often strikes fear into the hearts of most business people. It’s that fine balancing act of attracting people to your products or services or repelling them through sales tactics that are deemed sleazy.

Your business needs sales! You’ve got to have money coming in to keep going and the only way you’re going to do that is if you find customers.

However, sales don’t come out of thin air, and they all start somewhere – a lead. If you’re creating thousands of leads, then even if your conversion rate isn’t great, you’re still going to make a reasonable number of sales. 

As many businesses find though, generating quality leads isn’t as easy as you might think. You’ve got to be really active about going out and getting leads, and if you’re going to do it well, then there are a number of steps you should be considering. 

Reach Your Target Audience 

In order to generate leads, you’ve first got to get your brand in front of people. However, you don’t just want to be getting your content in front of any old people, you want to get it in front of the people who are most likely to become your leads. 

To do this, you’ve got to understand your audience inside out. 

Find out what kind of information they are looking for, what problems they need solving, and how they go about finding answers to their questions. When you understand your target audience, that’s when you can gain their attention by crafting the content that helps solve their problems. 

Once you’ve got the quality content, then you can start “hanging out” in the spaces your key demographics like to hangout. This can be on your website, search engines, social media platforms, guest posts; wherever it is that your audience is going to discover content. 

Once you start consistently engaging with a targeted audience, then you can start to focus on the next steps in your efforts to generate more qualified leads. 

Make It Into a Quid Pro Quo 

Businesses often make the mistake of believing they simply put a contact form up there and people fill it in because they’re told to. It’s very rare in life that you get people to do what you want them to without giving something in return though. 

So, what can you give people in return for their contact information? 

For many businesses, the most valuable thing you can give people is your knowledge and expertise – that’s why they’re here in the first place, so how can you use this to get that all-important email address?

There are lots of different ways people exchange their knowledge for contact details, but some of the most effective are lead magnets, content upgrades, and quizzes. 

If you want people to give you their contact details though, you’ve actually got to offer value. If you’re going to give people an interactive quiz, then make sure the results are well-thought-out and of value to the person receiving them. 

You’re building a relationship here, so you don’t want it to start off from a point where you’re misleading people into giving you their contact details. 

Optimise Your Landing Pages with Lead Generation Quality

When someone clicks on your lead magnet “5 Ultra-Efficient Templates for Your Website,” then they’ve taken the hook, but you’ve still got to reel them in. At this point, your prospect is led to your landing page – and this is a really important point in the process.  Your lead generation tool must deliver quality information.

You’ve done a lot of the hard work, but you’ve still got to drive it home and turn that person into a lead. 

This is why the focus of your landing page should be very narrow. Everything on it is geared to achieving your goal of getting contact details and there shouldn’t be any distractions from this goal. 

You should be using strong calls to action that all lead towards converting on your goal, and there shouldn’t be nav bars or other links directing people away from that goal. 

There should be two options – fill in the form or leave the page altogether. 

Remember, the people who get this far have already been sold to a large extent on your lead magnet/ content upgrade/ quiz; it’s just about finishing off the quid pro quo. 

To give yourself the best chance of achieving this, you want to keep your forms as simple and easy to fill out as possible, only asking for the basics, and limiting the barriers to people filling out the form. 

Build As Many Touchpoints as Possible

Once you’ve got contact details, then you can use your email marketing to keep building your touchpoints with your leads, and guiding people through the funnel. 

Different people will progress at different speeds, so it’s important you’re using your high-quality content to keep potential customers engaged with your business, and gradually lead them to taking more concrete steps. 

It might start off with someone signing up for your lead magnet, but when you build the relationship, it might develop into a free consultation, and then a free demo, before finally, you’ve converted your lead into a customer. 

Make sure that you’re consistently matching your CTA’s and landing pages to where your lead is in the funnel, and keep segmenting your audience the more you find out about them. The more you can learn about the lead, the more power you have, so be really engaged with your customer’s journey, and guide them through it. 

Takeaways

Lead generation is a skill that can be mastered; getting qualified leads is a process that needs to be optimised and worked on. If you just put a contact form on your website and hope for the best, then you’re probably not going to see the results you want, so you’ve got to constantly find ways to tweak your process. 

One of the first things you can do to boost the number of leads you’re getting is to recognise that you don’t get something unless you offer something in return. In this case, if you want to get people’s contact details, then you should be offering something such as your knowledge and expertise in return. 

When you’ve got people hooked with your offer, then it’s important that you’re landing page is well optimised, and completely focused on getting people to submit contact forms. If you start distracting people with other messages that aren’t related to what you’re trying to do, then you’ll find people drop off without becoming a lead. 

And finally, when you’ve got someone’s contact details, that’s where the real hard work begins. You’ve still got to be offering value at every turn, and guiding people through the customer journey, but with your email marketing, you’ve got a great tool to do this. 

Why not grab our free ebook, 5 Best Content Creation Secrets, and discover for yourself how to create content that leads to list building gold!