Whatever your industry sector, having a steady flow of leads is critical to your success. They’re your life blood.
You may have a dedicated sales team or, if you’re a smaller company or sole trader, you might handle the sales for your business yourself. Either way, you’ll need to make sure you have a steady supply of opportunities if you want to grow your business and keep your cash flow healthy.
But how do you do it, especially when you have a business to run?
When you consider the number of online channels available now, it can feel overwhelming. And each of those channels might be screaming at you to give their platform a try, snatching for a piece of your marketing budget. When I owned a wedding business fifteen years ago, I was bombarded with advertising and sponsorship opportunities, each claiming to be the best at providing new customers. And that was before social media advertising and pay-per-click really took off!
And now I receive endless pitches in my LinkedIn inbox, some well targeted and relevant, others completely left field or just not relevant to me or my clients.
Filtering through the noise can feel like a chore, but I think there are a few prime places to start:
Depending on who’s shouting the loudest, you may have heard that email is dead. It’s ‘old school’. No one reads emails anymore. Everything goes to junk.
Well, if that’s the case, it’s nothing to do with the death of email and more to do with the execution of it.
Your existing clients and warm prospects should always be your first port of call when you’re looking to drum up business. It’s much easier to get repeat business from a satisfied client who knows and trusts you than it is to attract, nurture and convert a cold prospect.
Sometimes though, it’s easy to forget about working on an existing relationship first, rather than looking for a new one.
Segment your list and understand the customer journey for each of those segments. Send different types of messages to people in different stages of your sales funnel. You probably wouldn’t ask someone out the first time you meet them, but you might after you’ve met a few times and you know them better. Asking for the sale too early is a turn off!
Create a lead magnet to capture email addresses from users on your site. I’ll cover this in a separate post, but a lead magnet is something you give away to gather data and build your email list. The best ones offer something of value to your target audience – a download, video or a free trial for example. Once your user has opted in (and you follow GDPR guidelines), you then have the opportunity to nurture the relationship.
Whether someone will open and read your email is in part dependent on what type of email you’re sending. So, a transactional email after a purchase is highly likely to be opened – people want to read these messages because they’ve already taken action. This is an opportunity to cross sell. What other products or services do you have which may be of interest to them?
Behavioural emails target a prospect based on their actions. Depending on whether you have a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management), you should look at what they’re doing and how you can maximise the opportunity. Have they been to a product page but not purchased, or did they abandon their cart? Have they opened your email multiple times or clicked on a link within it? These signals of interest give you an opportunity to convert a prospect who is almost ready to buy.
Email your existing customers regularly, and not just with sales or offers. How frequently you should email will depend on the length of your sales cycle, but weekly and at least monthly should keep you front of mind.
Nurture the people who have already bought into what you do. Try sending tips on how to use your products or get more value from your services. Offer some insight on industry trends, ask for feedback or send a newsletter and give them a glimpse of life inside your company.
Be clear on your goals. Are you pushing a promotion and looking for some last-minute sales, or are you aiming to create some engagement? Whatever the goal of your message or campaign is, always be clear on what you want the recipient to do – and tell them. A clear call to action is a must.
Email marketing is a huge subject, but even the simplest tweaks to what you do can have an effect. If the content is relevant, email is still a great source for lead generation. Email isn’t dead, irrelevant spam is!
If you run a B2B business you should be on LinkedIn, no matter how much you don’t like social media. It’s free (unless you upgrade to a pro package), your competitors will be on there, and people are on there to do business and network.
Before someone does business with you, they’re highly likely to check you out. They’ll definitely look at your website, maybe even Companies House, and on social media. Having a presence on social media helps to establish trust, providing another layer of reassurance.
But LinkedIn can also be a great source of leads.
Beefing up your profile with articles and posts relevant to you audience has a multiple effect. Firstly, it helps in the research stage mentioned above, but also it increases your searchability on the platform. Like all socials, LinkedIn wants to keep users on its platform, so it rewards regular users who offer value to other members.
You may not be aware, but LinkedIn scores its users on its Social Selling Index, and the higher your score, the more likely your profile will show in search results. If you want to use LinkedIn for lead generation, check out your score and see in which areas you can improve your searchability. It looks at how you engage on the platform – how social you are, in other words – and at your personal branding. Get your SSI here https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi
Make sure your profile is 100% complete before beginning any lead generation or social selling activity.
Some LinkedIn marketers recommend connecting with people you don’t know to open doors. Rather than going for the ‘I’m looking to extend my network’ type connection requests (which can come across as spammy) I recommend a more subtle approach, with the emphasis on building a relationship rather than going straight in for the kill. A good way to start approaching cold prospects is to join the same groups. Where do they hang out, what are their interests? Is there a trade body or organisation, or do they follow particular brands?
Once you’re in the groups, comment on people’s posts or on other comments and offer some meaningful insights or feedback. Again, don’t go straight in with a pitch or you’ll end up being blocked. Some people might click on your comment and take a look at your profile, others may scroll by. But, little by little, awareness of who you are and what you do, will begin to build.
The aim of this is to attract attention and establish a more natural connection with someone you’ve engaged with. From there, you’ll be more front of mind when your new connection is in a position to buy.
Many posts get few or no comments, so you’ll stand out immediately, and once you’re in a conversation with someone and you connect, you also then have a link to their connections too.
This approach takes effort, but it costs nothing, and it doesn’t take too long to begin establishing yourself as an authority in your field.
Another beast of a topic, but Google, Pay Per Click (PPC) ads and search in general, must be part of your marketing strategy. Who doesn’t Google? Googling has even become a verb!
It’s a weighty and complex subject to go into in full here, but there are a few basics which will help you to generate more traffic from search.
Firstly, make sure you have a ‘Google My Business’ page set up. It’s free to create and acts almost as a mini website for you on the Google platform. You can add posts, photos, links and offers on there and it’s still a relatively underused tool, so you may gain a competitive edge. It makes your number or website easily clickable for potential customers, and grabs attention when people are searching for what you do. Photograph your building, your shop or offices, your team. It all helps to bring your business to life.
‘Get to page 1 one Google’ has become the universal goal for anyone with a website and a shocking 75% of users only look at the first page of results. There’s no quick fix when it comes to search engine optimisation. It takes time and testing to finely tune your website to satisfy the algorithm.
Google wants to keep its users happy, so it will serve up search results that it knows will offer the best experience for users. All these elements can affect your search rankings:
- Security. Having a safe site is a ‘lightweight’ search factor but it makes sense to ensure your site is secure. Check that your site has https rather than http.
- Site speed. Huge photographs look amazing, but they slow down your site loading speed. Any longer than 5 seconds or so and people will click ‘back’ and try something else. If users are bouncing off your site, it will reduce your search appeal. If you created your own site, check your images sizes, and use a free online tool like Canva to reduce their file size.
- Engagement. The longer you keep people on your site, the better it will rate in search engines. Good quality content is critical to your success.
- Relevance. Make sure your site content is relevant to the keywords, titles and header tags you use and aligns with what your potential customers may search for.
- Links. If other sites link to yours in suggests that it’s link worthy and rich in content.
- Mobile experience. Check that your site works as well on mobile as it does on a desktop – or preferably even better! It depends on your industry, but the chances are most of your site visitors are on mobile. A poor mobile site will increase your bounce rate.
Set up Google analytics on your website so you can monitor site speed and bounce rates. You’ll also be able to see where your site traffic is coming from, which pages they visit and how long they spend on your site. It’s a free and incredibly rich resource.
There’s more on ‘tough loving’ your website in another post here.
This is a rapid round up of just some of the ways small businesses can generate leads without needing a sizeable marketing budget. Like many elements of marketing, the key is to test a variety of tactics and track the results to see what works for you.
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If you’d like some help with your lead generation please get in touch.
Retro River 