Modern marketers and busy business owners are under a lot of pressure to come up with the goods, but they’re not always given the time and the resources that they need to get the job done. Generating enough leads to fill your quota can be difficult at best, and if you’re not careful then it can be a major cause of stress for both employees and senior management.
On top of that, the marketplace is more competitive than ever, which means it can be difficult to make your company stand out with content marketing campaigns and the other tools of the trade that people are using to attract new leads and customers.
Sometimes you have to think outside the box, and this blog is designed to help you to do just that. Here are just a few of our top suggestions.
Finding More Offline Leads
The first thing to do is to dig up all of those business cards you’ve been hoarding from conferences and networking events. The chances are that you haven’t spoken to most of these people since you met them, so take the time to send out personalised emails to each of them reminding them of how you met and asking what’s new. If you strike up a conversation, ask if they’d be interested in a quick call to see if your companies are compatible.
While you’re at it, see if you can more closely align your offline marketing efforts with your online marketing automation tools. Come up with a clever way of using direct mail to capture email addresses such as by running a raffle where people need to enter a code from the mail along with their email address into a microsite.
Finally, rethink your calls-to-action on your offline material and think of new places to include them. Put a reminder to sign up for updates on business cards, letterheads, packaging, promotional material and anything else you can think of. Once you get something into your marketing automation system, you can start to nurture them as a lead and guide them along the pipeline.
Finding More Online Leads
Finding more leads online is both difficult and hard, depending upon how optimised your digital presence already is. One of the simplest ways to get more leads out of your existing activity is to run A/B tests on your data capture forms to boost their conversion rates. Even just a 0.01% increase in the average conversion rate will start to pay dividends over time.
There are two main ways to get more leads from your online lead generation campaigns. The first is to refine your calls-to-action, your internal signposting and your data capture pages so that you’re converting more leads from your existing traffic. The second is to accept your existing conversion rate and to focus instead on driving more traffic to the site.
To do this well, you need to change the focus of your online marketing campaigns. Instead of building links to boost search engine rankings, build links that will drive traffic and conversions. Speaking of rankings, focus on bringing in more traffic overall through long tail searches than on ranking high for a particular keyword.
Finding new leads requires thinking outside of the box. Hopefully these tips have helped to spark your imagination and encouraged you to rethink your approach to lead generation. If not, why not give Bant.io a try? We look forward to working with you.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.