Leads are the lifeblood of any business. When running an online business, you need a steady stream of leads.
You can always pay to get leads. But what if I told you that you can generate leads without spending a single penny?
Interested? Following are the top 3 ways by which you can generate leads for your site.
Generate Leads Through a Webinar
As with any form of content marketing, the first thing with webinars is to develop a clear understanding of the buyer persona who you’re targeting.
Know the audience you want to reach
A buyer persona can be useful and you can use the same persona to guide your webinar presentation.
Use surveys and carry out research online to understand your audience. Going through the list of attendees who registered for the webinar is often enough for you to understand how to best present the content to generate ideal results.
One of the best ways to understand the persona is through a registration form. This may reduce the number of attendees who sign up but will get you highly qualified leads. Don’t stop with names and email addresses. Have the form include spaces for specifying the job role, name of company, size and type of business.
This data will help you qualify leads.
Build a sales funnel for your webinar
On the back of a successful webinar is a well-oiled sales funnel that helps you get targeted leads.
To make this possible, start by building a thank-you page for customers who registered for the webinar. This thank-you page should have a clear CTA and should lead to a survey that helps you know the audience better.
Once they have signed up, don’t be idle. Send a series of relevant educational pieces around the webinar.
When you add reminders and replays of the webinar, you remain in touch with the leads and improve the odds of a sale.
Choose topics that connect with your audience
Marketers often create webinars on general topics that most people find useful. Remember this: a webinar is a form of interactive meeting. A few of these general topics I can think of are email marketing tips, SEO strategies, or hiring a virtual assistant among others. These topics won’t get people’s attention because there’s already too much content around these topics.
You need to think outside the box. People need experts on micro challenges. Micro challenges are something that affect a tiny subset of the population but they’re something that these people are willing to spend money on and learn more about. For instance someone interested in learning how to clean an email list.
If you’re an expert on that tiny niche, and can offer insights that no one else can, people will register to that webinar and listen to every word you’ve to say.
For instance:
Instead of a webinar on “SEO strategies,” talk about a specific strategy you had success as an SEO. Say, you targeted local businesses and created free logos for them in exchange for a link from their site. These topics attract, and challenge prospects and help them learn something new.
That’s why you need to choose a topic carefully.
Use Word-of-mouth Marketing to Generate Leads
We all know how powerful world-of-mouth marketing can be. Often great service and a great product is enough to get customers to tell about your brand to their friends.
But referrals or word-of-mouth can be simply more than hope. You can wrap that around a concrete strategy that brings you new leads day in and day out.
How? Simply ask for referrals.
Give voice to promoting your referral program on social media. You can use marketing memes that promote your referral program. Use an interactive website to promote your referral program.
Get on social media and ask customers to share their experience with friends after they bought and used your product. That’s called modern-day word-of-mouth.
Email is another way to generate these referrals. Referral marketing will only work for you if you’re referrable. People don’t tell about services and products to others that they themselves wouldn’t use.
So if someone’s saying that referral marketing isn’t working for them, that’s probably because they’re not doing a good job at being referrable.
Once the transaction is done, or the product has been shipped, offer customers a reward to refer a person they like to your business.
For other businesses, there’s always the possibility of asking customer service agents to call up customers and ask for referrals. Your agents know which customers are happy and will bring new business.
People always refer your business to family and others even without you giving them anything in return. Just that the referrals will happen more often if you give away some form of reward.
If you want them to take action, as in referring others to give them a reward, use referral marketing software to automate this. This is called an incentive and that’s what you give to people for mentioning you.
You can give away discount coupons, gift cards, money and more.
The reward program you choose should provide value to the client. After all, there’s very little incentive to give an elderly person a coupon for skateboards. They’re highly unlikely to use that.
Look at the purchase behavior. Look at your popular products and then form your referral reward strategy based on that.
Invest in Content Marketing
A company called Cliently recently shared its content marketing success on Facebook. They had started a blog for their SaaS business.
If you and I start a blog we may contribute around 100 to 200 articles at most in a year. Some people write even fewer posts.
But they decided to go all guns blazing. They started contributing to the blog six short months ago and have over 2000 plus posts on the site.
The results speak for themselves. You can see an uptick in traffic from November 2021, the month they started blogging. Fast forward to April 2022 which is six months later, they’re averaging 12,000 visitors a month with 80 to 100 trial signups. This is adding a neat little revenue stream on the side.
Plus, the blog is on track to generate 50,000 visitors a month thanks to the focus on pushing out new content every few days.
It need not always be a blog. It can be a link magnet like a free tool. This online logo creator tool from Designhill is the perfect example, getting millions of visitors and thousands of backlinks.
I am not here to say that all of this was a smooth ride. They had their share of hiccups. They started without any keyword research. They didn’t have a content calendar. They had no outlines to give to writers. At the beginning, writers wrote whatever they wanted. That changed with the firm hiring two analysts whose only job was to check for content quality.
This allowed only good quality content to pass through the strict filters and notably traffic and rankings improved. Yes, all of this sounds like a lot of work but thankfully you can automate most of this through a virtual assistant.
The trial signups are leads who readily convert into customers after the trial period is over.
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