In Digital Marketing, lead generation is the process of initiating a qualified buyer’s interest or inquiry into your product or service to convert them into a customer. It often involves collecting their information through forms on your website to follow up with them after leaving your site. This article presents the 14 most unique ways to increase sales through lead generation.
Generating leads across all your sales funnel stages is highly recommended, ensuring you don’t overemphasize lead generation at one particular stage. You should target customers across the awareness, evaluation, and conversion stages for maximum benefits.
If you focus extensively on building brand awareness, you won’t have as many prospects as possible to convert to customers. Similarly, if you focus on conversion strategies but ignore the evaluation and awareness, you won’t have any leads to convert at all. Learn to balance!
How do you increase sales through strategic lead generation? It’s about time we find out.
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Creative Ways to Generate Sales Leads
1. Simplify your Landing Pages
The most basic yet effective way to generate sales department leads is to simplify your landing pages or lead-generation websites as simplified as possible. Make your website user-friendly by understanding where to put the right information and call to action at the right time.
A survey by Hubspot revealed that 76% of consumers prefer websites that are easy to navigate. And since over 50% of the world’s population browses the internet using mobile devices, you should ensure your site is responsive on mobile and tablet devices to generate more sales leads.
2. Offer Free Samples
Prospects (qualified buyers) want more than word of mouth to establish your suitability to meet their needs. One way you can do so is by offering samples to help them make informed decisions. You can also publish case studies and testimonials to build interest in your prospects.
The goal is to demonstrate your expertise and make the prospect confident in your product or service. But in the entire sales process, make the conversation about them and the problems they’re facing. You can also show live demos to show customers how your tools work.
3. Offer a Gift With a Purchase
A simple gift to your prospects, like an e-book sent through email, can help you create a personal connection with them. It shows that you value their time and encourage them to make a purchase, even if not instantly. Gifts can help you open doors and boost conversions.
So, think of items you can offer to your prospects that they need. For instance, you can offer a free SEO checklist, audit report, or e-Book through email if you have an SEO audit website. And, you know what, collect their contact information to follow up with them regularly.
4. Provide Great Customer Service
Your customer service should be outstanding to avoid turning away prospects. Avoid asking clients about their budget or explaining to them how they’re in the right place at the early stages of the conversation. Let that come later when you already know what solutions they need.
You should answer your customer’s questions on the type of products or services most suitable for them or whether some services are available. Integrating a live chat on your website can be very helpful. That’s why I highly recommend you use free online chat software like Tawk (my personal favorite) or HubSpot’s Free Live Chat to give timely responses to prospects.
5. Monitor your Competitors
Competitive analysis can help you understand what you’re doing right or wrong and how to improve your sales lead generation process. Continuously monitor your competitors to find out what they are doing that you’re not, then adopt ideas that add value to your business.
And you don’t have to be unethical and engage in insider trading to study your competitors. A simple look at their landing pages, sales lead generation website, pricing, or sales funnel automation can give you ideas to take your sales revenue to the next level.
6. Introduce Loyalty Programs
Working with existing customers is much more profitable because you’d incur fewer overhead costs than when dealing with new customers. For this reason, firms introduce loyalty programs to drive customer retention, increase referrals and achieve overall growth. In fact, over 90% of businesses use some sort of loyalty program to attract and retain customers.
Derived from the ward ‘brand (or customer) loyalty,’ the loyalty program offers rewards, discounts, and other incentives to entice and retain customers. This is one approach you should consider to help you encourage repeat business as you target new customers to increase sales.
7. Use Sales Automation Tools
Artificial intelligence and relevant automation tools help you display the right information to your prospects at the right time and boost conversions. The tools can do repetitive tasks like emailing and scheduling, giving your sales team time to deal with tasks that need human trust.
The tools also help your sales team with the selling process, making it more effective and less time-consuming. Their ultimate goal is to help you sell as many products and services as possible. And their benefits go beyond automating repetitive tasks, saving time and energy.
8. Capitalise on Retargeting Marketing
Retargeting your lead generation campaigns, especially using PPC marketing on search engines and social media ads, can help you deliver the right leads to your sales department. This digital marketing approach involves serving relevant ads to your previously engaged users.
You can post content on social media platforms like Facebook and monitor social reach and engagement. Then create a special ad targeting all those who engaged with your earlier posts. You’ll serve ads to an interested audience, increasing their conversion probability.
9. Request Client Testimonials
Testimonials, especially video ones, can influence your prospects purchasing decisions. One reason they are super effective in driving sales is that they offer your audience an opportunity to discover that (or how) your products or services can do what you claim.
So, I want to encourage your existing customers to give testimonials about their experience using your product or service. Then you can use the negative feedback, if any, to improve them. And use positive feedback to prove to your audience your reliability in solving their problems.
You’ll manage to attract prospects that your sales team can easily convert into customers.
10. Utilize Sales Intelligence
Sales intelligence uses data and sophisticated software and tools to collect, track and analyze data relevant to your lead generation campaign. For instance, it helps you learn more about your prospects, including the platforms they often use and the type of problems they face.
Therefore, intelligence helps your sales team make data-based decisions regarding when, how, and where to target customers. It also provides data insights into customer prospects and leads.
11. Redesign your Sales Funnel
You should optimize your sales or purchase funnel, which refers to the visual representation of the customer’s journey, ranging from awareness to action. Use PPC marketing to drive leads to your website, and convert them to prospects by collecting emails through lead magnets.
You can refine your sales funnel by determining your target audience and identifying their problems, creating content that solves them, and optimizing your landing pages to place the right information at the right time. Then capture leads by offering lead magnets like eBooks and email marketing to nurture leads and incorporate social proof and trust signals.
12. Use Free and Paid Marketing
It would be best if you combined free sales lead generation, like social media ads, with organic ones, like SEO. Make sure to branch out to other advertising platforms, as you can’t rely exclusively on a specific one. Using more platforms strategically helps you attract better leads.
One advantage of digital marketing is that you can tell which strategy works best for you. Or even better, encourage your customers to tell you which platform drove them to your site. With such data, you can maximize what’s working for you while correcting what’s not working.
13. Host a Contest or Giveaway
Another way you can increase conversions and sales is by hosting giveaways and contests. People love gifts; some can spend more money to get something free. Others love winning and would be willing to spend to enter contests to increase their chances of winning. Your goal is to collect information about your prospects using free things and follow up with them regularly.
Find a way to include gifts in your lead generation campaign, and collect emails and other relevant information. If your audience is well-targeted, you’ll end up with prospects.
14. Leverage Video Marketing
There’re a couple of reasons why you should incorporate video marketing in your sales lead generation campaigns. Video-sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok have become search engines where buyers actively look for information and solutions to their problems.
With YouTube getting 122 million active users daily, it’s evident that the future is videos as people continuously prefer tutorials of people using products and services to reading manuals and product presentations. As a result, video marketing is a practical strategy to drive leads to your products and services. Not forgetting you can optimize your videos to rank on Google.
FAQs on Sales Lead Generation
Sales lead generation is a process through which businesses attract prospects (qualified buyers) and convert them into someone interested in their products and services.
Lead generation is very important in your business as it helps build trust, visibility, and credibility among the people who may be interested in your products and services. Driving high-quality prospects to the sales team increases sales, facilitating your business growth.
You can improve your lead generation effectiveness by simplifying your lead generation website and landing pages. Or even offer free samples and gifts, introduce loyalty programs to attract and retain customers and use sales automation tools and retargeting marketing.
Lead magnets help you build instant contact, maintain continuous and effective communication with prospects, and make lead information easily accessible. They also help you capture, track, distribute, qualify and nurture leads for your products and services.
Lead generation is important for B2B and B2C businesses, as it helps them create a sales pipeline by capturing and stimulating buyers’ interest in a certain product or service.
Some popular and effective lead magnets include whitepaper, mini-guides or e-books, templates, product samples or trials, training videos, or automated evaluation.
The simple answer is YES. Video marketing is one of the best ways to generate sales leads, especially when you publish tutorials about your products and services on video marketing platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Then optimize the videos to rank on Google.
Conclusion
Sales lead generation is the process of initiating a qualified buyer’s interest or inquiry into your product or service to convert them into a customer. It helps you drive quality leads to your sales department, which can easily turn into prospects (qualified buyers) and active customers.
You can increase sales leads for your business by adopting the following 14 strategies. But I recommend selecting at least three that you’ll start with or remix them for maximum benefit.
- Simplify your Landing Pages
- Offer Free Samples
- Offer a Gift With a Purchase
- Provide Great Customer Service
- Monitor your Competitors
- Introduce Loyalty Programs
- Use Sales Automation Tools
- Capitalize on Retargeting Marketing
- Request Client Testimonials
- Utilize Sales Intelligence
- Redesign your Sales Funnel
- Use Free and Paid Marketing
- Host a Contest or Giveaway
- Leverage Video Marketing
Let me know which strategies you’d be using to generate leads for your products and services. And if you have used any of them, what results did you get? Feel free to share or contact me.
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