More than 60% of B2B marketers send random leads to their sales team out of which only 27% turn out to be qualified for sales. Thus, it’s a no-brainer that your sales will improve by a huge margin if you generate qualified leads.
A business heavily depends on its sales team to generate revenue and the sales team, in turn, depends on the marketing team for qualified sales leads. A qualified lead (be it sales or marketing) is a prospect who is ready for a product pitch in order to get closed as a sale.
If you are a new business or your niche is too unexploited, you’ll first have to generate demand for your product(s) or service(s). Once you generate the demand, the lead generation process becomes comparatively easy.
A brief overview for generate qualified sales leads and converting them would be:
- Attracting relevant traffic to your website
- Engaging web visitors with your content
- Get lead magnets in place to collect lead information like name, email ids, phone numbers, etc.
- And lastly, convert these leads and generate revenue.
- Engaging surveys which you can create via survey maker tool
If you want to amp up your inbound lead generation game, then have a look at these 10 proven techniques for getting qualified leads:
1. Get your Content Strategy right
Having a good content strategy in place is the first stepping stone to your entire inbound strategy. In order to attract highly relevant traffic to your website, you will have to create rich content related to your niche. But, creating random in-depth content won’t take you anywhere unless you get the context right. Remember, if the content is king then context is queen.
Ideally, your content strategy should have 2 major points addressed:
- The ideation and editorial part
- The channels via which you will distribute the content.
Start out by creating buyer personas and map them to the buying funnel. By forming buyer personas, half of your “ideation” part of the first step will be taken care of. Especially, if you are in a very narrow niche – creating buyer personas will make it easier for you to decide what kind of content to generate.
Your plan should address questions like “Who are your customers?” and “What are their pain points?” Better yet, map your buyer personas to the simple buying funnel to create different content silos.
The buying funnel will typically be of 3 simple stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
The different stages of the buyer funnel will not only guide you into creating different forms of content but also will help you in adjusting the “sales pitch” tone. For example, you can publish e-books or “How-To” articles targeting the awareness stage of the funnel. For the consideration stage, you can publish in-depth case studies.
To nail the content marketing strategy for generating qualified leads, you will have to ensure that your content is top-notch. When a web visitor lands on your site and browses through your content, it should not only keep them engaged but also move the visitor down the funnel.
The end goal is to establish yourself as an authoritarian site in your niche and convince the visitor to submit his details in the lead form. Thus, ensure a good content plan to generate qualified sales leads.
2. Optimize your website for Search
Now that you have a good content strategy in place, make sure you get your website properly optimized for search. Your primary focus should be to get ranking for search queries relevant to your business and niche – thus attracting relevant visitors to your site. Engage these visitors and convert them to sales leads with content they are looking for.
As far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is concerned, well it has evolved a lot over the years. So much so that, now it is often interchanged with UXO or User Experience Optimization. You would want to make sure that your website is fast, snappy, secure with HTTPS, has a good mobile UX, etc.
With SEO, you would be primarily looking to rank high up in the search engine’s results page. Thus when a user is searching for anything related to your niche, your website should pop up at the top and attract the user to your site. Don’t indulge in shady practices like duping a web visitor by serving some different content than what he was expecting to see. Follow a neat and clean SEO strategy and you will be good to go.
Also do keep in mind that even with SEO, your end goal is to get web visitors to convert into qualified leads. To achieve that, not only will you have to serve top-notch engaging content but also implement proper CTAs (Call To Actions) in your pages. Amp up your SEO game with these simple tips and get qualified leads in no time.
3. Use Proper Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are any form of incentive that you can offer your website visitors in exchange for their email ids or other contact information. Lead magnets are a boon in capturing qualified sales leads. Typically, a lead magnet can be any of the following:
- Fun quizzes which you can create by using online quiz makers
- Informational PDFs
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- Case Studies
- Videos
Now, how do you place these lead magnets in front of your website visitors?
There are 2-3 ways which you can implement:
- Insert relevant lead magnets like e-books or PDFs inside your articles.
- Use desktop notifications to drive users to the lead magnet pages.
- Strategically place these lead magnets throughout your site for grabbing the attention of the web surfers.
While creating lead magnets, ensure that the information you are providing is unique and is of great value. You can easily create e-books and PDFs by tying together 2-3 similar articles or by repurposing old content. Once you have your lead magnets in place, you’d see a huge increase in the number of lead information submissions on your site.
4. Ease the Lead Submission Process
A user dropping off in between a lead form submission is the worst thing that can happen to your lead generation efforts. It is imperative to have a smooth lead submission process. For starters, collect only basic information like name and email id. However, if your business requires several other information like contact number, job title, etc. – break down the info submission process into multiple steps.
For example: first, ask for the name and email id. Right after they hit enter, another field pops up asking for the contact number, so and so forth. This approach towards qualified lead generation will grow your contact information collection by manifolds.
5. Get leads through referrals
To get qualified leads from referrals, there are several strategies that you can implement. One of the simplest ways is to ask for referrals from existing and past customers.
You can also routinely ask their customers for referrals.
Providing excellent customer service and going above and beyond for customers can also increase the likelihood of receiving referrals.
Implementing a referral program and offering incentives can also be effective.
Additionally, businesses can publish their website to online directories and get published on review websites to increase referral traffic.
Being active on industry forums can also help you generate more referral traffic.
Social media advertising can also be used for lead generation. Businesses can track the effectiveness of their ad campaigns by making a social media analytics report and analyzing various metrics, including click-through rates and conversions.
6. Personalize your message
Converting marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads becomes easy when your audience engages with your content. And for that you have to personalize your content.
As per MiKinsey’s report, 76% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that personalize. And 78% of people like to refer that brand to others and would like to become repeat buyers of the brand personalized.
When you personalize your content, it makes your readers resonate with your content and build trust with you. Personalization makes your readers feel that you know them well, and can easily help them to achieve what they want to achieve. And when there is trust, conversion happens easily.
7. A/B test your CTA
CTA stands for Call To Action. It is CTA that motivates your readers to take action. And that’s why it has to be written in such a way that it compels your reader to take action. For that, you must follow certain tips like
- CTA should be concise and clear
- It should create a sense of urgency
- It should highlight the benefit of taking action
These are some of the tips that help you create an effective CTA. To create the best CTA and get maximum output, you should experiment with several CTA. For that, you should run an A/B test.
A/B test will help you to experiment with two or three variations of the same type of CTA and you can access the outcome of it.
8. Incorporate user-generated content
User-generated content is marketing gold. Example of user-generated content includes
- Product reviews
- Videos
- Image/graphics
- Article/posts
User-generated content (UGC) can be a powerful tool for guest posts, blogs, and podcasts. By using UGC, you can increase brand awareness, credibility, trust, and social proof UGC can also help you to create content that speaks directly to your target audience’s pain points and positions your brand as a solution.
Additionally, UGC can increase customer engagement and trust, which can lead to more qualified leads.
To use UGC effectively, you should identify their goals and audience, collect and use UGC that aligns with those goals and audience and measure and optimize the performance of their UGC campaigns and strategies.
9. Host training webinars
Hosting training webinars can help in generating qualified leads through several strategies. First, by defining webinar lead generation goals and selecting topics based on business problems, you can attract an audience interested in your solutions
Second, by keeping the audience engaged during the event and ending with a clear call-to-action, you can guide potential leads through the sales funnel.
Third, by providing freebies at the end of the webinar, such as ebooks, discounts, or private sessions, you can generate leads and move them towards a purchasing decision
Finally, by understanding the target audience and using data collection and analysis to qualify leads, businesses can ensure that the webinars attract the right prospects and lead to sales.
10. Distribute your content via different channels
Generating content is of no use if you don’t know how to amplify it. Content amplification is basically how you distribute a piece of content via various channels to amplify its potential. Two major channels that you can exploit for amplifying your content are Social Media and E-mail.
Social Media platforms can be extensively used for generating well qualified leads. From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to LinkedIn, the majority of your audience will be on these platforms. By using social media analytics tools, you can track performance and repurpose your existing content in a way that is suitable for posting on each of these platforms.
Another way to generate traffic, thus leads, from your content is via distribution on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a website that lets you discover and share new products – from utility apps to templates to tech products.
We, at Ampliz, have used Product Hunt quite a lot of times to gain a considerable amount of leads. To have a successful launch on PH (Product Hunt launch checklist), all you need to do is create a free valuable resource and drive traffic to a landing page. We have a checklist on how to launch on product hunt, do check it out for an in-depth guide.
You can also make use of paid lead generation campaigns on Facebook & LinkedIn for accelerating the process. If optimized properly, lead generation campaigns can provide a great ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) for your business. Typically, these Ads open up a lead form, which is pre-filled with basic information, when clicked – this ensures a seamless lead generation process from a user’s perspective.
Emails are a great way to generate quality sales leads if you do it right. A good lead generation email should have a nice & clear email subject and an attractive email body. Again, even with emails – the idea is to provide enough value to the end-user so that it convinces them enough to submit their personal details.
Again, even with emails – the idea is to provide enough value to the end-user so that it convinces them enough to submit their personal details.
When it comes to email, you must have accurate and compliant email addresses of your target audience. Email marketing is one of the most effective lead generation techniques, provided you have the high-quality email address of your target audience.
Finding them manually is a cumbersome process, and there is no surety of the accuracy of email addresses.
That’s why Ampliz has come up with a database of your target audience that includes the email address and phone number of your target audience.
You just need to tell the attributes of your ideal customers, and within seconds Ampliz will provide an email database at your fingertips and it is the right place buy qualified leads.
How Do You Increase Qualified Leads?
To grow your business, you need conversions and to get conversions, you need good qualified leads. To accelerate your lead generation process, you can follow the simple steps discussed above. You may also consider talking to a marketing advisor to help you out with generating high-quality leads.
So, the 5 key takeaways are:
- Get your content strategy right
- Optimize your website for search
- Use proper lead magnets
- Ease the lead submission process
- Distribute your content via different channels
If you successfully implement these 10 simple techniques, you would definitely see a considerable amount of growth in your qualified sales leads.
Conclusion
To grow your business, you need conversions and to get conversions, you need good qualified leads. To accelerate your lead generation process, you can follow the simple steps discussed above. You may also consider talking to a marketing advisor to help you out with generating high-quality leads.
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