Did you know that lead generation is the number one challenge for 61% of marketers?

Lead generation is the lifeline of any business. As a service business, you’ll need a healthy flow of clients coming in the door to ensure your profitability.
You always need to begin with a plan. Once you have a solid strategy in place, you can begin your marketing outreach. Basics and essentials first. Keep reading to learn all about lead generation strategies for your service business.

Capitalize on Social Media Networks
One great way to generate leads for your business is to capitalize on social media networks. Post on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms that are relevant to your business. Leverage keywords and hashtags to ensure that your posts are discoverable.

Incorporate stories and visuals to increase engagement and create interest. Take the opportunity to connect with potential leads through direct messaging and comments. With this strategy, you can give your service business the visibility and reach it needs to grow.

Leverage Email Marketing to Reach Prospects
You can reach prospects, build trust, and generate leads by leveraging email marketing. You can identify prospects through targeted campaigns and create content that is tailored to their needs. You can provide personalized messages that entice prospective customers and help build relationships.

You can also nurture leads by providing engaging content and follow-up emails. By following up with prospects, you can encourage them to take the next step and book an appointment or consultation.

Employ Automation to Streamline Lead Generation Processes
Using automation is an important strategy for any service business. It helps you reduce errors, save time, and ensure you’re always up-to-date with the latest leads and prospects.

When it comes to automation, there are several things you can do. A pest control software, for example, can help you capture information quickly and accurately. It can send automated emails and messages to let you communicate with prospects effectively.

Finally, automated lead scoring models enable you to identify valuable leads. All these strategies are effective ways to generate leads and improve your business.

Read more: Lead Generation Strategies for Your Service Business

Did you know that a law firm’s practice area is a strong indicator of how potential clients find their services? For example, clients looking for support with criminal law often search with Google My Business and Google Ads, whereas clients looking for estate planning or divorce lawyers often come through organic channels such as blog posts or social media. But — while traffic to your law firm’s website is always great — if you can convert more of that traffic into inbound calls, it’s even better.

According to recent legal marketing data from CallRail, 42% of firms say that clients found their firm through search engines. Yet, 51% of respondents say website optimization is the biggest challenge their firm faces when it comes to online marketing strategy. Here are three best practices to help optimize your team’s call tracking strategy via the web:

Conduct A/B testing to optimize your firm’s inbound call volume
Many businesses include their phone number on their website’s contact page, while others prefer to keep it on their homepage. Additionally, there are countless micro adjustments that can be made to a website — layout, color, font. So how the heck are you supposed to know what works best for your audience? The answer: A/B testing.

Here’s how to put A/B testing into practice: Put the phone number at the top of the homepage for two months, and then move it to the bottom the next two months. The firm’s marketing team should then compare the performance results to determine which location is more successful. This strategy can be applied to all kinds of elements: button color, shape, and call-to-action language — you name it!

Landing pages, on the other hand, are a little easier. Simply create two versions of the same landing page, isolating a single element of your phone number’s appearance, and then test it across both landing pages — which should be used equally in a given campaign. Once you have enough traffic hitting these landing pages, you might be able to identify a difference in performance that can likely be attributed to your phone number’s appearance on the page.

Update the calls to action in your firm’s digital marketing content
Whether you find them in your firm’s blog or on a landing page, most CTAs are built around clicking on a link, downloading an ebook, or visiting a law firm’s contact page to take the next step in the client relationship. However, your firm could benefit from suggesting a phone call directly to your main line.

When it comes to the actual placement of your phone call CTA, make sure you have click-to-call functionality in place — especially on the mobile version of your site. This functionality streamlines the process for clients to quickly go from reading your content to contacting your firm, all without leaving your webpage.

In fact click-to-call is so successful, Forrester found that it can increase marketing ROI by a staggering 143%. In short, the function leads to more calls, more conversions, and a higher ROI. Which firm wouldn’t love to achieve these sorts of results?

Use dynamic number insertion when featuring multiple phone numbers on your website
Dynamic number insertion (DNI) is a call tracking feature that assigns a unique phone number to each online source and then displays that phone number to visitors who arrive at your website via that specific source.

But some firms worry that using a variety of phone numbers on their website might cause SEO problems. While it may be true that multiple numbers could cause confusion for Google, leading to SEO issues, there’s an easy fix: JavaScript. DNI uses JavaScript to render a phone number that is visible to your website traffic, but unseen by the search bots lurking on your site. This allows you to leverage as many phone numbers as you want, without any negative impact on your SEO.

Better still, DNI is easy to set up on any website. A call tracking solution can help you implement this function with just a little bit of code added to the webpage. Then, you can use the software to track performance and manage attribution for your marketing campaigns.

Read more: Web Optimization: Your best bet to driving lead generation

Marketers often focus most of their attention on design aesthetics, ignoring the many other factors that could turn website visitors into hot prospects. Lead-generation is more important than ever and companies shouldn’t underestimate the power of web-design skills when preparing to invest in a new lead-generation website.

Improving conversion rates sounds straightforward enough but many marketers struggle with the most fundamental aspects of lead generation and lead quality. How do you know what kind of leads you really need? And how do you know if your incoming leads are high-quality?

Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to a website and gathering relevant information that can be used to convert interest into sales. In short, it’s the fuel that any sales machine runs on. The right lead generation strategy is the differentiator that separates any company from its competitors, so understanding what makes a strategy effective should be a top priority across every industry.

Marketers need to adapt to new strategies to differentiate themselves from competitors and cater to a new generation of customers. Here are some new lead generation strategies that could help funnel and convert leads into customers.

Create content to attract your audience: Many companies spend most of their time crafting a headline and very little on the actual content. You need to understand what content is going to work for your specific audience. Weak content and good headlines can work short term and generate leads but you should rather think long term and make sure the content is consistent with the quality of everything else you do.

Use digital events to collect quality data: Digital events, such as webinars, concerts and livestreams, are now at an all-time high, enabling marketers to drive traffic to their platforms. These events are a unique way to generate leads and collect quality data. Creating engaging digital experiences meets customers’ needs and captures their attention. Consumers who might otherwise be unwilling to share information are glad to provide an email address and opt in to cookies when they get something in return.

The rapidly changing digital world creates unique new opportunities for digital marketers and it provides an excellent opportunity to gather quality data on potential leads. Salesforce is one example of a company that has enjoyed huge success from its digital events. When their event schedule was uprooted, they adapted quickly and, as a result, their virtual World Tour event brought over 1.2 million views to their social channels. That’s 1.2 million potential leads.

Targeting niche audiences: Casting a wide net catches the most fish but it’s also the most expensive. Identifying a niche audience is a key component of any digital strategy. Targeted marketing is therefore the key to success because online communities are becoming niche spaces.

Offer value to niche customers in terms of insight and advice as this will earn dividends in terms of data and trust. Furthermore, use account-based campaigns to target specific customers with personalised messages. Strengthen your existing connections and pursue new relationships by incorporating account-based campaigns into your digital strategy.

Also, because the walls between personal and professional lives are coming down, many business people are looking for a more personal touch in their digital strategy. People want to feel as if they’re doing business with unique individuals. Don’t be afraid to show off your unique personality through distinctive personal branding and personalised services.

More importantly, use digital video platforms – this allows customers to hear about your company and put a friendly face to it. Capitalise on the popularity of platforms like TikTok and YouTube to offer personable and informative content to your audience. In fact, 86% of digital marketers say video has helped them generate leads.

As personal lives are becoming more profession-centric, professionals are following TikTok creators, joining Facebook groups and subscribing to industry newsletters. Become a voice in those communities or even consider creating your own digital community.

Read more: The right lead-generation strategy is crucial to digital marketing success

​​In our highly digitalised world, digital marketing has become an indispensable strategy for many businesses. Terms, including “lead generation”, “paid search” and “organic search”, are often used in the digital marketing landscape. This then begets the questions – what is lead generation and how does paid and organic search come into the picture?

Lead generation is the process of getting audiences interested in your brand, products, and services, with the intention of increasing conversions. It is the first step to building a loyal customer base, playing an important role in the success of companies.

Paid and organic search are crucial lead generation components. Paid search involves paying search engines to improve rankings, while organic search relies on unpaid traffic and relevant search terms. When both paid and organic search strategies are implemented together, lead generation efforts are enhanced.

In this article, we look at how this can be done by exploring five search strategies to optimise lead generation.

Keyword research

Keyword research revolves around finding and analysing popular terms online users type into their search engines. Businesses can then leverage this information to empower greater business-customer relevance.

As mentioned above, both paid and organic search can be utilised in the keyword research process. For paid search or pay-per-click (PPC), keywords are used to run ads. Keyword research allows you to gain more information and insight on those searching your brand, ensuring that your ads are carefully targeted, and maximising your costs.

You can also integrate keyword research into your organic search strategy by weaving it into your online content and creating relevant links that lead to other pages of your website. We recommend maximising SEO services in Singapore for the best keyword research practices.

Timing your PPC ads

Timing is everything, and this is especially so when it comes to the ever-changing nature of the online sphere and the growing shorter attention spans of consumers. PPC ads are highly effective when they are aligned with what a customer needs. Perhaps the best aspect of PPC is its ability to showcase the most relevant ads right when the customer is looking for similar services or products. This increases conversions as customers are in their “buying cycle”.

For instance, having a food ad displayed around mealtimes empowers greater enticement. In addition, showing PPC ads during periods of high volume searches enhances lead generation. The targeted ads allow you to manage your spending while making the most of immediate lead generation.

Expand reach with display advertising

Have you ever visited a website and seen ads there? This is known as display advertising. The display ads showcased vary according to each user and come in many different formats from text to video. The type of ad you choose to run depends on your marketing goals and objectives.

Image ads are great for generating brand awareness, enabling you to incorporate your logo or product. On the other hand, video ads are useful for consumers who are already aware of your brand, but are keen on understanding your product and service offerings. As an essential marketing strategy, display advertising gets you millions of impressions and drives traffic to your website – all of which is part of lead generation.

Re-marketing

How often have you come across an online ad for a product you are considering purchasing, but never got around to doing so? This digital marketing strategy is referred to as re-marketing and targets users who engaged with your business before. They may have added your products to their cart without checking out.

Using cookies, re-marketing generates greater top-of-mind recall for your brand, and increases purchasing persuasion. Research has shown there is a more than 50% success rate of customers making a purchase through persistent advertising. The best part? These ads are shown to interested consumers, meaning the chances of them eventually making a purchase remains high.

Socials

There is no denying that social media has taken the world by storm. In fact, most of us are likely to have created accounts across multiple social media platforms. With 58.4% of the world’s population using social media at an average of two hours and 27 minutes a day, businesses are starting to realise the benefits of leveraging social media to promote their brand.

Apart from incorporating keywords on social platforms for an SEO advantage, social media also enables businesses to learn more about their consumers as information, including demographics and interests, is available on profile pages. Furthermore, Facebook can even generate a “lookalike” audience to identify prospective clients based on existing customer databases.

Read more: 5 search strategies to optimise lead generation

Lead generation is what drives any business.

Yet many business owners and managers in the service contracting industry leave lead generation to chance. Instead of implementing demonstrated processes to deliver reliable, predictable results, they send out the occasional e-blast or direct mailer and wait for the phone to ring.

Some common misconceptions often prevent service professionals from taking control of lead generation. Many think it’s just too hard or the effort isn’t worth it. Others assume only people with a particular personality can successfully drive leads. Some mistake lead generation for cold calling.

Ultimately, successful lead generation is a process. It takes effort to set up and maintain. But the work more than pays for itself. What’s more, anybody can do it. A lead generation system truly works when the whole team is involved, from sales to service technicians, support and management.

Referrals
The best source of effective leads is referrals. That means getting customers to talk about your company to their friends and neighbors. Typically, this won’t happen unless you ask them to do it.

A strong referral program rewards customers for recommending your company and is an important mechanism for generating leads. The essential elements of a strong referral program include:

· Incentives: Offer customers who directly refer new business to your company a reward, such as a $100 gift card or prepaid debit card. This is an excellent investment for a potential lifetime of revenue.

· Monitoring: Every owner should watch lead sources regularly. It’s easy and affordable to install software to determine where incoming calls come from. Additionally, ask new customers how they learned about your company.

· Buy in: Team members who are excited about their jobs and enthusiastic about their work are effective ambassadors. Instead of simply marking off a checklist at the end of a service call, they’ll engage with customers in ways to encourage them to share your company’s name.

Marketing
Too many owners and managers believe marketing is a direct pipeline to new business. In other words, thinking by scheduling an email campaign or promoting a social media post, the phone will ring off the hook.

That’s not the case. Marketing is a key part of a good lead generation strategy, but you must be realistic about its purpose and effectiveness.

Marketing is about making an impression, so your company is top of mind when a customer needs service. This can be as simple as a banner at the local ballpark or your company’s name and logo on a school play program, or you can invest in more sophisticated tools such as social media posts or pay per click campaigns. Either way, ongoing marketing helps build your company’s brand awareness throughout your service area. Over time, you can be confident that name recognition will drive new business in areas you’ve saturated with your branding.

Planting Seeds
It takes proper timing to turn brand awareness and name recognition into new customers. The odds are slim you’ll place a door hanger or send an e-blast the same day someone’s plumbing springs a leak.

One way to control timing is to plant seeds. Training technicians to discuss the condition and age of the system they’re working on can be a building block for planned equipment replacement.

Many customers rarely think about their plumbing systems, so giving them a reason to associate service with your company is part of a long-term strategy for generating new business. You can jumpstart planned replacement jobs by planting seeds throughout your relationship with a customer.

Read more: Driving Effective Lead Generation With Referrals, Marketing, and Maintenance

Digital marketing as the name suggests is the process of marketing/promoting or advertising your product/service through different types of media other than the traditional physical offline techniques of digital marketing. In layman’s terms, digital marketing is the process of showcasing your product or service through the means of electronic devices or connections in the virtual space. It can be in various computer-generated formats that are audio, video, or even written. Digital marketing in this new era is also known as online or internet marketing. As the majority of digital marketing happens on the world wide web.

The true potential of digital marketing lies in professionals coming up with different strategies to make a clear and positive impact on your brand through multiple channels. It’s all about creating unique and engaging online customer experiences for your brand.

Digital marketing is the one technique that enables you to reach multiple audiences across any physical bounds and target the interested prospects who are most likely to purchase your product or service. Digital marketing has time and again proven to be less expensive and more impactful and trackable than the physical, traditional modes of marketing.

There are 7 main types of digital marketing.

Let’s list them down!

Social media marketing

Email marketing
Content marketing
Search engine optimization marketing
PPC marketing
Affiliate marketing

Read more: The Key To Lead Generation With HubSpot Landing Pages