Strategic Market Solutions, LLC

Every business strives for long-term profitability, and the latter is impossible without a considerable and predictable lead flow. Leads are core for every company because they are prerequisites for earning revenues.

There’s always a small chance some people may discover and purchase your goods or services all of a sudden. But, in most cases, acquiring a lead is a tough and perpetual process called lead generation.

How Does Lead Generation Work?

Before starting selling and promoting the brand, you have to identify a consumer need to meet. This may include one or several pain points or “wants” of a target audience. With a clear understanding of what problems your products help to solve, you can choose the right communication channels and messages in your marketing strategy.

The lead gen process is impossible without knowing customers’ profiles. To understand how to address leads, you should first create and study “portraits” of buyers. These include demographics and insights about interests, traits, and even daily routines. Typically, the research implies building Buyer persona or key account profiles (the latter concerns B2B lead generation).

When you know everything about the offer’s value and target audience, you can start building awareness and nurturing a purchasing intent among prospects.

Read more: Lead Generation Strategies (Ultimate Guide)

Website lead generation starts with the homepage. After all, your homepage is probably your most visited page. A headline with a strong call to action (CTA) at the very top of the page is a good place to start. Now, “strong” doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write something witty or smart. Something as simple as “Start Your Free Trial” can be compelling. Keep the headline and the CTA in sync with the rest of the content, including the images that you are using. The idea is to catch your visitors’ attention immediately.

Heatmaps and other analytics tools can help judge whether your homepage is working. Compare your bounce rates and engagement rates against industry averages to gauge how your homepage is performing. If you are confident about the first page of your website, here are other proven lead generation tactics that can work for businesses of all sizes.

Four Website Lead Generation Tactics

You have probably read this a hundred times before, but it still deserves reiteration: A/B test important elements of your webpages. For a dedicated landing page, that would primarily mean your CTA and corresponding images. Sometimes, changing the color of your CTA button can yield remarkable results. Together with A/B testing, here are four lead generation tactics to consider:

Opt-In Forms and Gated Content

Gated content is content that you offer to your visitors in exchange for them identifying themselves. A common example of gated content is an opt-in form that lets users start a free trial.

To fully utilize the power of gated content, see what pages of your website are getting the most amount of traffic. Offer something of value to visitors on these pages in return for their contact information. E-books or whitepapers are another example of gated content that you can offer to visitors. Let’s say you are a SaaS company. Using traffic analysis, you figure out that your products page is one of your most popular pages. Treat your products page as a landing page. Break it up into logical sections, highlight the best features of your product, and include a compelling CTA. Plutio’s landing page is a good example of this. The project management SaaS platform has highlighted its core features in separate sections, complete with images and unique CTAs.

Read more: Four Lead Generation Tactics For Your Website

As the economy recovers, we might expect marketing spends to increase, however marketers still need to generate maximum ROI from their spend.

At Moneypenny, we’ll always consider new ways to maximise our marketing budget, so here are some techniques from leading marketing suppliers to generate great results, without breaking the bank.

We’re focussing on the ‘interest’ stage of the customer journey, when they visit your website, looking at some low-cost website enhancements, especially for those businesses focused on driving inbound leads through to a sales team to convert. They’ve worked well for us in the past, and we hope they’ll work for you too.

Tracking

You need to track every stage of the lead journey, from the first landing on your site, to signing the sales contract, to discover what is or isn’t working.

At Moneypenny we use a tool called Ruler Analytics to help us track our lead to sales process. Before Ruler, we had a real disconnect between what showed in our CRM and our website analytics, whereas now we can connect the two and for example can see what variations in key words work best, or which marketing campaign attracted most attention.

As Dave Smithbury, Head of Marketing at Ruler Analytics explains: “Ruler tracks all visitors to your website, recording page views across multiple sessions. When a visitor then calls you, completes a web form or live chat session, becoming a lead, Ruler matches the lead data to the activity, and sends the data to your CRM. You’ll be able to see what channel, campaign and keyword generated that lead, and you’ll be able to see their full customer journey too. When that lead converts into a sale, Ruler will fire all the revenue data back into your Google Analytics and other analytics dashboards. This means you can count sales and revenue gained through marketing, not vanity metrics like clicks and impressions. Once you know what’s working, you can focus time and budget on the campaigns and keywords that are bringing you revenue.”

 As a result of using Ruler, Moneypenny saw an 8% increase in quality leads, and reduced its Cost per Lead (CPL) by 11%.

Read more: Super-charged lead generation: How to drive more ROI from your marketing

Have you considered hiring a lead generation expert for your company? Whether it’s a newly founded startup or an up-and-running company, every business can benefit from the right lead generation expert.

If getting new clients has proven to be a wild goose chase, hiring a lead generation consultant can undoubtedly do wonders for your company.

Lead generation stands right after other marketing techniques in the conversion funnel. Depending on the type of your business and your preferences, you could be using direct calls, emails, landing pages, or chatbots for direct marketing. First of all, your lead generation consultant will help you ensure all the marketing techniques you use that lead up to the conversion process are productive.

Besides being omnipresent for outreach, marketing experts consider it best practice to be wherever your customers are for lead generation. So, you must take into account the processes taking place before turning potential customers into leads. Consumer research always comes first because it will help your company make the most out of future campaigns.

When it comes to your campaigns, research insights will also shed some light on the need to segregate them to optimize conversions even further. For example, potentials leads across different age groups sometimes call for campaign diversification. This way, you can segregate the conversion process and won’t have to worry about not making the most out of your campaign efforts. To further optimize the campaign effects, your lead generation consultant may use split testing, also called A/B testing.

Read more: What a Lead Generation Expert can do for Your Business

When Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, stood in front of the failing sales department of Premiere Properties in David Mamet’s 1992 Glengarry Glen Ross and told them that all but the top two salespeople would be fired in a week, Jack Lemmon’s character, Shelley, said, “The leads are weak.” While I cannot condone how Blake reacts to that statement (or really anything at all about that infamous and abusive monologue), one message I think Blake touches on is vital to extrapolate: “The leads are weak? You’re weak!” And while this was a line designed to chastise poor Shelley and shame him into performing, the message that lead generation is an internal problem, not an external one, is worth our attention.

It is undoubtedly essential to have a database of opt-in leads (as opposed to unwilling ones), and it is equally important to work that database of leads to convert them into customers or clients. However, the best leads in the world will do you no good if you haven’t first done work on yourself.

Leads have the sum total of human knowledge at their fingertips. No matter what your product or service, they have countless competitors to compare you with. So your ability to reach them and deliver your message or sales pitch is completely inconsequential when compared to who you are and how you present yourself. With so many options available to them, your leads are looking to see if you are relevant to them and if you are the right fit.

Read more: Busting The Lead Generation Myth: Look Internally, Not Externally

How Edifius generates leads with Perla Humphrey

Perla is the Co-founder and CEO of Edifius, an AI software company which has a product called Simba. Simba is a machine learning AI conversational voice spot. The purpose of this machine is to pick up businesses phones and has a human-like conversation with the caller in order to answer leads’ frequently asked questions and schedule appointments.

Edifius is a B2B startup. The most efficient marketing channel that they’ve started to generate leads is expos and conferences; out of 10 leads they talk to, 3 or 4 of them signup to their platform.

How Kudo generates leads with Fardad Zabetian

Fardad is the founder and CEO of Kudo, a language as a service platform for enabling video calls, web conferences and in-person meetings, with live language translation. Businesses can speak with their partners, teams and remote employees in their own language. The purpose is to remove language barriers among businesses, save them time and create opportunities.

Kudo has a magical feature called a language elector inside the platform, which allows them to select the language to join the meeting.

Read more: Lead Generation Strategies From 10 Startups

For a majority of managed service providers (MSPs), lead generation can be a struggle. As a business owner, you might think you lack the time and resources, but there are a few easy ways to get started. Below, we’ve put together a series of tips to help with lead generation, regardless of your business size.

Create a Lead Generation Plan

The purpose of a lead generation plan is to create a list of potential clients and to determine how many clients you’ll need to meet your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) goals. First, consider your ratio of leads to closed deals. (For example, let’s say on average you close one deal for every 10 prospects.) Next, consider your average deal size. (Let’s say your typical monthly contract is around $2,000.) Now, use this information to calculate the number of leads necessary to meet your MRR goal. For example, imagine that your goal is $20,000 MRR. If your average monthly contract is $2,000, you’ll need to have 10 clients that month. If you close one in every 10 deals, you’ll need a list of 100 leads or more to reach your goal.

Want to focus on growth? Develop a lead generation plan that outlines the percentage of growth you’d like to see month over month. Then use the process above.

Read more: 8 Ways to Boost Your Lead Generation Results Today

Lead generation is one of the most cost-effective marketing methods out there, bringing in leads and better profit and sales ratios than other methods may when used alone. Whether you’re utilizing lead generation and appointment setting services or trying it out in-house for yourself, understanding just how it can help your business grow is a crucial starting point. Here’s what you need to know:

What Is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is essentially the act of generating interest for your products or services in potential customers. The goal here is, as you might expect, to generate leads and make a sale or conversion as a result. It’s the start of the sales process in some ways and is the core driving force for a lot of companies when it comes to the customers they attract.

Without adequate lead generation, businesses and salespeople can find themselves losing motivation and, in some cases, may even see drops in traffic and customer numbers. Without customers and sales, businesses lack the resources to grow and expand efficiently.

Read more: How lead generation can benefit your business growth

Lead generation is an expensive task for any B2B marketer, but it’s not cost alone that keeps them up at night. Understanding the nuances of each lead and how to replicate some level of success is as much art as it is science. Once you pay for leads, do they convert? And if they do, how do they stack up against your other sources? Perhaps most importantly, how can those leads successfully transition out of marketing to sales?

The pressure to both create and convert isn’t slowing down. According to a 2018 HubSpot survey, 75% of companies say closing more deals is their top sales priority. But, Econsultancy found that just 22 percent of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

For many B2B organizations, balancing the demand for conversion and the importance of building meaningful customer relationships—and long-tail deal opportunities—is an ongoing battle. The insistence to prioritize today’s growth is at odds with the long-term growth of the business. In short, thinking about leads only for today starves the business for tomorrow.

Read more: AVOIDING FUNNEL FAILURE: 3 TIPS FOR LEAD GENERATION & CONVERSION