In 2022, everyone is trying to capture users’ attention to convert them into leads, and eventually, into paying customers. While basic techniques such as lead magnets and cold outreach can still work well, the world of lead generation has shifted and morphed into a more complex game of trying to win your consumer by making them fall in love with your brand, not just your product or service.
When generating leads, sticking to the basic strategies will only get you basic, somewhat qualified leads, which means it may be harder to turn them into loyal repeat customers or get them to advocate your brand through WOM. Especially for B2B businesses, generating leads becomes more of a challenge since the sale is often high ticket and takes a lot of consideration before a purchase.
Instead of stepping out of your brand’s tone of voice and becoming overly salesly to get a lead, it’s best to use out-of-the-box thinking when generating new leads. Here are 10 unique ways you can find qualified leads that will make your brand stand out and more likely convert leads into sales.
1. Think like the lead
The old way of marketing used to be screaming at the top of the rooftops “my product is the best in the world, you need to buy it from me.” In 2022, if you did that, your brand may suffer a bad wrap considering consumers are always ready to hop on Google and search for alternatives. They may even find a product or service that better suits their needs and has better reviews. (Sorry to burst your bubble).
To be able to capture the right leads and nurture them into paying customers, your brand needs to help the lead uncover what they want, and then present it to them on a silver platter.
To do this, it’s important to constantly be analyzing data about your audience through Google Analytics and your ad platforms if you are running ads. Creating a buyer persona and continuously monitoring the performance of your paid and organic advertising will help you to know how your consumers are behaving, where they are hanging out, and what their pain points are.
From here, you’ll be able to better craft your brand positioning statement and speak to your audience in a language that will resonate with their needs and wants, instead of pushing for the sale and talking about how great your brand is.
By showing your lead the benefits, instead of the features of your product or service, you’ll be able to build trust and credibility and be much more likely to capture them as a lead.
2. Don’t create a borning lead magnet
A lead magnet or gated content requires the user to subscribe with their email address and in return, get a free ebook, guide, video, or any type of content that typically expands more on a specific topic related to your niche. While this strategy is still commonly used today, it’s important to not assume just because you have a guide titled “Top 10 Best Interior Design Trends”, businesses will automatically hire your interior design company.
Creating a lead magnet that stands out means that you have to think outside of the box and get ahead of the endless amount of shallow content online disguised as “The Ultimate Guide” or “Get X Result After You Try This.”
While these titles can still serve as main pieces of content in your overall content marketing strategy (keep reading to learn more about that), offering something that stands out and gives the user actual value will be more likely to capture attention.
Some examples of lead magnets that aren’t guides are:
- Discounts or free shipping
- A free trial
- A quiz with the results emailed to the user
- Entering into a giveaway
- Opt-in to be on the beta list
- Free value-packed workshops for a limited amount of time
- Webinar replays
- Requesting a demo
- A free audit
- Access to a free community
- Workbooks or exercises
- Exclusive access to a podcast, interview or guest posts
- Beta access to new releases and exclusive news
Remember that your emails nurturing the user to make a purchase are just as important as the lead magnet itself. Once you get your lead magnet out to a few consumers, closely monitor their email open rates and engagement in your lead magnet. This not only gets you one step closer to converting your lead into a customer, but it also gives you more insight into who are qualified leads, or just users who love to collect freebies with little intent to buy.
3. Perfect your content strategy
Creating a content strategy involves creating and distributing content around your content pillars into different areas of your business so that it aligns with your main marketing objectives. A good content marketing strategy will enable your brand to create clickable and shareable content that you can link throughout your blogs, email campaigns, social media and ads. Not only this, but other companies can link to your content in their content, therefore increasing your visibility and improving your SEO ranking (i.e. making more leads see your content).
Although a good content marketing strategy doesn’t just focus on SEO and rankings. It reflects how well the business knows their consumer by focusing on the buyer’s journey and the user experience.
Creating content around questions that your audience asks helps them connect the dots about your product/service being the solution to their wants and needs. Using tools like Answer The Public to generate questions that your audience is asking in your niche will help you put yourself in the shoes of your audience, which will help you create more relevant and valuable content.
Once a user stumbles upon good content from a brand, they will be more likely to return to the site again for more content (which means you can retarget them or they may sign up for your lead magnet) or share your content with their network, which means more eyeballs, and more potential leads.
4. Harness the power of Affiliate Marketing, referrals and reviews
Affiliate marketing involves affiliates being paid a commission on every sale they make of a company’s products or services. This sometimes even includes a space on the affiliate’s website, promotion via social media and email newsletters and the affiliate being an advocate of the product or service. Implementing affiliate marketing into your lead generation strategy enables your company to be seen by everyone in the affiliate’s network. If you have real estate on the affiliate’s website, every tactic they do to increase visibility for their site will increase the chances of someone navigating to your site via the affiliate link.
A survey by Nielseniq concludes that 92% of people would trust referrals from friends, family and acquaintances, and are 4 times more likely to buy with these referrals. Using this to your advantage, creating a referral program for your B2B or B2C business has the potential to increase WOM marketing and essentially turn your current audience into a lead generation machine.
A tactic that increases the trust between your brand and the prospect just like affiliates and referrals, is increasing your ratings on review aggregator sites. Third-party review sites such as Trustpilot, Yelp, Clutch and Reddit are more likely to show up on search results when the user types their question into Google. This works especially well if your business is operating in a competitive sector, making getting your business’s site on the first page of Google even more difficult.
5. Get personal, like really personal.
Many business owners face a time in their career when they will have to show their face of social. Whether it be before their company is launched to build hype, or after 15 years of service to stay current. The bottom line is that a personal brand can be one of the greatest assets to support your brand, and bring you in qualified leads.
Why?
Because if someone likes you as a person, they will be more likely to buy your product or service or introduce you to someone from their network who will. Linkedin is a great place to start your personal branding journey as a founder, co-founder or c-suite employee.
While your strategy will likely include sharing a high percentage of content related to your niche, sharing personal content will humanize your brand. It will help the average person relate to you and remind them that we are all cut from the same cloth (no matter if doing B2B or B2C business). Some ideas that you can share on Linkedin to increase leads through personal branding are:
- Sharing your big and small wins and what you learned from them
- Sharing a bit of your family life over Linkedin and how you manage work/life balance
- Share an idea or some inspiration that came to you while taking your dog for a walk that is related to your industry
- Sharing an interesting opinion or viewpoint which inspired you to do what you do now
For B2B business owners, this tactic can help you not only help you reach new leads, but it can also help you build long-term relationships with other businesses that you may want to partner with or collaborate with in the future.
6. Stop wasting time on unqualified leads
There is one thing that is worse than not getting any leads – wasting your budget and time on unqualified leads. All businesses face the problem of unqualified leads using up their resources, but very few businesses have systems in place to avoid unqualified leads entering the sales pipeline. (Only 39% of businesses have steps to qualify the leads before they are sent to the sales team (Hubspot)).
Instead of spending money on the middle and the bottom of the funnel to try and convert any lead into a sale, spending resources on a lead management system will allow you to not throw money at leads you know won’t convert.
If you don’t have the resources in-house to have a full lead management system, some DIY ways to help qualify your leads are:
- Having a detailed contact form on your website that asks the right questions
- Being upfront about budget and intent before the lead moves from a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-qualified lead (either by having a phone call or sending a questionnaire)
- Targeting properly so that you do not waste time and budget on generated unqualified leads (this includes detailed targeting on ads platforms, and other techniques such as adding negative keywords on Google Ads).
7. Guest Blogging
If you are in the process of developing your personal brand to assist your business’ marketing, or you have already developed your personal brand, guest blogging is always a great tactic to add high-quality links from reportable sources and establish thought leadership. Finding guest blogging opportunities allows you to write a high-quality piece that will be shared on another repeatable website, therefore bringing in qualified leads as it will link back to you and your content.
While it can be tempting to create a list of every single publication to reach out to for a guest blogging opportunity, chances are you may only get a few high-quality opportunities. Although, there is an emphasis on high quality.
A high-quality guest blogging opportunity = an untapped amount of leads visiting your site via backlinks and interest
If you’ve scored a good guest blogging opportunity, then it may even open up more doors for you than just traffic and new visitors. Guest blogging opportunities establish thought-leadership, therefore attracting potential partnership, affiliate and PR leads, in addition to potential buyers of your product or service.
8. Make your business available and easy to reach
The user experience is not just limited to your website, it includes everything from when the user discovers your brand, until they have purchased, and beyond. Making your brand accessible to call, text, email or get directions is important to induce more traffic and lead captures.
Some ways that you can make your business more available to your users are:
- Optimize your social channels to have the maximum amount of contact information, in addition to your social media strategy including many CTAs.
- Registering your business on Google My Business
- Optimizing your SEO tactics so that Google can show viewers the most relevant information
- Running Google Ads to help have your product or service seen at the right time by the right people.
- Updating business hours on social media and Google
- Installing chatbots to respond to frequently asked questions
9. Retarget your leads
Some leads need a little extra push to move into a different stage in the funnel. Retargeting your leads that have not progressed to the BOFU (bottom of the funnel) through retargeting campaigns can increase your lead count by refreshing the old leads and turning them into qualified leads again.
The most common way to do this is through advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook, which allows you to retarget leads through actions like video views, website visits, remarketing lists, etc.
There are other interesting ways to refresh a cold lead into a hot lead again by nurturing them through email campaigns and adding exciting offers such as discounts, exclusive memberships, 2-for-1 offers, feedback surveys with a reward, or just reminding them of your UVP again.
More often than not, a lead may become warm again if they are reminded why they fell in love with your brand in the first place, either through an interesting email, an insightful blog post or visiting your new, updated website and having a pleasant experience.
10. Become exclusive
Being an insider makes people feel important and wanted, which in turn, will result in them supporting your brand by either making a purchase or advocating your brand through WOM. Creating a loyalty program can be an interesting way to generate new leads as it also focuses on creating more repeat customers.
With loyalty programs you also can collect data about your customer’s shopping behaviours and what interests them, therefore defining your customer avatar further and strengthening your knowledge about your audience. This will allow you to further develop your brand messaging and positioning to be more relevant to your target audience, therefore improving your other lead generation tactics
Conclusion:
There is no one size fits all approach to lead generation and it is most definitely a marathon, rather than a race. To learn more about what lead generation tactic fits best with your audience and your business, schedule a free consultation with Ballistic Arts to assess what areas we can work on together to get you more high-quality leads.
