Generate sales leads in business

To grow, a business must have constant access to potential customers interested in the product, that is, to leads. Various tools help find them and turn them into buyers: contextual and targeted advertising, promotion in social networks, regular events, and CPA networks.

Some factors do not necessarily affect sales directly, but they do increase customer loyalty. For example, this effect is provided by high-quality and properly packaged content and recommendations of partners.

The audience’s portrait influences the choice of promotion methods:

• Who are your customers, where they live?
• What they do.
• How much they earn.
• What kind of lifestyle they lead.
• What products and how they prefer to buy.

The choice of promotion methods depends on the portrait of the audience: it can be social networks, industry events, client recommendations, contextual advertising.

IMPORTANT PRACTICAL TIPS FOR LEADERS TO GROW BUSINESS

Thanks to the competent promotion, the client ends up on the landing page and leaves contacts in exchange for a lead magnet: a survey, a discount, a giveaway, or a coupon. After that, you can interact with him through the mailing list or social networks.

You can use GoogleAnalytics or other similar tools to track how customers contact a company before making a purchase.

Dwell on the following lead generation channels

Social networks

In social networks, work is carried out with a large and so far uninterested audience. Therefore, users need to be continuously involved so that they go from cold leads who do not need the company’s services and products to warm leads who already know something about the company and understand its value to hot leads who are ready to make a deal.

Set up targeted advertising 

It is essential to pay attention to the CPL (cost per lead) indicator on different social networks to see where it is cheaper to attract leads.

Correctly selected content in social networks allows you to organically form the customer’s interest in the product. If the content is supplemented with a call to action – a promotion or a discount, the lead can become a buyer.

PPC advertising is significantly overheated in some topics, so companies are looking for alternative lead generation methods to recoup their marketing costs.

Some companies believe that their audience is not on social media, so targeted ads are not suitable. This is certainly not the case. The strategy is merely essential. 

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is closely related to social media. Typically, influencers are selected based on reach and audience recognition. Bloggers can be searched for through exchanges like GetBlogger, where you can also track statistics from previous integrations.

What matters is the level of engagement and quality of the audience and its relevance to a specific brand—other factors: the number of ad integrations in the profile, organic growth.

How to quickly attract customers to your landing page

After advertising with a blogger, the audience needs to be directed to the company profile and motivated to take the next action, for example, a campaign with a limited duration.

Targeted advertising helps to choose the most suitable brand from a diverse audience of social networks, depending on its needs, taking into account the price of the product, geolocation, age, and users’ interests.

For example, the construction company, together with the marketing agency, wishing to improve the lead generation rates, began by compiling a portrait of the target audience on social networks, replacing stock selling posts with real videos. 

Developed a content strategy for posts and, as a result, sold through social networks, five houses worth 17 million rubles. This is the CTA button leading to the data filling page, the “Thank you” page, and the OTO (one time offer – one-time advantageous offer). Such links double the conversion “click-lead-deal”.

The expert also notes that, provided an adequately configured advertising campaign, tools such as target and context shows high efficiency.

For example, an accounting firm can create a landing page on how to submit reports yourself. The client downloads the checklist, leaves contacts, sees the offer “Fill out the declaration for you.” In this case, the likelihood of making a deal is higher than with a client who does not trust you.

Head of the marketing agency

There is also an option for a lead generation without the use of complex schemes, but in this case, it is essential to consider that it is necessary for the client to receive an answer to his request right on the landing page.

As for social networks, according to Maria Almusavi, they are useful for better indexing in search engines and retargeting. But in this case, the main thing is to choose the right audience and message.

The company’s rating is increased by partner recommendations, cross-over events, and mentions on social networks. 

paid attention to semantics;

grouped campaigns by request type for dealers and brands;

removed negative keywords;

analyzed the conversion of different sites;

paid attention to the nightly, cheaper traffic in search engines;

divided leads to service and sales.

Contextual advertising, SEO, and retargeting generate the best leads. Setting up these tools allows you to make a more detailed selection for a larger number of parameters:

Mailing lists and affiliate programs 

PPC advertising, SEO, and retargeting influence the interested audience and influence those are looking for a specific company or product.

Mailings and targeted advertising are aimed at an audience that does not need the product right now but may need it in the future.

On social networks and on his company’s website, which is a distributor of medical equipment, Nikita Krystin tests design solutions, visual templates, evaluates content for information content, and analyzes YouTube videos.

He also monitors the dynamics of the interest of the business audience, which is related to medicine and the health care system, and doctors, shares company news and scientific articles on medicine, business, and IT.

If you have a small business and low traffic to your site (up to 150,000 visits per month), it is best to generate leads through contextual advertising. Yandex and Google offer automated pay-per-action strategies, which means that you can only pay when the lead has made a purchase.

CPA networks

It makes sense for sites with high traffic to use CPA networks like Admitad or Where’s the Elephant? They only work with popular brands. Platforms for personalization and management of LTV help generate leads. These include the Flocktory. Let’s say a user buys a ticket. 

On the last page of registration, the online cashier offers him to choose a gift from the service partners, selected based on the interests, age, and geolocation of the buyer. Such platforms can also determine the current needs of users and send discounts via push notifications.

Each communication element should form the user’s desire to purchase a product; then, the content will directly affect sales.

According to the expert, offline events also have advantages: they allow collecting the MAC addresses of all meeting participants’ phones using special services like NPO Analytics. 

Content

High-quality content drives traffic and helps potential customers understand brand value. It should be accompanied by engagement with the audience, responsiveness to comments, emojis, stories, and effective free tools useful to the client.

Together with the agency Arctics Mobile, Dodo Pizza has increased the number of orders thanks to promotion on TikTok. The production of commercials was outsourced; each video was developed for four days, while every two weeks were taken into account.

As a result, the company received over 6,000 orders and over 6.5 million views of the most successful video. Lean Labs generated 355% more leads thanks to lead magnets and a call to action, and finance portal Bankrate improved its performance by creating a mortgage calculator.

Renata Abaidullina, Head of Marketing and Lead Management at ICL Services, shares her experience. It shows that face-to-face events (bring up to 70% of leads), SEO and contextual promotion (up to 20% of leads), and mailings (up to 10%) generate leads most effectively. Telemarketing testing during the pandemic fell short of expectations.

We pay attention to content that helps to make high-tech IT services more understandable for the target audience. The content must answer key questions: who is this service for, how is it useful for the business, and how is it beneficial for the client.

Since the market is changing rapidly, we study profile analytics, share industry information in major publications, comments in the media, social networks, involve experts – developers, business analysts, business architects, and consultants. A text-to-video ratio of roughly 80/20 makes content convenient for both visuals and audiences.

Renata Abaidullina

Head of Marketing and Lead Management Group, ICL Services

The expert considers it important to pay attention to design: content should be well packaged and recognizable. Generation of leads directly on social networks is not considered – it is rather a tool for networking and PR.

Until 2020, the company received 70% of leads from offline events, but everyone went online due to the pandemic. Despite the possibility of regular participation in partners’ online events and the launch of webinars on its site, ICL Services still believes more in personal communication with clients.