12 Vital Lead Generation Tips Your Business NEEDS to know

Struggling to come up with ways to generate the best leads for your business? You’re not alone. Thankfully, you’re in the right place. Lead generation needn’t be difficult, but it’s something you need to prioritize if you want to make your online business a success. Remember, lots of other businesses have been there before – and some of these tips come from tried and tested methods that have been proven to improve results for countless other businesses.

To get the best leads possible, you need to improve conversion rates when you ask people to opt-in or interact with your business. This requires a multi-faceted approach that gets more from your marketing efforts and increased visibility amongst the sort of people you want to do business with. So let’s have a look at the tips:

1. Use buyer personas

How can you know exactly what your customers want if you don’t try and see things from their perspective? You need to create a few key buyer responses and refer back to them regularly. Who are the sort of people you’re trying to appeal to? Make sure you keep your buy personas in mind when you design every part of your business. It should all be for them.

You can use CRM software to see what parts of your site and business are working with your customers and which areas need improving. When you combine this knowledge with your buyer personas you should be able to create a more bespoke offering that’s more likely to create leads.

2. Quality over quantity

When you start building a sustainable backlinking strategy, you need to prioritize quality over quantity. Yes, more is normally better – but not if they’re cheap spammy links. These could do your ranking and therefore lead generation goals more harm than good. Try and write quality posts and get them syndicated on authorities in your industry. That will generate more link juice to improve your rankings, but it should also help you generate more direct leads from article readers and clickthroughs. You can learn more here.

3. Keep your calls to action clear

Too many sites bury their calls to action or make them hard to find. If you want someone to opt-in or fill out a form to become a leader, make it obvious. Don’t expect them to guess. The harder you make it to opt-in, the more potential leads you’ll lose. You might want to try sticky widgets and other plugins to always keep your calls to action clear and above the fold.

4. Reduce distractions

This ties in nicely with the last point, but you need to make sure you reduce distractions away from opt-ins and other ways you could lose leads. While additional page ads can be a good way to generate additional income, make sure they open into new windows and don’t make you lose leads. Keep distractions as minimal as possible so you don’t lose your good quality leads.

5. Become an authority

When you start working with authorities in your industry, you’ll start becoming more of authority yourself. Make sure you increase your status online and in your community and try everything you can to become an authority people can believe in. Grow your brand and people will be more eager to give you their details. Generating leads will go from a hard process to one that almost seems like you have to turn people away. If you become big enough, leads will come to you rather than you having to go out and find them.

6. Use testimonials

One great way to increase your brand image and make people more willing to connect with your business is by publishing compelling testimonials on your website. These will work even more if they’re from someone people recognize, but even if they’re not – people want to see how your products or services have benefited other real people. Most people will be happy to provide you with a testimonial if they’re happy with you, and you can offer them a link back to their website in return for a good one.

7. Create sharable content

The better your content is, the more it’ll work for you and your business. People love to share great content online, and this will reach more people than ever before (and more potential leads). So make your blog posts, videos, and podcasts better than ever so they can do the marketing legwork for you.

8. Email market the right way

There’s a fine line between spam and effective email marketing. And you need to tread it carefully. Don’t bombard your email list with worthless spam. That’s one quick way to get people to hit that unsubscribe button. Reach out when it makes sense and make sure you offer people value. Treat the leads you’ve already got well so they don’t become cold leads as soon as you got them.

9. Fine-tune the buyer’s journey

Use your buyer’s personas to explore exactly what your customers have to do to do business with you. Look at things from their perspective and answer their questions or worries before they’ve got them. Make sure you know exactly how well your funnels are working, so you can generate more leads.

10. Test alternatives

Don’t simply assume you know which layouts or sales pages are working for you, do the A/B testing to know for sure.

11. Prioritize social media

Make sure you’re super-active on social media. The more you can get existing customers or followers to talk or like your brand, the more they’ll help generate additional leads for you. Having an active social media presence can make a big difference to your marketing efforts, and how many leads you generate.

12. Don’t make your forms complicated

One quick way to turn off potential leads is by making your message forms complicated and too long. Don’t ask for tons of different fields, or they might just click away as quickly as they arrived. Keep your forms open-ended so that people can get in touch with you for any reason. That’s how you convert the most leads possible.