Need to boost lead generation for your business? Out of ideas for finding new customers? Whether you’re B2B or B2C, a little work and strategy can help bring in new leads for your database. Learn from a Brooklyn inbound marketing agency. Check out our answer to the question: What is inbound marketing?
Here are some strategies for different types of businesses:
- Advertise online.
Use Facebook or Google Adwords to target ads to customers who will be most interested in your product or service. Create a website with a digital sales kit – a page separate from the homepage that acts as a sales funnel and provides detailed information about the benefits of your product. Be sure to capture email addresses for future contact with those who don’t purchase on their first visit – offer a freebie, like a coupon or an informational white paper, in exchange for joining your list. And contact your list at appropriate intervals – you want to stay top-of-mind, but you don’t want to be a crazy spammer.
- Write articles.
This strategy is known as “content marketing.” Create interesting, useful content in your subject area, and let Google bring you leads – people will visit your site for the free information, and if it’s good, they might just stick around to purchase your services. Hire someone to do keyword research for you if you’re not sure what keywords you should focus on –and if you’re not much of a writer, you can hire someone from a site like Elance, oDesk or Zerys at a very affordable rate. Make sure your site is designed to channel people from any page of the site to your funnel page.
- Use your social network.
If you have a small business, your network of friends and family members is chock-full of potential customers and a great place for lead generation – who’s more likely to find you trustworthy and reliable than the people who already know you? Create business pages on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, get friends and colleagues (and others!) to follow you, and then send out special offers that will be attractive. Make sharing across social media easy.
- Google it.
Web searches are an endless source of lead generation – you can look for your most targeted audience, with or without geographic boundaries. Focused on local businesses? Use a site like Yelp or Foursquare to aid you in the hunt – you can further categorize leads by the number of stars they’ve received. Check their website. If you do email marketing, you will generally find that business websites include a domain-specific email address (rather than, say, a Gmail address) and you’re not as likely to go directly into the spam folder. Check social media sites to see how many “likes” or followers a business has.
Or are you looking for leads all over the world? The same basic strategies apply. If you don’t have time to take on this task yourself, outsource it on oDesk or Elance.
5. Hit the streets.
You know those businesses you’ve driven past every day for years? Write them all down – or at least the ones you might sell to – and make a database. Searching for leads this way means you’re already fairly familiar with the business, what sorts of customers frequent it and how busy it is – after all, you’ve driven past the place a thousand times. Go home and sort according to whether businesses have potential as customers. Once you’ve built a successful database in your immediate area, take your lessons learned and expand your hunt to different areas of the city. Visit in person, direct mail or email as strategy dictates.
If you think it is time to start marketing your business online, give Park Slope Softworks a call. They have been in the market since 2005 and have can give you a great deal on an internet marketing package.
