We’ve grown our userbase by 10,000 in the last few months and we’ve gone through a lot of turning points that taught us a thing or two about lead generation. We’ve compiled some of those tactics that will help you generate leads as we did along the way.
These leads have helped not only us keep our business afloat, but help our customers do the sale as well.
What is lead generation?
Lead is simply anyone who’s potentially interested in a business like yours. Someone who’s looking for a solution that you’re already providing. They just haven’t discovered you yet. In the process of getting discovered by those who’re searching for a solution, you strategically get in front of your audience. The process of getting in front or finding your “potential customer” is called lead generation.
For any business, growing means getting more sales, customers & leads. When you’re just starting out and nobody other than yourself & that friend of yours has heard of your business, you will need to get in touch with potential customers upfront & introduce your business, nurturing them into becoming paid customers, in other words, lead generation.
Here’s a beautiful infographic to help you visually understand the process of lead generation & conversion.
Check out these lead generation strategies that have helped us scale our business multiple folds & get in touch with several highly targeted potential customers.
Top lead generation strategies for your online business
As we said earlier, we’ve found these lead generation strategies helpful to grow our userbase. You may not want to try everything mentioned here & we don’t even recommend trying everything at once. Each strategy would take a lot of trial & error to draw any conclusion about its effectiveness.
Furthermore, you may even discover new theories while executing these strategies, feel free to try those. We’d love to hear about what’s working for you in our private Facebook community of growth marketers, online business owners, entrepreneurs & more.
With that said, let’s dive into the meat of this post.
#1 Use exit popups
Emails are the bread & butter of any online business. No matter what you’re selling, having emails of customers (existing or potential) will never go in vain if you know how to make use of it.
One of several ways you can collect emails of website visitors is using exit popups. There are tools that can help you with the exit popups, but we recommend Optinmonster which is the most popular, featured-packed & trusted opt-in tool on the internet. Optinmonster claims to be the pioneer in implementing the exit intent technology in their software. This means the popup will trigger only when the user moves the mouse cursor towards the top bar of the browser (to either switch tabs or exit the page)
Furthermore, it’s important to understand the placements of these popups. It’s ideal to place these popups on the most visited pages of your site & usually the popups should enable an exchange of some valuable asset for the visitor for their email. That’s the most successful transaction you can have while they’re surfing your site.
Depending on where you place the popups, you can optimize for various goals like newsletter signups, lead magnets, deals, demos, booking a call, etc.
#2 Collect emails with live chats
According to 76% people prefer talking to the representatives of B2B businesses before making a purchase. This can be useful for lead generation. You can place live chats across sites or optimize to show on most visited pages.
This live chat can begin with exchanging their email and then the visitor can talk to real human beings. We’ve seen it, chatbots have a really bad reputation to carry along with the conversation.
You can use chatbots only to break the ice or direct users to a specific team. But once the stage is set, it’s recommended to have a human touch to add customers & retain them for your business as long as possible.
#3 Keep test what work & repeat
When you test things that work for others, you find untapped gold that probably no one else has found. Your way of testing, the factors you used while testing, your audience, your intent, your choice of words, your CTA & a million other things would vary & hence what you find out of testing will also be different.
What works with little variations will give you enough evidence that will fuel your work for years to come. When you have one solid evidence of something that works, all you have to do is put that on loop.
Another angle to look at testing is to use it as a lead magnet. Position a portion of the content as “experiments” & generate leads by offering to share the results in the newsletter. The benefit of doing this is that only highly relevant people will opt-in and get into your email list, this is a win for you any time of the day.
#4 Add lead generation forms to your websitep pages
Just like exit pop-ups, lead generations forms play a major role in generating leads. The aim isn’t to get the email of the visitor, the primary aim is to get any point of contact, emails are good but the visitors won’t exchange their email for nothing. Since lead generation forms are optimized for generating leads & not building an email list.
This can be to get in touch with your business for specific queries, CTAs for specific intent in your blogs & more.
#5 Use Linkedin email finder automation
People are going gaga over NFTs, but we’re sorry for the spoilers, but automation & NoCode is the future of everything. Not that we’re against smart people who make things happen, but we’re about facilitating their work for good.
We’re talking about Email finder automation in our app store. You can scrape emails from Linkedin profiles you like to get in touch with. Once you have the emails, you can schedule cold emails to nurture the lead. This will either convert leads into your desired goals, or you will learn one more cold emailing tactic that doesn’t work.
#6 Create evergreen & interactive content
We’re heading towards an economy where the intellect will be measured by the type of content people consume.
Creating evergreen content will not only help you with organic search (this will help you with discovery & sales traffic) but it will also put your business in front of the potential audience.
People don’t make buying decisions on how logical your marketing is, they decide to make a purchase based on the value you’re creating. Be it in your marketing campaigns or otherwise.
Content marketing is the central pillar for lead generation. How else on earth will you promote your business, lead generation forms, exit popup pages, newsletter, your personal/corporate brand & whatnot?
You can leverage social media to create & promote your content or create blogs that document several things your audience is searching for on the internet. Our experience says having a pool of both will be fruitful for immediate & long-term results.
Social media has a ready-made audience, hence you don’t have to do much to promote your content. But at the same time, the life span of content you create on social media is very less. On the other hand, the life span of content you create to rank on search engines is technically immortal. If done right, you will keep reaping the benefits of your content almost forever.
#7 Create & promote lead magnets
Lead magnets are the entry point for your potential audience. A huge chunk of the audience entering the point will be discovering your brand for the first time. That’s why you have the best chance at getting their contact details which can be used for cold email/calls.
While creating a lead magnet, one thing you should keep in mind is to think around buyer personas you want to target. When you know what your audience looks like, you will not only create relevant lead magnets but the whole creating process gets smoother & easier.
Think of how your lead magnet can impact your audience’s lives. Based on the degree of the impact, you can either take the lead magnet free or charge a small fee, or offer paid consulting.
What can you offer as a lead magnet to generate leads?
- Whitepaper
- Webinar
- Ebooks
- Templates
- Checklists/cheatsheets
- Experiments & case studies
- Trials
#8 Conduct exclusive webinars
We’re heading towards a world where e-learning is becoming mainstream. I remember Coursera as a tiny idea that has taken off at exponential speed. It has become a pioneer in e-learning globally.
Educating your audience is the easiest form of content you can think of as part of your content marketing efforts. Webinars are one of the most lucrative lead magnets you can think of.
Again, creating webinars will require you to know your audience. This will be constant for any marketing effort you make.
Here are some best practices of creating webinars for lead generation:
- Select a relevant topic: When you’re creating webinars for a wide audience, you will have to pick a specific topic. Since topic will not resonate with everyone you will have to brainstorm highly-specific topics & sub-topics for the webinars.
- Create valuable content: Upon selecting the topic & syllabus for the webinar, you will need to decide the depth of the content. Depending on the expertise of your audience, the depth of the topic that you will need to cover would vary. Don’t fall into the trap of creating generic content that’s freely available on YouTube. Create intent & practicality based webinar that’s nowhere available.
- Promote your webinar: Depending on your capacity, you can either opt to spend some money on paid ads or simply leverage organic search engines. Furthermore, you can invite people to join the webinar from relevant groups, pages from social media. If you have an email list, promote the webinar to the contacts especially if you have upsells in the webinar. No one says no to more money!
#9 Have a pool of potential leads
This one’s different. How does having a pool of potential leads help get more leads? Think of it like this. When you have leads in buffer, that is, you have never contacted before, that’s called the pool of leads.
You can reach out to the pool anytime when you’re looking for new clients or have run out of existing ones.
So where can you maintain or find this pool of leads?
We have several automations you can leverage to find a pool of leads that you can reach out to any time. Here are some of the spices (automation) to help you find leads in bulk from various online sources:
- Extract search results from Google maps
- Extract search results from Google search
- Extract Twitter following
- Extract Twitter followers
- Extract comments from a Tweet
- Scrape a twitter profile (to build buyer’s persona of your audience)
- Find Twitter profile URLs using names
Check out our automation store to find 180+ automation that you can leverage for your business.
Final thoughts & TL;DR
Lead generation is a slow process where each stage requires several steps which becomes monotonous very quickly. That’s why we have created tools that will take care of those monotonous steps. Lead generation can be automated but only redundant steps.
We have no intention of taking away the jobs of brilliant & hard-working people. Our tools exist only to make the lives of those amazing people, easier. Our tools are extensions of the people who help your business get leads.
If you’re the one-man army, you’d know this better than anyone. How important each minute is. With TexAu automations, you can focus on more important tasks & leave the repetitive tasks on us. We’re here to make lead generation a piece of cake for you.
Happy lead generation until we see you in the next one.
