Lead Generation Tips
There’s one key ingredient to accomplishing your business goals — customers! Without people *literally* buying into what you have to offer, your business dreams will stay out of reach.
All customers start their journey with you as leads. As a lead, they’ve been introduced to your company, have indicated some type of interest, and have the potential to become a paying customer. At this point, it’s like the first stages of dating — your job is to nurture the relationship, build trust, and connect with them until they commit (aka buy something from you!).
So how do you get leads? Well, we’ve got a few tips and tricks up our sleeves to help you gather leads and turn them into paying customers.
Lead generation – what is it?
“Lead” is a fairly broad term for people who are getting to know your business, but it includes those who interact with your content, sign up for a trial, visit your store, etc. What does that mean for your marketing efforts?
There are different kinds of leads based on the amount and type of interaction they’ve had with your business, and where they land in your buyer’s journey. No matter the type of lead, though, your marketing goals are the same: to help them transition from visitors to customers.
There’s a difference between unqualified and qualified leads. To help people move squarely into the qualified camp, it’s important to immediately nurture potential customers as soon as you get information from them. Utilize all your platforms — email workflows, social media, ads, blog content, etc. to stay on their radar and build a relationship with them!
Helpful Hints for Lead Generation
Content marketing ✏️
Content marketing is our bread and butter here at Soulheart. It’s an effective strategy to attract leads through blogs and other free content that guides customers to the next part of the customer journey.
When your CTA (call-to-action) is presented through valuable content, it makes for a more organic sales conversion process. Emails, especially automated emails, and ads are also great places to include CTAs to sign up, purchase, etc.
Need help with your email marketing or ads strategy? Let’s talk.
Utilize powerful marketing tools 🛠
Hubspot, one of Soulheart’s partners (and another one of our specialties 😉), offers CTA templates and lead generation software. Their form-scraping tool can automatically collect information and consolidate leads into a database, aka organization dreamland. Other great tools are Facebook and Google Ads which let you easily collect data about people who click on your ads.
There’s another tool that you use every day that doubles as a secret weapon when it comes to lead generation: your words. Sounds crazy, but creating conversations around offers and CTAs for customers in different stages of the buyer’s journey will help them make a final decision. A little communication goes a long way!
Remain flexible and use dynamic strategies 🧘♀️
Trends change and customer behaviors shift, so you need to track the performance of your content and CTAs to see what’s working, especially with social media. Using social media allows you to freely nurture connections and post valuable content that customers can resonate with. Posts sometimes take customers to landing pages where they’re further encouraged to provide information, resulting in potential customers. Wham, bam!
Use customer referrals 🗣
This is one of the oldest lead generation strategies out there, and it’s a win-win for everyone. If your product or service has pleased a current customer, ask them to share their experience with others in their network. It’s helpful to reward them for passing more business to you, which incentivizes them to refer people to you in the future.
Using customer referrals is a no-brainer tactic since customers are doing most of the work for you. Plus, we know that word of mouth is the BEST form of marketing since people trust personal testimonies. If you want to gain lots of qualified leads, invest in current customers and use their love for your company to bring in new customers.
What not to do: Buying leads 💰
Buying leads may sound tempting — after all, if you’re spending money on advertising anyway, why not go the easy route and go directly to the source?
It doesn’t pan out like you’d think, because those leads don’t ~actually~ want what you have to offer since they’ve never interacted with you. Whatever messages these leads receive from you are unwanted, which makes them much less likely to produce your desired result. Bought leads can cause your messages to be flagged as spam and even indicate to email providers that your emails should be filtered out. It’s also more expensive than gaining leads organically. Time is money, people!
Mission Possible 😎
Soulheart wants to see you thrive and build a sales funnel brimming with qualified leads. We’re confident that using the tips above will give you a great start on your lead generation strategy, because we’ve used them ourselves with great success!
Lead generation is a broad topic, though, and understanding its different facets is important to reaching your business goals. Have questions or want to learn more about lead generation the Soulheart way? Our team would love to connect with you!
