Lead generation is the act of increasing the number of potential customers that your sales team can nurture. Many companies are concerned about increasing their sales through strategic lead generation strategies, especially with the many challenges the public relations/marketing industry is going through right now.
Regardless of the type of business you are running, you will always need new leads. Lead generation typically comes in the form of an email address that allows you to start your email nurturing campaigns and eventually, lead to a new signup, or purchase. In fact, 91 percent of marketers claimed that lead generation is their most important goal.
Throughout the article, we’ll talk about the top lead-generation strategies you can use to increase sales in your business this year, and what kind of challenges the PR/marketing industry is currently going through.
Top issues at stake for the public relations/marketing industry
When it comes to creating an effective lead generation strategy for your business, you need to first be well aware of the top challenges the PR/marketing industry is currently going through. Let’s take a general look at what you can expect:
- Crisis management: This is important since you don’t want something to threaten a brand’s reputation, or trust from an organization or individual. A crisis can include product recalls, lawsuits, or even negative reviews.
- Reputation building: Building and maintaining a positive reputation in an organization is important in a competitive market. Reputation is measured by how customers, investors, employees, and others, will evaluate your business.
- Media relations: Establishing and nurturing relationships with the media is important for gathering the right information and opinions. Media relations include interacting with editors, producers, journalists, loggers, and even podcasters.
- Content creation: This includes the quality of your content and how you distribute it. Successful content is all about understanding your audience’s needs, and preferences.
- Stakeholder engagement: Includes the level of communicating and collaborating with internal and external stakeholders that influence or are influenced by some individual or organization. Some PR professionals fail to create engagement plans that address their needs and build loyalty and trust.
While all challenges pose a risk to the PR/marketing industry, you must always set your plan up to address these issues to ensure they are not getting in your way of creating an effective lead generation strategy. Your crisis management plan, reputation, content quality, and other approaches you have will have an impact on how you generate leads and how customers perceive you.
8 ways to increase sales through strategic lead generation
There are plenty of effective methods you can follow for generating leads, considering the top challenges the PR/marketing industry goes through each day. Without further ado, here are the 8 ways you can increase sales through strategic lead generation.
1) Use a lead management software tool
A lead management tool lets you identify, attract, and acquire new customers. Lead management activities include:
- Nurturing leads
- Lead capturing and distribution
- Lead qualification and scoring
Moreover, converting leads is an important part of a business, so getting the best lead management system out there is imperative. When choosing a top lead management tool, you can consider the following:
- Freshsales: You get a 360-degree view of your customer’s information, empowering your sales team to offer the best services it can. Freshsales uses an AI-powered deal insight that relies on customer data and patterns. With these insights, you can run targeted campaigns that improve sales.
- HubSpot: Can be integrated into a CRM platform. By using the tool, you can track, manage, and prioritize leads. Automated lead scoring helps your team focus more on what’s important.
- Zoho CRM: A cloud-based software that focuses on helping users and integrating data. Their interface is easy to use and has competitive pricing plans.
- Zendesk: A customer service and sales solution that serves the customer journey. Zendesk manages all data in one platform and allows you to streamline systems. Also, let’s not forget that you get API access and a mobile app to make interactions easier.
Of course, the tool you choose will depend on which best fits your business requirements. Compare paid plans and see if the tool you are using is worth the money. Some tools might be more expensive, but not offer as many features, so it’s good to keep an eye out.
2) Optimize your website
Collecting high-quality leads can happen effectively when you optimize your website. This means to do the following:
- Make sure your load time is not long
- Create an easy-to-navigate site on mobile
- Include call-to-actions (CTAs) in areas where you get the most traffic
Building a fast and mobile responsive website reduces bounce rates, and increases the time a customer will spend on a page. For websites that tend to have loading speeds longer than three seconds, bounce rates will instantly increase to 38 percent.
Moreover, if you want your visitors to spend more time on your website, don’t include way too many CTAs, but place them in special areas. The best places where you can include a CTA are:
- At the bottom of your home page
- At the sidebar of every blog post
- On a pop-up when someone first lands on your site is about to leave
- On your most important sales pages
Some websites will include way too many of them, but this makes your site start to look like spam and isn’t a good way of attracting new customers.
3) Create a high-quality newsletter
Email marketing will always play an important role in a company’s marketing efforts. Email newsletters on their own can be great for lead generation. Businesses will usually send out an email newsletter every week or month with quick tips, or blog updates.
Instead of that, consider how helpful you can be to your target customers. What kind of benefits will they receive after learning from your business? After that, create a strategic newsletter around it.
Your newsletters shouldn’t only be entitled to provide text information, but you can consider using videos as information as well. You can include podcasts in your newsletter, important marketing news, blog posts with helpful information, or a regular video that helps your customers learn something new about marketing, or your business.
4) Conduct a competitor and search engine optimization (SEO) analysis
SEO is one of the greatest online lead generation strategies you can use, all because of the low customer acquisition costs. Keyword research is an excellent way to generate targeted leads which can improve lead-to-sales rates.
Keyword research is one great way to generate targeted leads, which can significantly improve your lead-to-sales rate. You can use keyword tools like Ahrefs, or even SEMrush that will give you long-tail keywords, which are more specific and allow you to target your ideal customer much more accurately.
Also, don’t forget about your competitor analysis. You can combine it with SEO lead generation strategies to see what your competitors use to target their audience. Of course, you need to pay attention to the type of content you are creating. You can’t use the same keywords as your competitors if their content isn’t the same as yours.
5) Create high-quality content and lead magnets
Nothing can replace high-quality content when it comes to lead generation. This is great for capturing your audience’s attention and earning their trust in the long term.
Every business has something unique in its way of creating content. Some do it through podcasts, videos, articles, or any other method they come up with. Regardless of which content you create, you can always distribute it on your website and social media.
High-quality content is what makes people sign up for your company’s email newsletter and makes them become your customers in the long term. Moreover, alongside, you can consider creating lead magnets.
A lead magnet is a long-form resource that is offered to customers in exchange for their contact information. They can be in several forms, such as an ebook, whitepaper, template, or any other downloadable asset form.
Fifty percent of marketers claim that using lead magnets will lead to higher conversion rates.
6) Use AI and automation
AI is dominating many markets, and the good news is that it’s reducing manual work for us in generating leads. This is accomplished through the help of virtual assistants and chatbots. They also increase engagement on your site and nurture leads.
In fact, a study conducted by Drift claimed that chatbots help 55 percent of businesses generate high-quality leads.
You can integrate your chatbots with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and connect machine learning (ML) processes to applications like Google Analytics, Slack, and email automation tools.
7) Conduct A/B testing
A/B testing is a data-led method used for comparing two versions of a webpage. When using A/B testing, you are doing the following:
- You are creating two versions of your content. Many call them the “Variant,” and the “Control.”
- In this case, you display one version to 50 percent of your audience and the remaining 50 percent to the other side.
- Compare key metrics to see which part is performing the best.
One good example would be comparing landing page headlines, or checking out which one of your ads is performing better.
8) Showcase positive reviews
Positive reviews play a huge role in lead generation. You can probably relate with yourself when you want to download an app on the play, or app store. Positive reviews will make you feel better about using an application. When you see negative reviews, you’ll get suspicious and maybe not even download the app altogether.
The same goes for your business and lead generation. Many people will believe others and word of mouth is one of the strongest marketing tools out there. Reviews will significantly impact it and definitely make your lead-generation strategy much better than it is.
The new era of lead generation is here
Lead generation strategies are changing and it’s becoming more important than ever to follow the right steps for creating the ideal strategy. You need to first make sure that your website is not taking forever to load and that you aren’t overloading your website with CTAs.
Don’t forget to mention positive reviews about your business, it makes a significant difference, and conduct A/B testing. You want to see what works and get rid of what doesn’t.
