Small businesses nowadays are promised with numerous opportunities. Brought by lead generation, they get to achieve one of the things targeted in building small businesses, which is profitability. Small businesses want to expand more to become large businesses, and this entails crucial ways to grow a certain business. 

Most of us who have been a part of any business, be it small or big, understand that growing a business is a long term process that requires a lot of patience and appropriate strategies. These days, owners of small businesses have been continuously showing interest in growing their business as well as expanding their customer base. 

One of the key factors that plays a major role in the expansion and growth of a business is the effective lead generation. Efficient lead generation campaigns have proven to be the most effective in successfully creating a network that helps entrepreneurs identify the right opportunities and convert them into customers using the right amount of effort and grit.

Why You Need to Utilize Lead Generation

A business needs leads for its primary objective, which is sales. They are one of the objectives in utilizing a lead generation. Yes, businesses increase sales when existing customers are continuously buying your respective products and services. Subsequently, this is not enough when you want to increase profitability. 

To achieve more in profitability, you need to reach more people that are interested in buying your product or service line. Consequently, lead generation must be done. To have this, let us start by understanding what a lead is and why it is beneficial to a business.

Lead generation does not only advocate for sales, but also for further expansion of the business. Brand awareness is increased to different people because of lead generation. You get to attract new customers and they get to be interested in your product line. 

Any person or business that shows interest in your product or service is a lead. Let’s say a person visited your store but did not purchase anything. However, you got their contact information by getting them to fill a form. This person is now a lead for your business. In a much wider sense, a lead is a part of a network that consumers of your products or services follow when they progress from just a visitor to a customer. We also mentioned business’ while defining a lead just in case your business is B2B.

If you are the owner of a business, you naturally want people to purchase your products or avail of your services. Larger and successful brands already have established lead generation practices. It is however important for small businesses to find out what advantage they can offer over their competitors and how their product is better than others. 

Some concerns have been raised, especially on the cost. As a marketing professional, remember that lead generation entails a certain cost, but this is not as expensive compared to radio and television ads. Lead generation is also as timely and relevant to the conventional advertising methods, but is considered as less expensive compared to billboard and other typical advertising methods. 

If you find it difficult to visualize lead generation, just try to imagine yourself as a magnet. The magnet represents a certain company in a respective industry. And with this kind of magnet, you try to attract the people who are interested in your respective industry. Not only you attract these people, but you also get to attract those who have certain problems and seek to address their problem by searching for companies who will solve it for them. With you in the market, you try to generate leads by proposing a solution to their respective problem. And with this, there is a healthy attraction to these kinds of people. 

Now after we dug into the general benefits that lead generation campaigns can bring to your business, let us look at some tips that will help you leverage lead generation as a business owner.

Spot Your Target Audience

The primary step of establishing a lead generation campaign is spotting your target audience. Unless you know who is interested in your product and whose needs it fulfills the most, you won’t be able to successfully reach out to your target audience. Spend considerable time researching your audience, come up with a detailed idea of who they are, how much they earn, what their lifestyle is, where they live, what their interests are, and so on and so forth.

To spot a target audience, you can do this by having a cold call or by a common method called “word of mouth” or referrals. This may be a conventional method where marketers typically get familiar with, but this is still significant in today’s time, especially when acquiring more customers.

Choose the Right Promotional Methods

You cannot generate more leads in your respective business when you do not apply a successful promotional method. When deploying a certain promotional method, always remember that you have to establish a stable positioning strategy in order for more leads to get continuous interest in your certain business. 

To do this, you need to have comprehensive research. Do not deploy a promotional method that you are not sure, as the cost in acquiring more leads puts into waste. Pick a promotional plan that will have you to generate leads effectively so that you can offer your products and services to your target audience. Infographics, eBooks, training videos, free trials, bonus tips, transcripts, and other promotional methods can be done to generate leads. In these current times, there are innumerable ways with the help of which you can market your business and it is your job to identify which promotional plan will prove to be the most effective for your business. As long as it suits your convenience in terms of cost and promotion, build a strong foundation on that promotional method.  

Towards the end of this article, we will tell you about some online tools that you can use to promote your business online.

Make Optimum Use of Social Media

Social Media is a platform that provides innumerable opportunities to small businesses so that they can connect to prospective customers. People nowadays get to spend most of their time on social media. This helps them in generating new and efficient leads. It is very easy to create a page on trending social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can collaborate with your leads and use social to engage in conversations with them. This will help you find out what your customers exactly like and want. In this manner, you will easily be able to lay the foundation of trust on your products and services and they will eventually purchase from you.

Tools to Boost Your Lead Generation Campaign

As earlier mentioned, these are some of the online tools that will help you create and effectively make use of leads for your business.

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a form and email collection tool. With the help of OptinMonster, you can generate more leads, subscribers, and sales from the traffic you already have on your website. It helps businesses to fire up the number of leads with advanced tools used in marketing campaigns. Some of these tools include page-level targeting, OnSite Retargeting, Lead Sharing, and exit-intent technology. OptinMonster integrates with all the important CRM and email marketing platforms which makes it easier to not only get hold of more leads but also manage and share them.

2. HubSpot Sales

HubSpot Sales is an email follow-up tool. It is an efficient way to help you save time to generate new leads for the sales of your products and services. It automatically keeps a track of the interaction of your business with the customers and helps you be up to date on what is happening with your sales. It helps you to interact with prospective customers in a more hassle-free and well-organized manner. It is also very user-friendly as it is easy to customize as per your requirements. It also offers a startup package for its first-time users for free.

3. Instapage

Instapage is a landing page builder for your business’s promotion campaigns and digital marketing strategy. There are various features such as multiple campaign management, A/B testing, easy drag-and-drop page building, and much more that Instapage offers. It can increase the conversion rate of your regular visitors to customers of your business by almost 400%. It helps to deploy new pages and significantly increases general Return on Investment (ROI). The first page that you build on Instapage is free, however, there are paid plans for subsequent pages. 

4. Hotjar

Hotjar is a multipurpose tool that helps you identify the behavior of your users. Hotjar combines various strategies such as session recordings and feedback and survey polls to help businesses build an understanding of what consumers like in your site. It combines Feedback and Analysis tools and helps you get a clear picture of how to revamp your website’s user experience and upgrade its performance along with better conversion rates.

5. Tawk.to

Looking for live chat support or a messaging application to enable effective communication between your business and your customers? Look no further because Tawk.to is just the right choice for you. Tawk.to is so flexible that it allows you to connect to your customers directly from your site, mobile application, or even from a self-customized page. It also supports performance analytics and chats history.

To sum it up in a few words, we’ve now understood that lead generation is very essential for a business to grow. You can start with very basic tips such as website creation or promotion on social media. We’ve covered some of the lead generation activities that you can give a shot at for your business and identify which strategies work the best for you. Even if you don’t succeed at one, try another and find out what’s best for you. Use these tips to get the information from prospective customers who visit your website and convert them into long-term customers!