Every marketer’s significant objective is to generate quality leads, in enough numbers to keep the business growing. A successful lead generation mechanism is what keeps the funnel full of sales prospects.
Amazingly, only 1 in 10 digital marketers feel their lead generation campaigns are effective. And the campaigns are giving them a good number of quality leads within their marketing budget.
There are a lot of things that make a lead generation campaign successful. Most of the time it’s really difficult to know which part of the campaign needs fine-tuning.
Here I am going to discuss the 10 techniques which I used and they helped me generate quality leads. I generated quality leads for every business I have been associated with. So, let’s see how to generate quality leads for your business.
The Mechanics to Generate Quality Leads
Let’s first discuss the mechanics of lead generation.
Usually, there are four crucial elements that need to be there to make the inbound lead generation happen. These include:
Offer
An offer is something that is perceived as very high in value. Offers include free consultations, ebooks, whitepapers, coupons, discounts, free trials, sample products, and product demonstrations.
Call to Action
A call-to-action (CTA) is either text, image or a button that asks people to click on it and links directly to a landing page.
So that people can find and download your offer after filling their detail. Details which are asked to be filled are usually:
- Name
- Phone number
- Email address
- Age
- Gender
- Marital Status
- Sometimes physical address too;
After filling these detail the page allows to download the offer or get the free samples.
Landing Page
A landing page is a specialized and dedicated page for one particular objective.
It usually contains information about one particular offer and a form that requires the visitor’s basic details.
After filling in the required detail visitors can download that offer.
Forms
You can’t capture leads without forms. Forms collect contact information from a visitor in exchange for an offer.
The detail filled by the visitor can later be used to contact the visitor by email, phone, or letters.
The tips discussed below will cover each of these elements. So that you can generate the most qualified and quantified leads for your business. Now, let’s get started.
Use the Element of Scarcity to Generate Quality Leads
The scarcity of anything has a psychological influence on us.
We need more of the things which are scarce. Scarcity is great because it creates a fear of shortage.
And thus creates a sense of urgency to buy the commodity which is scarce.
Limited Time Offers
Limited time offers are among the most popular in the scarcity category. Just think about a sale on your favorite e-Commerce store.
Practically every ad is a limited time deal, stocks are limited, hurry up and grab it before stocks get sold.
Or Limited Seats available in an educational institute, hurry up and reserve your seats before seats are filled up completely.
Limited Quantity Offers
When something is limited in quantity, it suddenly becomes more unique or exclusive. In some cases, limited quantity or supply offers have outperformed limited-time offers. Why?
This is because it’s hard to tell when an offer of limited quantity will become unavailable. Because the quantities might get sold in a day or even in an hour.
While a time-based offer has a known end time means by that time the product would be available to buy.
Limited quantity offers are good for not only getting people to say “yes” to your offer but to avoid procrastination.
This type of offer is an excellent way of selling. This can be used for stock clearance sale or end of season sale, etc.
Limited Time and Limited Quantity
When both the scarcity factors are used in one offer that’s the Limited Time and Limited Quantity Offer.
First-come first-serve basis.
For instance, for an academic course, the institute might offer a 20% discount on the first 10 seats on the first day of the offer. That’s a very powerful combination.
Many businesses package these scarcity tactics with discounting, which is another great value-addition to the offer, especially for e-commerce businesses.
Create Attention-Grabbing Title
Catchy Titles, beautiful and meaningful images, and a great copy are essential for a lead generation campaign. If your offer is a piece of content, such as:
- A whitepaper,
- An ebook,
- Presentation,
- Essay,
- Research paper, etc.
You should put effort into creating an amazing title.
As you know, reaching your customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting. And your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.
Create Offers for Different Buying Stages
Most of the website owners want their visitors to contact them and the most common offer on most of the websites is “Contact Us.”
There is nothing wrong with the approach but not everyone is ready the very first time to talk to your sales team.
Remember, people want to do their own research for the product or the service they want to buy before engaging with your sales team.
Every prospect in the funnel is at a different stage of exploration or consideration, some may need more education than others.
Hence, it is significant to understand the need of every prospect in the different stages of his buying journey.
For example, someone at the beginning of the buying journey may be more interested in an informational content like a guide or eBook or maybe an explainer video, whereas someone more committed at the end of the buying journey might be more interested in a free trial or demo of the product or service.
You don’t need to pick and choose; create offers for each phase, and include a primary and secondary CTA to these offers on various pages throughout your site.
Or if you are sending email newsletters to your prospects, leads, customers you can create different landing pages for each type of your prospects and customers list to offer the next level of offer you have created.
Make Your CTA Clearly Visible
Calls-to-action performs best “above the fold” – the space where your web page is viewable to the user without having to scroll down, mostly on the header above the menu bar.
As per the heat map analysis on thousands of high traffic websites, anything “below the fold” is only viewed by 50% of website visitors.
Hence, it is a good idea to place your CTA slug above the fold and that will surely double your impressions and clicks. Doubling impressions on your CTAs will significantly increase your lead count.
Clarity Trumps Persuasion in Generating Quality Leads
H.G. Wells said that “Advertising is a Legalised Lying,” and that’s true to some extent.
Most marketers put more focus on being clever than clear. Rather than being clever, the marketers need to be clear while designing the lead generation campaigns.
If you’re giving away a free eBook on 25 Free Digital Marketing Tools for Managing Your Online Business, say “Download our FREE eBook to Manage Your Online Business Efficiently.”
Your Hook in the CTA should clearly convey a compelling benefit of receiving the offer for the visitor.
This is much more effective than “Download Now” or “Get a Free eBook on Digital Marketing Tools.” These simply aren’t specific enough.
See the below CTA is to promote a free eBook. There is little copy in this banner ad and a button that indicates it’s clickable.
“60,000+ Downloads” shows social proof and “60 pages Guide” clearly says how many pages this book contains.
Create Dedicated Landing Page for Your CTA
Calls-to-action sends visitors to a dedicated landing page after they click on your CTA banner or button where they receive a specific offer.
Do not use CTAs to direct people to your homepage.
Even if your CTA is about your brand, product or a service offer (and not an offer like a download, or free sample), still send them to a targeted landing page that is relevant to what they are looking for or the visitors would get confused and would leave your website in next click and that would increase your bounce rate.
Also, visitors might not want to visit your website again.
Send the visitors on a dedicated landing page through CTA will increase the chance of converting them into a lead.
Keep it Simple, Stupid to Generate Quality Leads
You certainly would have heard about the rule “keep it simple, stupid.”
The very same rule applies to the CTA linked landing pages. A cluttered page distracts the visitors.
On the landing page of the CTA be brief and to the point; it’s in the offer itself where you give more information.
In addition to your headline, include a similar image as in the CTA banner.
Add a brief paragraph explaining what the offer is. Also, add a few bullet points outlining the benefits of the offer to the visitor.
Maintain a Blog and Keep it Updated
Companies that blog regularly generate more leads compared to the companies those who don’t blog at all or blogs rarely.
According to HubSpot’s Benchmarks report, companies that blog 6-8 times per month double their lead volume.
This simply proves that blogging is a very effective channel for quality lead generation.
Don’t forget to include hyperlinks to landing pages within the copy of the blog post. Also, add them in call-to-action on the blog header or on the top of the Blog’s SideBar.
The idea is to get clicks on your offer from every possible place your visitor would be clicking on.
A/B Test Your CTA
Undoubtedly, A/B Testing is a great way to increase leads across all channels. A/B Testing is creating different copies, headlines, images, and banners of your lead generation campaigns.
Link them to different landing pages or having a different UTM tag to analyze the results. The A/B testing can be used in calls-to-action, landing pages, email marketing, advertising, and many more places.
According to research, A/B testing your landing pages and the CTAs can help you generate up to 40% more leads.
Conclusion
If you generate quality leads online then it has the inherent power to transform your business significantly.
Using great offers, calls-to-action, landing pages, and forms – while promoting them in a multi-channel environment – can reduce your cost-per-lead while delivering higher quality leads to your sales team.
These are the basic tips which one need to take into consideration while designing and lead generation campaign.
Though this article contains several best practices for every aspect of lead generation. It will help you increase your conversion rates. But, these tactics are just the beginning of the lead generation journey.
For the best results, and Generate Quality Leads don’t settle on one method. Keep tweaking and testing each step of your lead generation process. It will give you insightful data to analyze and improve lead quality and increase revenue for your business.
If you need more help on how to generate quality leads for your business you can always connect with us and we will help you get the things right.
