Increasing sales is important for businesses. But getting sales can be quite challenging when you’re constantly running out of prospects to nurture and convert.
Nowadays, lead generation has become a bottleneck for many businesses. According to HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2021, generating leads is the marketing priority for marketers.
Many businesses focus on increasing traffic to their website. You may be getting many visitors, but are you generating leads from them?
Without the right strategies and tools, you can’t convert visitors into leads. To do that, you’ll need to learn how to generate leads online.
Ideas for Generating and Capturing Leads
The main essence of getting more leads is finding a way to effectively capture them. You must be able to continue a conversation with them after they leave your website. You’ll need a few lead capture mechanisms that could attract leads and convince them to exchange their information for something else of value.
Here are some ways on how to generate leads from website visitors:
Build a Chatbot
One of the most common lead generation website best practices is to build a chatbot for the website. The chatbot could serve a couple of purposes, like:
- Answering queries,
- Dealing with customer service concerns, and
- Engaging with people by asking an ice-breaker question.
Having a chatbot helps initiate a conversation with your website visitor automatically, which it can then forward to a representative when necessary. For example, you’re offering a marketing tool that could help increase social media followers. Your chatbot could start with a trigger that says, “Do you need help getting another 1,000 Instagram followers? Talk to us today!”.
The chatbot could then provide a flow that gathers information like the person’s name, email address, Instagram handle, and marketing goals. A sales representative can then use this information to find the best package for the client.
Create a Lead Magnet
Many successful websites capture multiple leads, and clients do so by offering a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a piece of content that provides educational value to people. The most common forms of lead magnets include the following:
- Guide — Create an ebook that will teach or educate readers about a field topic in your niche. If you’re in roofing, create an ebook that teaches people the importance of using quality materials when building roofs and tips to getting roofing right. Provide a visually appealing book. Remember to add product information at the end.
- Industry Report — This might have the same format as an ebook (often in PDF, or PDF to link), but serves a different purpose. Instead of giving tips and best practices, it will offer studies and insights on the industry, including statistics and analysis that lead to some recommendations. Say, for instance, you’re a management consulting firm. You can create an industry report that shares statistics on employee engagement and determine areas for improvement.
- Free Consultation — You may also try offering a free consultation with a potential client to help provide contextual guidance. When a prospect books a sample session with you, they are closer to making a buying decision than someone who is browsing your website and reading your blog posts. It allows you to nudge an interested prospect into becoming a new client.
- Pre-recorded Webinar — Video content is one of the most active ways to bedazzle leads. If you’re a subject matter expert, create a thirty to a sixty-minute webinar and offer it as a freebie on your website in exchange for contact information.
- Assessment or quiz — Give a free assessment in the form of a quiz in exchange for people’s information. Some examples of assessments are financial health analysis, credit scores, personality quizzes, and so on.
- Online forms — It might be a stretch to say that online forms give your website visitors educational content, but it can be a great way to provide your customer with information. To add to this, 49,7% of online marketers say that online forms are their best lead capture tool.
Run an Online Event
Another of the more effective website lead generation strategies is to run webinars and events for free or at an affordable rate. In response to the pandemic, many professionals are open to joining webinars and online events. In fact, 93% of organizers plan to continue investing in virtual events moving forward.
Mount a conference or event and use the RSVP as an email list for future offers, promos, events, and product introductions.
Invite other subject-matter experts to your event and allow them to share their knowledge with your audience. You can also opt to record the webinar and use it later as a lead magnet for your website.
Also, your guest experts can share links to your website and event on their Instagram blog. If an expert has 100K+ subscribers, you'll get at least 1,000 Instagram followers who will click through to your site in search of targeted content.
Create an Automated Sequence
When you capture leads, you also want to be sure to keep them engaged so you don’t lose them.
One way to nurture leads is to put them in an automated sequence that offers more freebies and value-add content such as blogs, podcast interviews, or other lead magnets that could help build trust and establish strong relationships so you can convert sign-ups and close a deal.
Offer a Discount or Promo
If you have a physical or digital product to offer, another great way to capture leads is to offer a discount code for the first purchase. Get people to sign up to an email list and set up a trigger that sends them a voucher code when they sign up. This strategy can also hit two birds with one stone as it also gets you a quick sale on many occasions.
Tips When Capturing Leads
All lead capture strategies boil down to one tool— a lead capture mechanism, which will include the lead capture form, email list, and autoresponders that come along with it. Here are some tips when creating that lead capture mechanism.
- Simplify the opt-in process — One common mistake when creating a lead capture form is asking for too much information. Only take information that you absolutely need. In most cases, the first and last name plus the email address should be more than enough. In other cases, you can take people’s phone numbers too.
- Segment your leads — When capturing leads, it’s good to segment your email lists based on the source of the contact so that you will be able to determine which lead magnets or strategies convert best for your context.
- Stay conversational — Copywriting is an important aspect of the lead capturing and nurturing process. Conversational write-ups tend to work best compared to those that seem more stiff and formal.
Finally, work with professionals
Optimizing your website to generate leads is not as easy as adding a CTA (call-to-action) button on your homepage. Often, businesses need marketing professionals and designers to build a strategic approach.
Lead generation is just one task to master if you want to obtain a job with your marketing major.
A good marketing professional will assess your marketing systems objectively to bolster what's working and eliminate what's not. Hence, make sure to hire the right experts in your company to ensure success.
