A lot of creators are constantly looking for new and creative ways to generate leads and get new customers.
To do this, a lot of marketing professionals use in bound marketing.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing describes the various ways you can draw or bring prospective customers to your products and services through such avenues like:
- Branding
- Social media marketing
- Search engine optimization and
- Content marketing
Inbound marketing helps you to provide bespoke contents that add values to your audience or customers and this in turn helps your business build trust with your customers which is an essential building block toward establishing a business relationship with your customer.
Many established companies could hire a marketing agency to provide them with the relevant leads to grow their business. But if you have a low budget and would want to generate leads for your business, then, the strategies outlined in this post would prove invaluable for you in your marketing efforts to generate leads in a cost effective way.
Outline below are a few ways you can churn out leads to grow your business without paying a dime to a marketing agency.
1.Find A Problem Or Pain Point And Own It
A pain point is a specific problem your customers or intending customers have that gives them enormous concern.
Life is riddled with a whole lot of problems and its attendant pains. Most times, these pains are obvious to the customers and they seek solutions to them. Other times these pains or problems are not so obvious and you may have to figure a way to make these customers of yours to realize that they have a problem and that your business or product or service can help them solve it.
Your ability to identify a potential problem your target customers have [or would have] and being able to engage and convince them about your ability to solve that problem would determine how fast you generate paying customers.
Examples of pain points could be:
- Need to reduce weight
- Need to provide hearing aid to the elderly
- Providing financial advice to investors…etc
2.Create A Lead Generator
In the first place, a lead is someone who shows interest in your company’s products or services.
Lead generation in times past used to involve you purchasing lists of names of prospects and sending this list to your marketing department or to your sales team and having they cold call these people at home.
Now using digital channels, you can reach potential customers early in their buyer’s journey, earn their trust, build a relationship and be by their side until they are ready to make a purchase.
Lead generation then is the process wherein you get strangers to become someone who has an interest in your products or services
So what then is a lead generator?
Whatever medium you use to attract potential customers to your business or brand in other to engage with you or start a relationship with your business is a lead generator. They include blog posts, articles, videos or trainings.
The type of lead generator you choose to use is a function of your marketing budget. Once again,if you are on a shoe string budget…it is recommended you use pdfs as your lead magnets or host online workshops and webinars that will promote your lead magnet.
3.Advertise Or Promote Your Lead Generator
Once you’ve got your lead generator set up, there are two ways to promote it for people to see:
- Organically
- Paid traffic
Promoting your lead magnet organically would cost you nothing, but it takes time to yield fruits or get the desired reach or results.
However, investing a few quid in ads would enable you reach more people and has the potential to reach more of your targeted customers who may turn out to become paying customers for your business.
4.Craft A Referral Campaign
Once you begin to have customers and raving fans.Encourage them through incentives, offers or rewards system to recommend your business to their friends, family or network in return for ‘xyz’ benefits from your business. This way you get to garner new customers with zero cost.
Remember you need to generate leads for your business,and setting up an efficient referral campaign with your existing customers is surely going to yield outstanding results for your business in the long run.
5.Work With Your Personal Network To Identify Potential Leads
Often times we come across friends and associates we pass up an excellent opportunity to inform them about what we do …we inadvertently miss out on the opportunity to leverage the easiest way to get our brand’s offering out in the open.
Because we have built trust with our personal network…reaching out to them and asking the relevant questions in a respectable manner without sounding burdensome or inquisitive could prove effective in generating cheap leads from your networks for your business.
6.Host An Online Workshop, Live-Training Or Webinar
This is a very practical method of generating lots of leads real time. I had attended a webinar were the host introduced his paid course to the audience [ after the free teachings were over] …he did not only get leads, he equally sold quite a bunch of his course…people were already hooked,primed and receptive to his teachings so paying for a ‘solution to a problem’ found in his course was a lot easier…thanks to the webinar!
So find the right audience, give them valuable information that will establish you as an authority in your niche. And using a clear call to action, position your lead as the solution to a problem.
7.Contribute Informative Articles To Other Websites Or Blogs
This strategy though straight forward and common seem not to be deployed by many creators…everybody is busy chasing leads! To leverage this strategy, research blogs or website in your niche that have a high engagement and traffic…reach out to the owners of such sites or blogs and offer to do a free post or to serve as a guest blogger or writer.
Here’s the benefit you get when you do this:
- You’ll build relationship with peers in your niche
- You can redirect traffic back to your site
- Increase your brand visibility and credibility
8.Optimize Your Social Media To Promote Your Lead Generator
Smart marketers are using social media to generate leads.To choose the right social media platform…go for the ones most of your target customers are already using. It is generally agreed that facebook is the place to go because of the large population [more than 2.4 billion people use facebook monthly] also; facebook has some of the best tools to collect leads on its platform.
This isn’t suggesting you use only facebook to optimize your lead generator…before choosing which social media platform to optimize , make sure you are familiar with the demographics of the different platforms.
So here’s how to optimize your social media to promote your lead generator:
Optimize your profile. Add a contact information button, create call to action buttons, and provide links to your bio with a good description of what you or your business does.
Make sure that your landing pages are user friendly with simple forms. Make your contents clickable with a persuasive copy and clear images to enable your audience have a seamless access to your contents.
Conclusion
These aforementioned strategies are effective in generating leads across various industries. They are easy to implement and would yield the desired results with a little dedication, perseverance and commitment.
I hope you start using them today to grow your business and generate more happy paying customers.