Your business is small, but your challenges are not. And one of those looming challenges is to find new customers to widen your customer base.

Basically, you need to attract potential customers and increase their interest through nurturing so that they can turn into your customers. This is what lead generation helps you do. It is the process that increases visibility, trust, credibility, and interest from your target audience. So by creating a good lead generation strategy, you can get traffic from high-quality prospects who can be turned into high-value consumers. 

Here are some tips for creating a system that will help you identify sales leads in your small business, and — with the right focus and effort — turn them into customers.

Understanding What is Lead Generation

A lead refers to anyone who has shown interest in the products and services of your company. With the right strategy, you can turn those leads into your customers.

Lead generation is the practice of attracting potential through various marketing channels. The point is here to spark those potential interest in your products and services. It is an important practice as it helps your business grow. It lets you create a healthy pipeline that you can nurture to attract clients and boost revenues.

Now, let’s understand the strategies you can use to generate leads for your small business.

Incorporate an SEO Strategy:

Most consumers research and buy products online. They are likely to choose the products appearing in the top search results. The point is here to increase your visibility. Here comes SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization to improve your site’s visibility when people use phrases or keywords related to your business. An SEO expert will choose the right keywords used by your target audience. If you have basic SEO knowledge, you can use free tools like Keyword Planner to get more keywords to target. Once you get the right keywords, use them in your title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and Image ALT tags. Also, make sure to use them in the content.

Then, check if you have created Google My Business listing to attract a local audience. Google My Business displays your business information on Google Search and Maps.

These little steps can help you improve your web presence which in turn attract more quality leads for your small business.

Use an Email Marketing Strategy:

Email marketing is another powerful marketing channel to generate leads. It helps you reach new customers and produce revenue on a little budget. In email marketing, you send a commercial message, generally to a group of people, using emails that include advertisements, sales, donations, or requests for a subscription.

However, to generate leads through email marketing, identify your ideal customers–the people who are ready to buy from you. Then, create an offer that solves those issues and create a landing page to direct leads, and make sure it comes with an opt-in form.

Join Groups and Communities on Social Media:

There are many groups and communities on social media where you can find your prospective customers.

For example, there might be a fashion community on Facebook where you can promote your cloth outlet. When you find such communities and groups which are related to your industry, you have a great opportunity to tap into the prospectus.

If you find such an audience aligning with your product and services, try to establish a real connection with them. You can share your content with them. Or see if some special promos can work. Why not give them a link to your email list?

Create Your Community:

Online communities are a great source to find potential leads. If you build a branded community or public social network, the key objective is to interact with a group of serious followers who love your brand and want to engage with it. Not only the group can include your loyal audience, but also those who consider you an authority in your niche.

This will reward you when you post an offer on the channel. Some people will opt for it while others can share it with friends and associates who are out of the community.

Enhance Your Website:

No matter how amazing your products or services are, a customer won’t be interested if your website is not appealing and user-friendly. A well-optimized website encourages the customers to explore more and buy as well. Examples include Amazon and DropBox.

While there are many things to consider while optimizing your website, here are the important ones:

• Page Load time is important as most customers abandon the slow-loading website.
• Web design should be simple and clear, if not aesthetically pleasing.
• Mobile optimization ensures that your websites look good on a mobile device.

Implement Backlinks:

The number of high-quality websites that link back to your portal also plays important role in the ranking of your website. If you want to improve the SERP ranking of your website, this is a key thing to ponder over.

As I have told you a higher ranking increases the chances of getting found. To get high-quality backlinks, check out the sites that have high domain ranks and good scores.

Improve Your Content Marketing Efforts:

Google Ads is also an effective method to generate leads.

While outbound strategies are still efficient, they are likely to be more invasive. You are delivering a message to your audience. In contrast, inbound marketing brings clients to you by solving their issues.

Content marketing is also an inbound marketing strategy that is all about delivering quality content being relevant to your audience. While textual content is still relevant, you can venture into engaging ones such as videos and infographics.

Offer Free Trials:

Big and established companies have spent years building their reputations. No wonder why consumers trust them easily.

But this is not the case with a small businesses. New visitors have many doubts–it can be justified as they have never shopped from you before. That’s a free trial that should be offered to let them test your product or services. It can also help you generate leads.

Free trials are effective. They let prospective customers experience your products or services. It is just like those test drives being offered by car dealerships. Another benefit is that a person who opts for a free trial also enters your marketing funnel, meaning that you can continue to nurture those leads until they become a customer of your business.

Ask for Customer Reviews:

Reviews impact the buying decision.

Whereas positive reviews encourage a customer to buy from you, negative ones can create doubt in their mind.

A strong presence on review sites for your business can help generate leads. Sure, this strategy can be rewarding if you get positive reviews. However, you can also turn a negative review into an opportunity. For example, you can respond to the reviews of unhappy customers assuring them that you will take care of their concerns. This conveys a message to other users that you are caring about your customers.

But for all this, you need to ask for reviews from your customers.

Create Landing Pages:

If your site is not able to generate leads, there might be a problem with your landing pages which are the pages where visitors land after clicking an ad or search result. A poorly designed landing page can impact the conversion.

Another mistake could be sending traffic to a homepage instead of a dedicated landing page. This idea can cost you because the homepage is not that optimized for conversions. A homepage is more likely to work as coordination between other pages.

Therefore, make sure to use a dedicated landing page for your products or services to capture more leads.

The Bottom Line:

Getting leads can help your business survive and thrive in this competitive environment. Incorporate the lead generation techniques as given above, but make sure to track your analytics. This will help you determine the things that can work.

Once you start seeing results, you can use good automation software to automate the lead generation process. This way, your sales team don’t have to spend time on mundane task.