What Makes a Good Lead-Generating Activity?

No matter whether you’re a multi-million dollar enterprise or a startup, your sales and marketing teams are likely to face the same challenge – how to attract new leads and increase sales? It’s an open secret that without a stable source of leads, your business will suffer from the worn-out customer database and your revenue will be limited only to the customers you already have. With this in mind, forward-thinking companies know that a successful lead generation strategy is a central factor that directly influences company growth.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what lead generation actually is and list several easy-to-implement, yet effective, lead generation activities that will help you to increase sales.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of identifying, attracting, and gathering information about the people that may be interested in your product or service, and who can then become your customers. Lead generation is useful for both B2B and B2C business models, as it enriches your customer database and, as a result, boosts sales. Apart from that, the process helps increase awareness about your brand and grow credibility for your business.

Presently, there is a huge range of lead generation strategies that help to raise interest in your products or services and make potential customers share their contacts with your business. Even though there’s no universal solution that will work for every company, here are several lead generation tactics that have proven to be reliable for most companies.

Lead generation is a complex process that can get messy without reliable tools. That’s where a CRM platform comes into play. It helps organize information about leads, stores the history of interactions with them, and automates lead capture from the website. Equipped with a set of marketing tools, the CRM software allows you to personalize your marketing emails, segment your target audience and monitor the effectiveness of campaigns. Regardless of the lead generation strategy your business decides to employ, implementing the right CRM solution will definitely make any strategy more effective.

Define Your Target Audience

Before establishing any lead generation strategy, make sure you know who your target audience is. Reaching out to the wrong people will result in poor response rates and will be a waste of time, money, and effort.

Instead of taking shots in the dark, take your time to create a buyer persona. Think carefully about the demographics, locations, preferences, and interests of your target buyers. This will help you to define what your target audience is and what strategies will most resonate with them.

Optimize Your Website

Your website is one of the primary sources of information about your company. Therefore, it should be optimized to make it as effective as possible. Create an appealing design, develop attention-grabbing headlines, and post well-written content to present your product or service in the best light and convince the target audience to buy it.

Provide Free Product Trials

Potential customers understand that it’s better to actually try something once than to hear and see it touted a hundred times. By providing your target audience the ability to test-drive your product or service before committing to a purchase, you allow potential customers to experience the benefits for themselves and eliminate all possible pre-purchase doubts they might otherwise have.

Send Value-Packed Campaigns

Email marketing is still one of the most efficient ways to engage with your target audience. To make prospects keep in touch with your brand, you may send them value-packed marketing campaigns with free e-books, checklists, consultations, coupons, allowances, discounts, etc. This keeps your company from being forgotten and allows you to convert leads into real customers more quickly.