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Leads are the lifeblood of your business. After all, if people aren’t interested in your products and services, you’re not going to get very far. But all leads aren’t created equal. From those ready to purchase, qualified leads are the gold standard of leads.
Hand drawing Lead Generation Business Funnel concept with white chalk on blackboard.
The good news? There are many ways to generate qualified sales leads online. If you’re looking to learn more about lead generation channels, you’ve come to the right place.
Read on for a roundup of 4 of the best ways to generate quality leads online.
Email marketing works best when leads are permission-based, meaning the prospect has opted in to receive messages from your company. Spamming people has a brand-negative effect. Throughout Covid, the adoption of email marketing grew by leaps and bounds. Marketers understood that they had access to email wherever a prospect was working.
To overcome the flood in a typical in box, email campaigns should leverage highly creative messaging empathetic to prospect needs, informative videos, and links to relevant landing pages for conversions. Like other forms of marketing, email works best as a consistent campaign over time. Often, prospect response is in the 3rd or 4th email within a campaign.
As social media has become increasingly pervasive, it’s valuable for many aspects of marketing—including lead generation. With the number of social media users worldwide expected to balloon to 4.41 billion by 2025, its lead generation potential will only continue to grow.
One of the reasons social media marketing is so powerful for qualified lead generation is that it boasts high rates of engagement when compared to other platforms. But that’s not all. Because user profiles are full of information, it’s got built-in targeting and contact info.
Factor in geo-targeting and location tools, and it becomes obvious why social media is an optimal channel for lead generation: it lets you convert users into paying customers by targeting them with the most relevant content.
A few social media lead generation strategies include:
When you’re facing a challenge or trying to solve a problem, odds are you head straight to Google. That’s what most people do, and its why SEO is so important.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is how businesses can make sure their products, services, and websites are being shown to the people looking for them. When users enter a query into a search engine, the search engine uses an algorithm to determine which websites will best satisfy that query. When done correctly, SEO can register your website with a high search engine results page (SERP) ranking and create a consistent stream of qualified traffic.
SEO is also valuable because it yields organic leads which are proven to convert more leads into prospects. As such, it is a budget-friendly form of marketing that can help you build an authentic audience, create consumer trust, and improve online reviews and rankings.
Strategies for using SEO for qualified lead generation include:
Many people think of search engine marketing, or pay-per-click, as a tactic to promote e-commerce; however, it’s also a valuable channel for businesses and websites looking to boost their online lead generation. In addition to helping to fill the top of your funnel, PPC can also target prospects at all funnel stages. Clicks are only charged to your credit card when a prospect lands on your website or landing page.
PPC for lead generation has many advantages, including:
In addition to the above, you can tightly control your daily click budget. Once a budget is reached, ads are “turned off” for the day.
While organic marketing is an excellent way to attract leads, paid search engine marketing (SEM) methods like PPC can fast-track the road to higher SERP rankings.
Regardless of the type of products and services you’re offering, your lead generation strategies can make or break your business. It’s best to rely on a professional marketing team to organize, create and track your marketing while you remain focused on the day-to-day responsibilities your business requires.
Contact us today to discuss how the X-Factor Web Marketing team can help you generate quality leads online or with help another marketing question, such as how to build brand awareness online.
Think having amazing products and services is enough in today’s competitive marketplace? Think again. The truth is that when consumers choose certain products and services, it’s not as much about the products and services as it is about something else: the brand they’re associated with.
Need proof? Think Apple, Nike, and Google. Mere mention of these brands evokes certain feelings. And when these feelings are positive, products and services practically sell themselves.
Enter brand awareness.
Wondering what brand awareness is, why it matters, and how to make the most of it? Read on for our comprehensive guide to how to build brand awareness online. What is Brand Awareness? “Brand” refers to the way your company, customer service, products, and services are perceived by consumers. It is the lump sum of many aspects—both tangible and intangible—that shape how people see you. As such, your brand identity is one of your company’s most valuable assets.
Brand awareness refers to the degree to which your target audience recognizes your brand. In addition to creating association, brand awareness also showcases your brand’s personality, which further helps consumers bond with you.
Why Does Brand Awareness Matter? The more familiar your brand is, the more people will trust you. And trust is everything to today’s authenticity-craving consumers. It’s what transforms shoppers into loyal customers, prompting them to return again and again to your brand.
Brand awareness is also what sets you apart from your competitors. What makes a potential customer reach for your products on a shelf over another company’s? Brand awareness. In fact, 77 percent of consumers choose to purchase items based on brand name while 82 percent of investors look for brand recognition.
Brand awareness has other benefits as well. It makes you more credible, which in turn improves consumer confidence. It can also be used to communicate shared values to your target—an important capability given data indicating that nearly two-thirds of global consumers prefer to support purpose-driven companies.
In today’s employee-empowered job market, meanwhile, strong brand awareness can even help you attract talent.
The takeaway is clear for businesses looking to gain an inside edge? Building brand awareness is a must-do.
Tips for Building Brand Awareness All of which begs the question: How can you build brand awareness for your business? Well, it starts with a brand awareness strategy. A set of marketing tactics designed to help your business communicate its message, connect with its target audience, and promote brand recognition.
1. Harness the power of SEO If you want your brand to gain exposure online, there’s no better way to do it than with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO drives organic traffic to your website, which provides the seamless experience today’s consumers crave.
By researching keywords and building content around them, you can help your site place high on search engine results pages. This not only gets more clicks but is also a measure of quality assurance. After all, if Google recommends your business, it must be good, right?
2. Run a variety of brand awareness campaigns From native ads to social media ads, there’s no single-best way to maximize your reach to your target audience. That’s why it’s important to use a mix of methods.
For example, while native advertising is an incredibly effective way to increase brand awareness and attract new customers, social media marketing such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ads have other benefits—such as helping you target audiences based on specific preferences and behaviors and circumventing potential search engine algorithm issues that can impede organic and native reach.
3. Create amazing content From blog posts to videos, content remains king. In addition to helping you leverage SEO, it also allows you to deliver value to your customers. The best content is relevant, engaging, and credible. Its ultimate goal? To deliver satisfying experiences and build trust.
4. Make your content shareable You’ve put the time into making great content, so why not make sure as many people as possible see it? From social media posts to product pages to infographics, make it easy for your customers to share your content.
This turns your customers into brand ambassadors—an especially powerful technique when you factor in that today’s consumers trust their peers more than sales pitches
5. Be consistent Consistency of voice is critical to brand building. It helps consumers recognize your brand and what it stands for. Conversely, inconsistency of voice can have the opposite effect.
Consistent and well thought-out marketing messaging delivered consistently gains “mind-share” in the right markets. When a purchasing decision is being made, your company is in the mix.
Your brand voice and message should consistently resonate across all consumer channels.
Branding is a slow, methodical process that takes time and effort but the results pay off!
6. Monitor and measure While measuring brand awareness can be challenging, there are some metrics that can help you get a better sense of how you’re doing. These include measuring your website traffic, reviewing search volume data, and using social listening tools. Using tools like surveys and net promoter scores to set benchmarks is beneficial.
If you want to leverage the full impact of the brand you’re working hard to build, brand awareness cannot be an afterthought. Unfortunately, many businesses are so caught up in more “ROI based” tactics that they overlook the critical question of how to build brand awareness online.
That’s where X-Factor Web Marketing comes in.
As specialists in all things digital marketing, we can build your firm’s brand awareness. Allow us to focus on what we do best so you can focus on what you do best.
If you’re one of those folks who have web analytics and never reviews them, this video is for you. If you don’t have analytics attached to your website, it’s free and something you should pause the video to do now! Only kidding. Thanks to cookies, everyone is followed on the web now, offering unprecedented data regarding visits to your website. To evolve your operations as a modern, agile company, analytics data should be used to determine the overall user value of your website experience and which tactics are delivering the best ROI. Like all data, it’s only effective if measured with regularity to identify trends that could impact your bottom line. We look at a diversity of Analytics every day and can quickly uncover weaknesses in your website or marketing program. If you’re interested in a review of your web data, provide us guest access to your Analytics account.
