A steady stream of business leads keeps your company running, but leads don’t grow on trees. In the ever-competitive online business landscape, you must go the extra mile to snatch business leads from the hands of competitors. In other words, you need superior lead generation strategies to stockpile leads into your sales funnel and nurture them to conversion.
The following are seven bulletproof lead generation strategies — both time-tested and innovative — that we’ll elaborate on within this blog post (use the Contents List to the right to quick-jump to the one you want to explore):
- Referrals
- Email marketing
- Interactive content
- Psychological triggers
- Wording that sells
- Buying business leads
- Lead management software
Read on to learn about business lead generation strategies and how to find leads for business while not risking your reputation and long-term success.
1. Ask for Referrals
A referral program is an excellent marketing strategy for lead generation. Not only do 80% of consumers seek personal recommendations before taking action, but referred customers are 18% more loyal and 400% more likely to refer other customers. Referral traffic will grant you ever-increasing exposure, high-intent business leads, and, ultimately, more sales.
Whether you collect leads organically or through a referral program, you must cultivate trustful relationships with your consumers as the backbone of your lead generation strategy. Only around 61% of people trust their companies, making it possible to outpace 39% of competitors by establishing authority and trust.
The keys to referral success are incentives to connect new business leads — a referral program must be profitable for referrals — and leveraging the power of social networks. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook annually generate over two billion transitions to e-commerce websites.
Leading social media platforms for referral traffic to e-commerce websites:
| Characteristic | Traffic volume in million visits | Share of traffic |
|---|---|---|
| 1,078.74 | 47.87% | |
| YouTube | 551.31 | 24.46% |
| 218.66 | 9.7% | |
| 166.3 | 7.38% | |
| 121.78 | 5.4% | |
| 68.7 | 3.05% | |
| 29.37 | 1.3% | |
| GitHub | 4.02 | 0.18% |
| StackOverflow | 3.94 | 0.17% |
| Fetlife | 3.1 | 0.14% |
| Tumblr | 2.9 | 0.13% |
| Classmates.com | 2.31 | 0.1% |
| Hacker News | 0.79 | 0.04% |
Source: Statista
Do not promote your referral program in every correspondence to avoid looking desperate. Instead, have a clear content plan, focus on referral-prone customers, and ensure your offer is clear, direct, and financially reasonable. A 10% bonus on the referred customer’s purchase should be enough to generate interest.
2. Leverage Email Marketing
From awareness to consideration to conversion, a segmented email sales funnel will allow you to generate more leads. Segmented email campaigns bring 760% more revenue, making it imperative to tailor content to people throughout different stages of the email marketing funnel.
Source: Statista
Stage 1. Awareness
For this stage, you will need guides, price calculators, and other helpful information that strengthens your relationships while emphasizing the advantages of your product most naturally. Beware of hard selling at the awareness stage — it will scare away more customers rather than convert them.
Stage 2. Consideration
As strangers become high-intent business leads, you can offer them free webinars, tutorials, testimonials, and other reinforcing content.
- AMP emails are one the most effective new lead generation strategies. By transferring the action to the body of an email — checking available seats, booking an appointment, or buying on the spot — AMP emails increase conversion by around 10%.
Stage 3. Conversion
Those needing a final push must get it through a phone call or another cross-channel strategy. To convert more email leads, provide incentives and explain why your product is the right choice for immediate relief and long-term happiness.
Two Steps To Creating an Effective Email Sales Funnel
Step 1. Map Out the Customer Journey
A visual representation of the sales process will allow you to distribute your email marketing resources correctly. To draw a customer journey map, identify all possible touchpoints and customer actions at these touchpoints.
Source: Conceptdraw
A well-designed customer journey map will unlock valuable insights into how customers act throughout the sales funnel and how you can improve your service to generate and convert more email business leads.
Step 2. Tap Into Email Leads Sources
From a dedicated landing page to social networks to podcasts, use your online presence to redirect people to your newsletter via strategically placed opt-in forms, such as pop-ups, site covers, embedded forms, exit forms, and side-ins. Avoid unsolicited messages at all costs.
Last but not least, leverage email marketing automation to send the right messages to the right people at the right time. Email automation is extremely valuable for medium and large businesses, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) projected to grow at around 10% annually.
3. Engage Business Leads With Interactive Content
Quizzes, price calculators, animated infographics, contests, and other interactive content generate significantly more business leads than unengaging content. But even standard visuals generate leads effectively through 60,000 times faster perception than plain text.
The most popular quiz generated over 5.4 million social interactions! Regular quizzes capture nearly every third lead, or ten times more than an email letter. For the best results, make your quiz short — up to 20 questions — straightforward, relevant to the reader, and coherently structured (stick with the same number of answers throughout the quiz).
Source: Explodingtopics
Interactive content like polls, surveys, and stories will provide invaluable customer insights, helping you segment your audience better and tailor their experiences.
4. Appeal to the Leads’ Psyche
With an average U.S. consumer spending $300 monthly on impulse purchases, the right sales psychology can grow your bottom line exponentially. Do not just impress with discounts and offers – use subtle psychological triggers to secure more purchases.
Source: Statista
Emotional Triggers To Generate Business Leads
Fear of Missing Out
Limited-time offers and special deals your customers can’t find anywhere else may force them to act without hesitation. Creating urgency around products and services, especially on social media, will generate extra business leads while increasing brand recognition and driving newly acquired leads to action.
Source: Financesonline
Loss Aversion
Did you know people value losses 2.25 times more than equivalent gains? While the coefficient varies depending on multiple individual conditions — industry, buyer’s persona, etc. — customers will generally overreact to the possibility of losing $100 than earning the same amount. You would have to double or even triple the loot for the equal effect!
Source: Fqmom
Leveraging loss aversion boils downs to emphasizing the potential risks of not taking action immediately. For example, you can state something like “Sign up now to avoid losing $500 worth of the product” or provide a time-limited version so your customers can feel the potential loss of value.
Social Proof
We tend to copy other people’s actions to mimic the perceived correct behavior, gravitating towards products other people use. When customers see others engaging with a brand, they are more likely to engage themselves because they trust the third-party assessment of the brand.
Social proof is largely based on the opinion of your company and products, making reviews and testimonials a powerful weapon for generating leads:
- Having testimonials on your website can increase your traffic by up to 45%.
- Flawless reviews can increase customer spending by up to 30%.
Besides reviews and testimonials, you need influencers and experts who can vouch for you to build trust and eliminate the need for independent research as an opinion-shaping factor.
Source: Financesonline
Reciprocity
Whenever your friend buys you a coffee, you want to return the favor, don’t you? Reciprocity is a well-known cognitive bias that appeals to our idea of fairness as a social norm. We tend to give back value when we receive value.
To evoke reciprocity, offer a free trial or discounted price to let your business leads feel the product’s value, and then use a follow–up to secure conversions.
Source: Drip
Another way to leverage reciprocity is by running a referral program with a 10% discount for referring three or five friends. Launching the referral chain reaction may grow your lead generation efforts exponentially.
Learn three more ways to warm up your business leads using the power of reciprocity.
Endowment
Endowment bias is feeling more attached to an item you own than the ones you don’t. For example, you can offer an exclusive deal to a certain category of customers — something they cannot get from another company — to make them feel part of a privileged group and instill a strong sense of ownership over the product.
5. Focus on Words That Trigger Purchases
Not all words are of equal marketing power. Certain words and phrases can evoke a strong emotional response, such as a sense of urgency or fear of missing out. For example, “free” and “limited” suggest scarcity; “sale” and “guarantee” evoke a sense of opportunity and security; “exclusive” and “the last of its kind” makes the product look desirable.
Source: Contactpigeon
Business behemoths have long embraced the power of emotional triggers:
- Amazon uses “Prime” in membership plans to remind customers of the value of being a loyal customer.
- Apple uses “AirPods,” “MacBook Pro,” and “iPad Air” to emphasize advanced technologies and superiority over the competition.
- Starbucks sprinkles “fair trade,” “slow brew,” and “cold brew” across marketing campaigns to differentiate from other coffee shops while appealing to the environmentally-conscious demographic.
6. Buy Business Leads From Lead Providers
Buying leads may not seem like the best lead generation marketing strategy, as you may want to rely on yourself rather than a third-party company or affiliate network that you must trust to supply timely leads.
However, buying business leads may be a viable choice when you need progress ASAP, your pipeline is empty, or you launch a campaign that requires special leads you don’t generate. Above all, though, purchasing business leads is effective as a diversification lead gen strategy.
Source: Fitsmallbusiness
7. Automate Your Lead Generation
Winning the lead generation battle makes no sense if you can’t manage the newly acquired leads effectively. And you’re not alone: 65% of businesses struggle to harness their leads, seeking automation solutions to alleviate the pain.
The good news is that the market is abundant with lead gen solutions, one of which is Phonexa’s LMS Sync.
- Uniting lead analytics, lead tracking, lead distribution, and real-time reporting, LMS Sync covers the entire lead management cycle, from the first ad display to conversion, automating the lead gen process from A to Z while unlocking valuable customer insights. To further enhance your lead generation strategies, consider incorporating LinkedIn automation tools seamlessly into your automated lead generation process.
Phonexa brings it all together for you to synergize your lead generation strategies.
Schedule a consultation to discover how Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing automation suite can help you generate and convert more business leads.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a business lead?
A business lead is someone who has expressed interest in your product — for example, filled out a website form — and may convert into a paying customer. Essentially, a business lead is the same as a “lead.”
What is the difference between information-qualified leads (IQL), marketing-qualified leads (MQL), and sales-qualified leads (SQL)?
– An information-qualified lead (IQL) is a potential customer who has provided personal information in exchange for value; for example, an email address for a free subscription.
– A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a potential customer who meets certain criteria predetermined by your marketing team, whether demographics, psychographics, history of purchases, etc.
– A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a lead who meets your sales team criteria — for example, the level of interest in your company or product — and is ready for conversion into a paying customer.
Read more about how to qualify business leads effectively.
What business leads are the most important?
High-intent business leads (SQL leads) are the most important because they are the closest to making a purchase. On the other hand, low-intent business leads require extensive nurturing through marketing and communications messaging.
What is a lead generation strategy?
A lead generation strategy is a set of tools and techniques to spark interest in your company, walk leads through your sales funnel, and convert them into paying customers and brand advocates.
How can I get more business leads for my company?
Make your unique value proposition the centerpiece of your lead generation strategies. Communicate the benefits of your product and explain how it solves the problem in a way that other brands cannot guarantee.
From search engine optimization to pay-per-click advertising to pay-per-lead marketing, you can combine several lead generation strategies and then use Phonexa’s lead analytics software to separate the wheat from the chaff.
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