Is your business struggling to generate leads? You are not alone. According to statistics, 61% of businesses say generating leads is their biggest challenge. At the same time, 53% of marketers report that at least half of their budget is invested in lead generation. Without considerable qualified prospects or leads, your business cannot prosper. And if you apply the right strategies, your leads can easily turn into ambassadors who will advertise your brand.

5 lead generations strategies to explore

To boost your reach, here are 5 proven lead generation strategies that your business can follow to overcome your lead generation challenges.

1. Examine your website’s homepage messaging

Do you have a strong call to action (CTA) on your homepage? Your website homepage will be receiving visitors from social media sites, referring sites, and so on if you have been active in promoting your website.

Having a homepage CTA that blends with other elements like the headline, subtitle, relevant content, opt-in forms, and images is a great way to capture leads. For example, have a look at this homepage by Databox:

Databox homepage follows three essential tips to get leads and massive website traffic. For starters, they include a targeted message inundated with rich keywords to attract their target audience. The opening question, “Do you know how your marketing performed today” also attracts the users and helps them connect with the brand. 

Secondly, they have a to-the-point yet relevant information about their tool. This two-sentence information about the tool is enough to let users know what it’s all about and what they can expect from Databox. 

Finally, there’s an opt-in option that asks the website visitors to enter their company email and get started with Databox for FREE. Here, they’re using the combination of a CTA button and email opt-in to their advantage. 

2. Use email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to get acquainted with your customers on a personal level, increase trust, and establish brand authority. You can ask your site visitors to sign up for your email list. The subscription process should be simple. 

Use email to educate and interact with your subscribers and promote your products and services. Also, share your best advice and let your subscribers know the value of your products by solving pain points. 42% of companies say that email is one of their most crucial lead generation channels.

Some good email features to use and capture attention and increase leads are lightbox popups, sidebar widgets, after post widget, floating footer bar, and slide-in.

3. Leverage marketing automation

In a study, 80% of marketing automation users reported that they saw an increase in leads.

To start with, email automation can improve your bottom line. There are tools like Mailshake that you can use to increase your leads through automated email marketing.  According to a case study, Growthscore produced 500 leads in only 72 hours by leveraging an email automation platform.

Another way to implement automation and improve your lead generation strategy is by sending a follow-up. Stats have it that you are 9X more likely to convert your leads if you follow-up within 5 minutes.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots and customer relationship management (CRMs) tools are great for follow-up. They can automatically respond to your customers without needing your support team or sales team. Another advantage is that this strategy drives higher conversions while costing less.

4. Don’t neglect social media marketing

Among the leads gathered from social media, there will be people interested in your company. Plus, social media marketing can let you keep in touch with prospects for sharing special offers or news. 59% of marketers say that social media marketing is the most effective strategy used for improving lead generation quality. 

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter rank among the top platforms for lead generation. Some of the best strategies to implement to get more leads on social media include:

• Optimizing your profile by providing contact info, adding CTA, and a link to your bio.
• Creating compelling clickable content.
• Designing a user-friendly landing page.
• Using social lead ads.
• Offering incentives like sweepstakes, coupons, discounts, etc.
• Personalizing your offer.  

As long as you have a solid social media strategy, you can generate plenty of leads without having to invest much. In one study, it was found that 66% of marketers spend only six hours weekly on social marketing before producing leads.

5. Implement content marketing

Content marketing plays a crucial role in generating leads. Not only is content marketing effective, but it is inexpensive. It can make 3x as many leads as outbound marketing while costing you 62% less. Marketers who create blogs have a high advantage over those who don’t, as blogs are 13X more likely to increase ROIs. Make sure to craft informative and relevant content. Using effective headlines can increase traffic by 500%.

Adding the right keywords, adding numbers in headings, writing long-form content, making content scannable by using lists and bullets, adding infographics and high-quality images are some other ways to make your content discovered by search engines as well as easily readable to visitors. Consider taking help from an SEO company to get an expert SEO consulting session.

Also, consider guest blogging for acquiring qualified leads. It works as you will be teaming up with popular sites in your niche that have already gained your target audience’s attention.

Here are some tips to remember while guest blogging:

• Explore blogs that are doing well in your target leads’ niche.
• Come up with evergreen topics that your audience can read anytime.
• Build a lead magnet linked to your email marketing service to get leads directly.

While creating a lead magnet, keep it highly relevant to the content you have created for your guest post as well as the overall theme of your target blog.

Don’t forget to optimize your guest writer’s bio by sharing a link to the lead magnet’s landing page, as shown in the example below:

If you want, you can even share links in your intro alternately. 

Wrapping up

Lead generation is something that can’t increase by leaps and bounds overnight. However, if you apply the right strategies, you will see results before long. Start by optimizing your homepage messaging as your homepage will usually receive more visitors as compared to other pages. Email marketing, automation, social media marketing, and content marketing are other tried and tested ways to increase qualified leads. Whichever strategy you apply, keep your prospect’s experience in mind. 

If you are able to keep your prospects happy by offering enhanced user experience (UX), providing ample information, and solving pain points, capturing leads will become much more manageable. Once you gather enough leads, you can work on converting them into paid customers.

This guest blog post was written by Tim Ferguson, a writer and editor of Marketing Digest. He enjoys writing about SEO, content marketing, online reputation management, and social media. Connect with him on LinkedIn.