Leads are important for all sizes of business whether a small start-up or an established conglomerate. Leads are the potential clients that a business is hoping to attract in the future. Without healthy leads, your business is doomed.
Big businesses like Spectrum Cable have sizable marketing budgets across the spectrum of conventional marketing and digital marketing. They can afford to create a buzz in the market that would then get them leads. Small businesses normally have a very low budget or no budget at all. What can they do to create leads for themselves? They can learn to use technology to their benefit and create organic leads.
What Can Small Businesses Do?
They will have to outsmart the big companies with their daredevil tactics and take chances. Big companies have a lot to lose so they tread carefully. They are not too keen on trying new innovative methods. Young start-ups on the other hand can take chances with an innovative idea
Here are some strategies that new businesses can use to create good-quality leads.
Learn to Do Basic SEO
Here are some simple tips for local SEO that you can do on your own with a little help from self-help tutorials and blogs. Claim your free business directory listing on Google, optimize it as much as you can. You should optimize each page of the website by adding a compelling description in your metadata. You can also tag popular web addresses in your metadata to appear in searches if someone is searching for those companies online. Encourage satisfied customers to leave a positive review on your site. Most customers do comply if asked politely and professionally.
Do Content Marketing
You can start a blog of your own. Post all kinds of interesting content on the blog. You attract more clients if you publish articles, add videos, podcasts, infographics, any number of things to attract traffic to your publishing space. Offer your expert opinion on relevant articles and blogs as a guest comment. Leave links to useful content on your blog. This will generate interest for your blog and build your reputation and social ranking. Similarly, you can publish your articles or guest comments in the local publication and mention a link to your blog in it.
Make Use of Paid Ads
It helps a business if you keep aside a small budget for advertising on social media. Your organic efforts along with the paid ads can do wonders for lead generation. Even if you have only a website, you should aim at advertising on search engines.
It is researched that 94% of B2B sales are conducted after performing some degree of research before deciding on placing an order or doing a partnership. A little investment in search engines in the form of paid ads can go a long way. Sponsor your content so that it appears on more search engines and reaches a broader range of people. Choose your target audience and correct social platform for your product or service. Make sure to have your active presence there including organic and paid content and ads.
If you have a budget and you are in a B2C business like a restaurant, influencers can play an important role. Using influencers with your product or mentioning your product on their account is the best way to get leverage. Since influencers have a fan following, when fans see their favorite personality with a product, they usually want it too
Leverage Email Marketing
With the fast pace of social media and real-time communications, emails are mostly thought of as a dead mode of communication. This isn’t true, email marketing is still a strong mode of marketing. The trick lies in what you write in the email. The old-fashioned long email with many useless words is a thing of the past. Now emails must be visual with small precise messages. It can work very well with interesting photos of your product: your actual clients using your products can be a useful tool.
It’s an inexpensive mode of advertising. It still works if you know how to make an interesting email. One thing to keep in mind in a successful email campaign is that you must have a very large pool of addresses to send bulk emails to.
