Create buyer personas and revisit them often:
It’s crucial to maintain insight into who your typical customer is and what they need. Revisit your buyer personas every quarter at a minimum, and ideally every month, to ensure your message stays fresh and relevant to your audience.
Establish authority in your space:
Outbound content is a great way to do this; create content that doesn’t even mention your product, but rather is educational and simply includes your logo. Establishing your brand as one the market looks to for expertise and insights produces superior brand recognition.
Targeted content is always best:
You can’t be all things to all people. These days, your message and content must be highly relevant for leads to take notice. Aim to target specific market segments with different content initiatives, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Focus on quality rather than quantity:
You can have hundreds of blog posts but if none of them is interesting or engaging, they are irrelevant. One valuable piece is worth 10 irrelevant ones, so keep your focus on highly relevant content that engages your audience—it’s perhaps the most important
lead generation tips there is.
If your content is awesome, your readers will share it:
This is one reason why quality is so important. Look for ways to create content that stands out from the crowd. If it makes the reader say “wow,” they are more likely to share it, extending the reach of your content and bringing you new leads.
Focus on engaging leads, not simply adding names to your database:
This is among the most important
lead generation marketing strategies. Higher engagement levels equal more leads generated. Unengaged leads don’t convert, so focus on engaging them first and foremost and the rest will take care of itself.
Be strategic with your email marketing—don’t inundate them:
Email marketing is still one of the most important and useful lead generation techniques. But, with the volume of emails being sent today, leads are on guard and if you overload them they will unsubscribe, plain and simple. Shoot for no more than one email every week—one every two weeks is preferable.
Map out the buyer journey:
It’s important to understand the stages that a buyer goes through on the journey from realizing they have a need, through to selecting your product or service to fulfil that need. Identify each stage they pass through on the journey—you’ll need this for effective content creation.
Match content to the buyer journey:
Once you understand each stage of the buyer journey and what a lead needs to know or understand before moving to the next, you can create content that specifically provides the necessary information to progress leads on to the next stage.
Embrace multichannel marketing:
Leads are like snowflakes—no two are identical. And this applies to how they obtain their information as well. Some like
social media, while others prefer reading emails or watching videos. Make sure you cover the entire spectrum by presenting content in a variety of formats.
Have an email opt-in mechanism:
The fastest way to lose a lead to unsubscribing is to begin your relationship with them by sending unsolicited spam. Allowing them to opt-in ensures that you are marketing to leads who are genuinely interested to hear what you have to say.
Include forward to a friend links in emails:
Assuming you’ve already created awesome content and are now ready to start sharing it, give your audience a way to share it with their colleagues and friends. Hey, that’s essentially free marketing for you!
A/B test… and do it often:
Never assume you’ve reached perfection and don’t need to continue evolving. Trends shift and so do the needs of the market. A/B test your email subjects, email bodies and landing pages frequently to confirm that you’re on the right track, or to alert you to the need to course correct.
Use social media, every day:
It’s where people look these days for information, and it’s great for an online lead generation. Once you establish authority in your space (see above) you should see your social media following grow steadily. Try to post every day if possible—on every platform you use—and if you can’t, aim for at least three posts per week.
Respond to comments on social media:
Social media interaction is a two-way dialogue, so it’s important to respond to comments posted directly to your site or under your posts. It will cement your reputation for being a brand that genuinely invests in its customers.
Mix up your message and tone on different social media platforms:
Push for diversity in your
social media marketing. This is much more effective than duplicating the same message and tone across them all. The conversation on
Facebook should be inherently different than
LinkedIn, so take the time to mix it up.
Engage with industry influencers:
Identify and interact with them on social media. Contact them directly and ask about co-authoring content with them that they will post to their sites. Then enjoy the ability to reach their followers with content that you know they will want to consume.
Beware of keyword stuffing:
SEO is critically important, but don’t overdo it with keywords. Be sure to include your primary keyword at least four times in the body of your web content, and try to keep it at that. Search engines will notice when you saturate your content with keywords.
Format your web page title tags properly:
You should try to follow this format: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand. And remember not to go over 60 characters.
Limit your web pages’ description tag to 160 characters:
If you go over 160 characters, some of your descriptions will get truncated in the results displayed by the search engine.
Place your primary keyword in your web page’s URL:
Search engines look for this, so be sure to include your keyword in the web address to generate higher SEO rankings for each page.
Use pay-per-click advertising:
This is particularly important if you’re a young business looking to grow, as it ensures your web pages appear at the top of web searches for the keywords you specify.
Share customer testimonials:
You can create a web page template that lets you include testimonials at the bottom of various pages. This is more effective than having a dedicated testimonials page, as readers will see them more often and don’t have intentionally look for them to become aware of the reputation your company has among its customer base.
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