Lead generation is the primary and the most significant stage of a sales cycle. In fact, it can be called as the “sales engine” of any business. Lead generation strategies followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the lead that has been generated is not of superior quality, which means in other words, if they do not fit your brand’s ‘ideal customer profile’, your sales funnel and pipeline could end up to be extremely weak and vulnerable for a drop in sales revenue.
Lead generation includes the technique of collecting a database of potential leads with their contact information. Since, small and medium businesses’ strategies circles around the principals of spending less and gaining more, lead generation tactics should never become an uneasy overhead for your company.
84% of consumers trust the recommendations made by their family and friends.- Nielsen Survey (2017) Click To TweetAs a procedure, lead generation helps to move focused prospects into your sales funnel whereby you can target those leads for nurturing and eventually generate a sale.
Here are a few low budget lead generation ideas for small and medium businesses, which we found interesting enough to share for the growth of SMBs:
#1. Exit intent popup
Creating an exit intent popup for your website hardly requires 15 minutes. Exit intent popup helps businesses to track the movement of the website and mobile application users by offering an opt-in form when they leave your website.
Once you find your website visitor is leaving your site, by creating exit intent pop-up, without acting on a CTA (Click to Action) button like registering or buying, you can interrupt your visitor and re-direct them to take a specific action.
Several large organizations have been using this technique since long and have achieved exemplary results by implementing this as a part of their marketing strategy.
You can use exit intent popup when people are leaving your pricing page, landing page, or abandoning your shopping cart, because these parts of your website allow people to make the most important decision before buying your products and services.
#2. Add call-to-action button
Popularly known as CTA, call-to-action buttons are used for drawing people to use a particular product, application, or service. CTA is meant for provoking instant responses. For example, they provide the consumers with compelling reasons to make an immediate purchase with click-bait verbiage like- “This offer expires in 3 hours”.
You can include call-to-action buttons in your digital brochures, catalogs, emails and others. Hence, a CTA needs to be designed in an effective manner that incorporates click-worthy contents. For instance, you can include in your CTA content what your product or service can offer and how the consumer can actually sign-up and use it for free.
Always make sure that your “Sign up for Free” CTA button should be jazzy enough to stands out predominantly over everything else on the web-page.
#3. Share best practices or success stories
Most of your consumers would always like to know if your product or service really stands up for what you say or can it deliver the solution your consumers are looking for.
The best way to answer this question is to showcase what your brand did for your customers, and how their business benefitted by purchasing your products or services.
Therefore, while sharing your success stories, write a small compelling introduction, with a CTA that requires your prospects to fill in their details, once they want to download them.
This way, you will understand that your prospects are trying to find a solution to the challenges you noted in your story and might be interested in purchasing your products or services for solving their issues.
#4. Guest blogging
Guest blogging is a roundabout way for generating leads. Blogging as a guest on other’s websites increases your web traffic and thereby introduces prospects to your solutions, by using back-links within the blog contents to redirect traffic to your website.
Guest blogs are mostly published on websites that attracts very high traffic.
However, before you start blogging here are a few things that you need to remember:
#5. Add testimonials
Testimonials are similar to success stories but while success stories are written from your end, testimonials are provided directly by your customers, in their own words.
You shall often find customers who reach out on social media to appreciate your product, customer support endeavors, or even your organization. You can always leverage these testimonials and publish them on your website.
Testimonials are a highly effective way of demonstrating your success that helps your potential customers to decide on making a purchase.
#6. Add social proof
According to Nielsen Survey: “84% of consumers trust the recommendations made by their family and friends.”
Therefore, word of mouth marketing on social media is one of the best ways for generating leads. There are several portals that allow you to get connected to your potential leads. One such portal is LinkedIn.
Once you are connected with the leads and understand the level of interest, you can initiate conversation with the prospect or even create LinkedIn Groups, which allows people with similar taste and interests to comment or react to your postings on the group.
Takeaway
As an add-on, here is a link to the CONVERGEHUB LEAD GENERATOR, which is a free tool that lets you visit anyone’s social media page (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp etc.) and capture all information instantly without any manual typing.
Using this free tool you can save qualified leads from social media, other sites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse. It even lets you create notes and follow up tasks to get a head start with that lead.
You can save the captured leads in the Lead Generator itself or save them in the ConvergeHub CRM for even more sales power.
Did we miss on any other lead generation strategies for SMBs, on a low budget?
In such a case, please comment and let us know about it in the comment box below.
