‍A lead generation strategy is incredibly important for business growth. Generating leads means increasing brand awareness and interest in your products or services, nurturing curious prospects through the marketing funnel into your sales pipeline. Creating leads for your business is a powerful way to build relationships with future customers who also become loyal to your business.

The golden rule of marketing is to quality over quantity. But is this true for all types of business?

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For example, if you’re a fashion eCommerce store, sending the latest trends, products, and most popular products as weekly updates is useful for your customers to draw them in. While, if you’re a builder, you might want to showcase completed projects every month or quarter. 

People are over being sold to and just being a number in the masses on your database. In this article, let's uncover the most useful lead generation strategies that are simple to start with.

Lead Generation Strategy: What Is It?

A lead generation strategy helps to attract and convert prospects. A lead is a potential customer who has taken some action to show interest in your brand. They have shared their contact information or indicated that they are interested in doing business with you.

There are 4 components to lead generation:

• ‍Lead capture: The process of gathering information about a lead. Information may include the lead’s name and contact information as well as relevant qualifying details about them or their organisation (e.g., business name, position, number of employees).‍
• Lead magnet: An incentive that drives prospects to become new leads.‍
• Lead qualification: A process that uses the person’s information to determine how likely they are to buy.‍
• Lead segmentation: The process of segmenting leads based on their information, habits, and activities (e.g., job title, a lead magnet that attracted them, pages they visited on your website).

The most effective Lead Generation Strategy

Although it is old, email marketing is still one of the best lead generation strategies to use. Nothing beats a solid email marketing strategy. However, you need to combine email marketing with another type of marketing to make it effective. 

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To help your website and business gain more traffic we always advise using a combination of one or more of the following marketing strategies:

• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Blogging
• Email marketing - to draw people’s attention back to your website. 
• Webinars or virtual events
• Paid search or online advertising
• Testing and optimisation
• Social media marketing
• Website landing pages 

Amongst all of these, email marketing is the easiest to start with, especially when launching a new website or eCommerce store. Email marketing can help you nurture your customer base and pull them back to your website, products, and services.

For more information read this: Get more prospects, build trust and grow your Small Business Email List

Make email marketing work for my business

Email marketing begins with an offer in exchange for a contact of a potential customer.  By creating a targeted list of prospects can help your business stay on top of mind.

79% of marketers credit email as the most effective distribution channel for lead generation efforts

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The next step to email lead generation is making sure you have happy subscribers that enjoy receiving emails from you.

In addition to using email to initiate conversations, you should also have an effective follow-up tool to stay in touch with each lead, prospect, and customer. Being top of mind gives you the chance to reach them when they're ready to buy. Use a CRM to segment leads and make sure you follow up and help guide them in the decision-making process.

Integrate lead generation with blogging

You can make your website more visible to Google users by blogging regularly. It is also an excellent way to nurture leads and build your credibility as a subject matter expert.

Businesses that prioritise blogging are 13x more likely to see positive ROI (return on investment)

70% of businesses that actively invest in content marketing have an increase in repeat customers

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According to HubSpot’s recent Benchmark report, companies that blog six to eight times a month double their lead volume. This proves that blogging is a highly effective channel for lead generation.

A simple approach to lead generation can be beneficial

While you may be utilising one or more lead generation strategies, you may feel overwhelmed with the tasks and what to focus on running your business. If this is you, reach out and contact Caria Watt to see how we can help you.

If you’re not utilising email marketing, blogging, and some of the other lead-generating strategies outlined in this article, then it’s time to work on a plan. Remember to include personal touch-points, success stories, design a great offer, create a call to action and appropriate landing pages.

Above all, keep an eye on what works within your marketing to generate new leads, nurture prospects, and close more sales.