12 Effective tips to boost lead generation for small business

Lead generation for small businesses can be tricky primarily because your digital marketing team hasn’t garnered enough experience.

You need to decide which marketing channels work best for your business.

Some might do wonders, while others – not so much!

You would be surprised to know that 53% of marketers spend more than half their budget to generate leads.

With this in mind, you should focus on targeting multiple marketing channels that offer tangible results

In this blog, you will learn about actionable lead generation tips that can work best for your small business.

What is the importance of lead generation for small business? 

Lead generation is more about capturing a prospect’s interest and capitalizing on their needs. 

Business owners worldwide know that boarding new customers are the only way to observe uniform growth.

Unfortunately, all strategies need different resources to be executed. And while some might be cost-effective, others might consume a good chunk of your budget.

Without quality lead generation, it’s impossible to scale a business and grow revenue.

Hence, understanding the target audience and experimenting with different marketing channels is critical for small businesses that want to grow.

Now that you’ve learned the importance of lead generation, here is a list of essential tips to generate high-quality leads and contribute to a successful lead generation campaign.

12 Actionable lead generation tips for small businesses

Lead generation for small business begins by designing an online presence that prompts your niche to visit your website.

Here’s a robust list of ideas to help you achieve this feat.

1. Knowing your audience

Many business owners think that their products or services are for everyone. Well, it’s believed that if a product or service is for everyone, then it’s not for anyone.

So, before you are all geared up with your marketing endeavors, you must ask yourself the following questions.

• What type of customers would prefer to use my products/ services?
• What are their interests or expectations/ age groups/ demographics?
• Can your targeted niche afford your product or service?

Creating buyer personas is one of the best practices to start your marketing process.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customers, which are created based on your existing customer list and data observed from market research.  

2. Implement your SEO strategy

Google is the go-to place for people to start their product research or learn about a brand they haven’t interacted with.

If you want to appear on top of SERPs, you must implement an SEO strategy.

Here are some of the best SEO practices that you can try for your business.

• Optimize your Google My Business with relevant keywords.
• Buy subscriptions to paid tools such as Ahrefs for keyword research.
• Use keywords naturally in all content you post across your website and other marketing channels.
• Use relevant meta titles & descriptions, title tags, image ALT tags, header tags, and URLs.
• Garner has great reviews on online directories such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, and City Search. 

It might take weeks or months before your brand or content starts ranking on a search engine.  

But once you go through this grind and your page starts ranking organically on the search engines, quality leads will automatically make it to your doorstep.

3. Optimize your website

Every marketing channel’s end goal is to make users visit their website. And all your users want is an intuitive and convenient experience in finding or learning what they want.

Hence, there are many factors that you can focus on when optimizing one’s website.

Here’s a list of things to keep in mind.

Mobile-friendly website: As per statistics, mobile phones accounted for 63% of organic search engine visits.

Plus, your content will offer a different look and feel when viewed on a mobile phone screen. Hence, it’s necessary to develop a mobile-friendly website.

Loading time: As per Google’s page load time statistics, your bounce rate increases by 32% with a 1-second to 3-second increase in your page load time.

Landing pages: Poorly-designed landing pages that fail to deliver your product or service’s value are significantly responsible for fewer conversions.

Users are redirected to landing pages from ads, social media posts, and other marketing channels. If you get it right, you can get a user to take your desired action. 

Therefore, a landing page must be informative and direct, with the essential lead magnets.

4. Engage with your social media community

It has been examined that 66% of marketers generate leads by investing 6 hours per week in social media marketing. 

Initially, small businesses prefer not to use social media as they might not know the techniques to use these platforms to their benefit.

But it’s not that complicated if you pay enough attention. Your only goal should be to create a connection with your potential customers.

Today, social media offers many ways to engage with your community members.

One can start discussions, have live chats with industry experts, organize contests and competitions, and more.

5. Leverage email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most rewarding, flexible, and measurable channels. It’s because these users readily give you their email address unless you purchased it, which is generally not a good idea.

Emails can be personalized for each user. And by sharing relevant content, you can eventually convert leads into customers.

The two most important things with email marketing are segmentation and automation.  

Segmentation helps you send the right email to the right prospect. You don’t want to send a demo invitation or BOFU content to a user who just made it to your platform. 

Automation, on the other hand, can help you by removing the repeatability of your tasks while setting reminders for timely follow-ups for all your clients.  

A CRM with email automation can be a good fit for automating all your email-related activities, such as:

• Creating email templates.
• Seeking timely follow-ups.
• Segmenting users based on their position in the sales funnel.
• Automatically assign leads to sales team members.

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6. Update your blogs & content consistently

Content is your wealth when it comes to marketing.  

The only condition with creating content is that it should be relevant to your users. 

Your primary aim with the content should be to offer solutions to your prospects’ problems.  

An ideal blog should include statistics, infographics, videos, graphs, whitepapers, and more.  

The right piece of content optimized with targeted keywords can work wonders for your brand.

7. Focus on content marketing

Content marketing generates three times more leads when compared with outbound marketing.

The only way you can increase lead generation is by realizing that most visitors to your website are not ready to make an immediate purchase.

They need time to learn more about your services and what your competitors have to offer to choose what’s most suitable for them.

Content marketing is a strategic approach focusing on consistently creating and sharing valuable content with prospects.

With this approach, your sole aim should be to create content that educates a user on their pains and offers viable solutions for the same. And not just boring sales pitches!

8. Allocate a small budget for paid ads

An advertisement may be the most annoying thing if it’s irrelevant. However, if you hit the right chord and mention the solution of your prospect’s pain points, it’ll capture their attention.

With the advent of lead generation ads, capturing user information has become convenient and quick.

Pre-populated fields allow users to offer their information without being redirected to another platform.

Apart from this, conventional pay-per-click (PPC) Google ads can make you rank at the top for searches related to your products or services.  

To tempt your prospects, you can display banner ads with eye-catchy images and appropriate CTAs. 

If you’re investing in ads for the first time, you can start by deciding on a small budget. You can gradually increase your spending by learning what works best for your brand.

9. Try different lead magnets

A lead magnet is a piece of content offered to a prospect in exchange for their contact information, such as email or phone number.

This is one of the best lead generation strategies as it provides useful information and engages the prospect.

These include white papers, free trials, eBooks, and more.  

Here are the things to keep in mind while designing a lead magnet. 

• Lead magnets should be designed with a specific purpose. It can only generate quality leads if accessed by your desirable target audience.
• Lead magnets that users most appreciate are the ones that offer solutions to genuine problems. They can be anything from insider information, professional advice, or an easier method to solve something.
• A user would only trust you or even think of becoming a paying customer if you keep your word—especially the assurances you gave while soliciting their contact information.
• The best lead magnets offer solutions in a way that makes a user realize that you’re an authority on the subject.

Creating such free resources can help in generating leads and increase conversion.

10. Referral programs

Referral programs greatly help small businesses and are the only lead generation source for many businesses.  

This type of lead generation serves a company best as it doesn’t require significant investment or promotion. They mainly work on word-of-mouth publicity.  

For instance, if a friend, colleague, or family member is facing a problem, they might suggest your service or product as a solution. But this would only work if your brand offered them satisfactory services.

This organic approach highlights how referral examples can demonstrate the powerful impact of customer recommendations on expanding a client base.

11. Offer free trials

Your brand’s reputation can be a contributing factor to the success of your lead generation strategy. Offering free incentives to users is one of the ways of creating an excellent brand reputation.

Large businesses might not need this as much because they already have the client base to buy their products or services.

But if you haven’t reached that stage, you would have to offer free trials or freemium plans where a user can learn more about your services and make an informed decision.

12. Invest more in what’s working

While you implement the above-mentioned tips and strategies, you must keep a tab on the results they offer.

You can set up a Google Analytics account to observe data for your marketing channels.
This would help you learn about users who visit your page, their demographics, and the pages they engage with.

Observing this information, your marketing and sales teams can refine those pages or lead magnets that offer the maximum conversion rate while improvising with others.

So, the trick lies in doing more of what’s working and discarding what’s not.

To know more interesting lead generation ideas, check out this blog.

Afterword

Generating quality leads is the only way to grow a business.

This will help you decide what tactics work best for your business.

As you start seeing positive results, you can switch to automating some parts of the lead generation process with different lead management tools.

This will free your sales team from conducting repetitive tasks and give them more time to nurture and qualify high-quality leads.

To generate quality leads and streamline your entire business process from one platform, you can take a 15-day free trial of Salesmate.