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Lead generation companies: What we do and how we get you the leads you need

Traditionally, generating leads was done the hard way, by sending out direct mail with a survey or by using a magazine ad. Today, the internet has revolutionised the way we generate leads.

Social media has become the best way of generating leads today.  Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Google are leading the way in bringing in new ways of generating leads.  As a business owner you may be confused by the maze of social media platforms and how you can best leverage them to promote your business and generate leads.

The truth is that social media is much more than a platform to share personal stories; it is now the most powerful way of connecting with your customers. If used correctly you can use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to generate real leads for your business. The best things about it are its cost-effectiveness and the fact that you receive leads in real time.

Lead generation companies help you to reduce costs and increase your conversion rates

According to www.dreamgrow.com 50% of consumers’ purchases, both online and off-line, are influenced by Facebook.

Social media marketing has also reduced marketing costs by 45% while revenues have increased by 24% when using social media to generate leads.

You may have used social media to promote your business. You may also be asking yourself why it isn’t working for you. So let’s look at how we can use social media to generate leads for your business.

Tips to using social media to generate leads

Firstly, decide which social media platform is right for your business. Don’t try to use them all as you may lose focus in your marketing. Once you have decided which social media you are going to use think of it as a way to bring your customers into one community. Then it is your job to try and understand them and gather intelligence.

Find out what they are interested in, what their pain points are and how you can turn them into paying customers.

Gone are the days when businesses used surveys to generate leads. Today, it’s all about creating a story, building great content and forming emotion.  We can use videos, images and great writing to push customers through a sales funnel.  It’s quick, easy and very cost-effective. The best information to get from the customer is their name, email address and phone number.

Generating leads using Facebook

Generating leads using Facebook usually means creating Facebook ads. Facebook have teamed up with Axiom, a data aggregator that provides powerful insights into your customers, such as lifestyle, income and purchasing habits. Advertising on Facebook is not only cost effective but also highly targeted.

Average prices for a Facebook ad can be as low as 40p compared to a Google AdWords ad with a cost of £2.50 per click.

Your Facebook page is like a shop front

Don’t treat your Facebook page as a way of getting likes. People who visit your Facebook page will still want to know what kind of a business you are. Make sure that your page tells your customers a lot about your business and take care to create good content that strengthens your brand.

The ‘Girls Mean Business’ page is a great example of a page that isn’t just about brand also about building leads.

Generate leads using Twitter

Twitter has caught up in the lead generation game. 92% of clicks on Twitter result in a visit to a website. Twitter ads now have greater prominence in your news feed. Here are some tips:

• Use twitter cards.
• Use an eye-catching image.
• Support your ad with a fact.
• Make your copy very strong as you only have 140 characters.
• Track brand mentions and never lose out on an opportunity again.
• Twitter chats or ask me anything are great ways to create leads and can spark conversations for bloggers about relevant topics.
• Host an event.

How to generate leads using LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful B2B lead generation tool. It connects you with decision-makers across every industry. Their powerful InMail helps you to connect with decision-makers directly. What’s great about this is that it lets you get past the gatekeeper, usually a secretary, and go directly to the decision maker.

Here are some tips:

• Write a killer profile and be specific with your skills.
• Create your own group. These are your connections who you will be building a relationship with.
• Create a hit list of potential customers and you are ready to build a convincing message.

Leads on Instagram

Instagram isn’t just about vanity, it’s a platform to showcase your products. Beautifully. You can afford to be lazy on Instagram and snap away taking beautiful pictures. Your picture can tell the story for you. What’s different on Instagram is that instead of great content you can use hashtags. People jump from one hashtag to another giving you instant brand exposure. Once you start receiving ‘likes’ the conversation will follow. Don’t ignore comments but answer them as swiftly as you can.

Power up your videos for lead generation

Video has to be the most powerful form of marketing and lead generation. Video helps to power up all of your senses to create a powerful ad. Video uses sound, visuals, graphics, energy and a powerful message. Everything and more that you need to capture a lead.

Creating a video has never been easier. Your phone has become your video camera and with the touch of a button you can upload a video as quickly as you create it.

Go ahead and compare a video ad with an image ad. You will be surprised with the magnitude of reach you get with a video ad compared to an image ad.

AdWords, grab a lead at the right time and at the right place

Google owns more than 70% of the search market share. Which is the best market share in the mobile, desktop and tablet sectors. Google AdWords marketing offers businesses the opportunity to deliver high quality leads in real time. That’s people looking for your product or service at a time they need your service the most. Yet marketers have wasted a lot of money by getting their AdWords campaign wrong and losing out, throwing away thousands of pounds. So what’s going wrong?

Here is a list of mistakes businesses often make when running a Google AdWords campaign. Lead generation companies can help point these out to you.

1. Wrong keywords. Targeting the wrong keywords can be a huge mistake and a waste of money. Research what your customers are entering into Google search to find a business or service like yours.
2. Poor landing pages. Simply sending a user to your website may not be the best thing to do. Your customer visited your website and expects you to solve their problem. Make sure the landing page is relevant to the keywords they used in the search.
3. Poor content on a landing page is the main driver of increased bounce rates. Talk to your customers in the language that they understand and offer them a solution using your product or service.
4. Weak call to action. Give your site visitors a reason to leave there name email address and phone number. And make it easy for them to do so.

Building a successful AdWords campaign should be strategically thought out. Get this right and high-quality leads will poor in.

Your website is the face of your business

Your website is one of your key assets. It’s your shop window and gives great opportunities to create leads. Setup a CRM tool that catches leads and funnels them to an automated email system. Popular CRM tools include MailChimp and Infusionsoft.

Lead generation companies can help build you a better campaign so that you can get to doing what you are good at and that is building a better business.

What is digital marketing?

The ultimate guide to digital marketing success

What is digital marketing and why is it important for your business? Every business faces different challenges when it comes to digital marketing. Promoting your business online has drastically changed from 10 years ago, and as a website owner, you are facing an approach that can be full of challenges. By using the right techniques and tools you can come up with a digital marketing strategy that will result to better engagement, growth and ultimately, sales. In fact, 80% of decision makers say that they prefer to get the information in a series of articles rather than an ad (ExactTarget.com).

5 benefits of getting your digital marketing plan right

The following are some of the reasons why having a solid digital marketing plan can help your business stand out:

• Your business ambitions are clearer and more focused.
• You get a good idea of who your target demographic should be.
• It shows that you are an authority in your market niche, which makes your brand stand out.
• You get to reach out and communicate with your ideal customer. This leads to better engagement and in a higher conversion rate.
• You stand stronger against your competitors.

What is digital marketing? It’s time to get your online marketing spot on

Now let’s get started with how your business can get to know the importance of digital marketing to help your business grow and thrive. A digital marketing strategy becomes your marketing journey or map that’s focussed towards a single goal, which is the success of your business online. It can seem daunting, but this guide will help break down the stages that make up the full digital marketing plan.

Know your ideal customer

“The most important activity of any entrepreneur is to clearly identify the very best customers for your product or service, and then focus all marketing, advertising and sales efforts on this particular type of customer.” Entrepreuer.com

This is the most important question to answer before mapping out your digital marketing strategy. Knowing your ideal customer is going to be the most important factor of all your marketing efforts, since your entire marketing plan is going to be centred around this answer. Most businesses fail to understand this and end up targeting the wrong people for their products or services. This results in a loss of budget, no leads and no sales.

So, what does your ideal customer look like?

Your ideal customer will be those that have a need for your product or service. They have a problem and you as a company can help them solve this problem. The following are some questions you can answer to get a better idea of the customers you need to target.

• What is your target demographic? Do they comprise of more males or females? • What are their proportion when it comes to their age, interests, location, search and buying habits?
• What is the market size of your ideal customer?

Once you have answered these questions, you will be well on your way to answering your question ‘what is digital marketing’? and designing a digital marketing campaign that serves that purpose, and more importantly, helps your brand get the ambition it needs in order to succeed.

Why you Should love a customer journey map – and so should your customer

By mapping out a customer journey of your website, you can plan and design your website to fulfil the needs of your customer. Each point needs to satisfy a need or question. Your customer will be searching for answers around your product or service. Nail this and you will have a long term, loyal customer.

No two customer journey maps are alike, so don’t be tempted to copy one from another similar website, regardless of how closely it matches what it is you offer.

In this way, customer journey mapping looks to map out the complete customer experience throughout all of the main touch points between the customer and the website, from the initial contact, through to the selecting and purchasing process, to the after sales and possibly a repurchase. Customer journey mapping allows you to get a better understanding about the following:

• Improving the usability of a website.
• Getting a better understanding of how different customers use your site. • Remove any inconsistencies that hinder the buying process.
• Improve the overall customer experience.
• A better understanding of why someone exits your website at the buying stage.

Keywords optimisation

Fact, being on the top position of Google can increase traffic by 33% (searchenginewatch.com)

Keywords optimisation or search engine optimisation is the process through which you can help your website rank higher for particular queries searched on search engines such as Google, Yahoo , Bing and so on. There are plenty of tools online, including Google Analytics that can help you get your feet off the ground when it comes to keyword optimisation.

Create multiple landing pages

A landing page is the page that your visitor will arrive at after clicking on either an organic search, display ad or a Google text ad. Landing pages that have great content and engages with the customer have a higher conversion rate as compared to those that are cluttered with bad information. The more tailored your content is the better your conversion rate will be. That is why it is important to have a unique landing page for each key phrase.

Offer a killer call-to-action

A good digital marketing campaign compels people to buy your product or service. This is where your call to action comes in. “find out more” “visit us” and “call us today” are just some of the examples of a call-to-action. But, there is no limit to the creativity you can use to convert your audience. Keep it simple and easy to buy.

Brand – tell a story

We all love to read a story. Even better, if the story is true, and is about you, then you have built a relationship with your customer. What happens when you create a story? You create empathy. The result is a loyal long-term customer, because your customers are able to create a connection between their basic need and your commitment to providing a solution for the need.

Website site speed

We live in a fast paced world. People just don’t have the time to wait around for your website to load. Most consumers expect a website to load within two seconds or less. So, it’s your job to make that happen. Do away with the extra images, or useless GIFs, and anything that can slow down the load time of your website. Also, since your audience will probably be viewing your website on multiple devices, it is critical that your website can be viewed cross platform, as in, loads fast regardless of it being viewed on a smartphone, tablet or laptop. To test your site speed by Google, click here https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

Driving traffic using SEO – some common mistakes

We’ve touched on the importance of SEO above, so here we are going to name common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to their SEO strategy.

• Focusing only on the search engine. Instead, write content that is people-friendly, not bot-friendly.
• Bulking on the backlinks is not a good idea. In fact, too much of anything can be bad for you, and that goes for backlinks too. Building too many bad links in a short space of time can result in a penalty from Google so only stick to good quality content links.
• Not focusing on authoritative links. Don’t waste your time linking to sites that have little relevance to your industry.
• Blogging – a great way to boost your traffic. Search engines love content and so do users. A blog is going to give you the opportunity to create unique and informative content which is relevant to your target audience. You can use a blogs as a marketing tactic to drive more traffic towards your website.

Advertising gives you instant results

Digital marketing includes organic (or free) optimisation along with paid ad placements. As SEO can be a long-term goal, spending a small portion of your budget on PPC can give your great short-term results. But having an ad campaign still won’t guarantee you great results. You should ensure that you have great landing pages that have all of these important elements discussed in this article.

Social media

Simply put, social media marketing helps you to get your content seen. Marketers today call this strategy “top of mind.” The better you promote your content across multiple marketing channels, the more your content and your brand is going to be seen.

Build an audience

Marketing is expensive, and unfortunately, the “if you build it they will come” strategy doesn’t apply to online marketing. That’s why there are actual steps that can be taken which will help you build a loyal audience. So, maximise your success by building an audience of prospective buyers. Capture names and email addresses. Set up a CRM campaign to communicate to on a regular basis. And finally, always focus on quality rather than quantity, and always track your metrics.

Email marketing

There are many reasons why email marketing is considered to be extremely important for any digital marketing campaign. First off, it’s cost effective, easily measured and enables you to reach out to more customers. Yet, email marketing can be costly and time consuming. Using the right software can set your email campaigns on automation so that you are left with valuable time running your business. Email programmes also let you segment your data allowing you to trigger emails at the right time with the right message.

Conclusion

I hope this article has answered your question of “what is digital marketing?” While a digital marketing strategy can be beneficial to the success of your business, the selection of marketing techniques that you use will mainly depend on the brand type as well as the market circumstances. When it comes to digital marketing the deeper your insights into customer behaviour and preferences are the better your campaign will be. At the end of the day, the success of your digital marketing campaign will also depend on how you manage the various components that are part of your digital marketing strategy.