Stabilizing business operations and thriving is one of the toughest challenges for businesses in the Post-Covid-19 era. Those that want to come back stronger will need to reimagine everything.
Businesses will require cohesion among all teams—customer-facing and otherwise to strengthen their readiness to confront both challenges and opportunities this era presents.
More importantly, you’ll need to identify and implement innovative ways to understand changing consumer needs and attract customers to your brand.
To that end, we’ll consider five great lead generation strategies that may help you generate hot leads.
- Invest in LinkedIn Ads
There are several promising statistics about LinkedIn ads:
Brands that invested in LinkedIn ads enjoyed an exposure that resulted in a 33 percent increase in purchase intent. Further, LinkedIn ads can reach over 14 percent of the world’s population. But it’s not just any population, but those who care about their work.
Professionals don’t just frequent the platform to capture fresh industry insights or connections, they also come looking for solutions.
The platform offers excellent prospecting opportunities so long as you reach the right people on time, and the best way to do this is through LinkedIn ads.
There are various ads you can use in your campaigns, including text ads, sponsored content, inmail message ads, as well as dynamic ads. Here’s how to get started:
- Create your account within the LinkedIn campaign manager platform. It will facilitate setting up and controlling ad campaigns, management of creative assets, creation of custom target audiences, conversion tracking, and provide performance-based reporting.
- Know what you’re going after. Is it lead generation, brand awareness, website visits, or conversions? Your goal enables the platform to make recommendations that may boost your campaign’s performance.
- Utilize the targeting options. Ad relevance improves the likelihood of engagement and conversion. There are multiple attribute categories at your disposal including demographics, member groups, interests, work experience, job titles, education level, and skill.
- Epic Content Still Rules
Great content attracts audiences. When you’ve got your audiences’ ears, you can market your solutions to them and make a sale.
To maximize your content strategy:
- Put together your customer avatar. If your content is to appeal to customers, it will need to reflect their values, pain points, and business drivers. You’ll also need to think about potential objections to a sale to ensure your content tackles their concerns upfront.
- Choose your content types. While content remains an epic way to reach potential customers, some content types attract leads better than others. Examples include social media posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, case studies, and blog posts.
- Choose appropriate content distribution channels. Now that you know your target and the content you will put together for them, think about distribution. You can do it organically by sharing the content on social channels where your avatar hangs out. Or you can invest in paid distribution channels like social media ads, banner ads, and native ads.
- Create a content map. It will map out what content needs to be published, by whom, the frequency of publishing, and promotion. This way you’ll keep track of what content is coming down the pipe.
- Cold Calling
As you engage your lead in conversation, you’ll be boosting awareness of your brand and educating them about their problems and the solutions you can offer. The listener can easily pick up on your expertise, improving credibility and encouraging them to consider working with you.
These are the hallmarks of lead generation that you find within the cold calling tactic.
Best practices include:
- Verify that your list of prospects is ready to solve their problems. As you build your list of contacts, use online data like search intent to verify their propensity to solve their problems. There are businesses that lack the time, motivation, or resources to solve their problems. Calling them may not yield positive results.
- Identify the gap in their needs. Craft an opening statement that tells the prospect the problem you’ve noticed or think they experience. You can base this on your observation of their business or industry stats that show that X percent of their industry struggle with this problem.
- Get the prospect to validate your point (2 above). Now that you’ve pointed out the gap, you need your prospect to agree that it’s a problem they want to fix it. You’ll need to get them to say it quickly otherwise you’ll be going on about something that’s not a priority for them.
- Ask for your goal. If the prospect confirms that solving the problem you pointed out is a priority, ask for a meeting. Inexperienced salespeople may think that’s moving too fast, but if you keep selling past this point, you may jeopardize the whole thing.
- Create Lead-Generation Quizzes
Today’s buyers need a reason to part with their email addresses. Reasons that go beyond promises of exclusive content. Site visitors and indeed potential customers want something that inspires and entertains even as it educates them.
Lead generation quizzes pretty much fit that bill. Since most quizzes require the user to provide their email addresses before accessing the answers, they make for great lead generation tools.
A solid quiz won’t just grab attention and keep audiences engaged but also allow you to tap into people’s problems almost on autopilot.
Best practices include:
- Ensure the quiz is a well-thought-out problem-solver. Research what customers struggle with and center your quiz around it. Since quizzes rely on pre-determined flows to pilot users in a certain direction, depending on the answers they provide, you’ll be able to recommend useful solutions.
- Keep your end goal in mind. You’re here to collect email addresses while gaining an in-depth understanding of the user. Embed an email request form for respondents to complete once they finalize the quiz to facilitate results and allow you to maintain touch with the respondents.
- User-friendliness. Avoid complicating your quiz by offering too many options per question. 3 to 4 answers for every question are sufficient and will help you narrow down the problem and provide relevant solutions.
- Retargeting
This is a savvy way of engaging leads who’ve shown interest in your brand previously. Through retargeting ad campaigns, you continue to build awareness and additional touchpoints to past website (and LinkedIn) visitors.
These campaigns are displayed across a network of websites or on social media networks to catch the eye of past users consuming social and web content.
Once the user clicks on the ad, they are sent to conversion-optimized landing pages that align with their position in the purchase process.
Retargeting campaigns are ideal for top-of-funnel prospects as well as those at the bottom of the funnel. You can target:
- Contacts who’ve visited your site more than once
- Contacts who’ve visited your product and pricing pages
- Contacts you read your blogs regularly
- Contacts in a particular geography
Narrowing down to list-based targeting helps you fine-tune ads and landing pages with messages based on your knowledge of the audience.