How you can turn a frosty visitor into a hot lead: the secrets of lead generation

A b2b lead generation report released by Holger revealed that most marketers are not satisfied with the result they are getting. About 80% of the people surveyed said their efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective. Only 16% rate their efforts as extremely effective and 4% report their lead generation programs as not effective at all.

What are the 16% marketers who are generating great results doing that the 80% are not doing? It is simple. They have a successful lead generation strategy in place. For you to succeed in generating leads that will turn to customers for your business, you need a solid strategy in place.

In this post, you will be learning how to catch the attention of your visitors, convert them into leads and potential client using four key elements:

1. Content marketing
2. Lnding pages
3. Email marketing
4. Facebook ads.

Let’s get started.

Content marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, it is predicted to grow to a $300 billion industry by 2019. Content marketing is a good strategy for generating leads both for the B2B and B2C niches. This is why 91% B2B marketers use content marketing while 86% B2C marketers use content marketing.

One effective content marketing strategy is blogging. The truth is small businesses that blogs get 126% more lead growth than does that do not. This is because 77% of internet users read blogs. In fact, after reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of U.S online consumers made a purchase.

Another great content marketing strategy is webinars. A survey carried out by Readytalk revealed that , 62% of all b2b marketers use webinars to prospect or nurture leads, 49% said 20-40% of webinar registrants turned into qualified leads and webinars average a 42% registrant to attendee conversion.

Other lead generating content marketing strategies includes white papers, analyst reports, videos, webcasts, slide presentations, e-books, and infographics.

So, if content marketing is an effective strategy to generate quality leads, how much does it cost?

The interesting fact about content marketing is that it is very cheap. In fact, it costs 62% less than traditional marketing and per dollar spent, and it generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.

The above statistics showed that content marketing is profitable for generating quality leads for your business. However, for content marketing to work for you, you need to create high quality, search engine optimized and engaging content for your audience. You need to do this on a regular basis so that you can always turn your website visitors into hot leads. Find out what content your visitors want and create it for them.

Ensure that you promote your content extensively to generate good results. In fact, content marketing is 20% content creation and 80% content promotion. Let’s take a look at a company that used content marketing to generate quality leads for their business. Marcus Sheridan, a Pool (River Pools) selling guy wrote a blog post that drove traffic and generated over $2,000,000 in sales.

As you start driving traffic to your blog, you will need landing pages in strategic places to collect your visitors’ email addresses so that you can turn them into leads.

Did you know that over 68% of b2b companies use landing pages to generate new leads for their business?  That is how important it is to have a landing page on your website.

However, most often than not, visitors will not want to part with their email addresses. In this case, you can offer them free resources such as e-book, report, whitepaper, guides, checklist, etc. This will help you to readily entice them to sign up to your email list.

Make sure you use fewer fields in your forms. Too much fields take time to fill and this can discourage users from signing up. Marketing experiments carried out tests on three landing page form having nine, seven and five fields. The form with five fields outperformed the rest.

Therefore, the shorter your landing page form, the better. Use a catchy headline that will attract your audience.  Add images and trust element such as testimonials, anti-spam statement, social proof, etc. Add an actionable CTA. Use persuasive words like “Now” “Get” or “Try” to make your audience click.

An example of a company that generated enormous leads from their landing page is Moz. They created a landing page that generated $1 million. Do you want know more about this topic? Discover the anatomy of the perfect landing page.

Now that you have started attracting visitors and capturing their email addresses, it is time to start nurturing them to turn them into paying customers. Email marketing is very effective.  It has an ROI of 4,300%. Also, 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message and 138% more is spent by consumers who receive email offers than those who do not.

However, in order to turn your email list into a lead generation machine, you must ensure that your emails are relevant to your subscribers or else they will be deleted faster than you think. This implies that you must know your subscribers and the type of content they like. Deliver the right content to the right subscriber at the right time.

In serving relevant content to your subscribers, you might want to segment your subscribers into groups so that you can readily give them useful content.  According to Campaign Monitor segmented email campaigns can give a 760% increase in revenue.

Ensure you do a/b test to improve conversion. Try new email formats, test new subject lines, adjust CTA buttons and adapt your content to effectively optimize your email campaigns.

Make sure your emails are not too long because it can discourage your subscribers from reading. Make it concise and use actionable CTA.

Facebook is one of the most popular social media networks out there. As at the third quarter of 2017, the platform has over 2.07 billion monthly users.

You can find your audience on the platform and directly target them with the Facebook lead ad. The truth is getting visitors to your website either from the search engine or from Facebook is not an easy task.  However, with Facebook lead ads, you can specify your target audience, create an ad and target them. It is cheap, effective and has a good ROI.

Facebook lead ads form is very easy to fill.  It is prefilled with users’ information, so they don’t have to fill in the details.  All that is needed is for them to confirm if the details are correct and then submit it.  This generates less resistance from your audience, giving you the opportunity to convert them to leads. You can learn how to create Facebook lead ads here.

A good example of a company who used Facebook lead ads to generate lead is Maserati – a luxury automaker.  They created a Facebook leads ads to sell their newly released Levante SUV. The Facebook Lead ads reached 4 million people on Facebook and Instagram.

This generated 21,000 leads and 127 vehicles were sold. Below is the ad.

Now you can turn a frosty website visitor into a hot lead by simply using content marketing, landing page, email marketing, and Facebook leads ad strategies.

This will enable you to continually generate unending leads for your business.Have you tried any of the strategies above to generate leads for your business? Let’s discuss in the comment section.

Pss…if you want know more about the lead generation topic we just crafted an hot list of 101 tips to boost your lead generation result