Lead generation takes advantage of a potential customer’s interest in your business. It’s more effective than cold-calling or cold-contacting since leads have shown their curiosity about what your product or service is about in some way or form.
You can make it your business to provide companies with prospects who have a higher chance of converting into a paying customer rather than merely selling data on people who may not be interested in your clients’ merchandise. Digital marketing has vastly improved advertising and catching your target audience. There are also a lot of niches that you can choose to focus on.
Why Is Lead Generation Lucrative?
Consumers nowadays are wiser. They know that each brand they see online is trying to sell them something. With lead generation, you can sift through millions of Internet users and find the ones who have shown organic interest in your clients’ business. This way, the transition from curious window-shopper to paying customer becomes more natural.
Lead generation technically falls within the second phase of the inbound marketing process. It happens once you have established an audience, so they’re no longer strangers to you or your client’s brand, and those followers are ready to be sales-qualified leads.
What You Should Do To Start Your Own Lead Generation Business
As with other types of ventures, you need to learn more about lead generation before you can go ahead and build your business. There are lots of valuable resources online like blog posts from HubSpot and training courses fromJournal Review to give you in-depth knowledge on this aspect of digital marketing.
After you’ve gained the necessary information about the technical processes involved with a lead generation business, start your company by following these tips:
1. Choose A Niche
It’s crucial that you choose a niche that’s popular but not overly-saturated with lead generation companies. You must find the balance between a product and service that’s always in demand, but not with too much supply. Some of the best industries are insurance, medical, legal, and real estate because they provide high lifetime customer value with massive potential for development.
2. Pick A Platform
The most common platform is creating a blog where you can post articles about the niche you’ve chosen. However, social media is another channel that’s gaining traction because of how easy it is to promote your posts and build brand awareness by reaching your target audience.
Here’s an in-depth look at popular lead generation platforms:
Facebook – The social networking giant has a feature that allows administrators to add a simple call-to-action (CTA) button on top of your brand’s page, which can direct your followers to your website. There’s also the Lead Ads function, which allows users to stay on their website to give their information and get your offer.
Twitter – The microblogging site has Twitter Lead Gen Cards, which provide the name, email address, and Twitter username of potential customers, which are automatically generated for those who interacted with your promoted tweet.
Instagram – Instagram is a fantastic platform to promote your client’s brand or your blog. You can add a link in your bio that directs prospects to a landing page. To supplement your lead-generating link, you can drive traffic to it through your posts or stories.
LinkedIn – The professional networking website created Lead Gen Forms that auto-populate a user’s information when they click on your CTA. This makes data collection straightforward.
Blogs – If you already have a blog, you can monetize your content by getting your readers to give their contact information to you and share that with your clients.
3. Price Your Leads
Research diligently on how much leads cost in the industry you’ve chosen. The price varies among niches and even within the same trade, so it’s best to get a holistic idea of the amount you should charge for the data you have.
One way to do this process is to get the minimum and maximum selling price for leads. Another method depends on the lead’s age, whether you have acquired in-depth information from the prospect, and, as mentioned above, the industry that you’re in.
Take into consideration the guarantee as well. This means that you may need to refund your clients for bad leads. Make sure that you address this in your contract by having policies and procedures for lead returns written in black and white.
What You Can Do To Maximize Lead Generation For Your Clients
As you can see, anyone can start their own lead generation business. However, there are things that you can do to ensure that you get the highest converting leads for your clients. When they see that most of the people you’re sending their way are converting into paying customers, they’ll continue to ask for your services because of its positive impact on their business.
Here are lead generation tips to help you get the most out of your leads:
1. Know The Right Tools To Use
You must know the right lead generation tools to use for each metric you’re trying to measure. There’s software for separating leads from non-leads, communicating with prospects, and reaching your target audience through marketing tactics.
Some valuable lead generation tools include:
Leadformly - Forms are crucial to capturing leads, so you need to optimize each one in your website to entice prospects to give their contact information to you. The program allows you to create high-converting lead generation forms.
Hunter - This email lookup service is ideal for finding people who mistyped their emails in your forms or those whom you connected with during in-person networking activities but weren’t able to get their email address. With this, you can type in the person’s name and get a hold of their contact information.
Boomerang - If cold email outreach is part of your lead generation strategy, this Gmail extension lets you schedule emails. Moreover, you have the option of bringing emails back to your inbox if you don’t get a reply from the recipient to help you keep track of follow-ups.
HubSpot Sales - HubSpot Sales is a section of the digital marketing company’s platform that gives you the power to track email opens and updates you when the prospect reads your message. It also has a Gmail extension. Overall, HubSpot is one of the best tools for automating digital marketing from managing your contacts to publishing posts to your blog and gathering new leads.
Unbounce - This tool is for building custom landing pages that, as the name suggests, will facilitate conversion completion and avoid people from abandoning your form. It has a drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates that you can personalize for your brand.
IFTTT - If This Then That is a platform for automating a series of actions when a specific scenario happens. For instance, if you use Craigslist to find leads, the software can automatically send you an email when someone from your industry posts in a particular category on the website.
Intercom - This live chat app provides visitors on your site to reach someone in your team, which helps increase conversions if they have questions about your content or the products you’re endorsing. Its features include conversation management, targeted messaging, and automated content publishing.
Vyper - Contests are an excellent way to reach your target audience. Vyper lets participants garner additional entries by completing more actions like answering a form on your blog, referring a friend, or following you on all social media platforms.
2. Construct A Grading Structure For Prospects
Not all leads are equal. Some may be ready to leap from stranger to customer while others may have expressed interest or curiosity about your client’s products or services but could still need more time and persuasion to warm up to the brand. You ought to define a criteria to separate the leads that are high-converting to the ones who needs more work.
By differentiating the levels of interest for your prospects, you can implement marketing strategies that are appropriate for them in the hopes of having all your leads become paying customers of your clients. Nurture and educate each potential buyer using relevant content.
3. Value Quality Over Quantity
The grading structure also ensures that you direct the highest-converting prospects to your clients. Sending several leads doesn’t always assure you that a sale will happen. With most lead generation arrangements, you only get paid if your referral buys something from the company.
That’s why you should only provide the contact information of those who are fully interested with what your client is selling to avoid wasting you and your customer’s time, effort, and resources. You’ll also gain a reputation of being trustworthy and effective if you practice this quality over quantity principle.
Conclusion
A lead generation business is beneficial for both consumers and companies since you direct potential buyers to reliable sellers, where they can purchase the products or services they want or need. Learn more about this particular industry, especially about the tools that you should use by reading online materials and signing up for training programs that will give you in-depth knowledge about its processes.
