If recent years have taught us anything about marketing, it’s that you can’t rely on in-person sales tactics. Networking events, trade shows, and even in-person retail sales aren’t a reliable option when people aren’t gathered together. Transitioning your business to generating leads digitally can be intimidating but there are three surefire ways to build your business online. Here’s how we help our clients to generate leads online.
How To Generate Leads Online: Our Top Three Techniques
Like any new lead generation tactic, these techniques take some time, expertise (or training), and advertising budget to accomplish. But, when properly executed, you can watch hot leads pour into your business from previously undiscovered avenues. We’ve organized our top three techniques for where your customers are in your marketing funnel: from just starting the relationship, through active interest, to completing the sale.
1. Social Media Ads: Build Your Relationships And Sales
If your business hasn’t done much with your digital presence yet, this is the place to start. The easiest way to dip your toes into digital marketing is through social media. The first thing you need to do is choose the right social media platform to build your brand. Some brands will thrive on TikTok, others need to make use of LinkedIn. Choosing the right social media platform is the first step in ensuring your time and advertising budget are well spent.
Share Engaging Content
With all of the noise on social media, how can you make your business stand out? There are many ways that brands can make their social media presence unique: through storytelling, sharing educational content, or through a unique voice or personality. The most important component to standing out on social media (and making the most of the infamous algorithms) is creating content that engages your audience. It’s important to think of how your brand would use social media if it were a person. Social media algorithms are built to engage people – so you need to come prepared with engaging content.
Video content is particularly popular right now and can be easily created if you plan ahead. Posing questions and polls can also help create engagement with your audience. Be sure to include faces where possible since our eyes are naturally drawn to other people.
We recommend creating a content calendar to keep you on track. Using our free downloadable calendar of special days can help to inspire new posts for your brand.
Advertise to Your Audience
Relationship building happens naturally with your social media audience, but that engagement doesn’t always lead to sales. To be more effective you’ll most likely need to utilize an advertising budget to reach new leads.
Facebook, for example, has a useful audience builder that allows you to get really specific with who you are targeting. That could be people who have already interacted with your brand, people who are similar to your most avid shoppers, or it could more broadly include people with an interest in your industry. From there you can create ads for as little as $1 per day to reach the people who are most likely to become customers. Keep in mind that due to recent privacy changes you may not be able to perfectly track the sales generated by your ads (especially for retail businesses), but that doesn’t mean sales aren’t happening.
2. Building Website SEO: Generate Leads By Sharing Your Expertise
When a user is midway through your marketing funnel they’ll likely start researching your industry, your products, and your brand. Ensuring that your prospective customers can easily find everything they want to know about your business is key to building trust, and ultimately making the sale. Work on creating useful content on your website that answers your customers’ frequently asked questions and establishes your expertise in the field. This helps your business in two ways: you grow your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), while generating leads right from your website.
Blogging 101
Starting a blog for your business isn’t as daunting as many people think. Brainstorm about the questions you typically answer for new customers, or for your prospects before making the sale. All of these questions can become informational blog posts on your website.
Taking the time to write out blog posts that answer common questions benefits your potential customers by giving them the information they need before they’re ready to buy. Additionally, each blog post can use lead generation forms to give your business contact information to add these prospects to your mailing list or allow you to reach out and schedule your first meeting.
SEO and Keywords
While you can increase your search engine ranking in many different ways (like our listing amplifier for local SEO) identifying the right keywords is critical, especially when it comes to blogging. Read our post about Golden Keywords to make your website number one on Google.
When you’re ready to make a real impact on your search engine results, our SEO Audit can take you to the next level. Get in touch for more details.
3. Google Ads: Drive Leads When They’re Actively Searching
Our last (but not least) favorite way to drive leads online is through advertising on search engines like Google. Google Ads are among the most popular ways to advertise your business online because of their massive reach and reliability. Not only can your website consistently appear at the top of the Google search engine results page, but on Google Maps, and as visually rich display ads on websites all over the internet.
Google ads can be used at any time in the marketing funnel.
- Demand Gen ads are great for name recognition and relationship building.
- Shopping ads are perfect for retail items because they show the product and price.
- Search ads are great for when people are directly searching for products or services like yours.
- Video ads allow your brand to advertise your products or services in engaging advertisements.
- App ads allow app creators to advertise their apps on many different channels associated with Google.
One of the most powerful ways to use Google ads is when people are directly searching for your product or service. Shopping or search ads can send people directly to the page on your website where you can make the sale. For products or services that aren’t as easy to sell outright, you can direct people to a landing page with your lead generation form. This way people can fill out your form and you can continue with your sales process with your new leads!
Generating leads online can be intimidating! However, understanding your options and choosing the best fit for your business allows you to prioritize your time and marketing needs. At Get Online NOLA, digital marketing is our specialty. If you’re ready to shine online, click the button below to book a strategy session!