Lead generation plays a critical role in determining the success of a business. It’s the top priority for more than 50% of marketers when deploying respective marketing strategies.
But, capturing quality leads can be difficult for businesses, especially when they’ve just gotten started.
People often find it difficult to trust brands they’re not familiar with and incline more toward known names in the industry. That’s why startups often find it difficult to attract a relevant audience and grow leads to fuel the sales funnel.
Fortunately, there are a few ways for new ventures to overcome this and attract an audience that best represents their niche.
So, without further ado.
Let’s get started.
1. Producing Evergreen Content
Content is king. For 87% of marketing visionaries, content is the core of their digital marketing strategies.
Content helps you connect with a relevant audience and increase awareness about your brand. You do that by addressing the queries of your potential customers and helping them find the best-suited solutions.
Content helps you to interact with your target audience and enables you to gain their trust by providing them with the answers they’re looking for.
With a carefully crafted content strategy built around relevant keywords, startups can build authority in their respective industries and generate organic traffic.
You just have to produce evergreen content that stays relevant over time. This would increase your chances of attracting more leads over the years as the importance of your content doesn’t fade away with changing trends.
2. Leveraging Social Proof
One of the most effective ways startups can get people to trust their brand is by leveraging social proof.
People are generally indecisive when it comes to making purchase decisions and tend to be more skeptical to consider new brands. They rely on the recommendations of others who made purchases prior to them and are happy with the decision.
It’s reported that customer reviews influence the buying decisions of around 72% of people. Hence, leveraging social proof is a wise strategy to consider for startups to generate leads and maximize conversions.
User-generated content influences the decisions of 90% of customers compared to other advertising forms. This shows that social proof likely yields a higher ROI compared to other promotional tactics. Plus, it’s user-generated content. So, it doesn’t cost a dime.
You can add social proof to your site by publishing reviews from satisfied customers, adding testimonials, or showcasing how your product or service served as a fitting solution for a respective use case.
It doesn’t matter how you do it, what matter is leveraging customer satisfaction to gain the trust of new prospects.
3. Using Lead Magnets
A lead magnet, also known as gated content, refers to digital resources that you allow your audience to access via your site after they’ve performed a certain action.
Using lead magnets is an effective way for startups to gather contact details from their respective audiences and grow email lists.
People often shy away from sharing their contact details with businesses, especially when they’ve just gotten started. Lead magnets come in handy here as you entice people to share required information in exchange for valuable resources.
These resources can be anything from online courses and free webinars to e-books, guides, white papers, and more. Just make sure that the gated content is curated as per the interests of a relevant audience to pique their interest for increased traction.
4. Adding Opt-In Forms to the Site
Adding opt-in forms to your website brings you a step closer to transforming your site visitors into customers.
It takes a lot of hard work for a new venture to get people to visit the company’s website. But, it’s less likely for people to make purchase decisions after their first interaction with your brand.
People generally explore different alternatives and make the final decision once they’ve completed their research.
But, for a new business, there are fewer chances for people to return to the website once they’ve left. In that case, retargeting is your only option to ensure conversions.
So, it’s best that you enable opt-in forms on your site. Opt-in forms help you gather information from users once they’ve visited your site and make it possible for you to reach out to them after they’ve left.
5. Pay-Per-Click Ads
Pay-per-click ads are an excellent way for startups to grow leads quickly without having to wait weeks or months for organic traction.
Climbing the search engine rankings may take quite a while. This means getting traction organically not just requires consistent effort but also patience. But, if you wish to speed things up. You might want to consider pay-per-click ads to generate quality leads.
PPC ads make it possible for you to showcase your brand at the top of search engine recommendations displayed in response to certain queries. And in exchange, the search engine charges you a fraction of your marketing budget.
Pay-per-click ads give you a much-needed boost in increasing your website traffic and converting it into leads if patience is not your strong suit.
6. Email Outreach
Email outreach is old-school yet one of the effective lead-generation methods to be considered by startups.
An average email marketing campaign is reported to have an ROI of 4400%. This makes email outreach one of the most effective methods to grow leads without having to break the bank.
But for this to work, you have to carefully curate your messages to grab the attention of your intended audience. Personalization plays a key role here as you can’t expect to generate quality leads via generic or bland messages.
People have diverse interests and preferences and it’s best that you account for them when drafting your emails. You can also use email templates as long as you personalize your tone and the message as per the different characteristics comprising your audience.
Your emails should be persuasive but not blatantly promote your brand. Just try and connect with your target audience by helping them find answers to their question. This would help you build trust which in turn facilitates the lead-generation process.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 6 proven ways for startups to grow leads. It’s difficult for new businesses to generate leads compared to established brands. So, if you’ve just gotten started and having a hard time attracting prospects, try out the recommendations and see if they work for you.
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Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.