3 Lead Generation Strategies to Create a Magical Marketing Cocktail

Don’t you love a good cocktail? It’s like a mini event on its own; a glass of something beautiful and heady with colourful umbrellas and often, with a cherry on top.

When you think about the marketing strategies that you’ve used for your business, are you more of a cocktail person or do you tend towards a beer funnel approach? 

For most of us, the whole point of digital marketing is to generate leads and encourage people to purchase our product or service, right? However, the sad fact is that many businesses – especially smaller businesses without a dedicated marketing team – struggle to get the alchemy of lead generation right.

We’ve curated some of the most relevant information from the world’s top performing businesses and marketing companies so that you can get a taste of what lead generation strategies are working efficiently.

Let’s take a look at the cocktail of ingredients that equal success.

What Does Your Home Page Say?

The home page of your business is like your shop window where potential customers can browse your offers and get a feel for your business. 

Besides the obvious recommendations of ensuring a clean and simple layout, a good user experience and a mobile friendly page it’s important to make sure that your message is clear. 

If you are driving traffic from a paid ad or from a social platform, then be sure that the message on your home page echoes that of your referring post. A confused customer will click away and follow another path which is simply a waste of time and money for you. So, if you are promoting an e-book or you have a limited offer on a certain product, then your message should be seamless.

Digital Marketing Pro increased visitors to their site to over 400,000 per month over a period of time, and as most of it went to their home page they optimised it effectively. 

Their case study says, “I did some changes to the homepage though to showcase 5 sticky posts together with a list of the latest articles. It’s a good practice to keep your most important content on your homepage or sidebar because it helps in a number of ways. I am using the same practice on this blog, look for the ‘Must Read’ section on the right sidebar.” 

Key takeaway: Ensure that your core message is clear and synchronous with all other platforms.

Offer Value First

A business relationship is all about give and take in equal measures. If you want something from your audience, such as an email address, then you need to give the perceived equivalent first. This is called a lead magnet and can take many forms such as a trial offer, a free download or a discount off their first order.

Understand that people – all people – are bombarded with sales messages and simply must ignore some of them to maintain their sanity. So, your message will need to be tailored to the audience at the point that they are in their journey, it will need to stand out from the roar of the crowd, and it would need to be valuable.

Once you have offered something to trade, you have moved away from the overly pushy, college beer guzzling mentality and have positioned yourself as a potential partner. You’re no longer selling to them, rather you’ve created an offering.

Remember, engaging in digital marketing to gain leads is a different beast from selling. Your sales department are there to determine which of your products is best for the customer, process orders, and provide good after-sales service. The lead generation process is one of drawing a potential customer to your business in order to solve a need or a pain point that they have. 

Key takeaway: Offer something of value before you ask for their information or worse, before ask for the sale. 

Reduce Friction

Have you ever found a product online, got terribly excited and then found that your attempts to buy the product seem to involve multiple hoops to jump through? It happens and can be exhausting!

That’s a sure way to lose a sale, unless you’re the only person in the world selling that particular product. 

From your home page to delivery, your process needs to be seamless. But, before you even get to that point, there are things that you can do to encourage leads to interact with you.

For example, can your potential customers contact you quickly with questions? Popping a chat button on your website or even a WhatsApp widget allows for instant interaction. On social media platforms, be sure to set your away message so that people know that their message has gone through, and when you are open for business, return their message or call as soon as possible. 

If you are asking for information, whether it be to input an email address to sign up for your newsletter or to create an account, try to link the process through Google or Facebook. This means that much of the required information can be prepopulated thereby reducing friction and smoothing the way forward. 

Key takeaway: Ensure that your processes are seamless and require the minimum of interaction from the user. 

Lead Generation Processes Work

Certainly, enhancing your lead generation efforts with these simple tactics will help to turn the tide and bring in more, qualified leads. 

We’ve found that most people want to know that you care – that you’re not simply trying to add them to your pipeline and churn them out the other side. A genuine interest in other people and the process of solving their problems with the product or service that you offer, will always shine through.

The rest of it is common sense, make it easy, make it transparent, make it seamless.