The biggest challenge in front of startups is how to make a product a success.
Even if your product is hyped a lot and it is offered at an unbelievable price, nothing matters if it is not marketed properly.
So, many startups don’t succeed even with the best product in the market, when they fail to create buzz about it.
Don’t you read the stories of failed startups that do not last even for their first five years?
The key to success is the number of leads. It is as simple as that.
The more leads you are able to generate for your business, the more likely you are to succeed, even if your product is average.
It means that leads are necessary to keep your startup in business and to maintain its lifeline — that is revenue generation. Revenue also translates into profits which is the only guarantee for the success of your start up.
How to Generate Leads When You Have Little to No Traffic
So here we share 20 tips to generate tons of leads for your business.
- Optimize your web page to generate more leads
Your website is the most ideal place to generate leads. What good is working hard on social media, Google rankings, and word of mouth if the customers diverted to your website don’t stay there even for a minute and bounce off without taking any action?
Your website needs to be optimized in order to achieve its objective. If it is to generate leads then you need to capture the contact information of your website visitor. This basic information about your customer can initiate their sales journey as your sales team can get in touch with them helping them kick start the sales process.
With the do-it-yourself website builders, it’s quite easy to create a website these days. But you must also be familiar with the optimization process to make sure that your website is able to attract leads.
If you don’t have the expertise in this field, we can suggest you certain tools that would help you enormously to achieve this objective.
If you want to create high performing web pages, you can use Lead Pages. It will enable you to create effective web pages that are proven for lead generation. You can choose from a lot of sample pages from the templates provided in the tool, so even a novice can create and publish them.
- Run a contest or announce a giveaway
This is one of the best strategies to generate leads these days as people are very much attracted to giveaways and contests. You can inspire the visitors to refer their friends, like or share your content and also to perform a certain action in exchange of a prize.
However, if you get more creative with your contest, you will likely achieve even better results. You can announce prizes based on point system for actions like tagging, sharing and referring. You can search online for the case studies and ideas to know how to implement such kinds of campaigns.
- Let the visitors talk to you directly
Most of the websites have a passive approach to engage with the visitors such as creation of FAQs pages, but this is not the best way.
There are many innovative ways businesses are using these days to engage with the users such as creation of help centers, forums and even live chat. Both human representatives and bots are being used for such kind of interaction, which is considered much better than the passive interaction through measures such as creation of FAQ pages. Your ability to engage visitors will always result in better engagement and word of mouth promotion.
4. Implement both outbound and inbound marketing
It is a fallacy on your part to think that only inbound marketing is enough to fetch leads and excel as a business. According to credible research, outbound marketing performs many times better than inbound marketing especially in the short term.
However, this does not mean that you should focus only on outbound marketing and should ignore inbound marketing altogether. Let’s implement a balanced approach strategy. When formulating an outbound campaign, send personalized emails, aggressively participate in online communities and share informative content that can help your audience to take an action or visit your website.
You can also conduct webinars to convert the engaged customers and solve their problems before they decide to buy from you. It not only works as a relationship building exercise but also generate more leads.
5. Leverage new technology
New technologies are responsible for bringing new trends in marketing. Smartphones changed the way we interact and access information. Similarly, with the advent of tablets our reading habits changed and we switched from paper media to online screens. So, the marketers should also adopt the technologies and channels through which they can get more leads leveraging latest devices.
6. Leveraging Twitter
Twitter is an extremely powerful channel of marketing largely because we can directly interact with any of our customer through tweets and direct messages.
You can also use Followerwonk and source potential leads with its help. It will provide you information about your followers and their social media habits. You can reach out to them with this tool to generate leads. It also helps you to connect with influencers and leverage their audiences to sell and market your product. Overall, don’t ignore Followerwonk while tapping the enormous potential of Twitter.
7. Use high quality content to your benefit
Everybody knows that content is king but very few businesses are actually successful in content creation and content marketing. The reason is we do not focus much on the quality of content. Your content should be informative and it should also address the pain points of your audiences.
Apart from that the visual quality of your content should be great. So, rather than using just the text based content, you should also try to add visual elements such as images, infographics, picture messages and videos into your content to boost engagement. To create excellent videos, you can use InVideo and Lumen5.
8. Create effective tweets
Twitter is a powerful way to present yourself in front of your audiences. You should try adding images to your tweets and use hashtags to reach wider audiences. A stronger presence on Twitter means more leads coming your way.
9. Be data driven
Being data driven helps you sharpen your marketing campaigns. For example, you can use online databases such as data.com where in you can find lots of information about your potential leads. It will not only reduce your time to look for the right kind of leads, but also sharpen your campaigns to directly contact your prospects. This way you can get 125% better output.
10. Leverage LinkedIn
LinkedIn has emerged as the largest platform that connects businesses and professionals. It has become the best place to find new clients for your business and also to publish content to your engaged customers.
11. Use marketing automation
You can automate your marketing to generate more leads.
For example, you can use Drip, which is an automation tool. You can automate your email marketing and manage pop ups through it. You can also collect information of your prospects with the help of this application. The best part of it is it can be used completely on autopilot to generate leads. You can also automate your social media with tools like Agorapulse. With the help of this tool, you can automate scheduling evergreen content on different social platforms.
12. Leverage Quora
Question and answers have been used for a long time in academics and this is considered the best way of learning. Quora is one of the most popular questions and answers portal on the Internet, where people go to get the best answers to their queries. This is one of the best ways to beat your marketing drum and let the people know who you are. You can drive tons of traffic from Quora to your website.
13. Leverage blog commenting
When you comment on a blog you instantly attract the attention of its readers. Most of the readers are already interested in the topic and they can be turned into qualified leads. Furthermore, it is the cheapest way to advertise your business and create awareness. If you are more informative and generous in your comments, people will definitely be interested in your offer, which has to be irresistible.
14. Guest posting
Guest posting is one of the best ways to generate leads. However, you should keep a few things in mind which are as follows:
A. Your articles should be written to provide relevant information to your audience
B. Make sure that you use your guest post to send the visitors to your landing page
C. Make sure that the information provided by you is unique and interesting
D. Make sure that you promote your guest post aggressively to get more traction
E. Make sure that the destination site is popular and frequently visited by your audience
15. Leave your signature
Email signatures are a great way to promote your content and send qualified traffic to your website. You can mention the link of your website or landing page and the traffic is likely to flow through if you are doing aggressive email marketing. Make sure that the HTML coding in your email is working on different platforms.
16. Experiment with a gaming app
Sales and marketing is all about discovering new channels where in your audiences are thronging the most. It will be beneficial for you, if you try gaming apps as gaming is the new trend and more and more people can be found on gaming apps rather than on blogs. A smart marketer should definitely try to leverage this medium. For this, you need to create an app which could be an expensive option, because most of the gaming apps are free. But, if you have a strong marketing plan, it will definitely produce results.
17. Interact with your audiences through forums
Being active in forums has more advantages than we can think of. Forums actually help you to understand your customers in a better way and contact them if you have a good offer. You can also answer the queries of your potential customers if you are active on forums and thus move them a step ahead in the buying cycle.
18. Conduct influencer marketing
Interviewing the influencers in your niche on your blog, YouTube channel or social platforms will definitely bring its own rewards. Ask simple questions and try to engage your audiences with it. It will enhance your credibility and will also allow you the opportunity of being in front of their audiences as most influencers use their social handles to share the interviews in which they participate.
19. Leverage YouTube videos
These days people like to consume videos more than any other content format, especially on YouTube as it is considered the Google of video content. Be it “how to” videos, tutorial videos, interviews or keynote speeches, YouTube videos get far more views than ordinary blog posts. Furthermore, YouTube is also used as a search engine and with increasing views, it keeps on increasing your organic visibility in its feed. It also differentiates you from your competition, because not many businesses are able to create videos.
20. Offer a free tool
People love using tools and they will love it if they are offered free of cost. It will invite audiences in bulk to your website. For example, Neil Patel offers a website analyzer on his blog QuickSprout, through which you can check your website’s rankings, traffic and other analytics. Businesses are leveraging this tactics to invite free traffic to their websites. Similarly, websites also offer free plagiarism checkers, grammar software, and SEO health check software etc.
Final thoughts
So, these were some of the smart ways to attract more leads for your business. Let us know in the comments section if you have some more killer tips which can be beneficial for startups and businesses.
