One of the greatest strengths of the Internet, at least for marketers, is the amount of choice that it allows. In the pre-digital era, when businesses marketed to their leads and customers using purely offline methods, choice was limited and expenses were high, with a ‘small’ advertising campaign often costing thousands of dollars.
Today, with digital advertising services reaching over 70 percent of the entire world population, advertisers can reach thousands of people for cents. They can advertise to millions of people for hundreds of dollars, and build a scalable, effective campaign for their company with a budget that’s lower than their average weekly paycheque.
As such, the time is right to run experimental lead generation campaigns. From ads that truly ‘pop’ out of the page to unusual online lead generation methods, the low-cost lead generation options available to marketers today make it more important than ever before to try as many lead generation methods as you possibly can.
These five lead generation methods might not all work for every business, but they all offer specific advantages that make them advertising kryptonite for certain types of business. From direct response to personalized cold approaches, read on to learn more about the five most effective ways to generate leads for your business.
Cold Calling the Right Way
Most salespeople get cold calling wrong. Instead of taking a reasoned and personal approach to making contact with potential business leads, they take a ‘one size fits all’ approach to lead generation and end up scaring away potentially lucrative leads with their overzealous, unfriendly, and decidedly impersonal way of connecting.
Cold calling has been the bedrock of low-cost, high-involvement lead generation for decades, and it isn’t going to stop working all of a sudden. If you’re failing to produce real sales leads from your cold calling efforts, you’re probably using the failed tactics described above instead of a personalized, solution-based cold calling strategy.
The best salespeople – and the best call centers, for low-cost products – think of cold calling in simple terms. Instead of calling to sell something, they’re calling a personal contact – someone that they’ve looked into before – to sell a solution to the problems that most acutely affect them.
As such, their approach isn’t built around moving units, but around building realistic solutions to problems in the lives of their customers and contacts. If you can develop a cold calling strategy that uses a similar sales frame to convert your leads into new customers, you’ll have no problem generating business ‘the old fashioned way.’
Online Advertising the Intelligent, Laser-Focused Way
There are two ways to advertise online. The first is to identify your prospects, build a campaign that’s designed from the ground up to identify their problems and draw them in as potential sales leads, ask for their contact information, and follow up with a variety of effective, personalized sales techniques to secure the deal.
The second approach is to market to the widest possible audience, blasting images of your product or service at them again and again, and hoping that eventually they will give in and make a sale. Instead of firing a single effective bullet, you hold down the trigger and hit your targets using the ‘spray and pray’ method of advertising.
Guess which method is more cost-effective? While large corporations and gigantic companies with large marketing budgets can afford to employ the second strategy, most small businesses are better off focusing on the first. Using retargeting, search advertising, and online lead generation, it’s a very effective method when done right.
Rather than building campaigns that reach all of your prospects, build advertising campaigns that reach the most qualified of your prospects. This could mean a tiny change to your Google search keywords, or simple a tweak to your advertising copy to better differentiate between tyre-kickers and serious potential customers.
Once you have an advertising campaign that draws in leads, you can use tools like retargeting pixels to isolate your core audience and focus on building strong leads from your weak targeting data. From here, those leads can be further broken down into a variety of subgroups based on your results from phone-based sales calls.
A lot of people forget this, but generating leads is effective the process of pouring sand into a series of funnels. The first funnel focuses the stream, making it tighter and thinning out the unsuitable prospects. As you funnel more using sales calls and other tactics, you soon end up with a small – but valuable – group of customers.
Direct Mail the Personal, Ultra-Effective Way
A lot of people ignore the massive potential reach of direct mail due to its reputation as a costly, ineffective form of marketing. In industries where large amount of postal mail come in daily, direct mail isn’t particularly effective. However, in industries that carry out most of their communications online, direct mail can be highly effective.
At its core, the art of marketing is standing out. As such, when you’re dealing with online businesses that carry out most of their communications using the Internet, sending a personalized letter by mail can make a huge difference. You immediately stand out from the crowd and make yourself noticed, resulting in huge interest.
One of the best ways to improve your direct mail response rate is to write out your letters by hand, or sign the envelope with a real signature. Anything that makes the letter more personal and old fashioned – handwritten notes, a stamped postmark, or a scribbled, handwritten address – all add to the appeal of your message.
At the end of the day, lead generation is about getting people to notice you and being able to capitalize on the attention. Whether you’re using direct mail, cold phone calls and direct pitches, or an online advertising campaign to generate leads, the result of your actions should be the same: more attention, more inquiries, and more business.
The post Three New-Age Versions of Old Fashioned Lead Gen Techniques appeared first on Circular - Lead Generation & Conversion Tips.