Even if your business has the best products or services, success still relies on making customers aware of them. This is done by generating leads, which you can accomplish by driving more traffic to your website, creating compelling calls to action (CTA), and building effective landing pages.

Generating leads in digital marketing is a highly competitive area of business. Always keep in mind what a lead represents: a potential customer who has indicated interest in your company’s products or services.

Generate Leads Correctly

Lead generation refers to the process of attracting prospects and converting them into someone willing to provide their contact information and learn more about what your business offers.

Attracting them requires a smart strategy and follow through. Here’s a look at some of the ways to generate leads for your business.

The Basic Steps of Generating Leads

Using the strategies of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), businesses can generate more traffic to their website and bring in more leads. The basic steps are as follows:

  • Potential customers become aware of your product or service through channels such as content on your site that ranks high on search engines, social media posts, and advertising.
  • While on your site, they decide to click on a Call to Action (CTA), which directs them to a landing page
  • The landing page includes a form asking for their contact information, which they fill out and submit

You have now generated a lead. Getting them there requires careful consideration of each step in the process

Driving Traffic to Your Site

This is the top of the lead generation funnel and where the bulk of lead generation activity occurs.

You must first attract prospects to your site and the CTA. How do you get them there? There are many channels to make potential customers aware of your business. The common thread through them all is to offer content that is relevant to their needs and solves a problem for them. Some of these methods include:

Content. This can include individual webpages, blog posts, and product descriptions. The key is the make the content relevant and to use proper SEO techniques to rank high in search engine results.

Social Media. Posts on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can reach thousands of potential customers, and links from social media can drive them to your site.

Targeted Ads. Advertisements are essentially content and the CTA rolled into one – people who click on them are making a decision that they are interested enough to click through and see your offer. It is essential that wherever that click takes them responds directly to what is promised in the targeted ad.

Product trials. Offering a free trial of your product immediately sends potential customers from considering your product to using it. Once they are trying your product, you can entice them to buy by offering special deals or additional services.

Call to Action

The CTA is typically placed on every webpage. That way, even if someone has come to your site through a blog post they found interesting, they may decide to click on properly based CTAs that invite them to “Learn More” or “Get More Info.” The key is to make the CTA easily seen but not obtrusive.

Landing Pages

The decision to fill out a form is a big one for any consumer. Creating proper landing pages is key to getting them to take that final step. A good landing page should sum up all the advantages of your product and service. It should also have a form that is clearly visible and easy to fill out (and doesn’t ask for tons of information – name, email, and phone are typically enough).

Once you have their information, email remains a powerful tool to directly speak with customers and close the sale.

These are some of the basic approaches on how to generate leads. Put in the time to make a plan that works for your site and your budget. If you create a sound strategy and stick with it, the return on investment can prove many times over what you put in.