With the rise of new online social networks in recent years, lead generation has been undergoing some significant changes.
Your potential buyers are overwhelmed with all the noise, and as a result, they ignore the messages that do not appeal or engage them.
You need to find new ways and techniques to reach them.
Having different ways to target your market allows you to cut through the noise and get your messages and content seen by your leads more frequently.
Here are 3 surprising lead generation techniques that you can apply for your business -
1. Turn Helpful Calls Into Leads With SoHelpful:
You have probably heard the term 'Sell Without Selling' many times.
Question is...how can you do that?
The answer is very simple - by helping your prospects!
That’s right.
You can help them in many different ways, but one of the best ways is to connect with them 1 on 1 over Skype, Hangouts, or phone calls and answer their questions, hence solving their problems.
This is also known as Helpful Marketing.
SoHelpful actually makes it easier for you to implement this technique.
According to SoHelpful, “being helpful is one of the most effective ways to build our reputations and grow our businesses.”
SoHelpful is a platform where your potential customers can easily schedule a call with you, which also integrates with your Google calendar.
You have a profile page with testimonials. You send potential customers to your page so they can view your testimonials and expertise and then pick a time according to your availability.
You can promote your profile on your blog’s sidebar, have the link pinned to your social media pages, or add the link to your email signature.
This is like getting inbound calls from your target audience who have questions or problems related to your niche.
The technique here is to -
- Build trust and be a friend with the person over the call by listening, understanding and providing suggestions that are actionable.
- Ask if you can send some emails that elaborate on what you just discussed.
- If the person agrees, then add him/her to your email list.
- Send a series of emails that tell him “what to do” to solve a problem.
- At the end, insert a friendly, natural sales pitch based on what you are selling (a service or a product).
In our case, we’ve found that customers who schedule a help session with us are almost twice as likely to convert - surprise!
2. Use Quora For Lead Generation
Quora is one of the most active Question & Answer sites on the web.
Anyone can ask and answer questions about anything here. However, you would like to focus on a specific angle based on your niche.
In case you are new to Quora, checkout this guide to creating your Quora profile and set it up so you can submit questions and answers the right way.
Target Questions That Are Specific To Your Niche
First, you should figure out what your potential customers might be looking for. So knowing your ideal customers is very important before you start using Quora for lead generation.
Say you are a small digital marketing agency that offers PPC ads and Done-for-you content marketing services. What are the questions your potential customers might be asking?
Things like -
- How to get positive ROI with PPC ads?
- What are the most common mistakes companies make with PPC advertising?
- Which is better, content marketing or traditional marketing?
You get the point.
Once you find those niche related topics and questions, your next step is to answer those questions.
Make sure you add value through your answers and not just self-promote.
Write detailed answers maintaining a good format and structure so it's easily readable. When appropriate, add relevant reference links, images, and videos.
This is a good example of an answer that provides value: What are the most common mistakes companies make with PPC advertising?
Quality answers will result in more views and eventually get shared across different channels and social media networks. When people find value in your answers they will follow or subscribe to your Quora profile or visit your website/blog and sign up to read more of your content.
Sharing your answers on your social media pages will give you more exposure. There is also a good chance for Google to index your answers when you acquire social proof.
Mentioning Other Quora Writers And Users
Mention and tag other Quora contributors and users who are expert and have covered similar topics. They receive a notification when you tag or mention them on your answers. This will help you to connect with the experts in your niche and also build a powerful network of influencers.
Track Your Results
Pay close attention to the Quora's 'Stats' analytics tool. You can see all the questions, answers and posts you have contributed, profiles of people who followed your question, views, upvotes, and shares etc.
Track ROI coming from the answers on Quora in Google Analytics. For more info on that check out this post.
And of course, check how Quora performs in your Google Analytics. For us, it was one of the top 5 traffic sources and converted at a whopping 8.5%!
3. Optimizing Twitter For Lead Gen
Many people look at Twitter at just a social network for updating people on your status.
However, we’ve found that some people tend to be particularly receptive on Twitter, even more so than email, especially in the marketing niche (where people are bombarded by email offers daily).
Here are 5 advanced strategies to help you get more leads on Twitter.
I) Include A Call To Action (Cta)
What is the first thing that grabs the attention of a visitor on your Twitter profile?
Probably, it's your background photo and your bio. So it only makes sense if we put our call to action (CTA) on those places.
Also, having a pinned tweet with your CTA is very effective.
These simple techniques can be very effective to get more leads on Twitter.
Using the same call to action in each location can make it easier for your visitors or followers to know what to do next when they visit your profile.
Check the examples below:
You can see that Yaro Starak uses his Twitter bio combined with a pinned tweet to invite his followers to grab his free blueprint, in exchange for their email address.
Here you can see how Ian Brodie uses his CTA in his Twitter background photo and bio.
You can create these Twitter backgrounds very easily using tools like Canva and Snappa.
Ii) Build A Targeted Twitter Following
Getting leads through Twitter requires you to build a targeted list of Twitter followers who have the potential to turn into clients in the long run.
Follow people who are interested in your niche, products, or services. They are likely to follow you back since they can relate to your industry or topics you talk about.
It’s all about who you follow and who follows you back.
Also, consider searching for hashtags, keywords, or company mentions when you search through tweets related to your industry.
Iii) Share Click-worthy Content
Tweet quotes, questions and trivia along with usual industry content as they are some of the most shared content on Twitter.
You can use pieces of your own content as quotes.
Ask questions and share links to yours or others’ blog posts that answer those questions. Asking the right questions will help you get more retweets and shares.
Iv) Educate And Engage Before You Sell
Understand what your followers need and give it to them. Share content that educates and engages with them.
There is no exact formula that says how many times you should be tweeting every day.
According to Buffer, "Post as often as you have engaging, entertaining, or useful content to share."
If you decide to tweet 7-10 times a day - split that between your own content, other people's content and promotional content that promotes your services or products.
But do not over-promote.
According to Rallyverse, a good rule of thumb is a 30/60/10 ratio.
That is - 30% Owned, 60% Curated, and 10% Promotional content.
V) Use Twitter Landing Pages To Move People Into Your Funnel
What better way to generate leads than through a landing page?
You can generate leads from Twitter and move them into your sales funnel.
Create super valuable actionable content for your followers that solves one of their major problems or answers a very important question in a strategic way.
It can be a short ebook, mini blog/video series, step by step infographic, white paper, checklist that can be offered to your followers through a landing page.
Keep your landing page short and simple with one clear CTA.
Its very easy to create landing pages with Leadpages or Unbounce.
A/B test elements of your landing page in case you don't see much conversions from it.
Are you already using these techniques for generating leads? Let me know in the comments below.