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With only 18 percent of small business owners interested in selling their business to employees, small business owners today aren’t waiting for an opportunity – they’re creating opportunities for themselves.
Focusing on lead generation allows them to reach financial stability and ensure future success.
With proper lead generation tactics in place, your business can grow and expand, attracting wider audiences, instilling trust among consumers and clients, and increasing revenue.
However, coming up with lead generation tactics is easier said than done, especially for small businesses that cannot afford to make significant investments into them.
Paradoxically enough, there aren’t many lead generation techniques that you can employ for cheap.
The most effective among them – like social media ads, PPC, SEO, or email – usually take some time to help in acquiring new customers. And when you are a small business looking to expand, time is money.
So, it’s a tad difficult to find affordable lead generation strategies that check the boxes.
Here we’ve summed up a set of 6 rules that can help small businesses generate more leads and improve their conversion rates.
Take a look-
Identify Your Target Audience
None of your lead generation tactics will be successful if you don’t know who your target audience is. So, identifying your target market is the first step toward generating more leads.
Learning about your current consumers and profiling the potential ones will help you understand which marketing tactics will be the most appealing to them.
This takes time and effort, but once you’ve identified your target audience and analyzed it, you’ll have a much easier time outlining your strategies.
So, figure out who your audience is, what they want, what their hobbies, interests, likes, and dislikes are. This allows you to personalize your marketing messages and make them more useful.
Personalizing email marketing, for example, generates an average ROI of 122%. The more in-depth you go in your target audience analysis, the better your lead generation tactics can work, and the better your ROI will be.
It should be noted that small business owners should be as objective as possible when analyzing their target markets. Many entrepreneurs have their ideas of who they want their target audience to be, and many are often mistaken.
Just because you wanted young adults to be your primary customers doesn’t mean that your product or service will appeal to them the most.
Look at the data objectively, and even if your target market is different than you’d hoped, use that information to adjust your marketing. This is the only way to improve your lead generation.
Use QR Codes
QR (Quick Response) codes have become quite popular as a part of lead generation.
Thanks to the increase in smartphone penetration that went from 10% in 2014 to 36% in 2018 and access to high-speed mobile internet which increased from 48.8% in 2014 to 61.2% in 2018, most people now use QR codes to make payments.
You can use the QR codes to deliver certain information to anyone who scans them, and in turn, you can use their info like email or mobile number to reach them for future campaigning.
There are plenty of QR generators on the web using which you can create your own QR code and then use it to capture leads. Here are 5 amazing ways in which you can use QR codes:
Promotional Material– Any printed material or a website that’s part of your promotion is a good way to use QR codes.
Billboards– Place your unique QR codes on a billboard as a part of OOH marketing.
Website– Place QR code under the contact us section to enable visitors to download your contact information.
Social Media Pages– Add a QR code to your LinkedIn and Facebook pages to pull leads into your website. One of the most outstanding ways of doing so!
But, make sure to test your QR code before putting it to use.
Use Social Media Platforms
The most comfortable and most convenient way to reach your target audience is through social media channels. They’re designed for bringing people together and will help you connect with your prospective customers.
Almost half of the world’s population is on social media, and regardless of the size of your business, social networks can help you grow.
Primarily, you’ll be able to build awareness of your brand. You can use AI tools like ChaGPT (released by OpenAI) and ChatGPT Chrome extension for posting regularly and interacting with your followers, thanks to automated blogging, the word will quickly spread about your business. For generating content faster marketers use ChatGPT prompts to get a chance to increase engagement. The more emotionally invested your audience is in your business, the easier it will be to improve your conversion rates. Engage with your audience by sharing valuable content, replying to the comments, offering support, and answering questions. Generating leads using a social media platform is even easier thanks to AI voice generator technology. This enables business owners to produce shorts form video content in an automated way. In other words, this means tons of engaging content to drive new leads.
Secondly, you’ll get a chance to increase engagement. The more emotionally invested your audience is in your business, the easier it will be to improve your conversion rates.
Engage with your audience by sharing valuable content, replying to the comments, offering support, and answering questions.
To truly boost your lead generation from social media, you’ll have to not only utilize Facebook Ads but also try out the benefits of lead generation on LinkedIn. Facebook has exceptional targeting options that will allow you to reach the people you need. You can also download Facebook leads and incorporate them into your usual sales process. However, if you’re looking to expand your reach beyond Facebook, consider implementing a LinkedIn lead generation strategy. With LinkedIn’s extensive professional network, you can find and target decision-makers in your industry, resulting in high-quality leads that can drive business growth. Exporting lists from sales navigator is as simple as a couple of clicks. Once, you have exported the list to your CRM you can enrich the data you have and personalize your outreach to the leads.
Create a Quiz
A perfect tool that can add to your social media marketing strategy is a quiz builder. Lead quizzes have the average lead capture rate of 31.6%, and they’re the most shared type of interactive content on social media.
This means that with a simple quiz, you can reach a much wider audience than you’d ever hoped.
A quiz builder is a complex piece of software that is very simple to use, even if you have no previous experience with creating an online quiz.
All you need to do is come up with the topic for your lead quizzes, type in your questions, answers, and results, and share them on your social media accounts.
When creating your lead quizzes, it’s important to remember what your goal is — to promote your products or services and generate online sales leads.
So, don’t forget to include a call to action at the end of the quiz!
Send Newsletters
Lead quizzes are excellent for gathering contact information and email addresses from your target audience. Don’t let this go to waste.
If you want to convert your qualified leads into buying customers, you’ll need to nurture your relationship with them and build trust.
So, once your leads have completed your lead quizzes and given you their email addresses, send them a “thank you” email to show your appreciation.
You can send them an email with their quiz results, or all the other results they could have gotten. Notify them of your other similar lead quizzes, ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, and keep them posted about your new offers.
Make use of the information you’ve gathered about your audience to personalize your email marketing tactics. Just a customized subject line will increase the open rate of your emails by 26%.
And whatever you do, don’t spam your leads, it’s the easiest way to get blocked. There’s no need to be sending a newsletter every single day. A weekly or biweekly email will do the trick.
Word of Mouth
Lastly, the oldest and the most efficient lead generation tactic is word of mouth marketing. Although, it’s evolved in the past few years and it now mostly takes the form of online reviews.
But how can you make your existing customers spread the word about your business and leave a review? Well, all you need to do is ask.
Over 77% of customers would leave a review if asked, so don’t be shy about it. A single positive review can have a massive impact on your business and encourage many leads to become your loyal, buying customers.
Word of mouth marketing will help you build trust and improve your lead generation efforts, so don’t neglect it.
The Bottom Line
Small businesses need to work hard to boost their lead generation efforts, but it’s the only way to succeed in today’s competitive market.
The most straightforward and most efficient tactics for improving lead generation include:
- Identifying your target audience
- Using social media platforms to your advantage
- Creating lead quizzes
- Sending newsletters
- Focusing on word of mouth marketing
These tactics have proven to be successful time and time again, but it’s essential to realize that lead generation is an ongoing process.
For the best effect, you’ll always need to be working on your lead generation tactics, improving and tweaking them as you go.
Speak to our SMB expert to leverage Uniqode’s location-based tech to generate more leads for your business. Choose a time here!
Angela White is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing for the consumer market in the areas of product research and marketing using quizzes and surveys. Having a knack for writing and an editorial mindset, She is an expert researcher at a brand that’s known for creating delightfully smart tools such as ProProfs Quiz Maker.
