Simple Tips on How to Generate Leads in Digital Marketing?

Internet marketing has developed to become a professional platform for all kinds of businesses, including those that are solely generating money online. Not only corporate giants but even small businesses and startups are benefiting from online marketing and promotions. You’ll find plenty of success stories of how all small companies all across the globe are reaping in maximum benefits due to their strong online presence.

In June 2020, Google conducted a survey which showed that 32% of American customers purchased online with a business they hadn’t dealt with before Coronavirus. This gives a big opportunity to brands for connecting with new consumers.

At the same time, it’s also challenging particularly if you’re coping with variations in your everyday business operations or bandwidth restrictions that may decelerate your performance.

As an internet marketer, your objective is to find and connect with your best leads, faster.

In this article, we’ll share a few ways on how to generate leads in digital marketing. But first, let’s take a look at why lead generation is important for internet marketers.

What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?

Lead generation involves the process of appealing and engaging leads. You want potential consumers to find your content, follow you on social networks, subscribe to your newsletter, and determine what others are talking about you.

For instance, if you’re a law firm, you can receive the following to generate new leads:

• A form of submission from a prospective customer asking about your services.
• A phone call from a prospective customer to book a consultation.
• A direct message on social accounts inquiring about your fees.
• An email from a prospective customer asking to set up a consultation etc.

Importance of Lead Generation in Digital Marketing

If you want your business to grow, you need consumers. And to get those consumers, you have to promote yourself and grab the attention of prospective buyers by advertising your services and what you can do for them. That’s why lead generation is so important in digital marketing.

When you generate a lead, you can pass it on to the sales team that can nurture and finally convert it into a paying consumer. You can do so in a variety of ways. For instance, you can add the customer’s email to an email newsletter for further follow-up or you can make a phone call to the prospect.

Thanks to the advancement in technology, you can do a lot more with the info acquired from your lead generation efforts. You can also use software that tracks product demand and consumer habits. This will help you analyze trends and make it easier to target your prospective audience through internet marketing

Step-by-Step Guide on the Lead Generation Process

How to generate leads in digital marketing? Here are the different steps:

Step 1:

A visitor comes across your brand via one of your marketing channels. For instance, your website, blog, or social media page.

Step 2:

They click on your call-to-action (CTA), which is an image, button, or message that encourages site visitors to take some kind of action.

Step 3:

The CTA directs your visitor to a landing page, which is designed to capture lead info in exchange for an offer such as a free video, eBook, etc.

Step 4:

Once the visitor ‘lands’ on the landing page, they fill out a form in exchange for the offer. And this is how you’ll get a new lead.

How to Identify Customer Intent During Lead Generation

You may find it challenging to identify where customer demand is shifting while ensuring you have the right query coverage. Over the past few months, search interest has been observed to surge for terms such as “small business loans,” “video conference”, and “online learning.”

To react to these variations in customer behavior, let’s quickly refresh the basics:

• Tap into intent – Combine broad match keywords with Smart Bidding. By assessing various combinations of signals in real-time, you can make the most of shifting trends while fulfilling your objectives.
• Pursue new audiences across Google – You can reach a large audience segment with Discovery ads as they explore YouTube, Discover and Gmail. This reach, along with Google’s machine learning and exclusive understanding of intent, will simplify qualified lead generation at scale.
• Stick to Google’s creative best practices – Create advertisements that clearly showcase your value to the audience researching new brands. You can begin with messaging that articulates your unique user benefit, an impactful CTA, and a number of ad extensions.
• Explore new prospects – Leverage optimization score, Google Performance Planner, and tools like PPC Signal. As the market develops, you may find that your campaigns, bids, and budgets aren’t set up to satisfy changing demands.

How to Generate Leads in Digital Marketing?

Here’s how you can identify and generate leads in your small business, eventually turning them into paying customers.

1. Website Optimization and SEO

If somebody is searching something and your website appears first, chances are go be get engaged with that customer. This is only possible if you have done SEO & Website Optimization.  A website or landing page is where visitors reach after being directed from your Google ad or from a link in your social media posts. High-performing landing pages pair copy and design in a manner that solidifies your value proposition in the visitor’s mind.

To keep visitors from bouncing, landing pages usually don’t have any external links. However, brands sometimes take a chance by adding a link back to their site.

Follow these tips to turn your landing pages into lead gen machines:

• Don’t use big walls of text. Use short, to-the-point sentences.
• Make your content visually attractive by laying it out in bullets and shorter paragraphs.
• Use the right mix of photos and videos that are relevant to the copy.
• Avoid lengthening the page. Prioritize value over length.

2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Display Ads

As a PPC advertiser, you perhaps mainly focus on generating qualified leads. However, there are a few updates in PPC that can directly generate leads for you.

Lead Form Extensions

Customers now prefer to use different ways to get in touch with a brand. In fact, nearly one-third of customers would rather purchase from a brand that offers more varied ways of reaching them, such as web forms and calls.

Google has developed lead-focused ad formats that span its ecosystem, including call ads and lead form extensions to help visitors connect with your brand in more ways. Using new lead form extensions in Google Ads, advertisers can now display a lead form directly in the advertisement. This will give visitors a simple way to share info as they search, explore, and view relevant content.

This smooth flow can help you generate high-quality leads in a more proficient manner. Currently, this feature works globally with ads on Search, YouTube, and Discovery. Google will start rolling these out across Display campaigns later this year.

Display Ads

Unlike PPC ads, you can get more creative with display ads as you get to play around with copy, images, illustrations, and even animation. However, some features of display ads are similar to PPC ads. For instance, you have to work with limited ad space. Moreover, when a person clicks on your ad, they are directed to a landing page.

Here are some best practices to turn your display ads into a valuable lead generation channel:

• Carefully select websites where you are going to feature your ad.
• Make sure the messaging is consistent between your display ad and the landing page.
• Even if you don’t have anybody content in the ad copy, make sure you write a clear CTA.

Import offline conversions

Is your only objective to drive leads? Of course, not! You want to turn those leads into sales, right? To optimize for this objective in Google Ads, you must connect your converted leads to your online campaigns.

That’s why Google is making it easier to import offline conversions simply by using the info visitors already enter in your lead form. Consequently, it’ll take less time to integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Although lead data can help you optimize campaigns, you can also use it to nurture leads with Customer Matches. Whether you are creating an online connection with an offline customer or improving present relationships with custom messaging, Customer Match allows you to continue the conversation with your best clients.

Recently, Google has launched the following updates to Customer Match:

• You can now produce similar audiences based on Customer Match lists. This will help you find more prospective consumers.
• It has improved match rates that will be updated in real-time. Now you can easily troubleshoot your list and connect with more consumers.

Google is also partnering with Zapier to create a Google Ads integration that will simplify the way you work with data. It will automatically import and export data between Google Ads and your CRM system. This solution presently supports lead form extensions, offline conversion imports, and Customer Match.

3. Use Content Marketing to Establish Thought Leadership

Content marketing includes making and conveying instructive content about your niche. Your essential purpose isn’t to sell your product or service. You want to build trust and authority around your voice as well as your brand. This is an “inbound” method of creating leads for your business, rather than the outbound model of making a sales pitch upfront.

Keep in mind that you just can’t ignore the importance of backlinks in content marketing. Google perceives a site more authoritative if its backlinks come from dependable and high authority websites. This figures out where your site positions on Google for the search terms you’re targeting.

Content marketing can be done in various ways including:

• Blogs
• Infographics
• Videos
• Images etc.

4. Use of Social Media

Often businesses commit the mistake of using social media as a platform to just talk about themselves. Instead, you should use it to discuss news about your industry, share tips that aren’t always written by you, and never avoid discussions.

Remember, the audience today is very perceptive to a brand’s voice, and if your voice is distinctive, they’ll perceive and welcome it immediately. You also must be able to change tones based on the social platform you’re using while still retaining the brand’s essence.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the utilization of email to market products or services while creating associations with prospective clients or customers. Email advertising can involve newsletters with updates on the organization, or promotion of deals and exclusive offers for subscribers.

At its best, email advertising permits brands to keep their clients educated and tailor their marketing messages to their recipients. Alongside content advertising, email is the most favored channel for online lead generation because:

• It’s easy as you don’t need a developer’s efforts or a designer’s time to write an email.
• It’s valuable as an email is often the first point of entry to a lead.
• It’s ubiquitous as everyone has an email ID, and this is not going to change anytime soon.

6. Organize Webinars

Just like events and conferences, webinars hold similar significance for online lead generation. To make webinars work, you should select a topic that the audience finds interesting. You should engage the right speaker and have a quality conversation.

Once the webinar is over, here are a few best practices to follow-up:

• Send targeted messages to your registrants based on registrant types, such as present consumers, recurring registrants, and new registrants.
• Turn the webinar into a blog post and publish it so that it reaches a wider audience.

Common Lead Generation Challenges for Small Business

Lead generation marketing is an imperative process to identify potential customers who fit your target group and are interested in buying your product. In any case, this essential activity is not without its challenges. Many advertisers face difficulties that, if not resolved, can truly hinder results.

Here are a few common challenges that you must tackle to achieve lead generation marketing success.

1. Target Mismatch

Target mismatch is perhaps one of the biggest online lead generation challenges that small business owners face. It occurs when they fail to cover areas or content that are preferred by the target users.

These business owners come up with methods that they consider right or appealing for the target audience. Simply put, it is one of the challenges that stem from an entrepreneurial miscalculation.

Want to generate productive leads? Follow these tips:

• Align your product or service with the needs and wants of the target customers. You can only do so if you stop imposing your ideas of attractive content on the audience.
• Use all possible resources to get insight on what your potential consumers find interesting.

2. The Quantity and Quality Dilemma

Small businesses naturally have fewer resources, which has a direct impact on their marketing and advertising strategies, and the budget available. However, this isn’t the main online lead generation challenge for small businesses. The pressing issue is figuring out how to allocate their budget on either quality or quantity of content.

By focusing more on quantity, it’s likely that you will fail to attract a lot of quality leads that eventually turn into paying customers. Similarly, too much emphasis on generating the right quality of leads may drain your budget before you gain enough customers to keep your business running.

3. The Small Business Weak Point

Amidst several other challenges, following up on prospects is one of the recurring online lead generation challenges. As mentioned previously, problems with budget allocation and limited resources can make it difficult for small companies. But the lack or inefficiency of a follow-up system for online leads can also be an expensive mistake.

Although several small businesses may claim that they always follow-up on their leads, they often overlook that the process should be as quick as within 24 hours. For instance, you should set up automated systems for phone call returns, email auto-responders, etc.

Even though it is difficult and expensive to develop and implement a mechanism for swift follow-up on leads, it’s a vital requirement to transform leads into paying customers.

4. Surviving Against Competition

Small businesses also face online lead gen challenges imposed by competitor practices. This is mainly due to the better financial assets of some direct competitors as well as their technological inclination and available resources. All this adds to the pressure experienced by small business owners.

Internet marketing is a useful tool to attract prospective consumers, even though it also has a variety of challenges for small business owners. In fact, small businesses should comprehend the potential challenges so they can develop a balanced approach toward their digital marketing methodologies, response mechanism, conversion tracking, and more.

The secret to overcoming online lead gen difficulties is to do exactly what’s needed with balanced budget allocation and a balanced ratio between quality and quantity of content and leads alike.

5. Poor Quality Lead Database

Remember, poor input yields poor output when it comes to lead generation. If a brand has a bad lead generation database, it can’t effectively collect precise, in-depth insights on the prospects with whom they want to work.

Take your time to comprehensively audit your infrastructure requirements, which includes the kinds of software solutions your business needs. The database you use should be in line with your goals, targets, and procedures. You should also validate and verify the data you gather, so that you can get accurate insights from analysis, which, in turn, facilitate smarter business decisions.

6. New and Valuable Content Creation

As lead generation is an ongoing process, many small business owners struggle with producing new forms of content. The needs and demand of the audience is constantly changing, and you must adjust your practices as per these ever-fluctuating trends. Otherwise, you are likely to suffer.

Small businesses have to work on creating new content as the audience today has become more receptive. Moreover, it has become challenging to form a bond with the current audience via content.

But that doesn’t mean you should lose hope. Take cues from the existing content that the viewers already engage with online, and work to create similar content that provides a fresh take on topics that interest your audience.

Wrap Up

When you learn how to generate leads in digital marketing, there’s nowhere to go but up. You must conduct some planning and analysis to attract potential leads to your site and convince them to convert on an offer. The more leads you have, the higher chance you have of closing deals and making sales.

No matter what lead generation method you use, ensure you deliver significant value, optimize every page of your website, and produce useful content. Also, determine the best lead magnet for your visitors. Carry out A/B testing, explore digital marketing automation, and interact directly with your leads via email marketing.

Remember, it’s all about creating strong relationships with prospects. Think about interacting on social media, providing a free tool, or hosting a webinar. It might be challenging but you can find success with the right tools in your arsenal.