Finding top-notch leads with a genuine intent of purchasing your product isn’t easy, whether you try outbound or inbound lead generation.

Sometimes, your strategy can be faulty.

In the case of inbound lead generation, your content might not be relevant enough or attractive enough for potential customers. Another possibility is that maybe prospects can’t find that content on their own quickly, so they can gently glide down your well-thought-out sales funnel.

In the case of outbound lead generation, maybe you’re focusing on the wrong strategy, such as outdoor ads, when in fact, influencers would resonate better with your audience. Or perhaps they would prefer emails.

These problems appear because you don’t fully understand your target audience and environment. This lack of understanding leads to poor choices regarding content and channels.

Let’s assume your sales team is savvier than that, though.

If you’re still not generating enough sales leads, in this case, you may be dealing with one of these two issues:

  • Low-quality leads don’t convert or cost too much for your company. The solution isn’t increasing your pool of potential customers; it’s building a new user persona and finding a new pool to fish in.
  • Too many leads. Drowning in leads isn’t fantastic either because it entails wasting resources. Sometimes that means losing too much time on unqualified leads and missing those with higher conversion chances.

Getting more potential customers that convert boils down to addressing the right audience with the right messages. Here’s how to do that:

1. Keyword research

51% of people search for the products they want to purchase on Google. That means you have to leverage Google’s algorithm and avoid being penalized for keyword stuffing.

Here’s where SEO and keyword research come in.

It would be condescending to talk to you about the basics of meta descriptions, alt texts, etc. Of course, you know you should be doing them.

Instead, let’s point out the single most crucial element of keyword research:

Writing content that attracts, motivates, and moves your audience. If you strive to stay relevant for your potential prospects, you will start thinking like them. As a result, you will intuit which keywords they’ll use to find you.

Intuition is the safest autopilot in our brains because it’s based on interiorized knowledge.

Of course, you can still use specific tools to find keywords, rank them, avoid cannibalization, and so forth. But using your insights about your customers helps you make the proper selection when writing compelling content.

2. Lead nurturing strategy

Automating tasks around lead nurturing saves you a lot of time and resources that you can reinvest in better content, for instance. Luckily, the market is literally teeming with software solutions that allow you to:

  • Customize your email list by picking the best prospects.
  • Contact these people automatically.
  • Schedule emails, social media posts, and other events.
  • Generate reports and measurements to adjust your strategy.
  • Find ways of keeping potential customers engaged.
  • Let your prospects easily book a time to meet with you.

If you have a smaller company or a reduced budget, you may be tempted to neglect lead nurturing because it takes a lot of effort to keep in touch with people. However, research shows that prospects need 5-7 recurring contacts to buy your products.

It takes even more contacts to purchase expensive products and create long-term loyalty.

By contrast, most marketers will only check in with their leads once or twice before giving up. So remember: a sales-generating lead is a nurtured lead.

One way to build a relationship with your leads is by letting them easily book a discovery call or product demo with your sales team. By using an online scheduling tool such as YouCanBookMe, leads can book a time to meet in seconds. They also get automated confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups to keep the conversation going without taking up too much of your sales team’s valuable time.

3. Chatbots

A chatbot helps you keep the conversation open with prospective clients and web visitors 24/7. A social media chatbot will:

  • Answer questions and complaints
  • Direct people to specific support teams
  • Customize interactions with prospects
  • Keep people interested through prompt replies

You should also implement a web visitor chatbot on your website. This chatbot assumes that everyone who reaches your website is a qualified lead, taking people through the preliminary stages of your sales funnel.

The point is asking the right first question.

Let’s take the example of an eyeglass website.

A pop-up saying “What can we help you with today?” is too generic.

By contrast, a pop-up saying: “Hi, my name is Adam. Do you want to find out which eyeglass shape complements your face the best?” can hook more prospects.

As you can see, this chatbot should be specific and offer customized replies/options to your prospects.

Remember that chatbot messages have:

  • 80% open rates
  • 15-60% click-through rates

By contrast, emails have open rates below 25% open rate and only 4% click-through rates.

Thus, a chatbot personalizes the interaction with your prospects, engages them, and leads them down the sales funnel.

4. Online directories

Online directories have large customer bases. Most importantly, though, someone who finds your company in an online directory and then gets in touch with you has more chances of converting than someone who randomly clicks on your website on Google.

That’s because online directories are more professional than search engines.

So, getting your name and company description in a few relevant online directories ensures seamless conversions with minimal effort.

5. Social proof

According to user-generated content statistics, 93.4% of people read reviews before buying from a company for the first time. Also, 90% of people make purchase decisions based on UGC at one point or another. Thus, user-generated content can increase your sales without much effort.

However, you will need to make that UGC visible for everyone to see:

  • Encourage people to use specific hashtags when sharing posts about your brand.
  • Repost UGC on your website and social media.
  • Include UGC in your marketing emails.

You can also incentivize potential leads to post about your products/company at least once in a while. These incentives can be specific rewards, discounts, and prizes within certain competitions. However, recognition, inclusion, and other social motivators provide even more substantial reasons for people to create content about your brand long-term.

Besides, this category of incentives doesn’t cost anything and is the cornerstone of customer loyalty.

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6. Content creation

Relevant content can attract more leads and generate more sales. However, you have to publish the right content on the right channels.

That also boils down to knowing your audience.

For instance, you can increase sales of your face fitness course by publishing 10-30-second face Yoga videos on Instagram. Alternatively, you can sell your software solutions to more companies if your website has downloadable infographics and case studies.

Or, if you want to take a more active role in your content marketing, you can use webinar software to host a weekly or monthly webinar full of educational value.

Interested prospects may search for specific statistics or tools and thus reach your website. If your content is authoritative, you can hook these prospects.

By contrast, publishing your case studies with relevant infographics takes a minimal amount of work.

Wrap-up: building your lead generation strategy

If you want to generate more sales leads on autopilot, you must focus on the right pool of customers and automate as many interactions as possible. However, this automation shouldn’t feel forced or robotic; it should be customized, relevant, and engaging so that you can convince more of those potential leads.

Thus, whenever you think about including a new tool or strategy in your marketing campaign, look at it through your prospects’ eyes.

David Morneau

Written by

David Morneau

David Morneau is the co-founder and CEO of inBeat, a hybrid micro-influencer marketing SAAS/agency that helps brands scale their marketing efforts. He has helped over 200 DTC brands to date.

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