Most businesses in the start-up stage lack funds and hence, they focus solely on building products and services that they believe will bring them much-needed returns. In doing so, they do not give much attention to the lead generating aspect, believing that their products and services will automatically generate sales.
Obviously, they are mistaken and statistics prove this. According to a recent study, more than 80 percent of all businesses fail during the first 12 months of operation, a figure clearly indicating that starting a new business is just one part of the puzzle, while the other, and perhaps an even difficult one, is generating leads and converting them into sales.
Moreover, with the evolution of the internet, lead generating techniques have also evolved in the 21st century. Presently, sales managers want highly targeted and qualified leads that further speak volumes about the value of the product and USPs. Although such leads can help any sales manager and business owner achieve targets and goals, yet, as one can expect, they are hard to generate, especially for low budget start-ups.
Here are some of the most effective offline and online activities that budget conscious start-ups should execute in order to generate targeted and high-quality leads.
Offline lead generating activities
Offline lead generating activities often have their roots in traditional methods of marketing. Although they might actually sound a little retro to begin with, the fact is that some of the offline lead generating activities are highly consumer oriented and can help you interact directly with your target audience, which further improves your chances of converting them into sales.
Here are some of the best offline lead generating activities that you still can't rule out.
- Cold calling:
Cold calling is perhaps the most favored offline lead generating activity that has been around for decades, but is as direct as a start-up wants. For this, all a start-up has to do is to figure out its potential target customers and then start calling them to promote services and products that they are likely to purchase. This is also a softer approach as even if you're turned down, you'll most likely remain in their phonebook contacts for a long period of time. - Direct Mail and Brochures:
Although traditional in its nature, direct mail is still the third largest direct advertising method, with the first two being television advertising and newspaper advertising. Obviously, since we are talking about low budget start-ups, television advertising is out of the question. Direct mail, on the other hand, is quite affordable and hence, allows you to reach to the coffee tables of your potential clients with ease and precision.
Along with postcards that speak about your products and services, you can also try printing good quality brochures that you can spread on corporate events that you attend. Moreover, brochures and postcards stay in the homes of your potential clients for a longer time than newspapers do and hence, your chances of converting these leads into clients increase significantly. - Giving free seminars:
Most business owners often do not realize the importance of giving free seminars as they fail to recognize the number of groups who are looking for speakers. This way, apart from interacting with a highly targeted group of individuals who know about the kind of services you offer and your market presence, you will get an instant credibility for everything you speak and offer.
Recent statistics state that there are more than 2.5 billion internet users in the world. Needless to say, the internet is an incredibly large market that every start-up should tap. Owing to the sheer size of the market, success depends on just capturing a mere fraction of the entire market.
However, unlike traditional customers who unequivocally believe what they see on brochures or advertisements, the online community is highly intelligent and hence your sales managers will have to make use of modern lead generating activities to capture a highly targeted audience.
Here are some online activities that low budget start-ups should do to generate qualified and credible leads using the internet.
- Search Engine Optimization & Pay Per Click Advertising:
In this day and age, talking about SEO seems to be a no-brainer, especially for a digital marketing agency, but it's good to revisit the basics ever so often.
Search engine optimization is perhaps the best way to generate targeted lists. People searching for information are more likely to visit a website through search results.
Also, don't forget about running Pay Per Click ads, either as banners or as text ads on properties that are frequented by your target audience. In addition, if you're going to drive leads from your ad campaigns, ensure that your target landing pages are in place well before you get started.
- Driving leads from Facebook:
Many businesses feel they can capture leads from social networks, primarily Facebook, by just sharing good content. Obviously, if an entrepreneur dives into Facebook without any plan of action, chances of driving any significant number of leads from the platform is slim. However, with more than a billion users regularly visiting their Facebook pages, you cannot leave it altogether too.
The fact remains that entrepreneurs often get too obsessed with the number of Likes their business page is receiving, without focusing on ways these Likes can be converted into sales. For the conversion to happen, the first thing you need is a lead, which can simply be an email address. Obviously, Likes are important, but they are only important because they can be converted into leads with the right strategy.
Nothing beats good quality content when it comes to generating Likes. However, generating and sharing the right kind of content too is not as easy as it might sound. For this, you have to make sure that you follow the 10:4:1 rule. This means that out of 15 status updates that you make to your Facebook Page, you should share 10 highly informative articles from third party websites, which ideally should contain solutions to the problems your target audience regularly face. Four updates should link to your own blog posts, which again should be highly informative without forcing a sale onto your customers, and one update should link to a landing page where you can make a sale or generate leads.
There are many ways to generate leads via Facebook and one of the best ways, and perhaps the most used way, is to host a contest. There are several competition apps, such as ShortStack, which you can use for the purpose. However, to run it successfully, you have to be clear about the kind of information you will need. For example, if you are looking for the email addresses of your potential customers, you have to ensure that you get the user's permission to contact them via email. Moreover, select the prize of the competition keeping in mind the likes of your targeted audience.
If your business page has a large number of followers, you can promote discount coupons on your Facebook Wall, which work when your followers head over to your shopping website to purchase goods. While they make the purchases, you can ask them to register at your website and hence get qualified leads for the future as well.
Another way businesses are using Facebook to generate a large number of leads is to make use of customized tabs, where you can pull in the lead generation form from your website. For this, you can use apps like Static HTML app or Pagemodo app. Once the customized tab is in place, you can expect your followers to visit it and register for updates from your website. - Blogging:
According to recent studies on the behavior of internet users, a majority of users from all parts of the world spend most of their online time on social networks and reading blogs. Hence, blogs are a great tool that can help improve your digital presence. While most businesspersons opine that blogs can just get you into the good books of Google's spiders, the fact remains that if done correctly, blogs can be used as a lead generating machine.
The first thing you have to do here is to make your blog as an extension of your business website by hosting it on a sub-domain. This way, the number of links your blog receives will add to the authority of your main website. Secondly, you should never use your blog as a salesperson of your products and neither as just a platform for posting press releases. Rather, you should try to resolve the queries most of your customers have, and probably share with you using your contact pages, in the form of blog posts. Other than this, you can make use of your search logs to see what keywords your visitors used to land on your page and get a sense of the kind of problem they might have to fuel your posts.
Blog posting is essential and you should do it regularly. By regularly we don’t mean that you should hire a complete team of content writers to write quality content for your blog ten times a day, but you should at least write a couple of good and informative articles every week to ensure that your blog readers regularly have something new to read. Moreover, your blog articles should have a catchy title and should be formatted in an easy-to-scan manner. Use short paragraphs, bullet points and informative pictures to convey your thoughts.
Additionally, since the online audience does not hesitate in sharing a good quality article on social networks, make sure that your blog posts have social sharing buttons.
Moreover, readers who read the entire post should have the option to check out related content from your website by clicking a button or a link at the end of the post. The end of the article is also a great place to link your landing pages that require email registration.
These are some of the best online and offline activities that low-budget start-ups can do to generate qualified leads. We'd love to hear from you about some tips that we might have missed. Have any of these tactics worked for you before?
Author Bio
Sarvesh Bagla is an SEO pro and the CEO & Founder of Techmagnate, a leading name among SEO Companies in India. When not reviewing a client's SEO strategies, training, consulting or speaking on local search and SEO, Sarvesh can be seen watching soccer or RC Car rallies.
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