5 Online Strategies To More Get Small Business Leads
5 Simple Internet Marketing Strategies To Get More Small Business Leads
Generating small business leads is the lifeblood of running a successful organization that is ready to grow and thrive. There are many approaches to lead generation for small businesses that each come with their own benefits and opportunities.
In a #BizHackLive webinar, Alex Oliveira, lead generation expert and founder and CEO of Prediq Media, explored and explained different strategies for generating small business leads. Here are some of his key takeaways and tips.
TL;DR: 3 Necessities for Generating Small Business Leads
There are a few non-negotiables when it comes to using online marketing to generate small business leads. To run a successful campaign, you need:
- Effective advertisements and content
- A valuable offer that resonates with your target audience
- Access to the platforms your audience engages with
- Team alignment with your campaign’s strategy and goals
Want more of these great insights? Sign up to receive updates on upcoming events and get invited to #BizHackLive webinars. Don’t forget to follow BizHack on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Before you begin to use online marketing to generate leads for your small business, it’s important to assess several aspects and ask questions, including:
- How are people searching for your product/service?
- Are you serving them on those channels?
- How does your strategy stack up against the competition?
- What’s your click, lead, and call conversion rate?
- What social media platforms should you be on?
Using Affiliate Marketing For Lead Generation For Small Business
Lead generation for small businesses begins with understanding the possibilities. For most businesses, those include buyers searching online, marketing channels, online marketplaces, and other advertising channels. As the advertiser, you decide which marketing channels you want to present your offer on, such as email marketing, PPC ads, SEO, video ads, or social media ads. The marketplace, such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon, would capture leads or take those clicks to your website to buy your service or product. This process is called affiliate marketing.
TIP: You need to have a valuable offer that is relevant to your target audience. This is what is going to drive the clicks.
Small Business Leads Traffic Sources
| OWNED | EARNED | PAID | SHARED |
|
|
|
|
“I don’t depend on an algorithm for owned sources,” Oliveira said. “If I can drive traffic to my website, I control the media.”
Social Media Apps To Consider
Before deciding which platforms your business should be on, the most important thing is figuring out where your target audience lives and if you can engage with them there. A straightforward way of determining your audience’s preferred platforms is by seeing where your competitors are.
“I would never recommend to anyone, to any business, that you have to be on every platform because you don’t,” Oliveira said.
Online Marketing with a Sales Team
Many business owners blame their salespeople when they do not have the same momentum as when they began.
“You need to be aware of how you are nurturing your team and giving them love,” Oliveira said. “Because if they are not reciprocating, that is one thing, but if you’re not giving them the same love that they deserve, you can’t expect for them to go out there and be a super salesperson every day because it is not going to happen.”
TIP: You are 20x more likely to talk to your online lead (prospect) if you contact them in less than 5 minutes from their initial interaction with your offer vs. 30 minutes. Follow up quickly.
Getting aligned with BANT
You need to make sure your team is aligned with the goals set for your lead gen campaign.
There are three steps to a small business lead generation campaign:
- Engage
- Acquire
- Retain
It is rare to see in organizations of all sizes that marketing, sales, and customer success are all done by the same team members. It is essential for all team members involved in a campaign to be talking to each other and headed in the same direction as far as strategy and goals to have the most success with small business leads generation.
“You can’t have a marketing conversation if you are not talking about sales,” Oliveira said.
It is all about BANT when your team is qualifying leads:
-
- Budget: Can they afford your product/service?
- Authority: Is this the decision-maker?
- Need: What is their pain point? Why is your product/service necessary?
- Timing: In what timeframe will the solution be implemented?
You Need to Run Ads to Grow
“Every company that succeeds online today has a paid ad strategy. It does not need to be thousands of dollars a month, but you have to run some ads,” Oliveira said.
Amazon, Facebook, and Google provide many tools for small businesses, but let’s face it, they are also in it to grow and make their shareholders’ money. They will always sit in the middle, between the consumer and us, the sellers. When you are running search paid ads, you will need to use Google and Facebook. If you are an e-commerce company running shopping ads, it is almost impossible not to advertise on Amazon.
You can start with a small budget. Start with $100, make a time balance for the next 30 days, decide who from your team will oversee measuring, launching, and then executing.
Here are a few musts before running any kind of lead generation campaign:
- Website Audit
- Target Audience
- Product Offers
- KPI’s and Analytics
- Customer Journey
Website Audit
If your ad sends leads to a landing page, make sure you do not have any other links other than your call-to-action. All of your menu buttons, social media links need to be removed. You want to test everything on your landing page before launching your lead generation campaign.
TIP: Customize your call-to-action button on your leads forms. Instead of leaving a “submit” button, have something warmer such as “Get Quote” or “Talk to Us.”
A/B testing your landing page:
- CTA Buttons
- Subject Lines
- Ad Copy
- Color
- Video vs. Image
TIP: Every UX stat out there shows that the colors below are the best for your CTA buttons.
Lead Generation Campaign Basic Goals
Once you have taken care of all the pre-campaign items, you need to account for the things that your lead generation campaign must accomplish.
Your lead gen campaign must:
- Qualify your leads
- Nurture your leads
- Compliance basics
- Measure and optimize
Nurture Your Leads
Half of your leads may not be ready to talk, let alone convert, until a month or two or more, from the point of their first interaction with your brand. Timing can depend on a multitude of factors beginning with the industry you are in. You need to follow up and nurture your leads, not for 10 days, but maybe for at least six months. If you are not currently nurturing your leads, you need to start right now.
When creating a lead generation campaign to gain small business leads, you need to first start with the question, how does every aspect of this campaign benefit the end-user? Look at the images, links, call-to-action. Then, you need to drive innovation and set yourself apart from the competition.
TIP: Sometimes, setting yourself apart from your competition entails using creatives that your target audience would not expect at all.
Think of SMART Goals When Building Your Lead Gen Campaign
- Specific: State what you will do using action words
- Measurable: Provide ways to evaluate using metrics or data targets
- Achievable: Be certain it is within your scope and possible to attain
- Relevant: Makes sense within your job function and improves the business in some way
- Time-Bound: State when you’ll get it done and be specific in the time frame
Here Are 5 Strategies For Generating Small Business Leads
1. eBook
Be the expert in your subject matter and provide a valuable piece of content for your customers and prospects. The purpose of an eBook is a behavioral targeting technique that, through the act of downloading it, they are indicating they are your ideal client. So, the book’s topic must align with your ideal client’s interests.
As a result of inbound marketing efforts, you want people to come to you because you have established yourself as a thought leader and a trusted source of high-quality information. An eBook is your best calling card. It is a guide or manual that can be 100 pages or 10 pages, visual, 1000 words. There are many ways it can look. It is content you create to educate your target audience.
An eBook is an excellent piece of content that can eventually be broken down into blogs and can be repurposed for social media. If you can optimize the content properly on your website through SEO, you will drive traffic.
What You’ll Need:
- What’s your expertise/passion?
- Research your topic
- Plan time and budget
- How you’ll promote it
- What’s your lead goal?
A great example of a company that does this sort of inbound marketing is HubSpot. HubSpot is one of the great thought leaders in digital marketing. Their inbound marketing system is one of the most innovative in digital marketing training and education.
For resources to help you write your eBook, check out bookbaby.com, fiverr.com, textbroker.com, and upwork.com.
2. Webinar Live AMA: A Case Study
When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in 2020, Oliveira broke down his eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Online Lead Generation, into 12 different buckets of content that became 12 webinars to host throughout the year. This worked out well for his company.
Here are some of the stats from his webinar series:
- 12 webinars
- 150 staff hours
- Average of 25 attendees
- Added more than 500 emails
- More than 2,000 clicks
- Generated more than 25 leads
- Cost $10,000
- Gained give new clients
- Created more than $100,000 in sales
3. YouTube Ads
It is really easy to create a YouTube ad, and it works. At the end of the YouTube video, the viewer is presented with an embedded form to click to get to your offer.
A YouTube ad can:
- Elevate brand and product awareness
- Increase your leads and SEO
4. Facebook Leads Ads
It is vital to always hammer down on this opportunity and to know that not always selling on Facebook is OK. You can also create ads to promote a cause you believe in like voting to generate leads.
If you want to win on these platforms, you must be willing to invest some money because otherwise, your audience will not see your content.
5. Chat
Chat can solve problems in real-time, whether it be sales, customer service, product questions.
As a business, you need to ask yourself:
- How is your communication?
- What’s your click conversion rate?
- Do your site visitors have questions that chat agents can answer in real-time?
Live Chat vs. AI
AI can streamline a chat, but it can’t take the place of human intelligence and empathy. The point of chat isn’t to answer frequently asked questions. It is to have an actual human behind the screen to generate leads and get them to convert.
You can get ApexChat’s technology implemented in your website (a chat icon anywhere on your website) where your potential customer can chat with a real human who understands your products and answers questions.
The great thing about this company is that they will charge based on the number of leads they generate for you, not a monthly fee or number of conversations.
Final Call To Action
There are so many possibilities in digital marketing to help generate small business leads. Digital marketing is constantly evolving and it is crucial to stay up to date on how you can leverage what you already know to continue bringing in new business. The most effective way to grow is to continue to give your target audience things of value.
