A recent study revealed that for every 10 businesses, 2 fail in their first year. In the second year, the failure rate rises to 3 businesses in every 10 businesses. These statistics reveal the dire situation of businesses in the world. 

Though businesses fail due to a wide array of issues, a significant factor that causes the failure of businesses is the lack of clients. In the modern age, this can be termed as the lack of leads that have a high conversion rate.

Leads are people OR clients that have shown interest in a businesses’ services or products. So far, lead generation as a marketing tactic has shown significant benefits over telemarketing. The typical working of business leads is that the business contacts them after showing interest through numerous possible ways.

Lead generation relies on possible clients willingly submitting personal contact information. This is a factor that has made it more accepted, unlike the irritation that telemarketing brought about to clients. 

In this article, we shall look at a few ways that a business can use to generate leads.

1 Social Media Promotions

The extensive use of social media has resulted in its use as a business avenue. This is supported by the use of e-commerce platforms. Due to its widespread adoption, many businesses use social media to reach their target clients.

You can utilize social media to disseminate information about your company’s services. You can also post sample photos of the products you offer. Most social media platforms have tools to help businesses reach a wider target audience.

The posts about a businesses’ services or products can be promoted as ads to ensure that they reach more people. The use of ad targeting on social media has helped numerous businesses to grow significantly.

The ad targeting service entails relying on algorithms offered by the social media platform to identify possible clients. Client identification on social media is highly reliant on the user’s behaviors. If a user has been searching for available apartments in New York, the social media company will offer the user ads about this. The ads will be businesses that offer residential apartments in their place of desire.

2 Outsourced Marketing

In-house marketing staff is not always available for all businesses. This is not profitable to a business if the required marketing resources are not a constant business need. This is where outsourced marketing comes in.

Outsourced marketing entails the consultation of external companies to offer marketing functions. Outsourced lead generation is a highly efficient way of gaining leads. This is because the external marketing agency is always fully equipped with the required resources to ensure that its services are of the highest quality.

Outsourced marketing has developed in the current day to include not only consulting marketing agencies, but also social media influencers. Social media influencers have a high lead generation turnout because their content is relatable to most people. The basic act of tapping into the core human interaction needs makes social media influencers an efficient method of reaching out to possible clients.

3 Client Engagement

The widespread adoption of technology and modern marketing methods should not be taken as a reason to disregard the popular old-school methods. Lead generation through direct client engagement is done through the implementation of direct interaction platforms such as:

1. Product activations
2. Product sampling

Direct client engagement also offers the business a chance to interact with their existing clients and get their reviews and recommendations. This shows that direct client engagement offers an avenue to get new leads and improve the business relationship with existing clients. 

You can also opt to use indirect client engagement methods to generate leads. Indirect client engagement entails the use of FAQs, questionnaires, etc. Indirect client engagement, however, may not be as efficient as direct client engagement for lead generation.

4 Client Referrals

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Marketing data from numerous businesses shows that client referrals for lead generation offer the best lead conversion rate. Lead conversion rate is a derivative of the total number of leads gained and the number of leads that ended up being clients. 

Client referrals offer an easy lead generation method for businesses. Client referrals can be a selfless act done by existing customers or can be invoked by the business. A business can invoke existing clients to make referrals by offering an incentive. 

The most common incentive offered by businesses is product or service discounts. Despite the incentives offered, the profitability of client referrals is still high. 

A study showed that referred customers have a retention rate that is 37% higher than that of regular clients. Client referrals are very effective because they take advantage of existing social bonds among people. 

5 Guest Blogs

In the modern age, every business should have its website. Website ownership can significantly contribute to a business’s success. Websites can offer an avenue for businesses to gain numerous leads and make sales. Most business websites, however, are only designed to act as advertisement platforms for the businesses’ products or services. 

Building a business website that also offers blogs related to the businesses’ workings improves lead generation numbers. The website blogs improve leads through curation of search engine optimized content. 

Guest blogs help to generate traffic to your website from an audience that is interested in your content. 

Guest blogs can also contain posts that link to external businesses that complement what you offer at your businesses. This helps to create a more organic and genuine feel to your posts. Guest blogs that link to different posts on the same business website give a feel of generic forced advertising that will drive away possible clients. 

Conclusion

The significance of marketing for lead generation should not be overlooked by any business. However, when implementing the various methods of lead generation, it is paramount to consider the type of business.

Some lead generation methods cannot work for some businesses. An example of this is a pharmaceutical company cannot implement direct client engagement with product sampling to generate leads.

The lead generation method used should be relevant to the business at hand.