It's no secret that in the modern world of business leads are the game-changers for any growing company. Of course, you can pay for leads. However, it is not the wisest decision to spend a fortune on leads to get your sales up, right? We offer you a comprehensive guide to lead generation to help you free leads for your business.
Before we talk about the strategies, you must have a clear idea about leads and why are they so important for your business.
A lead is a person who shows interest in your company. It is the potential consumer of your products or services, and can convert into revenue-generating customers by going through the sales funnel.
There is a difference clear between website traffic and leads. People may somehow land on your website make a few clicks just to leave a few seconds later - that is traffic not a lead.
There are quite a few types of leads you must have a clear idea before we move to the strategies.
But that is not all. Before you start generating leads, you must be able to distinguish between a hot and a cold lead.
Cold leads are the people that identify to be well-qualified as your target audience, but they have little to no awareness about your company.
A warm lead, on the other hand, is a person, that has in some way, shown interest in your business either by following your company, or came as a referral from a friend or previous client.
These types of prospects are much more valuable than cold prospects, as they are more likely to convert to customers.
Hot leads, on the other hand, are those who went through both cold and warm stages. This type of leads meet all the set criteria and are very likely to become a revenue-generating customers.
Now, as you are aiming for free leads, it is pretty obvious that you would want to focus more on your warm and hot leads and leave out the cold leads for further observation.
Let's be real, everyone wants their business to grow and flourish. Of course, you don't want to be stuck in the same place serving the same few customers forever, right?
We no longer live the era where a customer is going to walk into your store to ask you for a product they need. Business and sales process has evolved a lot; buyers and customers are more aware and conscious than ever.
Hence, these people must be able to find us and as well as be found by us. These people are our leads, our potential customers!
There is no doubt that they are the key if you want your business to grow. Without leads filling your sales funnel, you have no one to contact and try to sell your products to.
Moreover, when a stranger instates a relationship with your company by showing an initial interest in your business, the transition from visitor to customer is much more natural.
The more hot and warm leads you get, the more are the chances of them going down the sales process, converting into a loyal customer. Thus, helping to grow your business.
You can gain free leads through Lead generation process.
Lead generation is the process of sourcing new leads. That is, attracting and converting visitors and prospects into leads who has shown interest in your company's product or service.
It is done through creating awareness about your company to gain the interest of a person to your company’s product or service, and further nurturing them to convert into a happy customer. In recent years, due to the he rise of new online and social techniques, lead generation heavily focuses on digital media and channels.
Lead generation is a vital part of any organization.
Although lead generation can occur organically when a stranger reaches out on their own and shows interest in your product. In that case, the relationship grows naturally and gives you a better chance to build authentic connections.
However, in the modern era, that is not enough!
Competition is increasing, and the buying process is changing constantly. It is highly necessary to find new ways to generate leads more effectively and get heard through the noise. At the same time, it is equally important to focus on being found and build continuous relationships with your leads.
You can generate leads in two mains ways - Inbound and Outbound.
While both inbound and outbound strategies play their significant parts in getting new contacts, our focus is to get Free Leads. So, we will concentrate more on the inbound strategies of lead generation.
So, let’s get into the detailed discussion to see how these strategies work.
Email is a foundation and key component of every marketing campaign, and can be a great way to generate free leads.
You can use lead magnets to build your email list and connect with people who already know about you.
You can start by creating a list of potential leads. Then you can send emails to your leads to let them know about an event you are hosting, or to send new information or content, promote a new service offering, or to stay in touch with customers in general.
You can also send personalized emails to your leads to meet their needs and requirements. This will help to convert leads into customers much more easily.
Besides, by putting your content in front of leads, you can also find people who might not be looking for you.
You can use email templates to create professional and personalized emails for your leads. Furthermore, you can make use of online tools to help you find email addresses of your leads as well as other details.
(Check out our list of tools to help you find email addresses of leads by names.)
Blogs can be of great help in generating free leads.
A blog is an excellent place to build trust with your leads. Readers can stumble upon your blog from all over the web, and convert into leads for your business.
However, you need to remember that anyone reading the blog may not immediately be interested to subscribe to your blog or in what your business has to offer. In this case, a well-organized blog can help to keep your readers interested, coming back for more, and eventually get them interested enough to start looking at the rest of your site. So, creating useful, high-quality content for your blog can help you attract leads to your business.
Moreover, if you have a rich blog, you can ask other websites to publish your blog and help you generate backlinks and new leads to your website. You can also use guest blogging in other websites of similar niche as a means to gain free leads to your blog and your business.
Influencer marketing is another great way of gaining free leads.
It is the opposite of blog marketing, as here instead of writing a blog, you are seeking bloggers to do it for you.It is a great tactic that brings together brands and companies with influencers who have a similar niche.
These influencers can showcase your product, service, content, etc. to their audience, which can be diverted to leads for your company.
While influencer marketing is not always free, not all influencers want cash in exchange for a post or review.
Some are quite happy doing so, in exchange for a free license to your software, a shout out, or a discount on your product or service; a win-win situation for all!
In this case, you need to target micro-influencers. It is the best to target influencers who already showed interest in your brand, or use your product. They may have fewer subscribers compared to heavily famous bloggers, but they drive greater engagement and can even be more profitable in some cases.
This is the age of social media. There is no need to clarify the importance of social presence, and it's impacts on your business.
What could be a better place to generate free leads? Almost everyone uses at least one social media these days. So, it is very likely that your leads are online as well.
Moreover, this increasing popularity of social channels is directly connected to information abundance. Through social networks, buyers have been able to research and learn about products and services a lot more than before.
By penetrating all the major social media channels, you can be where your leads are, and drive them to your company. At the same time, you can personalize the user experience, and build your brand image in the process - ultimately building that trust you need.
Popular social media networks to start building your social presence include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.. Through a social media presence, you can generate free leads by-
A landing page is a web page that a visitor lands on in response to clicking on a search result, email, or an online advertisement.
While a landing page is used for many reasons, one of its most frequent uses is to attract leads through the use of forms, offers, trials, etc.
You can set up free landing pages using templates and automated software to attract free leads to your business.
Retargeting can also help you to gain leads for free.
It is the process of promoting to users who visited your website in the past but didn’t convert to customers.
When a user visits your website but doesn’t take any action, you can take the help of retargeting to stay top of their mind, and ultimately encourage them to revisit.
It can be done by sending them emails to keep them updated, or advertising to them through social media channels. By doing so, you stand a better chance of them remembering you, and engage with you when it’s more convenient for them.
Referral marketing, also known as word-of-mouth marketing, although underrated, is very useful for lead generation.
It is simply asking your existing customers to refer your products and services to their fellow associates. You can always ask for a referral from a customer after a purchase is made and if they are satisfied, they are likely going to be happy to provide a referral.
It helps to get your brand in front of more people, as well as build a positive impression, which, in turn, increases your chances of getting more leads.
In order to get more leads online, your leads must be able to find you! And for that to happen, you need to be able to stay on top of the search lists.
Improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website and blog will help you appear higher on searches for keywords that describe your product or service. This will help drive traffic to your website and increase the chances of lead generation.
Last but not least, the internet is full of tools that might help you generate free leads.
You can find different tools serve different purposes that would ultimately help in the lead generation process. You can use one or multiple of the tools to help you in the plan.
Here are our list of top picks of free tools that may come in handy in generating leads -
Generating free leads is not the easiest task. It takes an adequate amount of time, planning and effort. We hope this article helped guide you leads and how to generate leads for your business.
Now it is time for you to start testing out these strategies to find what works best to generate leads for your business. Do keep in mind, what worked today may not work as impressively tomorrow. With a bit of experimenting with strategies, you will improve your lead quality and lead generation process.