Small businesses have to overcome numerous hurdles before making a name for themselves and ensuring an ever-increasing revenue stream. Naturally, some of the biggest obstacles are generating leads and inspiring loyalty.
At first glance, it seems simple enough – find a market gap and have your business fill it. Customers will flock to you without much effort on your part. In practice, it’s not nearly as effortless.
If you don’t want to be in the 70% of businesses that fail within a decade, you need to ensure that your lead generation tactics are flawless.
Let’s take a look at a few tips and tricks that will help set you up for success:
Start with an Impeccable Website
Most members of your target audience will have one thing in common – when they need products or services (that happen to be in your offer), they’ll first look them up online.
Over 97% of users search online to find local businesses and make purchases. So, only having a website will immediately up the ante on your lead generation.
Still, it’s not enough to simply have a website. You need to make it a great one if you’re going to generate and convert your leads.
Create a clean design that makes it easy for your website visitors to scan your pages and find the information they need. Be clear about who you are, what your business does, how it can help your audiences, and how interested prospects can contact you.
It’s also always a good idea to take a look at what your competitors are doing with their websites and gather some inspiration from that.
Perfect Your Landing Pages
With your website done, it’s time to start developing landing pages. One of the worst mistakes you can make in this regard is to use your homepage as the go-to landing page for all your ad campaigns.
Your homepage is already the most frequently visited page on your website, so there’s no reason to keep directing your audiences to it during your campaigns. Instead, create dedicated landing pages focused on converting visitors.
You’ll need to make your landing pages enticing, relevant to your ad content, concise, and direct. Present your offer, highlight your brand’s value, and include a clear call to action.
The better your landing page, the higher your conversions will be. Do some A/B testing to find out which landing pages perform the best, find out what your audiences want, and keep tweaking your pages until you get the desired results.
Improve Your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest prerequisites for successful lead generation. By enhancing your SEO, you will:
- Improve your site ranking on search engines like Google
- Increase online visibility
- Provide a better overall user experience
There are a number of factors that impact your SEO ranking, including:
- Page loading speed
- Internal and external links
- Quality of your content
- Security
- Mobile-friendliness
- Keyword usage
If you want to rank on search engines and attract audiences, you’ll need to develop a comprehensive SEO approach. You can’t just improve your page speed, neglect all the other aspects of SEO, and expect to rank first.
SEO is a slow and steady approach, so take your time perfecting it.
Provide Relevant Content
One thing that will help you improve SEO and boost lead generation is content. In the online environment, content is king.
Content marketing allows you to improve keyword usage, take your external and internal linking to a new level, engage audiences, enhance your visibility, and display your expertise.
Whether you’re creating blog posts, e-books, video guides, infographics, Facebook Stories, or any type of content in between, your focus should be on quality. Keyword stuffing and improper backlinking are a no-go. Here’s what you should do instead:
- Provide valuable information that will help your audiences
- Offer solutions to your target customers’ most common problems
- Provide relevant insights
- Entertain your audiences
Before long, you’ll notice just how helpful content marketing can be for your lead generation.
Make Use of Social Media
We can’t talk about lead generation for small businesses without mentioning social media. It’s a gold mine for attracting customers and inspiring loyalty.
Whether you like it or not, you need to have a social media presence as a small business owner – it doesn’t matter if you’re running a small antique shop, a dropshipping business, or a family-owned pizzeria.
However, before you join all the most popular networks and get in over your head, analyze your target audience. See which platforms most of them use and examine how they interact with other businesses on them.
Then, only join those platforms that you can easily manage. After all, you’ll need to stay active on these platforms by regularly posting fresh content and responding to comments and messages. If you’re on more than a couple of platforms, you’ll likely find it difficult to keep track of them and use them to your advantage.
Take Advantage of Lead Generation Quiz Makers
A reliable lead generation quiz maker is ideal for engaging your audiences. It makes quiz creation a breeze, allowing you to know your target customers better and offering you a chance to stand out from the crowd.
You can create any type of quiz you want:
- A fun personality quiz that grabs the viewers’ attention
- An assessment quiz that tells you how much your audience knows about you and your products
- A market research quiz, which allows you to assess your target audience’s most common pain points
Share your quizzes on social media to reach a wider audience, add them to your lead generation emails, and embed them on your website to convert visitors.
With a lead generation quiz maker, it will take you no more than a few minutes to create engaging quizzes that boost your visibility and help you attract customers. You can also integrate it with email marketing tools or customer relationship management tools to nurture leads efficiently.
Monitor Your Online Reputation
To generate leads as a small business owner, you need to keep a very close eye on your online reputation.
You could have the perfect brand persona, excellent products and services, top-notch support, and a bulletproof content marketing strategy – and yet your reputation could still suffer. You need to be careful to pay attention to what people are saying about you and your brand.
Your customers and even competitors will talk about your brand on forums, social media groups, review sites, personal accounts, and more. Keep a close eye on all brand mentions.
If someone is harming your reputation online, you’ll need to be ready to clear things up, highlight your brand value, and present your business in the best possible light.
Respectfully respond to negative reviews, engage in discussions on public forums, offer solutions to public complaints, and ensure that your online reputation is excellent.
Spread the Word About Your Business Through Different Channels
Even with the best strategies at your disposal, it can sometimes be challenging to significantly increase lead generation on your own. Sometimes, you’ll need a little bit of help. Don’t be afraid to ask for it!
Spread the word about your business through different channels. For instance, you could try guest blogging, wherein you create content for other websites in your niche. Doing so will help you expand your reach, showcase your expertise, and attract a wider clientele.
Alternatively, you can reach out to influencers who make sense for your industry and who can connect you with their followers. Influencers inspire trust among their followers, enjoy an excellent reputation, and can easily impact their fans’ purchasing decisions.
Final Thoughts
Lead generation for small businesses can seem like an insurmountable challenge. But it’s easier than you may think when you have a few tricks up your sleeve and know what you’re doing.
So remember, if you want to boost your lead generation and conversion, you’ll need to:
- Create a great website
- Perfect your landing pages
- Work on your SEO
- Create relevant, engaging content
- Make use of social media
- Use a reliable lead generation quiz maker
- Monitor your online reputation
- Spread the word through channels, such as guest blogging and influencer marketing
Follow these tips to ensure the success of your small business and start generating leads like a pro. Your business could also benefit from some creative experimentation on your part to complement the ideas discussed above.
If you need further help developing a lead generation strategy for your business, reach out to the small business experts at HighClick Media. We’ll take the time to get to know your business, identify its particular needs, and come up with solutions that will help your business grow. Reach out to us today at 252.814.2150 or drop us a line here.
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Guest blogger Angela White is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing. Specifically, she writes in the areas of product research and marketing using quizzes and surveys. She is a researcher at a brand that’s known for creating delightfully smart tools called ProProfs Quiz Maker.