If you want your small business to thrive and grow, you need a steady stream of new leads to fuel your enterprise. Unfortunately, these leads aren’t going to generate themselves—which means you’ll need to have a solid lead generation strategy in place.
But what exactly is a lead generation strategy? What are the different types of lead generation strategies? And how can you choose the best one for your small business? Well, we’ll get into all that here. Let’s jump in.
What Is a Lead Generation Strategy?
A lead generation strategy is a collection of different business growth tactics designed to help you generate more leads for your business. Having a lead generation strategy can help you discover more prospects who might be willing to buy your products and services.
When implemented and practiced properly, a good lead generation strategy will provide your business with a steady stream of prospects, so you can connect with them, pitch them, and secure sales appointments with them that could (ideally) lead to more revenue generated for your business. Lead generation methods vary in size and scope, so it’s rare that any two businesses have identical approaches since every company has their own goals they want to hit
Why Is Having a Lead Generation Strategy Important?
So, how do you boost organic traffic to your website?
The short answer is search engine optimization (SEO). Through various SEO tactics, you can gradually optimize your website to be more authoritative in the eyes of search engines and more relevant for your target audience. The higher your authority is, and the more relevant content you have, the more pages of your website will be ranked highly for keywords and phrases you’ve selected. With higher rankings and greater visibility, higher volumes of organic traffic is a natural result.
The question is, how do you optimize your website for search engines?
SEO is a complex field, and its many strategies and tactics can’t be summarized in a simple paragraph. Throughout the rest of this blog, we’ll go over some of the most important tips for optimizing your website and improving organic search results. But for now, let’s just focus on the basics.
Ultimately, search engines decide how a page of your website ranks based on its relevance and authority. Since search engines like Google and Bing are also businesses themselves, they want to provide their users (or customers) with the best experience possible. This is what makes SEO an important part of your digital marketing strategy because it enables search engines to easily identify your content as useful and resourceful for what users are looking for.
In this equation, relevance refers to how appropriate this content is for the search user’s needs. For example, if a search user is looking for pumpkin pie recipes, and you have an excellent pumpkin pie recipe on your website, that page of your website will be considered highly relevant for the search query.
Of course, there are probably thousands, if not millions of pumpkin pie recipes on the web. So how do you Google and other search engines sort the wheat from the chaff? The answer is by evaluating authority. The more trustworthy and authoritative a source is, the higher it’s going to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). You can build this trustworthiness and authoritativeness by writing better content, building more links, and making your website better optimized.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the more specific ways you can increase organic traffic to your website.
Outbound vs. Inbound Lead Generation: What’s the Difference?
There are hundreds of different sales development and marketing tactics you can use to generate new leads. With each new technological development available to digital marketers, that number continues to grow over time. Broadly speaking, the core lead generation strategies can be divided into two categories: outbound sales development and inbound marketing.
Outbound Lead Generation
Outbound lead generation strategies rely on you actively reaching out directly to new prospects that you’ve targeted. These strategies require you to learn more about your target audience, discover how to reach them, and then try to convince them to work with you.
A few of the most common outbound lead generation methods include:
Cold calling — While cold calling tends to get a bad rap, it’s incredibly effective to build your sales pipeline and generate new sales opportunities. The average cold calling conversion rate may be about 2%, but when you consider the high call volume sales reps make on these accounts, a 2% conversion rate can still result in a positive ROI, making it still a completely realiable and popular outbound sales development strategy.
Email marketing — If you have a list of potential prospects, you can begin cold emailing them, attempting to reach out to decision-makers the same way you would with cold calling. The difference is, email marketing is much easier to automate, and you can reach out to people more frequently and less expensively because of it. To get the best results from your outbound lead generation strategy, it’s vital to use a combination of cold calling and email so you can reach the right prospects at the right time.
Networking and social media outreach — Last but not least, you can also practice outbound lead generation with the help of networking and targeted social media outreach. As you meet new decision-makers in your target market, you have the opportunity to introduce yourself and your small business. While many people you meet won’t be interested in your brand, products, or services at first point of contact, nurturing relationships with them over time can help build trust and result in revenue generated.
Inbound Lead Generation
Inbound lead generation strategies aim to naturally attract people to your brand through digital marketing efforts. Rather than reaching out to individuals, you’ll instead build an online marketing approach that captures people’s attention by offering them insights, tools, and other forms of value.
Examples of inbound lead generation strategies include:
Content marketing — Your clients are hungry for information. In fact, they’re so hungry for it, they’re going to seek it out on their own. If you provide them the content they want, they’ll naturally seek you out and immediately be impressed with what your company has to offer. Developing better blog posts, eBooks, sell sheets, and other materials can increase your brand visibility and bring more people to your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) — SEO and content marketing go hand in hand, since high-quality content is a practical requirement to boost your website’s domain authority. That said, SEO requires your attention to a wide variety of different tactics, all of which are designed to make your website and its individual pages rank higher for search queries relevant to them. Higher rankings lead to more organic traffic, which in turn, can present a steady stream of leads.
Social media marketing — Lastly, one of the most common forms of inbound lead generation is social media marketing. As a small business, social media is likely attractive to you because it’s free, readily accessible, and highly scalable. If you can build a solid audience and post consistently great content, this could be a valuable source of new leads for you.
Benefits of Having an Outbound Lead Generation Strategy
Sales lead generation strategies often focus on an outbound approach. So what are the benefits of having an outbound lead generation strategy? A few of the most significant benefits of having an outbound lead generation strategy include:
Quick Ability to Get Started
While inbound strategies typically take weeks to months to ramp up, you can get started with an outbound lead generation strategy right away. Once you have a list of prospect names, phone numbers, and other forms of contact information, you can start calling and emailing them, which means you can start selling faster and pushing them through the sales funnel.
Casts a Wide Net of Potential Buyers
Outbound strategies tend to cast a wider net of potential buyers than inbound strategies, giving you access to a wider range of people who may not discover your content organically. This isn’t always an advantage, since casting a wider net can lead you outside your target audience, but outbound strategies do typically support higher volume, allowing you to connect with more potential customers.
Enables You to Target Specific Markets
Inbound lead generation tends to be somewhat unpredictable, meaning you may struggle to attract the people you want to attract. In outbound regeneration, you benefit from more specific targeting. If your small business is looking for very specific types of customers, outbound can help you narrow down your audience and generate more leads that meet your ideal customer profile.
Gives You More Control of Your Results
In some ways, inbound lead generation is like fishing; you never know exactly what’s going to bite or when it’s going to bite. But outbound lead generation is more akin to spearfishing; you’re actively looking for a prospect to target. You have more control in this type of strategy, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
More Consistency
One of the most significant benefits of outbound lead generation is the consistency of the strategy. Once you establish a pattern of tactics and conversational habits, you can repeat these processes and see similar results. If you’re not seeing the results you want from your sales development approach, adjustments can be made to yields a more significant ROI.
Benefits of Having an Inbound Lead Generation Strategy
While outbound lead generation may be a reliable approach to business growth, there are many benefits of having an inbound marketing strategy as well. The core benefits of having an inbound lead generation strategy include:
Less Manual, Day-to-Day Work
Make no mistake; inbound lead generation requires significant effort and investment. However, inbound lead generation requires less manual day-to-day effort from your marketers and salespeople. Much of this work can be automated, so you won’t have to reach out to people individually; therefore avoiding tedious work.
Warmer, More Aware Leads
Attracting people naturally with content, social media posts, and search engine optimization means your leads are going to be warmer and more aware of your brand. This doesn’t always precisely correlate with a higher close rate, but your salespeople will spend less time on initial introductions and more time actually selling to leads who are ready to buy.
Higher Trust
Leads who discover your brand naturally are going to be more trusting of you than people who are targeted by your outreach campaigns. With inbound marketing, you have the opportunity to establish yourself as a trusted lead in the industry through statistics, knowledge, insights, case studies, and more. Inbound lead generation gives prospects all the insight they need to make a decision on their own of whether or not they see the value your company has to provide them.
Better Buying Cycle Timing
While outbound lead generation gets praise for its targeting, inbound lead generation is often better when it comes to buying cycle timing. Because you can shape your inbound lead generation with target keywords, content distribution patterns, and more, you can guide your prospects through the stages of the buying cycle and ultimately reach them when they’re most likely to buy.
Lower Costs
Though costs vary for both outbound and inbound lead generation, inbound strategies tend to have lower costs, especially in the long term. There are many reasons for this, including reduced manual effort and the semi-permanence of the assets you generate for these strategies
Why Growing Businesses Use a Variety of Sales Lead Generation Strategies
Each lead generation strategy is unique, offering distinct advantages and disadvantages. Some are fast but unreliable, while others are slow and highly reliable. Some are highly targeted and expensive, while others are broadly targeted and inexpensive.
Depending on the nature of your company and the leads you’re trying to generate, some lead generation strategies are going to be strictly better than others. But for the average business, one lead generation strategy is never enough, because it doesn’t offer enough coverage. The most successful small businesses use a variety of sales lead generation strategies, so they can capitalize on the diverse advantages of all of them.
It’s obviously a bit more expensive and time consuming to focus on many different lead generation strategies, rather than just one, but if you keep these strategies in alignment and budget smartly, you should be able to see a much higher return on investment (ROI) this way. As an added bonus, when you use many different lead generation strategies simultaneously, you’ll be able to easily compare and contrast them. After running these strategies for a few months, you should have a better idea of which tactics work best for your specific small business.
Best Lead Generation Tactics to Follow
The best lead generation tactics can facilitate better results, regardless of whether you use primarily outbound strategies, primarily inbound strategies, or a mix of both. To get the most out of your lead generation efforts, it’s important to follow these lead generation tactics:
Focus On Quality Over Quantity
Novices in the lead generation game typically suffer from “more is better” thinking. They want to generate as many leads as possible as quickly as possible. This isn’t necessarily a bad intuition, but it is a misleading one. More leads are generally better, but only if the quality of those leads is adequate. Early on in your lead generation strategy development, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. After all, a single valuable lead is worth more to your small business than dozens of uninterested ones.
Rely on Lead Generation Services
Lead generation services could provide you a shortcut to better lead generation results. When working with an outsourced sales or marketing agency to generate leads on your behalf, you’ll pay directly for the quality leads generated for your brand. It cuts out the hard work on your end while paving the way for more profitable lead nurturing and sales.
Watch Your Competitors
Are you struggling to come up with new lead generation strategies? Or unsure of which strategies would work best for your industry? One of the best ways to research and brainstorm is to watch your competitors. Which lead generation tactics seem to be paying off the most for them? Chances are, these tactics will work equally well for your business.
Watch Your Competitors
Are you struggling to come up with new lead generation strategies? Or unsure of which strategies would work best for your industry? One of the best ways to research and brainstorm is to watch your competitors. Which lead generation tactics seem to be paying off the most for them? Chances are, these tactics will work equally well for your business.
Warm Up Your Leads
Even if your leads are highly qualified, they may not be familiar with your brand. And as your sales team can surely attest, warm leads are almost always better than cold leads. That’s why, as an extension of your lead generation strategy, you should have a lead nurturing strategy in place. Drip email campaigns, social media marketing, and occasional outreach can quickly warm people up to your brand and make them more likely to buy.
Experiment, Measure, and Analyze
Experimentation is your strongest lead generation tool. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going to motivate your prospects to action, or exactly which tactics will result in the greatest number of qualified leads, so conducting experiments and studying the empirical evidence resulting from them is the best path to greater actionable knowledge. Even simple experiments, like A/B tests, can teach you about the nature of your target audience and the efficacy of your best strategies.
Key Takeaways
Most lead generation strategies can be categorized as outbound or inbound, but you’re going to need both types of strategies if you want to be successful. Each lead generation strategy in your repertoire will have unique advantages and disadvantages, so diversifying your lead generation strategy portfolio is typically the wisest move.
Need a hand selecting the best lead generation strategy for your business? Contact the business growth experts at Abstrakt Marketing Group to learn how we can be your partner in sales development and marketing!
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