Whether the CEO of a large company or a manager of a small business, you understand that one of the most important parts of growing your business and company is generating credible leads. In this post, we discuss the best sources to find effective leads that generate plenty of interest and revenue.
What is a Lead?
A lead is a potential customer that expresses interest in a company’s product or service. For example, if you took an online survey to look at a car on a dealership’s website, and entered your email to access the car’s details, you might receive an email a few days later checking up on your interest in the car. This process is subtle, and not as harsh as cold-calling someone out of the blue, with no idea whether or not the customer is interested. With leads, you already know if the customer is interested, which helps you save energy and spend time connecting with people that actually want to do business with you.
Importance of Leads
Without leads, your company will sit with no data, plan, or growth. Leads are important because you need them in order to create more sales. When a company takes the time to build leads, it shows that the company is credible, trustworthy, and is interested in building its own growth. When you find potential leads, those leads will feel recognized and generate interest. With new interest emerges high-quality prospects that convert to high-quality customers. Leads are important because your revenue relies on it!
How to Increase Leads
With Orbitly, you can uncover large amounts of data from social media handles, profiles, and email accounts, which can help you create leads for your business. If you post asocial media advertisement, and have customers interacting in the comments, you can use Orbitly to find out more information about those that comment. With a simple search process, Orbitly can take an Instagram handle or name and pull up an entire profile about a potential client. Think of all the ways you can use all of the information gathered from a customer’s social media profile!
Try offering coupons for your product.Adding a coupon is an incentive for a potential customer to buy. If your company doesn’t have a blog or social media presence yet, it’s time to create a blog and social media profiles. Start out small, then move to more profiles as you become comfortable. Better yet, hire a social media manager that takes care of monitoring social media comments and messages for you! More customers read blogs than ever before, and a blog can generate a good bit of traffic. When you collaborate with another company, see if they will feature you on their blog, and you will get leads through clicks on the backlinks.
Along with coupons, you can offer product trials. Product trials can draw a customer in, and allow them to try a sample of your product before committing. If they enjoy your product, they will be much more inclined to follow through and buy in the long run.
It is best to organically create leads, rather than buying them. When you buy leads, you run the risk of the leads not wanting your product at all, and irritating the potential customer. That customer may tell other customers that your company is violating their privacy, and word spreads quickly.
Tried and true advertising is one of the original ways to gain leads. All you have to do is create some ads (or have an expert design one for you!) and utilize social media ad space. You can even advertise in video form on platforms such as YouTube. Video ads catch the eye of potential customers, and can draw them in when they view your product inaction. Do you have any friends that have relatively popular blogs? Maybe you know other business owners who also need advertising space? Try asking your friends to display an ad for your company, or trade ads with other business owners.
Analyze data as much as possible. If you analyze your data, you can determine what your customers are looking for, what they want from your company, and what products would be most popular. This can save you a lot of money, and help you find the perfect audience for your products.
Sending out emails and surveys are another great way to increase leads. Customers often volunteer their contact information in exchange for free downloads or PDF’s of free information. If you create a free product that is in demand, you would be able to generate quite a few leads. With each email that you receive, plug it in to Orbitly to find even more information. Get a head start on how much you know about your leads, and make sure you try Orbitly next time you have a lead!