Businesses are always looking for ways to generate more leads online through their digital marketing efforts. However, many don’t know exactly what it is they need that will help optimize their strategy, leaving them wondering how to generate leads in digital marketing.
Here are some ways you can generate more leads online:
- Create valuable content
- Use creative and effective CTAs
- Use your network of current customers for business referrals
- Live chat features on your website
- PPC ads
- Social media
But what do these mean from a practical perspective? Read on and learn how to make better use of your website, your content, and even your existing customers.
Valuable Content to Generate Leads Online
One of the most popular ways that businesses can generate leads online is through the creation of great content. Great content is content that gives customers value, engages with them, and converts.
Whether it’s blogs, videos, checklists, eBooks, or another form of content, there’s no better way to engage with your audience and build brand awareness. Providing value will keep them coming back to spend more time with your brand.
Whether you have an in-house marketing team or partner with a marketing service provider, focusing your efforts on serving your customers by creating valuable content will keep them coming back to your website and other channels.
Blogs can result in a 434% increase in indexed pages —which are pages that search engines consider valuable—and a 97% increase in indexed links.
Choosing which type of content you want to create depends on your goals and where each content piece fits into the buyer’s journey.
Typically, it all starts with blogs that help build your initial presence on search engines. Blogs often provide value with helpful information that answers questions, informs, and leads the user to more content that is further down the sales funnel and is typically more conversion-oriented.
Other forms of value include entertainment, education, and inspiration. For example, a blog on developing leadership qualities would be informative as well as inspiring.
Let’s delve into the types of content to help you generate leads online.
Related Blog: Digital Trends in the Retail Industry
Types of Content and Their Uses as a Lead Generation Tool
Blog content is the foundation of content strategy, as mentioned above. Blogs answer questions, build organic traffic, and often act as the initial landing page for visitors coming from search engines. These visitors can then be guided to other content and pages that are designed for conversions.
Content like checklists, eBooks, and white papers tend to be gated and are designed to convert traffic into leads through content forms. These are examples of content that blogs can link to and push users toward.
The goal is to pull them from SERPs (search engine result pages) via SEO-focused, informational blogs and gently push them deeper into your site toward these types of content that is typically more technical, answering questions posed by earlier pieces and, hopefully, generating a lead at the end of it all.
Blogs often perform best when they have custom visuals. Visuals for blogs include infographics and videos within them. In fact, infographics are the fourth most used type of content in marketing.
Additionally, you can create graphics or video-based content like infographics or video series that are good for SEO, highly shareable, and easily engaged with. Though the goal of this content isn’t directly to generate leads online, they act as great ways to engage with visitors for longer periods.
Bonus: Use Creative and Effective CTAs
A good call to action (CTA) can be the difference between someone immediately leaving your site after reading a blog and setting them on a path to becoming a lead. A well-written CTA is important. However, presenting the right CTA at the right time is crucial.
For example, a CTA calling for a user to contact a sales representative appearing on a surface-level informational blog might be a step too far. The user may not be ready to jump that far ahead. But they might instead be interested in another blog that pulls them deeper into the sales funnel, a video on the topic, or maybe a piece of gated content on a similar subject.
Additionally, you can tailor CTAs to specific audiences to increase the chances of that coveted click by changing it up based on the host content’s subject, location within the funnel, content type, and more. Adjusting the copy and graphics depending on these types of factors can help you generate leads online by giving people the right message.
Other Types of CTAs
There are other types of CTAs you can include on your site that aren’t designed to generate leads online but can help you collect data to see how well your website and content engage with customers.
Having a “read more” button on a blog can help show you how many people are choosing to read on past a certain point which gives you some insight into how well-written your blogs. You can also find out whether the topics are relevant enough for your target audience.
Including some social media sharing buttons will encourage your audience to share your content with their followers, giving you an extended reach and some helpful data on which types of content are popular and being shared and which aren’t.
All these CTAs provide valuable data that you need to use when planning content in the future. What is working? Which blogs are leading to conversions? Which blogs are being shared? What about them is working/not working?
Data from well-planned CTAs can give you answers to these questions and elevate your digital marketing strategies.
Related Blog: How to Use Audience Data in Omnichannel Lead Generation
Use Network of Current Customers for Business Referral
Whether it’s to drive more sales or just find leads, using your existing customer base as a tool to reach more people is a tried-and-true strategy.
There are plenty of great referral lead generations strategies you can implement and send to your current customers. Adding referrals to an existing rewards program, giving out referral codes to existing customers and employees to share can help.
You can also try offering additional coupons or deals to customers for more referrals and asking people to tag their friends on social posts. All of these are unique ways of accomplishing a similar goal: use current or past customers to find new ones.
Live Chat Features on Your Website
Imagine being able to chat with every single person who visits your website. With chatbots, it’s possible! Chatbots are an automated service on a site that helps users by answering questions and guiding them in a conversation with multiple paths and endpoints.
Chatbots can get the conversation started with an initial question that pops up as soon as someone loads onto the page, then they can collect information, connect users with sales representatives, and use post-chat surveys to gather more information and measure the effectiveness of the conversation path.
Chatbots are a great addition in how you generate leads in digital marketing.
PPC Ads
Though digital ads don’t generate leads directly, they are a vital piece of the online lead generation puzzle because they drive traffic to your landing pages by attacking keywords and grabbing the attention of your audience.
50% of visitors who come from PPC ads are more likely to make a purchase than visitors from organic search
With a strong strategy and research that identifies the best keywords, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an effective way to pull in qualified search traffic that targets specific people, interests, and intentions.
Social Media to Generate Leads Online
Social media marketing has an effective influence in lead generation, according to 77% of social media marketers.
Social media is an increasing necessity in how your business can generate leads in digital marketing. Millennials and Gen Z consumers, for example, use a number of social media channels to complete a purchase.
But how do you generate leads in digital marketing with social media?
As with blogs, ensuring your content provides value to the use is your best bet. Often, the value of content in social media can differ from blogs. Social media users expect more humor and quick insightful tips when navigating social media channels.
A social media strategy should have very clear goals. Using your goals and measuring results can help you as you optimize your social media strategy and improve it with every campaign.
In Conclusion
Digital marketing and generating leads online is all about knowing your audience.
What questions do they have, what are they searching for, and how are they searching for it? The more you know about them, the easier it will be to create content, ads, and customer experience features that bring in traffic, engage with your audience, and help them become a lead and connect with your team.
To learn more about how to create a quality website that engages users and generates more leads, download our helpful eBook What Makes a Quality Website?
