Online businesses use a number of different marketing techniques to generate sales. Whether it’s to stand out from their competitors or simply to enhance their reputation, companies deploy a great many different methods for developing their business. In this article, we’ll be looking at one of the most important components that drive any strategy: how to generate leads.
As you read this article, you will find out more about 5 truly effective strategies for attracting qualified leads and for developing your business online.
Search Engine Optimisation, more commonly called SEO, is an absolutely essential method for generating leads in 2022. SEO involves a whole raft of techniques, enabling qualified leads to be attracted to your website from search results.
When properly optimised, content can enable your website to be displayed to users carrying out searches associated directly with your products or services.
One of the components of SEO that makes this possible is to use relevant keywords that relate to your business on your website. The aim here being to target responses and then attract leads from people looking for your solution to solve their problems.
Let’s take the example of a business that hires out vehicles for weddings, located in Gloucester. This business could position itself using the keywords “Wedding car hire Gloucester”. But to achieve a higher ranking in the results, it might be better to use other keywords that correspond with the specific features of the business, such as “Mercedes to hire for weddings Gloucester”.
But there’s more to SEO that just selecting the right keywords. To enable it to be ranked correctly in search results, your website needs to be optimised based on a large number of criteria that are more or less complex, depending on the case, with regard both to the contents of a webpage, as well as the technology that ensures it operates properly.
For example, you should pay particular care to the way multimedia content is optimised and its size (image, photo, video, etc.), as well as the actual architecture of your website or its popularity by running netlinking campaigns.
Your SEO strategy needs to fit in with your objectives, your audience and your budget. For example, if you are targeting a Russian audience, you’d do better to base your SEO strategy on the requirements of the Yandex search engine, instead of Google.
Although Google is far and away the most used and most sophisticated search engine in terms of referencing technology, there are plenty of others, such as Bing, Qwant and DuckDuckGo.
Using Google Ads, you can lift your website to the top of the search results, enabling you to attract the attention of prospective customers as efficiently as possible. Because it is the world’s most used search engine, Google offers greater visibility and high-precision targeting. In actual fact, this search engine enables you to highlight your website based on keywords or sentences entered by users when conducting searches. This makes it possible to target only those users who are actively looking for your products or services as a solution to their problems.
Thanks to Google Ads, you will be able to target new customers at any stage of the purchasing process by selecting different keywords and sentences, depending on your business.
For example, if you have an e-commerce shop selling smartphones, you can choose the sentence “New iPhone released” or “Google phone functionalities” so that users planning to buy a new smartphone become aware of your online store. And if you want to target users at the moment they make their purchasing decision, you might want to use keywords such as “low-cost iPhone 13” or “Google Pixel 6”.
Whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, the social networks have long demonstrated their value for businesses wanted to develop their visibility and reputation. And that’s not all. Because social media are also powerful tools for generating qualified leads.
In the same way as Google Ads, the social networks also suggest you highlight the content of your choice with a predefined audience. This is content that you select yourself, based on various targeting criteria: demographics, age, buying habits, interests, etc. The big advantage of ads that are sponsored on social media is the sheer diversity of the content to be showcased. There are all sorts of choices open for you to use: photo, video, story, article, carrousel, CTA, etc.
Because there are lots of different social networks with different audiences, your choice comes down to selecting the platform that corresponds the closest to the type of business you are in and your target audience.
For example, if you’re in the B2B market, there’s every advantage to being on LinkedIn. On the other hand, if the audience you are targeting is a young one, you’d do better to communicate on Instagram or TikTok.
As a result of advances in artificial intelligence technology and the fact that it is now more widely available, chatbots are becoming part of digital marketing strategies, enabling you, among other things, to generate qualified leads by offering a better user experience. Configured correctly, chatbots enhance the satisfaction of visitors to your website by providing fast, accurate answers to questions from potential customers – and with phone or e-mail contacts tending to be (too) long, chatbots provide an opportunity to offer immediacy and interaction with your visitors.
In addition to improving the experience of users, chatbots also help add value to your online business because they help reflect an image of reliability, dynamism and innovation.
We were talking about that on our Medium article, but chatbots are also able to provide responses that are relevant and personalised to the needs of your visitors, thereby increasing the chance of them being converted into qualified new business leads.
However, it is very important to configure your chatbot correctly. If you don’t, it can become counterproductive. In fact, a chatbot with a scripted message that is poorly optimised or inappropriate for your audience may have the opposite effect by creating frustration and a reluctance to use and convert to your brand.
Calls to action, more commonly known as CTAs, are elements of a website presented in the form of buttons enabling visitors to be converted into qualified leads.
Depending on your business and the sector you are in, you can set up CTAs that are in line with the challenges of your online business. Having said that, you will need to analyse and test a number of different CTAs in advance before selecting the one that delivers the best conversion rate for you.
To do this, you first need to consider all of the elements of your CTA, whether in terms of its text content (Find out about our offer vs Click here), the way it looks (dimensions, colour, shape, etc.), as well as how easy it is to use (location, contrast, description, etc.).
For example, you can test the effectiveness of various potential CTAs that you may have selected and then actually conduct A/B tests aimed at measuring their performance (click-through rate, conversion rate, heatmap usage, etc.) and then finally select the call to action that generates the best scores.
Whatever type of business you have and the sector you are operating in, these 5 strategies will enable you to attract qualified leads effectively and, by cause and effect, generate more sales and generally boost your business!