Lead Generation For Small Business

The buying process has changed and you need to find new ways to reach potential customers and get heard through the noise. Instead of finding customers with old school mass advertising, you now have to focus on being found. Back in the old days, information was scarce and the sellers had all the purchasing power. Today, we have an abundance of information. People have so much more knowledge. They are educated enough to look at all of the offers, browse the internet and find all of the potential vendors themselves. And now it's marketing that has most of the organizational power. It's marketing that is the most powerful and impactful business function today. Right now, I want to share with you my five step lead generation strategy for small businesses that you can use and implement today.

Hey there, this is Monique and you're listening to episode number 15 of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about lead generation for small businesses. So let's get straight into how you can get more leads, that's more potential customers for your small business.

The reason why lead generation is important is because the buying process has changed and you need to find new ways to reach potential customers and get heard through the noise. Instead of finding customers with old school mass advertising, you now have to focus on being found and learn to build continuous customer relationships.

Back in the old days, it used to be like this. Information was scarce and the sellers had all the purchasing power. Salespeople would go from door to door and try to sell to people, and companies would send out catalogs so customers could order, or mass advertise with no way to personalize their messaging to get potential customers into their physical locations. This means that sales had most of the organizational power and sales was almost the most powerful part of a business.

Now everything is different, right? We live in a whole different world. We have digital technology and it has transformed the way that we live and the way that we do business. Me and my team here at the Dragon Digital Marketing Agency have the mission to educate you about growing your small business by taking advantage of digital media and digital technology, and to use it to attract great customer relationships.

Today, we have an abundance of information. We are bombarded with so much information every day that it can feel overwhelming sometimes, right? There is Google, there's YouTube, there are social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and there's forums like Quora, and there are blogs, and there are review websites, just the internet in general. So today people have so much more knowledge. They have access to a lot more information and are so much better informed than they used to be back in the day.

That goes for both consumers and also businesses, because at the end of the day, whether you're in B2B or B2C, we all deal with people. We communicate with people. We seek relationships with people who are human beings and who live in this modern world. So the buyers have almost all of the purchasing power. Now they are in control. They are educated enough to look at all of the offers, browse the internet and find all of the potential vendors themselves. And now it's marketing that has most of the organizational power. It's marketing that is the most powerful and impactful business function today.

And lead generation, meaning attracting potential customers to your website, is part of digital marketing. Lead generation is important for your small business, because it enables your website and thus your business to get enormous traffic. It attracts more people to come to your website and learn more about you. You can then strategically get your website visitors to visit your brick and mortar physical location or get your website visitors to buy directly online. Lead generation leads to more sales for your small business, no matter what kind of business you have, it ultimately helps you to grow your business.

If you have a quality lead generation process, it will help you a lot in finding the right customers that your business needs and increase the number of website visitors who convert into your customers.

Let's have a closer look at what lead generation actually is and what a lead is. A lead is any person or company that shows interest in your products or services in some way, shape or form. Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has shown interest in your company's products or services.

This is what a holistic lead generation strategy looks like. You want to stimulate and capture people's interest in your products or services to develop your sales pipeline. You develop a sales pipeline by getting leads into your marketing funnel.

Remember the marketing funnel has six stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. A person has to be aware that you even exist first before they can become your customer, right. You need to let your ideal customer know that you exist first so they can become aware of you and you get that brand awareness. Once they're aware of you, you got to arouse interest. You have to offer something valuable to them that they want and are interested in, like great content. If they like what they see and you leave a professional impression, you showcase your expertise in the right way, your website offers a good user experience, and you come off as trustworthy and legit and not spammy or anything, they'll consider you. In the consideration stage, your lead considers doing business with you because you offer a solution to something they need and want. Then if you create a sense of urgency and you show that you're successful and you have social proof, like your customer testimonials on your website and so on, and you provide informational content so that they can learn more, you awaken a buying intent. Now, if you have a great unique value proposition and a unique sales proposition, you convince your lead to buy from you, when he or she is in the evaluation stage and compares different offers. If you've successfully managed to differentiate yourself and you've satisfied and nurtured your lead through all of those stages, you'll get the purchase and they become your customer.

Every time a lead goes from one stage to another stage in your funnel, that's called a conversion. For example, you've converted a stranger into an aware person, or you've converted a lead into a customer. That's what conversion means.

Now all of this doesn't have to happen in a day or two. It really depends on how important and how impactful that decision is to your potential customer. It often takes several interactions and positive experiences to turn a lead into your customer. You want to nurture your leads throughout the buyer's journey until they have become your customers, and then keep on delighting them and foster the customer relationship to maximize your customer retention.

If you're interested in learning how to get the perfect unique value proposition and unique sales proposition for your business, you have to check out my new course that I've just launched. And in my free course, I teach this and much, much more. I also show you how you can get your targeting laser focused and reach your ideal customers by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is an ideal customer avatar. And in my free course, I'll show you the questions that you have to ask to get a profile of your ideal customer, that you can use to personalize your messaging, and to no longer waste your time trying to convince people who are not even in your target audience. With a buyer persona you'll only invest time and effort in communicating with actual potential customers. So check out my free course. The link is in the episode description . And if you're on my website, you'll find a link on the show notes page as well. I also have a free buyer persona template that you can download and use right now to create beautiful buyer personas that you can share with your entire company today. You want to check out my free marketing and branding course videos and the buyer persona template, because it will help you to grow your small business and stand out from competitors.

Leads typically hear from a business after opening communication. For example, by submitting personal information for an offer, trial or a subscription, instead of getting a random phone call from someone who've purchased their contact information. For the leads that fill out a form, they often do so in exchange for something relevant, like a relevant piece of content or a compelling offer. To be successful in generating leads for your business, you need to have multiple lead magnets.

Lead magnets are relevant and compelling pieces of content that you offer for free in exchange for contact information, like a name or an email address. Interested people will enter their contact information to get your lead magnet. And then you'll have permission to contact them. Some examples of lead magnets are job applications or actionable and comprehensive guides, useful templates, coupons with great deals, helpful eBooks and other amazing content.

If you want to learn more about lead magnets, you can check out my blog post in which I explain lead generation in more detail. I'll leave you a link in the show notes. So make sure you head over to the show notes of this episode on dragon-digital-marketing.com and check it out.

See how content marketing is closely related to lead generation? You need to offer your own high quality and super valuable content to your audience to showcase your credibility and expertise and make them trust you enough to give you permission to contact them. You can reach out to our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing, if you need any help with your content marketing.

Now I want to mention an important point and talk about buying leads. People ask this a lot. "Why can't I just buy leads? I'll buy a bunch of email addresses and then send out an email blast."

I understand that you want to fill your marketing and sales funnel quicker, and you have the temptation to think about buying leads. It's a lot easier and takes far less time and effort, right? Please think again. When is going the easy way ever right? Do what is right, not what is easy. The easy way usually just leads back in.

Any leads you buy don't actually know you. They didn't actually opt in to receiving anything from you. So any messages that you send to them are therefore unwanted messages. Sending unwanted messages is intrusive. It means you're not making a good impression. Chances are, those blindsided people will mark your messages as spam. This doesn't only filter out future messages from you in their inbox. This info is also shared with their email provider and once enough people flag your messages as spam, you can go to a kind of black list that's shared with other email providers. Your email deliverability and IP reputation will be harmed. And it is really, really hard to get out of that list once your reputation is ruined.

Besides that, it is also very expensive and it will cost you much more than creating great and amazing content that will actually build up your reputation and work in your favor. Nothing worth having comes easy. Besides that, you really don't want to do business with people who sell other people's data without their consent, do you?

So now, how can you generate leads? Let me walk you through the steps of the lead generation process. First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, your blog, or one of your social media pages. That visitor then clicks on your call to action, an image, button, or a message, that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action. That call to action takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page that is designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer. An offer is the content or something of value that's being offered on the landing page, like an ebook or a template and so on, right, your lead magnet. Your offer must have enough perceived value for your visitors, for them to provide their personal information in exchange for access to it. Once on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for the offer. And Voila! You have a new lead.

This is the ideal lead generation process. There are actually a bunch of things to tweak and optimize for this to go this smoothly.

So right now, I want to share with you, my five step lead generation strategy for small businesses that you can use and implement today.

Step one. Identify your target audience. Know who you want to target and know your ideal customer. Having a buyer persona is incredibly helpful for that. So go ahead and grab my free template for that if you haven't already.

Step two. Create lead magnets. Create amazing pieces of educational content that address your leads' pain points, solve their problems with actionable tips and give them all what they want and need. Ask for something in return for that more premium piece of content, like an email address, so you can contact your lead via email marketing, or you can also ask for a phone number, for example, so you can reach out to your lead via text message marketing.

Step three. Promote your content and deliver it to your target audience. You need a promotional plan that will get your content in front of your target audience. Consider using your website or your blog or your social media accounts for that. Also think of speaking engagements and industry events and current customer referrals as promotion opportunities.

Step four . Create your marketing funnel. You need to have a plan for collecting the contact information and what you want to do with it once you got it. Your plan lays out how you want to guide your new lead through the stages of your funnel. What content do you plan to nurture them with? I have a podcast episode where I explain what kinds of pieces of content are best suitable to offer to leads in which stages of the funnel. I'll link it down below for you to check this one out as well. You want to check out that episode too, because the needs of a person in the different stages of the funnel are different. And you want to be recognized as the solution your new lead needs in this exact stage that he is in, in this time.

Step five. Nurture your leads and engage them. After the conversion is before the conversion. You want to rinse and repeat this process to get repeat customers. In addition to email, social media provides a number of opportunities for small businesses to create conversions as well. Engage your audience and engage with your audience too, and nurture the customer relationship with the people who care about you and show them that you also care about them. You can also use your social media channels to find out more about what your audience needs and wants. Follow them back and show some interest. The more positive touch points your leads have with you over time, the more likely they will trust your brand and eventually buy from you.

Summing up. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode.

Lead generation is a continuous process. You need to get an efficient system in place and use the tips that I've shared with you in this episode. Lead generation is important for your small business because the buying process has changed and you need to find new ways to reach potential customers and get heard through the noise. The modern age requires you to become digital and leverage digital marketing to generate leads for your business.

And the five steps of the small business lead generation strategy I suggest are: Step one, identify your target audience. Step two, create lead magnets. Step three, promote your content to your target audience. Step four, create a marketing funnel. And step five, nurture and engage your leads.

Check out my free online course called Brand Story where I teach you how to build a brand and stand out from competitors, which includes how you formulate a great unique value proposition and unique sales proposition and how you create a buyer persona that makes your marketing stronger, and you can download my free template for that.

If you want to learn about more ways to attract more customers, listen to my podcast episode number three.

And if you need more help with your digital marketing, check out our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing. We're happy to help you out.

That's what I got for you today. Until next time.