How to Generate Leads For Your Business

If you’re like most business owners, you’re always wondering how to generate leads for your business. In fact, lead generation is something that keeps your business alive. A lead is considered to be someone who has in some way expressed interest in something you have for sale.

If you look at lead generation as a sales funnel with the wide side at the top, it would look like this: Leads > Prospects > Customers. Lead generation is a numbers game, as you’re going to have many more leads than prospects, and many more prospects than customers. Upon getting a lead, your initial goal is to qualify them, turning them into a real prospect and then converting that prospect into a customer.

In order to accomplish this goal, you need to nurture your leads from day one.

Here is how to generate leads for your business:

Step 1. Set Your Goal. What do you want to accomplish?  Increase sales? Educate prospects? Entice people to get your free trial? You need to determine your lead generation intentions from the start so that you can design your lead nurturing campaign to match your goal.

Step 2. Measure Twice, Cut Once. Every single piece of content that you send to your leads needs to be edited for grammar, clarity, and format. If you make silly grammatical or punctuation errors, they will notice and yes, they will judge you for it.

Step 3. Hire Help. If you don’t know how to set up a lead generation or lead nurturing campaign, hire someone who can help you. There are any number of marketers who can review your goals and help you determine what type of information you should send to your leads.

Step 4. Drip It Out. Don’t overwhelm your leads by sending them too much material. Instead, practice the drip system where you send a little bit of information at a time. You want to tease them, heighten their desires, and make them want what you have to offer BEFORE you give it to them.

Step 5. Consistency Pays Off.  To keep your business top of mind, you need to send out messages and information to your leads on a regular and consistent basis. If someone signs up for your email list, they are expecting to get regular messages from you. Don’t make them suffer an email drought — if you don’t stay in contact with your leads, they will forget you quickly.  Make your messages to them short, to the point, and informative so they’ll be happy to read the messages you have sent.

Step 6. Use Your Blog. While you will use your email marketing service to send information out to leads via your email list, you can also use your blog update feature within many email marketing systems to notify leads of new blog posts. When writing these posts, talk directly to your leads as the audience.

Step 7. Understand Your Buy Cycle. Each of your audiences has its own buy cycle. To qualify and ultimately convert those leads, you should have information going out to your leads at every stage of the buying cycle.

Step 8. Understand Your Audience. Nurturing a new lead is completely different from talking to a current or past customer. Ensure that you segment your leads into the interested parties, prospects, and current/past customers. In this way, you’ll be able to target your messages correctly to the needs of a particular audience. Check out my article, How to Find Your Niche, Determine Your Ideal Client, and Target Your Market.

Step 9. Know Your Products and Services. I hope that know your products and services backward and forward. This deep understanding will help you determine how a product or service impacts your audience. If you choose to outsource some of this work, you’ll need to help your contractors understand your products and services as well.

Step 10. Know Your Numbers. If you want to be certain that your lead nurturing and lead generation strategies are working, follow the numbers. As you are setting your goals as defined in Step 1, determine what metrics you’ll study to determine your success or failure. Here are the 12 key marketing metrics you should be tracking.

As you embark on a lead generation campaign, remember that slow and steady wins the race. When you deliver informative and engaging information to your leads on a consistent basis, many of your leads will become happy customers.