A steady stream of business leads is essential for the operation of your company. However, leads don’t just appear out of nowhere. To snatch business leads from the hands of competitors, you must go the extra mile. Or, in other words, you require exceptional lead generation strategies to accumulate leads in your sales funnel and nurture them for conversion.
In this blog post, we will elaborate on seven bulletproof lead generation strategies that are both innovative and time-tested (use the Contents List on the right to quick-jump to the one you’re interested in):
- Referrals
- Interactive content
- Email marketing
- Wording that sells
- Psychological triggers
- Lead management software
- Buying business leads
Continue reading to discover businesses’ lead generation strategies and how to find leads for business without jeopardising your reputation or long-term success.
1. Ask for Referrals
One of the top strategies to get leads in marketing is to implement a referral program. Not only do 84% of consumers look for personal recommendations before making a purchase but referred customers are 400% more likely to suggest other customers and 18% more loyal. Increasing exposure, high-intent business leads, and, ultimately, more sales are all outcomes of referral traffic.
To ensure the success of your lead generation strategy, it is essential to cultivate trusting relationships with your consumers, regardless of whether you collect leads organically or through a referral program. Establishing authority and trust is feasible, as only approximately 61% of people have confidence in their companies, making it possible to outpace 39% of competitors.
Leveraging the power of social networks and incentives to connect new business leads— a referral program must be profitable for referrals — are the keys to referral success. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter annually generate more than two billion transitions to e-commerce websites.
E-Commerce Websites’ Most Popular Social Media Platforms for Referral Traffic:
| Characteristic | Volume of traffic in million visits | Traffic share |
| 1,078.74 | 47.87% | |
| YouTube | 551.31 | 24.46% |
| 218.66 | 9.7% | |
| 166.3 | 7.38% | |
| 121.78 | 5.4% | |
| 68.7 | 3.05% | |
| 29.37 | 1.3% | |
| GitHub | 4.02 | 0.18% |
| StackOverflow | 3.94 | 0.17% |
| Fetlife | 3.1 | 0.14% |
| Tumblr | 2.9 | 0.13% |
| Classmates.com | 2.31 | 0.1% |
| Hacker News | 0.79 | 0.04% |
In order to avoid appearing desperate, refrain from promoting your referral program in every correspondence. Instead, adhere to a well-defined content plan, prioritise clients who are referral-prone, and ensure that your offer is financially feasible, clear, and direct. A 10% bonus on the referred customer’s purchase should suffice to pique interest.
2. Involve Business Leads With Interactive Content
Price calculators, quizzes, interactive content, animated infographics, and contests generate significantly more business leads than uninteresting content. However, even simple visualisations efficiently generate leads through 60,000 times quicker perception than plain text.
There were more than 5.4 million social interactions from the most popular quiz! Nearly one-third of leads are captured by regular quizzes, which is ten times more than email letters. To get the greatest results, keep your quiz brief (no more than 20 questions), straightforward, relevant to the reader, and coherently structured (maintain the same number of responses throughout the quiz).
Source: Explodingtopics
Polls, surveys, and stories are examples of interactive content that can offer invaluable customer insights, enabling you to segment your audience better and tailor their experiences.
3. Leverage Email Marketing
From awareness to consideration to conversion, a segmented email sales funnel will enable you to generate an increased number of leads. Because segmented email campaigns generate 760% more income, it is imperative to tailor content to people at various email marketing funnel phases.
Source: Statista
Stage 1. Awareness
During this phase, you will require guides, pricing calculators, and other beneficial information that strengthens your relationships and highlights the benefits of your product in a natural manner. At the awareness stage, avoid aggressive selling since it will frighten away more clients than it will convert.
Stage 2. Consideration
As strangers transition into high-intent business leads, you may offer them tutorials, testimonials, free webinars, and reinforcing content.
One of the most effective new lead generation strategies is AMP emails. By moving the action to the body of the email, such as checking for available seats, booking an appointment, or buying on the spot. AMP emails boost conversion by around 10%.
Stage 3. Conversion
A phone call or other cross-channel strategy is required for those who need a final push. In order to increase conversion of email leads, provide incentives and explain why your product is the best choice for both immediate relief and long-term happiness.
Two Steps to Make an Effective Email Sales Funnel
Step 1. Map Out the Client Journey
It will be possible to distribute your email marketing resources effectively by utilising a visual representation of the sales process. Begin by identifying all possible touchpoints and the actions that customers may take at these touchpoints in order to draw a customer journey map.
Source: Conceptdraw
Valuable insights into customers’ behaviour throughout the sales funnel and how to enhance your service to generate and convert more email business leads can be accessed through a well-designed customer journey map.
Step 2. Access Email Lead Sources
Use your online presence to redirect people to your newsletter through strategically placed opt-in forms, including site covers, pop-ups, exit forms, embedded forms, and side-ins. This can be achieved through a dedicated landing page, social networks, or podcasts. At all costs, refrain from unsolicited messages.
Last but not least, to send the correct messages to the right people at the right time, leverage email marketing automation. With a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 10% every year, email automation is becoming more relevant for both medium and large enterprises.
4. Focus On Words That Encourage Purchases
Not every word has the same marketing power. Some words and phrases can elicit a strong emotional response, such as fear of missing out or a sense of urgency. For example, “limited” and “free” suggest scarcity; “guarantee” and “sale” evoke a sense of opportunity and security; “the last of its kind” and “exclusive” make the product look desirable.
Source: Contactpigeon
Business behemoths have known for a long time how powerful emotional triggers can be:
- To remind customers of the importance of being a loyal client, Amazon uses “Prime” in its membership plans.
- Apple emphasises its technological advancements and superiority over the competition by employing the terms “MacBook Pro,” “iPad Air,” and “AirPods.”
- To stand apart from other coffee shops and appeal to the environmentally-conscious demographic, Starbucks sprinkles “fair trade,” “slow brew,” and “cold brew” in its marketing campaigns.
5. Appeal to the Psyche of Leads
Considering that in the UK, approximately a third of consumers make impulse purchases when shopping, the right sales psychology can grow your bottom line exponentially. To secure more purchases, use subtle psychological triggers rather than just impressing customers with discounts and offers.
Source: Statista
Emotional Triggers for Producing Business Leads
Fear of Being Left Out
Offering your customers exclusive discounts and limited-time offers that they won’t discover elsewhere could compel them to take immediate action. In addition to enhancing brand recognition and motivating newly obtained leads to take action, the creation of urgency around products and services, particularly on social media, will generate additional business leads.
Source: Financesonline
Aversion to Loss
Did you know that people value losses 2.25 times more than similar gains? Despite the fact that the coefficient is contingent upon numerous individual factors, such as the industry and the buyer’s persona, customers will typically react more strongly to the possibility of losing $100 than they would to earn the same amount. You would need to double or even triple the loot to achieve the same result!
Source: Fqmom
Stressing the possible consequences of delaying action is the essence of using loss aversion. For instance, you might say, “Register now to avoid losing $500 worth of the product,” or offer a limited-time version so your customers can understand how much they might lose.
Social Proof
People often emulate the actions of others to mimic the perceived correct behaviour, which results in a preference for products that are used by others. When customers observe others engaging with a brand, they are more inclined to engage themselves because they have confidence in the third-party evaluation of the brand.
Social proof is primarily based on the opinion of your company and products, rendering reviews and testimonials a powerful tool for generating leads:
- Your website’s traffic can be increased by up to 45% by having testimonials.
- A 30% increase in customer expenditure can be achieved through flawless reviews.
To build trust and eliminate the necessity for independent research as an opinion-shaping factor, it is essential to have influencers and experts who can attest to your credibility, in addition to reviews and testimonials.
Source: Financesonline
Reciprocity
When your friend purchases a coffee for you, you are inclined to reciprocate every time, are you not? A cognitive bias that is well-known is reciprocity, which is based on our perception of fairness as a social norm. Our natural tendency is to give value back when we get value.
To encourage reciprocity, offer a discounted price or a free trial to allow your business leads to experience the product’s value and then use a follow–up to secure conversions.
Source: Drip
Another way of utilising reciprocity is to implement a referral program with a 10% discount for referring three or five friends. Starting the referral chain reaction may result in an exponential increase in the success of your lead generation endeavours.
Learn three additional ways to prepare your business leads using the power of reciprocity.
Endowment
Endowment bias is feeling a stronger attachment to an item you possess than to ones you don’t. For instance, you may provide an exclusive deal to a specific type of customer that they are unable to obtain from another company. This will make them feel like they’re part of a privileged group and give them a strong sense of ownership over the product.
6. Get Business Leads From Lead Providers
Buying leads may not appear to be the optimal lead generation marketing strategy, as you may prefer to rely on your own capabilities rather than a third-party company or affiliate network that you must trust to provide timely leads.
However, purchasing business leads may be an option if you require progress quickly, your pipeline is depleted, or you are launching a campaign that necessitates special leads that you are unable to generate. But most importantly, purchasing business leads is an effective strategy for diversifying lead generation.
Source: Fitsmallbusiness
7. Automate Your Lead Generation Process
There is no logic to winning the lead generation battle if you can’t get newly acquired leads to be effectively managed. And you are not alone: 65% of businesses struggle to harness their leads and are in search of automation solutions to alleviate the pain.
The good news is that lead management solutions, like Phonexa’s LMS Sync, are widely available on the market.
By integrating lead analytics, lead distribution, lead tracking, and real-time reporting, LMS Sync automates the lead generation process from A to Z and unlocks valuable customer insights, covering the entire lead management cycle from the first ad display to conversion.
Phonexa brings it all together for you to optimise your lead generation strategies.
Book a demo to learn how Phonexa’s comprehensive marketing automation suite can assist you in generating and converting a greater number of business leads.
Frequently Asked Questions
Exactly what is a business lead?
Business leads are individuals who have demonstrated interest in your product by completing a website form, for instance and have the potential to become paying customers. Essentially, the term “business lead” is the same as a “lead.”
What is the difference between marketing-qualified leads (MQL), information-qualified leads (IQL), and sales-qualified leads (SQL)?
– A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a potential customer who satisfies specific criteria that have been predetermined by your marketing team, such as psychographics, demographics, purchase history, etc.
– An information-qualified lead (IQL) is a potential customer who has agreed to provide personal information in exchange for value, such as an email address for a free subscription.
– A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that meets the criteria of your sales team, such as the level of interest in your product or company and is prepared for conversion into a paying customer.
Read additional information about how to qualify business leads effectively.
What are the most critical business leads?
Due to proximity to a purchase, high-intent business leads (SQL leads) are the most important. Low-intent business leads, on the other hand, need significant nurturing via marketing and communications messages.
What is a strategy for generating leads?
A lead generation strategy is a collection of tools and techniques designed to generate interest in your business, move leads through your sales funnel, and convert them into brand advocates and paying customers.
How can I increase the number of business leads for my company?
Make your lead-generating strategies revolve around your unique value proposition. Explain the advantages of your product and provide a detailed explanation of how it resolves the issue in a manner that is not possible for other brands.
By integrating a variety of lead generation strategies, including pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimisation, and pay-per-lead marketing, you can then utilise Phonexa’s lead analytics software to differentiate the wheat from the chaff.
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