Simply hanging the proverbial shingle outside your business will not bring in all the customers you need. In most small businesses, whether online or brick-and-mortar, you have to chase your customers. You must target and approach them through lead generation strategies that deliver your message to the right customers.
Effective lead generation is not an easy task for most small business owners. Many entrepreneurs form a business to specialize in what they do best, such as a hobby or certain product expertise. Most do not have marketing savvy and lead generation experience that can help them acquire the customers they need to stay in business.
Thankfully, here are four tips on effective lead generation that can help you reach more of your target customers and bring in more sales.
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Host a Seminar
Become an expert in your industry and choose to host a seminar. Hosting a seminar will attract many potential customers and clients to your business by providing a valuable service for them with the information you deliver, but you’ll also have a powerful list of leads you can use to help sell your products or services.
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Write an E-Book
Again, gathering good leads and forming a working lead generation strategy sometimes requires a bit of bait. The free e-book has become one of the most effective online lead generation strategies. Why? Because like a seminar, you provide valuable information to potential targeted customers.
Write an online e-book that is narrow in topic and specific to a wide problem. Format it like a professionally bound book, but publish it as an easily downloadable PDF file. Market your e-book online and ask for email addresses or other contacts in exchange for your valuable free gift. This can provide a host of contacts you can use for newsletters and potential sales notices.
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Improving SEO Strategies
Your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) is a valuable marketing tool and should be part of your lead generation strategies. You must know the right keywords to use on your web pages and updated articles so search engines can find you when a user makes a query. Check your traffic stats. What keywords does your current traffic use? Use tools like Google Adwords to help you find alternative keywords and phrases that may be more targeted to your customer.
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Evaluate Your Response Stats
If you want to improve your lead generation efforts, you must analyze how well your efforts pay off. Using lead generation such as pay per click or pay per call gives you plenty of tools to discover whether you search ad campaign is working properly.
Even other advertising methods such as print, TV, and radio can be evaluated. Use specific telephone numbers, ad ID, or website landing pages to discover how well your lead generation efforts work. This type of analysis can be extremely valuable when re-formulating lead generation strategies.
Lead generation is not easy, but when you have a sound lead generation strategy in place, your efforts will pay off much better in the end.