3 Effective Lead Generation Tools that will Boost your Business

February 9, 2015

If you ask online marketers what they spend the most time doing, they would probably say online lead generation. With so many options available—email, social media, search, display—, marketers often become overwhelmed. The is trick to know the right channels and figure out which ones will serve your strategy best.

So how can you use these highly effective online lead generation channels? Let’s use the following example to better demonstrate them.

You own a cake baking and decorating business. You create delicious cakes for birthdays, graduations, holidays, special events like weddings and other general celebrations. The majority of your clients have opted in to receive emails from you and are following you on social media. To order, they can go to your website or call your store.

 

1- Lookalike or Similar Audiences on Facebook

In 2013, Facebook created an advertising tool called Lookalike Audiences to help businesses use their current contacts to reach similar audiences. The tool is an addition to Facebook’s Custom Audiences. It lets you upload your customer contact list and use it to send out targeted Facebook ads to these customers.

If you’re not on Facebook, look around as you might be living under a rock. No matter what kind of business you have, you should have some sort of Facebook presence because more than likely, your audience certainly does.

Sounds like a great tool, right? Not only can you advertise to customers who already buy from you. You can also reach beyond them and seek out new leads. You wouldn’t have to hope your ads reach the right people.

 

How can I get more Facebook Page likes for my business?

Let’s say you want to get more clients to like your Facebook business page. You already used Custom Audience several times and exhausted your email addresses. Now nearly everyone has liked your page and the ones who haven’t probably never will. That’s where Lookalike Audience comes in:

1. From your Audience menu, choose the audience type that you want to target (let’s say you have a list of clients you know have children under the age of 13). Now click the “Create Similar Audience” button.
2. Choose the country you want to target and then either “Optimise for Similarity” or “Optimise for Greater Reach.”
   1. Similarity: Facebook will automatically access those who were most similar to the compiled Custom Audience. In most cases, this option has a smaller reach, but it is more accurate.
   2. Greater Reach: This option will allow you to reach more people. There’s a chance though that more of them will not be in the demographic you were targeting.
3. Test and test again to see what works best for you

When word-of-mouth isn’t enough, Lookalike or Similar Audience lets you get the word out. Reach out to people who match your contact list’s many demographics in order to find new leads.

 

2- Behavioural Retargeting

Most store owners estimate that of the people who visit their websites, only about two percent of them purchase anything on their very first visit. Most of the time, they just want to browse the products, make notes or possibly compare prices. For visitors coming to our cake baking website, maybe they just want to see their options.

Behavioural retargeting focuses on the 98 percent of clients who do not buy on the first visit and need a little more coaxing. Using Google Remarketing codes (which should be on every page of your website), you will know who visited your page. From there, you’ll be able to make educated guesses about that visitor’s need.

Obviously, people looking at wedding cakes probably aren’t searching for holiday cakes, right?

Once you have this knowledge, you can create more targeted ads to push products you know certain people were looking at. The result is a more personalised experience for the consumer.

More things you can do with behavioural retargeting

• Offer solutions for their problems (“Planning your wedding? Here are our cakes.”)
• Create brand recognition
• Send viewers to your email sign-up page

This method of online lead generation keeps your brand and product fresh in the mind of people who visited your site but didn’t purchase anything. In a way, it’s like getting a do-over or a second chance. Your audience is vaguely familiar with you, and with behavioural retargeting, you can make your brand recognition grow. 

 

3- Email Marketing/Marketing Automation

Marketers have long since assumed that email marketing is dead and done, but actually, it’s still a very vibrant form of communication between clients and companies.

With the advent of marketing automation, email marketing has evolved and become easier to tailor to certain demographics. With software tools that can help you create, schedule and track emails; email marketing is stronger than ever.

Email marketing is about reminding clients of your product or service and how it can help them solve their problems or fulfil a need. For many companies, clients have a wide variety of needs. It’s difficult to design an email that meets very specific needs and ensure it makes it into the hands of those clients.

Let’s say you want to create an email, targeting offices that might be having holiday parties. Here’s how you would do it:

Database selection

After you put in your clients’ email addresses, you can then select only the ones you want to send your email to. Select your business clients.

Email creation

For these clients, you should display your most delicious holiday cakes to entice viewers. Keep the text short and clear, and be sure to include a link to your holiday cake page on your website or to the ordering form online.

Schedule

Choose the time and date you want to send your email. Try to predict when your clients will be the most active or when they’ll check their emails. For a baking business, you might schedule the email just before lunchtime.

Track

Automation software tracks the number of people who opened the email as well as how many of them clicked onto your website. This should help you better construct your emails. If people opened the email but didn’t click the links, maybe the text was confusing or the images weren’t quite right. You can create follow-up emails for any clients who clicked on your links but didn’t order a cake.

Marketing automation takes a lot of the guesswork out of email marketing and allows you to create targeted emails for a targeted audience. You won’t have to wonder if your emails were effective, and with each try, you’ll have a better understanding of your audience’s needs.

As you can see, online lead generation is a difficult, but hardly an impossible task. With the right mindset and software, you can reach your clients and show them why you are the best option for them!