Congratulations on thinking of growing your small business!
It's just the start, more have to go. Let's set your lead generation strategy to grab more opportunities for your business.
Identify your target audience
What kind of lead do you want to have for your business – you have to identify them first. So, it starts with identifying your target audience. It's quite easy to find out your target audience. You have to prefer them first for whom your products/services are made. In other words, find people or a set of audience who are interested in your products or services. They are your target audience.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) creation
After identifying your target audience group, you need to create ICP or buyer personas. Each buyer persona should come with a different pain in their way that your business is covering.
Suppose your business is a supplier of medical equipment. It has three USPs (Unique Selling Points). These are: 24/7 support, best price in budget, and same-day delivery. With these three points, you're ahead of your close competitors. Maybe your competitors are covering any of these three points, but not all three, and that's where you can shine.
So, set these three points in three ICPs, like;
| Mr. Jim Halpert Age: 30 years Profession: Medical shop owner Looking for: A medical supplier who has a 24/7 support system |
Mr. Tim Johnson Age: 52 years Profession: Medical shop owner Looking for: A budget-friendly medical supplier |
Ms. Pamela Beesly Age: 49 years Profession: Medical shop owner Looking for: A medical supplier who can deliver within the same day |
|---|
Identify whom to target
Find decision makers whom you need to contact to move your sales further. If you consider the earlier case, you need to find the emails of medical shop owners in your targeted region to plan your outreach strategy.
With the help of lead extraction strategies, you can get your targeted leads. All you need to focus on is finding the right sources when you start extraction. Local guide, Google map, etc, are good to find emails of your targeted people.
Set email campaign
Once you collect all emails, the next thing you have to do is plan for your email campaign. Remember one thing: one email campaign won't suit all your ICPs. Variation of emails, as well as the total email campaign, should be there separately.
Before you start email marketing, you have to think about your target people, audiences, and their levels of thought. Emails should reach your target audience at the right time and convey the right message to them. Prepare the email content before launching the email campaign. Make all emails conversational, not like traditional salesy emails. Before you finally put your email list for your campaign, just make sure your emails are verified and accurate.
Score leads
Over time, emails would generate responses. The people who responded to your email are your leads. You need to save the respondents separately in your database and make them leads. Once you get them, you have to assign scores to each lead. You have to make them as "hot", "warm", or "cold". Hot leads indicated immediate conversion, warm leads need nurture, and cold leads need a broad strategy to convert.
Once you score your leads, you have to find out which leads are easy to convert. You'll get a detailed picture of which leads to approach now and which to approach later. Basically, you can structure your lead funnel once you score your leads.
Nurture qualified leads
Warm and cold leads usually need further nurturing to pass down the sales funnel. Nurturement involves connecting your leads directly through the sales and marketing efforts. There are many ways you can connect to your leads apart from emails. That's where we are coming to the next section. Overall, nurturing leads can make them shift from one warm state to a "hot" state if you're consistent enough.
Expand your content channel
If you think email is the best way to connect with your leads, you're wrong. Well, you can connect your leads via omnichannel strategies. At present, there are multiple ways you can connect to your audience and sale your products or services. The following popular channels to connect your audience are;
- Blogs
- Social Media
- Podcast
- Videos
- Webiners
- Inflencer marketing
It's always best to expand your content channels in order to generate leads for your small business. Speak out about what you offer in a transparent manner to gain attention. Be authentic in what you say and what you do, this will help you stay relevant in your content strategy.
Take help from SEO
If you think that keywords are the only thing that SEO does, you need to update your thoughts immediately. In the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in representing brand value and providing brands a proper AI visibility. If you apply the latest SEO measures to your content, it will get more visibility in AI engines as well as the search engines.
SEO works with data support. Track your content performance and make sure it's always aligned with your marketing goals.
Collect referrals from existing customers
Utilize your existing customer base to grow for more. Ask referrals from your existing customers in order to connect with more prospects. If you're in B2B, referrals from your existing clients are like gems. There is a high chance you're going to crack the deal if it is backed by your clients.
Track and modify strategy whenever needed
There is no perfect strategy that is going to work 100%. You have to tweak everything here and there to make a perfect strategy to work out. To evaluate the efficiency of your strategy, you need solid support from data. When data in your hand, you can find where the problems lie. Plus, you can figure out how the problem will be solved.
