With so many small businesses opening left and right, you may find yourself overwhelmed with how to stand out from the market. Like many small business owners, you may have some ideas about reaching your target audience, but it all might seem too vague for you to create marketing plans.
As a small business owner, how can you get more leads for your business? Is it possible to have a proven strategy that can help you get quality customers in the long term? This post will explore some of the most up-to-date, effective lead generation strategies you can apply.
How to Get More Leads for Your Small Business: A Step-by-Step Guide
There are critical areas of lead generation that you should focus on as a small business entrepreneur. The four key branches include content creation, email marketing, social media marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You can choose to focus on a couple of these branches and work your way to more marketing strategies as you expand.
If you're wondering how to get more leads for your small business, mastering these four areas will surely boost your chances of growth. Below, you will see a simple, step-by-step guide on each of the four common marketing branches that will help you reach quality potential customers.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest yet still most practical small business strategies that will help you generate leads. The very first goal is to create a lucrative offer that will help you get contact information. Of course, this offer depends on the type of business you have. Below are some examples:
- E-books: Giving away a free e-book is ideal for small business owners who are authors, content creators, thought leaders, or service providers. The e-book provides a “sample” of your competitiveness in your niche, giving value to your target audience. Creating an offer on your website to provide a free e-book in exchange for their email address is one way to get contact information.
- Discounts: A hefty discount is an excellent option for businesses in the physical product industry. Boutiques, home goods, merchandise, and other physical item stores can offer an attractive deal as users will place in their email addresses and receive the coupon afterward.
- Webinars: Some highly experienced entrepreneurs also offer free webinars within a landing page in exchange for an email. Afterward, the users will be part of an email newsletter with a marketing campaign to upsell or present other offers.
These free and attractive offers are ways to get your target audience’s email addresses, allowing you to give automated newsletters that will turn warm leads into successful sales and deals.
Content Creation
Content creation is deeply embedded in the other branches of small business marketing. This is because you need content to build relationships on email newsletters, social media, or website blog posts. However, there are some key pointers when creating content for several platforms:
- Providing value: Whether it’s to inform or entertain, the content you create must value your present and future customer base.
- Keyword-optimized: Another essential factor for content creation is the use of high-value keywords. These keywords must be related to your business and what your target audience is likely to search. For example, if you own a physical store, it can be great to use geo-targeted keywords on optimizing your website for local search.
- Clear and appropriate: The content you provide should be delivered in a manner that is fitting to the language and culture that your target audience has. Whether you’re offering a product or service, it is essential to have content that makes you a persuasive authority for your niche.
- A powerful call to action: Your content aims not just to provide value and attract customers. It must also encourage your audience to take action. These can include inquiring more about your offers, going to your online shop, or using your service.
These hallmarks of effective content creation can help you produce various blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, or videos that will generate leads for your business.
Social Media Marketing
Social media has now been a commonplace avenue for small business marketing. Scrolling past our feeds, we can see small and large businesses alike using the power of social media to present offers. Thus, it is another branch of focus you would want to generate leads for your business.
There are two main ways you can go about in social media marketing:
- Organic posts: Each social media platform has its respective format of posts. Optimizing your organic posts on your Facebook page, Instagram profile, or Twitter account can help users click, leading to a landing page where you can present your offer. Other organic posts have the goal of increasing followers for a wider reach.
- Sponsored posts: Sponsored posts are those you see on your social media feed of businesses you don’t necessarily follow. These paid posts are integrated with the social media’s algorithm to present your offers to a potentially interested demographic in your product or service.
The great thing about social media is that you can reuse content from your blog posts or any other part of your website to bring new topics to your target audience consistently.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
If content creation is the slow and steady way to generate leads over time, PPC is the method to gain exposure quickly, especially from search engines.
You would notice that when you search for information in Google or other platforms, some results will show up as “Sponsored.” This is called the PPC strategy of many businesses, and it is commonly done to get leads quickly throughout the campaign.
Creating PPC ads requires some level of technical skill in optimizing bids, creating compelling yet concise titles and descriptions, as well as finding the right relevant keywords for your business. To maximize the budget, you have PPC ads. Therefore, you must be well-versed in such areas to get the most returns.
Lead Generation for Small Businesses: A Concrete Strategy
Hopefully, these four focus areas will give you a clearer picture of ways to reach your target audience. Learning how to get more leads for your small business can be challenging at first, but everything is doable with a concrete marketing strategy using these four pillars.
Are you looking for a comprehensive El Monte internet marketing company to help with your small business needs? E-Marketing Associates can help you implement powerful strategies to generate more leads for your small business. See how we can help your business grow.