Lead generation is the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. In this blog, we’ll cover four of the most effective forms of lead generation and how you can use them to fill your sales pipeline.
1. Inbound Marketing: One great strategy for generating quality leads is to offer gated content, or online materials, such as eBooks, webinars or videos, that require a user to fill out a form with their contact information to access them. This can be a particularly effective approach for generating solid prospects because it allows you to capture a lead while simultaneously gathering intelligence about them. For example, if someone is interested in attending a webinar about accounting best practices for small businesses, they might be interested in purchasing small business accounting software as well.
2. Outbound Marketing: Outbound marketing refers to the traditional use of external, paid channels to deliver a business message and content to an audience, rather than making your content available on your properties. Some examples of outbound marketing tactics include email blasts to purchased lead lists, trade show sponsorships, radio ads and television commercials. While inbound marketing is all about luring an audience to you with content customized to said group’s interests and pain points, outbound marketing is all about pushing content/messaging out to a wider audience. Inbound attracts while outbound interrupts.
3. Email Marketing: In a recent MarketingSherpa survey, 81% of marketers said email is the most effective channel for communicating with potential customers. Many email marketing campaigns, take a newsletter approach. Email newsletters can include information about new services and technologies, customer testimonials, recent blogs, and more.
4. Social Media Marketing: Like email, social media is a highly effective tool for engaging with current and potential customers. In fact, 72% of Twitter users are more likely to make a purchase after engaging with a brand on the platform. Sharing your content on popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can drive readers to your website, boost traffic and bring in new, quality leads.
Lead Generation: Got Talent?
If you are serious about growing your business, you need to dedicate time to lead generation. This may mean hiring additional staff that can focus on business development full time. Or, it may mean carving time out of a current employee’s schedule to dedicate to lead generation planning.
Effective lead generation requires flexibility. Experiment with different strategies for obtaining leads and communicating the value of your business to them. Don’t create messages around your product. Instead, focus on the pain point in which your services will alleviate. Lastly, as with anything in marketing, constantly monitor the metrics around your campaigns so you know what works and what doesn’t over time.
More: For more quick tips on lead generation, check out our latest installation in the Business Made MSPeasy series. This video features quick and dirty tips for MSPs to drive business success to new heights.
Chris Rudnick is director of demand generation at Datto Inc. Read more Datto blogs here.
