Foolproof lead generation tips to take you to the next level

Consider using part of your advertising budget to give away products or service to bloggers or influencers in the right niche. Some influencers have huge followings on social media – and if they are in your niche, at least some of their followers will be too.

If they like your product, they will share it on their networks, including YouTube, Instagram and their own blogs, and may provide you with a backlink, which will help to boost your own SEO.

If you know which other sites your audience visits, it is a good idea to guest blog for them. As long as they are not in direct competition, you can add value to the other site, get a backlink and reach a new audience.

If writing isn’t your strong point, get a ghostwriter to blog on your behalf. If you want to impress a new audience, you need to be sure your writing and grammar are up to scratch.

If you want to tap into an influencer’s network and reach some of their audience, invite them to guest blog on your site. They are unlikely to do this for free, so make sure you offer to pay them.

They will be happy with the backlink and the chance to reach a new audience, while you get some quality content and a fresh voice on your site. The guest blogger will almost certainly share the post through their own networks, giving you the potential to pick up more social media followers and email subscribers.

Sometimes it’s good to step out from behind the screen and get out into the real world. Look for conferences or events in your niche in your local area. They are a great way to network with potential customers, as well as influencers who could promote your product.

If you are feeling confident and think you have something to say that could add value for others, consider taking it a step further and applying to speak at a conference.

Exit-intent pop-ups detect when a visitor is about to leave your site. They appear, often with a promotion, at the last minute. 

The interruption is often enough to stop a visitor from leaving and encourages them to look again at the product they were considering or to finish off filling in your subscriber form.

Using Twitter’s own search feature (or even just scrolling through your feed or searching hashtags), will let you see what people are talking about on Twitter.

If some common questions or issues crop up, write a blogpost to address those issues. Then respond to all of the tweets with a link to your article.

Not only will your blogpost get views, but you have the potential to turn these views into new Twitter followers, new email subscribers and fans of your brand.

A Twitter poll is a great way to gather information, which you can then use to improve your lead generation efforts.

Offer between two and four options in your poll and keep them simple eg ‘What flavour would you like us to produce next?’ or ‘Which colour of paint do you prefer?’.

Twitter is a great tool for generating leads, particularly if you are primarily a business to business company, rather than business to consumer. But Twitter moves very fast. Your tweets will disappear from a person’s feed within minutes.

But you can stay at the top of the newsfeed by paying to promote your best tweets. Pricing is variable and dependent on a number of factors, but if you choose ‘website clicks and conversions’ as your objective, you will only be charged when someone clicks the link to your site.

When you know what people are searching for online, you can create the content that answers their questions and solves their problems – either by adapting existing posts or writing new ones.

Search Google for ideas that will help you gain leads. Look up your competitors to see what their top pages are and look up keywords, extended phrases and similar words.

You can also use Google Webmaster tools to see which keywords are already driving traffic to your site. 

With more web traffic than ever coming from smartphones (currently just over half of internet access is through mobile devices), it is important that your beautiful website design works well on a small screen. 

Make sure that everything, from your call to action to your forms, fits the small screen. And as typing on a smartphone is harder than typing on a desktop or laptop, keep your forms as brief as possible, so that visitors aren’t put off filling them in.

A slide-in scroll box is a discreet call to action, which appears on the bottom of your screen, so it is visible but not too disruptive!

The box displays a short message, with space to capture a visitor’s all-important email address.

A survey or quiz is a great way to get traffic and interaction on your site, as well as helping you pick up valuable information. Make it fairly short and offer a lead magnet for taking part, so that visitors are happy to spend five minutes on it during their lunch break or between jobs.

Ask for their emails at the end to pick up new subscribers – and so you can email them to follow up on any of their questions and ideas.

If bloggers or influencers love your products or services, set up an affiliate programme so they can share the love. They include links to your products in their content, meaning you can reach a much bigger potential audience. 

If a blogger or influencer make a sale through an affiliate link, they make a small percentage of the cost for themselves. As you only pay them when they make a sale, this can be a very cost-effective form of marketing.

If something seems too good to be true, your audience may fear that it is! Big concerns are always whether they are going to be charged for something or whether their data will be shared.

So make the language on your site clear and reassuring:

• ‘Sign up here for free’

• ‘You can be sure that we will never share your data’

If they trust you, they are far more likely to subscribe to your emails.

Visitors to your site want to be sure that their data and any payment details are secure, so make sure you display security seals visibly.

You should always have an SSL certificate, as well as trust seals from safer payment companies like Worldpay.

If your call to action isn’t getting quite the response you were expecting, you need to test what works and what doesn’t. 

Make small changes to see what gets the best response – would a different colour work better? Or maybe a different heading or even placing the call to action button higher up the screen?

If a pop-up is moving, your visitors really can’t ignore it! Animation can draw attention to your opt-in forms and make people more likely to subscribe.

Your landing page should be simple, clear and effective. It should have a clear call to action – a single goal and a single reason why a visitor is on that page.

If there are too many calls to action, too many messages or too many links on your page, reduce them! Your goal is to gain a lead or make a sale, so make sure that is very clear.

This might seem obvious, but you should make sure the wording on your call to action is the same as the title of your landing page. 

It’s all too easy to forget as you craft your brilliant copy, but if the titles don’t match, many people won’t bother to read all the way through your landing page to check they are in the right place. Instead, they will leave your site and might find the answers they were looking for with one of your competitors.

Nothing will make a potential customer trust you more than real reviews from real people. So once you have some customers, get in touch with them and ask if they could share a few words for your website.

Ensure they are visible, perhaps below your opt-in form or scrolling along the bottom of your site, rather than hidden away on an obscure part of your website.

If stock is running low or a promotion is about to come to an end, it is a great time to encourage visitors to act fast.

Highlight the number of items you have left in stock or the time remaining on your special offer to encourage customers to act and avoid disappointment, rather than wait.

If your website covers a wide range of products or services, your audience won’t be interested in everything you have to offer. 

So you can target campaigns based on what visitors have browsed on your site. If they have been looking at vegan recipes, there is no point sending them offers on meat or links to your latest blogpost on cooking with minced beef. Sharing a campaign around vegan cooking will make them far more likely to subscribe and buy from you.

Publishing just one extra blogpost a week can increase traffic by 18.6%, according to recent figures. That is traffic that can all be converted to leads.

But if you are too busy with the day job to write an extra post – or writing isn’t your strong point – hire a ghostwriter to write engaging copy on your behalf. Those extra leads should ensure it is money well spent.

Can you see the wording on your website if you squint? If you can’t, others won’t be able to either. 

Try a different colour or a larger font to make your call to action legible.

Want people to opt-in for your lead magnet? You don’t need to sell it to them in great depth – a few bullet points should be all they need to help them make the decision whether or not to sign up and to give you their email address.

Your homepage should look beautiful with engaging text and stunning images, right? 

Actually, it’s not as important as you might think. Very few people arrive on your site through your homepage – they will be arriving on a landing page, either following a search or because you have promoted it.

So put your time and energy into optimising the landing pages and blogposts which bring traffic to your site.

There is no right or wrong colours for your page and your call to action button, but there are still a few things to consider.

Keep your colours consistent – so if your call to action buttons are blue, make sure they are always blue. They should also be on brand, so don’t use a colour that doesn’t fit anywhere with your logo or corporate colours. 

People are more likely to use a call to action button where there is a good contrast between the text and the button – so your text could be black or white or an opposing colour (eg red/ green), but it needs to be clear and visible.

The word ‘social’ can sometimes get forgotten when it comes to social media. Social media isn’t just somewhere for you to endlessly shout about your brilliant products on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. One-sided communication will make people turn away from your brand.

Instead, engage with customers and potential customers on social media. Listen to what they have to say and respond with solutions. In that way, you build relationships with your leads, which ultimately builds loyalty to your brand.

Social media moves fast and your posts will be lost in someone’s feed very quickly. So to stand the best chance of getting seen, make sure you are posting at the right time of day. 

For Facebook, that is between 1 and 4pm on Thursdays, Fridays and at the weekend. For Twitter, it is 12-3pm during the working week. For Instagram it is between 11am and 2pm and again between 7pm and 11pm, with a peak on Wednesdays.

A picture says a thousand words, so replace as much of your text as possible with images. 

The brain actually processes images 60,000 times faster than text, so if you want to make your opt-in really stand out, use pictures wherever possible.

People like statistics, facts and figures – so make sure you include them in your blogposts to add value.

Convert them into an easy to use infographic for visitors who prefer images to text. Infographics are great for sharing on social media too.

One of the best ways to convert visitors to customers is by offering them a discount, on either individual products or their total spend. Put a time limit on the discount to encourage people to buy now rather than wait.

But use discounts sparingly – offering them too often will make people think they never need to pay full price.

Nobody likes spam, so it makes sense to reassure people that you will never spam them, right? 

Actually, even mentioning the word ‘spam’ on your site is enough to reduce conversions by as much as 18%. Say something reassuring instead, like: ‘We will never share your information’.

To position yourself as an expert in your field, as well as a business which is friendly and approachable, join online communities.

This could be a local business group on Facebook, if you only sell in a small geographical area, or a regular Twitter chat for your industry. Get involved, comment regularly and suggest your products and services when appropriate, without coming across as someone who is only interested in the hard sell.

Educational content is a great way to accelerate lead generation. So whether you are an expert in online marketing, gardening or healthy eating, it is easy to piece together your content into a mini educational course.

Offer your course as your lead magnet when people opt-in to your subscriber list.

If you have something to add value, or even a friendly and encouraging word to say, spend some time commenting on blogs in your niche. This will help you reach a wider audience made up of the blog’s readers.

There will usually be space for you to add your own website URL to the comment form, but don’t spam by adding it in the body of your comment. This is considered particularly bad form in some niches.

People want to see the face behind the business on your website. Research shows that photos including faces on Instagram receive 38% more likes than those without.

So put your leads at ease with photos of yourself and your team on your site.

Samples and giveaways are a great way to get people excited about your products. Obviously this works particularly well for food products.

Leads who sign up for a free sample have already shown a real interest in your product. If your product is good, particularly in terms of taste and value, they should hopefully be back for more. If they share their samples with friends and family, this can prove to be a very effective form of lead generation.

Stand out from the crowd with an irresistible offer. It could be a discount, a free sample or exclusive free content.

Engage with your audience to find out the one thing they would be unable to refuse. Communicate with them through social media or face-to-face if you have a bricks and mortar shop.

When you’ve spent time writing a brilliant blogpost, you want it to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. So consider syndicating it. That means you pay a little bit of money (usually pay per click) for it to be suggested as ‘recommended reading’ on other blogs in the same niche.

Although these links won’t usually count for your SEO, they are a great way of driving more traffic to your site.

Your headline is what draws people in to read your blog or sign up for your lead magnet. That’s why you should spend time getting your headline right. 

Your headline should make people want to click and keep reading, so it has to generate interest in your topic. And remember not to make it too long – you want to be sure it will fit properly on a smartphone screen.