As a business owner, coming up with a great product or service is only the first step. To succeed, you also need to get the product into the hands of the right clients. That starts with effective lead generation. By keeping your pipeline full of potential customers, or leads, you can build a sustainable market for your product or service. Let’s take a closer look at lead generation and how you can harness it to grow your business.

The Keys of Lead Generation

Lead generation is crucial to expanding your client base. With many other businesses likely competing for the same leads, you need to make sure your approach is targeted and effective. The following are two keys to lead generation.

1. Defining Your Audience

You don’t want just any leads. You want leads that are more likely to turn into customers. As such, the first step in effective lead generation is to define your target audience. Who are they? What age range do they fall into? Where do they live? What gender(s) are they? What need do they have that you can fulfil?

2. Creating an Approach

Once you know who your target audience is, you can focus on developing a lead generation approach that appeals to their particular needs. For instance, if your target audience is men between the ages of 30 and 50 who live in rural areas, you’ll need to consider what types of ads are likely to reach these clients and what sorts of marketing tactics appeal to them.

Inbound Versus Outbound Lead Generation

There are two ways to generate leads. You can use outbound marketing to directly generate interest in your product or service. TV ads and newspaper ads are examples of outbound marketing. Another option is inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, you create content that meets people’s needs and interests and then introduce your product or service once they’re engaging with your platform.

Inbound marketing tends to cost less than outbound marketing. It also tends to reach a wider customer base since many people skip TV ads and throw away direct mailings.

Inbound Lead Generation Tactics

If you decide to build your lead generation strategy around inbound tactics, here are some top ones to consider:

  • A Website: Create a responsive website, and consider working with an SEO service to optimize it with searchable, user-friendly content.
  • Content Marketing: Sharing useful blogs, videos, and infographics with potential leads can generate a lot of interest,
  • Social Media: Utilizing platforms like Instagram and Facebook can generate a large number of leads very affordably.

Regardless of which strategies you choose, your campaign needs to hold your market’s attention and direct them towards your product. You want to create customers, not just contacts. Working with a marketing automation team can help keep your lead generation process consistent and effective.

Lead generation is the cornerstone of any good marketing program. Keeping new leads in the pipeline will help keep your sales high and your customer base expanding. If you’d like help with lead generation, contact us to get started with one of our expert teams.