Category: Lead Generation

LinkedIn Is the World’s Largest Professional Network with over 150 Million Professionals. Unlike Other Social Media Platforms Which Focuses on Family and Friends, LinkedIn Focuses On the User’s Professional Identity. LinkedIn Is The Most Professionalism Platform For Job Seekers. People Get Most Percentage Of Jobs From LinkedIn By Professionalism. LinkedIn Helps You To Connect To Different High Level Of People From Different Industries And Fields, Helps To Interact With Them. Mainly This Channel Focuses on Where the Users Are Sharing About Their Work, Their Experience, Skills, and Day To Day Activities And Making New Contact with New People.

LinkedIn has:

• Home Page For Checking The Posts Of People You Have Added, Or You Posting Stuffs.
• Network Page For Connecting To People.
• Jobs Page For Searching Your Preferred Jobs In ANY Location You Want.
• Messaging Page For Getting In Contact With Random.
• Notification Page For  Getting Important Notifications Like Jobs, Whoever Gets Connected to You.
• Work Page Where You Get To Visit  *More LinkedIn Products Like Learning, Insights, Post a job, Advertise, Groups, Pro finders, Salary, and Slide share.
• LinkedIn Business Services Like Talent Solutions, Sales Solutions, Post a job, Marketing Solutions, Learning Solutions.
• And Lastly, You Can Create Your Company Page.
• In LinkedIn Ads, You Can Create Your Own Business Page Where You Can Target People on Different Basis.

Here Are The 5 Ways How To Generate Leads In LinkedIn:

STEP 1: Optimize Your Profile:

To Connect With People That You Do Not Know, You Need To Optimize Your Profile, Because If you Have Never Meet Someone Before And Suddenly You Try To Connect With Them Through LinkedIn If You Have An Unprofessional Photo And Just Two Simple Words Describing Yourself What You Do And What You Don’t Then They Won’t Accept Your Request. However, If You Have A Professional Photo And A Good Biography Then Would Like To Know More About You. Optimizing Your Profile Is Very Simple. Get A Professional Picture, Complete Your Profile And Write Something Good.

STEP 2: Create Your Own Company Page:

You Have To Create Your Company Page Where You Can Create Page As Per Your Business Size And Also For Educational institutions And Where You Can Showcase Page. After Creating Page Go To LinkedIn Products And Click Advertise And Then You Have To Create Account Where You Have To Put Your LinkedIn Page URL You Created.

 

STEP 3: Create Your Own Group:

Creating Your Own LinkedIn Group Is A Good Way to Make Leads And Build Your Authority Within Your Niche. Starting A Group Is Easy To Do But Maintain And Growing Up Is Hard To.

You Can See On Your Right Hand Side Of Your Screen, Click On Groups And Create New Group. Give  A Group Name, About The Group, Set Group Rules, Set Discoverability  Of The Group And Your Ready To Go. Once Created You Can Start Adding Content.

STEP 4: Create Potential Customers List:

You Can Search Potential Customers According to our content. Your Goal is To Create Maximum list Of Potential Leads. Its Very Easy To Do By LinkedIn Build In Search Option. LinkedIn Has Over 400 Million Users. You Can Easily Reach Out To Them If You Want. Using Filters In Search To Find The Best Potential Leads For Your Business. You Want To Focus On People Within Your Industry Like CEO, Managers. After Completing Your Relevant Searches You Can Build Large Potential Leads. You Can Start Connecting. You Can Target Different Audience Depending Upon Company (i.e. Company connections, Company size, Company connections), Demography (i.e. Age, Gender), Education ( i.e. Degree, Field Of study, School members), Job Experience (i.e. Job Functions, Job Titles, Job Experience ), Interest and Traits ( i.e. Member Groups, Member Interest )

Step 5: Start Connecting With Members On Your List:

This Is The Most Time Consuming Aspect Of The Entire Process. You Can Not Build Thousands Of Leads In A Single Day, It Will Take Time. Your Profile Should Be Optimised  So That Random Reach Out To You. You Can Reach Out To  Members By Sending Out Messages To Connect. Just Write A Simple Message And Then Send.

You Follow These Steps And Become Successful, Spend Months Building An Image With The Members Of The Group. Become A Good Leader By Blogging And Publishing Good Content. Value To Every Member Of Your Group. Connect With Them Anytime They Want to Reach You and Try Solving Their Problems As Well. If You Have Been Successfully Engaging With Your Audience, You Will Have High Turnout Rate. Once Done Keep the Group Going, Start another One And do It All Over Again.

Conclusion:

Generating Sales Through LinkedIn Is A Time-Consuming Process.  It Takes Months To Get Results.  But If You Do Good In Building Up Your Group, Then You Will Get Results, It Will BE Worth It.  If You Execute These Steps Properly, This Is The Most Effective Strategy In Online Marketing For Generating Leads.

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 From initiating contact with people and keeping the communication until they become customers is sales funnel. The art of opening a conversation in various modes of communication decides the number of closures which can be expected, the more number of prospects who respond to your first note are the ones who will get through the filtration where various aspects will be checked like eligibility, interest, time for conversion and most of all the thought process of buying from competitors. There are various sales funnel stages depending upon the nature of business and while building a sales funnel a few points must be considered for a smooth flow or the loopholes will let the prospects find another way.

• A verified lead
• On-time contact or follow up
• No communication barriers
• Answer to all questions

The main motive of a sales funnel should be to convert cold prospects into a hot lead; a good follow up of the sales funnel allows the team to know the current status of possibility of conversion and if there are fewer chances than change the way of approach. The visual representation of a sales funnel is as the word funnel, wide on top, and narrow at the bottom. There are various kinds of sales funnel, as mentioned above, based upon the nature of business, for example, the stages of an E-commerce funnel might differ a little from marketing sales funnel but the motive remains the same, conversion of prospects into customers. The sales funnel is the journey of the prospect where its duty of the sales team to have proper communication with the prospect. The sales funnel shows whether the prospect was called or not is it a qualified or not and for all of it to be on record it is advised to use a funnel CRM.
The widest part of the sales funnel includes getting the lead into it and making the prospect aware of your product this is a platform where your prospect can be in your competitor’s funnel too. The right mode of communication with the prospect and making sure there are is no communication gap takes the prospect down thru the funnel. Making sure that the prospect is aware of the product or whatever the sale target is very necessary.

Sales funnel stages:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Action

Although it can be debated at any given time that finding eligibility also has to be one of the concerns, well that completely depends upon the type of leads you are dropping in the funnel. Having the right leads is very important as the funnel should function smoothly and stick to the process. It is also another scenario where the leads you have were not generated by any promotions or paid ads but organically the prospects landed on your website. Once they start getting aware of the facilities or benefits that you are offering the next stage creates the finest of the impression and is the biggest factor to decide the conversion.

Interest: at this stage, the prospect is actively looking for different possibilities through answers by various sources and is trying to reach their motive. There are high possibilities of the prospect searching for these answers on Google, time to nail the prospect with the right content is very much needed, and you can attract them with quality and meaningful content as for the organic clients they will indicate by following you on social media or subscribing to your newsletter.

Decision: the decision to take advantage of the solution offered by you can take time, the sales offers can push the prospects to make this decision at the earliest regular follow-ups through calls can help or webinars sales pages, etc can help you for the conversion.

Action: Time where prospect turns into a customer, the concerned agree to the terms and conditions or signs the contract and hits the purchase button. This should not stop the conversation or communication with the customer as there are high chances of another purchase and not just that but also to maintain the reputation with the customer for better relations which ultimately maintains your online reputation too.

Retention: As mentioned earlier, the conversion of the prospect should not stop communication with the customer. The focus on this stage should be to keep the customers happy and no other statement other than the one from your customer boosts and maintains your reputation on digital platforms. Existing customers can increase their revenue by purchasing more products from you. It is necessary to keep a healthy relation with them.

What are marketing and sales funnel?

There is a very thin gap between sales and marketing funnel, while marketing funnel focuses highly on awareness and lead generation the sales funnel is to convert the leads into customers. It is pretty much agreed that marketing funnel is to make sure brand awareness is happening at regular times and the brand is being recognized which ultimately helps to generate leads.

How to build a sales funnel from scratch:

Analyze the behavior of your audience, you cannot sell your product to everybody, there has to be a selected audience to whom you try to reach thru posts or paid ads, whatever may be the mode, the message of awareness has to be loud and clear. The audience should look forward to more. Capturing the attention has to be creative and needs to be done with different modes and at this stage, organic results matter the most. If you have a good budget then run the ads on the required platform where according to your analysis audience is likely to be present and respond.

Build a landing page:

The user experience or the first impression of your website has to be satisfying, have a dedicated landing page for the expected users or surfers; it has to be friendly enough to make the user take the next step. The landing page plays a crucial role in setting the expectations, as the word goes “the first impression is the last impression”. It is important to write attractive and meaningful content, content which is completely related to the link on which the user has clicked, anything which is unrelated and not attention-seeking may lead the user to close the tab and move on, effecting your sale and bounce rate at the same time.

Create your sales funnel:

What complicates the situation and also makes it interesting at the same time is that you cannot have the same sales funnel for all your prospects, everyone has their own needs for the products you are offering. They might use it differently from others or gift it to someone else a same approach for all the customers can lead the customer away from your funnel.
One of the best approaches to understand the customer’s requirement and state of mind is to talk to them. By this approach, you can cover the gap between your product and customer’s understanding, more of all it builds a good rapport with the customer. Make a list of a few important questions to be asked. At the same time also ask if the prospects have tried any solutions for the challenges they faced. When you have all the required details (have a good list of questions to be asked, necessary eligibility criteria, and time frame in which customer is looking forward to buying the product, etc) it will help you to bring the prospect smoothly thru the sales funnel, for which again you need to have content created which meets the basic criteria or the needs of the customer, keep the lead warm with emails and other modes of communication.
As mentioned above about having different sales funnel, it also makes sense to create a customer’s persona.
The sales funnel is just a good design if there are no leads, in the current scenario the world is on a platter for all of us, online marketing has opened many doors of opportunities for small scale to large scale businessmen and entrepreneurs. There are various ways to generate leads, social networking sites, and search engines that will help you to generate enough leads. There are two modes of generating these leads, one is organic and the other is paid. While the organic traffic to your website and details submission helps you to cut down the finances and at the same time increases the chances of ranking up, paid traffic can consume your amount depending upon the nature of your product and once you stop paying that means no traffic no leads. While performing these activities you will automatically get to know about the lead funnel.
To maintain rapport and keep the customer engaged we can follow few steps required in online sales funnel. Regular posts on social media, blogs, videos, or more of all maintain a social media calendar.
While all the steps are followed from time to time your sales funnel strategy brings the prospects to the stage of closure. Closures can be done with various approaches; team can choose to do it with sales pages with such an approach it is necessary to make the customer feel secured about his payment details. Sales calls, a personal visit, or webinars.
As you follow the entire process you will realize there are different phases in the funnel, the prospect’s mindset keeps challenging the sale and hurdles like evaluation and decision take time. If it is B2B sales than the renew process and if it is B2C than repurchase phase.

Next time you set your goals, do go through marketing and sales funnel stages, design flow for the prospects and follow it accordingly, cover the loopholes where the prospects might end up in your competitors funnel, regular follow-ups without disturbing the client, like videos, newsletters and soft calls often give a fine touch to the base of the funnel.

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Just launching a product is not enough. It needs to reach the right customers at the right time. Earlier it was so tough to identify the right set of customers and every company was investing hugely in marketing/advertising to identify the segmentation of customers by doing surveys, doing activities, hiring agencies, and collecting physical data which translates into leads.

The approach was more macro rather than micro. But with the explosion of smartphones, mobile data connectivity has given the birth to NEW DIGITAL / ONLINE Platform. More and more business owners are turning to the internet to generate new customers (LEADS converting to CONVERSION) and grow their company revenues.

This has opened vast opportunities in the field of Lead Generation both as Employers & Employees.

Technology is making customers smarter and more analytical, now they want everything at a click. So, it’s required to change the way companies where planning earlier and segmenting or generating leads in the Current Era.

Importance of Lead Generation in the Current Era:

 In the current era, more emphasis after the New Product launch is to promote the product to the right set of customers (Converted from various Lead Generation activities). The process of attracting your ideal customers and getting them interested in buying your products or services are known as LEADS. With digitization, Leads can connect with your business in various types. For example- your websites, Email marketing, networking events, social media, and ads- all play a role in generating leads.

In the present fast pacing world, it’s necessary to become Digital in Lead generation at every stage of the customer journey. From AWARENESS (Stage where people know they have a problem) to EVALUATION (Stage where they are looking for solutions) to CONVERSION (Stage where they are making a decision).

3 Stage Customer Journey:

A big opportunity for both Employee & Employer is how good one can pair Lead generation with lead management to convert leads through the purchase funnel. So in the current era, this combination of activities is referred to as pipeline marketing to give more micro-level results with revenue growth and optimization of companies’ ROI.

Growing opportunity for Digital Marketers to make a career – A recent study tells that direct traffic to your website, traffic through search engines, and web referrals are the 3 most popular online channels for lead generation, accounting for 93% of leads.

Top Methods for Lead Generation in the Current Era:

 Earlier conventional methods for generating leads typically fall under the umbrella of advertising but with Digital explosion now more micro-level leads are generated which are more effective and almost free by organic search engine results or referrals from existing customers.

Good Leads can be generated from various activities and sources. For example- digitally via the Internet, through personal referrals, through telephone calls either by the company or telemarketers, through advertisements, and events. A recent study shows that 89% of email marketing as the most-used channel for generating leads, followed by content marketing, search engine optimization, and finally events.

1. Website for Lead Generation: One of the most important places for lead generation is your company website. A good website needs to have a High-converting landing page / Compelling Call of Action / Attractive Offers / An Opt-in form. Website visitors become leads by taking actions like:
2. Subscribing to your email list
3. Subscribing for Newsletter
4. Grabbing your lead magnet (Like- eBook, checklist, download, or anything else that your visitors would find valuable).
5. Signing up for a webinar
6. Starting a free trial

• SEO for Lead Generation: How to Attract More Organic Leads – If you’re not using SEO as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing a great opportunity to get more qualified organic leads by attracting more traffic to your website.

SEO serves as a funnel in helping your website to become one of the best lead generation tools. To get the best results and encash this opportunity, you need to keep optimizing and creating quality content so that search engines and the customer searching sees the value in what is offered and ends up in signing up or purchase.

In a nutshell How does SEO help with lead Generation and how it works:

Content Marketing for Lead Generation: Creating quality content and keep optimizing them helps you to attract an audience, and helps to turn them into leads, and convert into sales. Once a visitor becomes customers, you can use more new content to keep them informed and interested.

These days, customers find information and start making a decision long before they talk to you. Your content should have that potential to provide that information. That’s why you don’t just need a strategy for how to get leads to your website with SEO, you also need a great content marketing strategy for quality Lead generation.

Along with quality content for better leads, one can Create a blog and attract blog subscribers / Use videos or podcasts to boost engagement / Build your business personality with photos and infographics / Use various Lead Magnet ideas Like-  eBook, checklist, download, or anything else that your visitors would find valuable. Important points to keep in mind for effective content:

• Know your content goals and content marketing mission goals
• Figure out the content types that best suit your audience
• Create a quality content to appeal to your audience
• Working out the best channels to distribute the content
• Building awareness of your business
• Creating interest in your products and services
• Making your audience actively consider buying from you
• Helping prospects make the decision to use your products and services

The internet is a highly visual place. Use a combination of text, images, and videos to tell visitors a story and create an emotional connection between your brand and leads.

• Email marketing for Lead Generation: Email marketing is the most direct and effective way of connecting personally with individuals, nurturing them, and converting them into customers.

In the present Era, Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy not only for Lead Generation but also having personal connections with prospects and customers. Despite the rise of social media email remains the most effective way to nurture leads and turn them into customers.

Effective marketing emails convert prospects into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal customers, raving fans who become your brand ambassadors.

Lead Generation through Email marketing has a high conversion ratio. By recent results, it is proved that email marketing has an ROI of more than 3700%. That’s why Email is the No1 communication channel. The best part of this is that you own your email list and no one can take away those leads.

Email is simply the best way in all 3 stages of the customer journey and converts sales online.

Few Top most steps to get started with generating leads via email marketing are:

• Selection of email marketing service
• Designing attractive signup forms and marketing campaigns
• Creating the best lead magnet
• Write killer email subject lines so people open your emails
• Personalize and make a human connection with your emails
• Keep tracking your email test results so you can improve your strategy
• Try to Avoid Spam Filters
• Regularly update by removing Inactive Subscribers to Keep Your List Fresh
• Perform some A/B tests to identify which timeframes seem to do best and explore those in future campaigns.
• Using visual and pics with amazing Content to convey the message, Every Time
• Optimize for Mobile
• Send more value emails than sales emails.
• Social Media for Lead Generation:  Sticking with lead generation beyond your website, social media can drive leads directly and can improve ranking and visibility for SEO.

With the rise of time spent by individuals on social networking websites, social media is becoming a big business opportunity to generate leads and product communication.

The Top important sites for social media lead generation are Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  Many companies actively participate in social networks including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to find talent pools or market their new products and services.

Here are some tips to help you Get More Leads from this Social Media Platform:

• Choose the Right Hashtags
• Engage with Your Audience / Go Instagram Live / Participate in Twitter Chats
• Share User-Generated Content
• Add a Link to Your Site / Add Social Buttons to Your Email Newsletter
• Discover What’s Working to Drive More Engagement
• Add Security Seals
• Post at the Right Time of Day
• Replace Text with Images / Use Statistics and Data Points

Lead Generation in the present era for businesses needs to change. This shows how big opportunities are available with Digital Transformation. Companies / Individuals who don’t have a good online presence and need a head start in marketing their products and services need to understand, that a business cannot wait for 6-9 months before their website starts to rank well on the search engine and the website gets organic search traffic. Lead generation methods mentioned can help you market your products and services on the Internet from the very first day.

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Author- Ashish Mishra- Sales & Marketing Professional

“Be Digital as Future Demands”

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