How to Build a Sustainable Lead Generation System for Your Small Business
As a small business, lead generation is one of the most important elements of running your business. Without it, growth can be stunted, leaving you scrambling. Lead generation essentially widens your customer base and helps you boost sales. But how do you start? In this article, we’ll discuss how you can build a sustainable lead gen system for your small business.
Understand Your Audience
First things first, you need to understand your audience. Otherwise, you’ll be aimlessly shouting from the rooftops hoping anyone will listen. Instead, you need to focus on who wants to listen to what you have to offer, and target your marketing efforts to those.
For example, there’s no point in a local raw dog food business trying to sell to cat owners, or even dog owners halfway across the country, if it doesn’t offer delivery. Instead, they’d target dog owners who are interested in the benefits of raw dog food and who live within a certain radius.
Easier said than done, we know.
To determine your target audience, you need to follow a few steps:
- Determine the characteristics of the goods or services you offer. What problem will it solve? Who’s most likely to benefit from it?
- Research your market. Next, look beyond your business with external market research. Start with competitor research to find out who they are targeting, the demographics they appeal to, and what gaps in the market your business can fill. You can do this by looking at their website, socials, and tools like Ahrefs or Semrush.
- Create buyer personas. Use information gathered to create profiles of imaginary people who would buy your products. The profiles can include details like age, job title, education level, income level, marital status, pain points, hobbies, and much more.
- Consider your market channels. When you’ve got your personas, you can examine their habits. Younger consumers tend to head straight to social media whereas older generations prefer more traditional news outlets. When you know what your audience is doing and where to find them, it’s much easier to target your content to them.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s all about trial and error. A/B test as much as you can for constant evaluation of their needs.
Create High-Value Content
One of the most essential elements of lead generation is content. From the copy you put on your website to your social media posts, everything should be intentional and lead your user further down the sales funnel.
The type of content that usually attracts leads include:
- Blog posts
- Guides
- Social media
- Podcasts
- Videos
Once you capture their attention, you can continue the journey through the funnel to build trust and credibility before converting users to leads.
When writing your content, you must take keywords into account. Keywords are the words or phrases that users search for in order to gain helpful information or solutions to their problems. Going back to the dog food business, a typical keyword that potential customers would type into search engines would be ‘raw dog food shops Brighton’, for example. It’s then essential you get some mentions of this keyword and its variations throughout the content, as well as simply providing helpful content. The more questions your content answers about a specific subject, the more likely the users will see you as an authority in the industry.
Having quality, optimised content will also make your content more discoverable on search engines. And more impressions tend to lead to more leads! But we understand how difficult it is to plan the right kind of content for your website when you’re busy running your small business, so an SEO service may be a good option.
Optimise Your Website for Lead Capture
Optimising your website is super important for capturing those all-important leads. Landing pages, calls to action (CTAs), and lead forms are all elements designed to pull a user in and hopefully convert to a customer.
To optimise your website for lead capture, you need to incorporate relevant keywords into your content to help ensure your website appears in the SERPs (search engine results pages), and builds trust with visitors. Next, you need to create an intuitive navigation. This means it’s clean and easy to navigate, making it quick to find your service or product pages.
Throughout your website, you need to include relevant CTAs as a way to direct visitors to the contact page, sign-up pages, service pages, or booking pages. You can even use CTAs at pages focused around the top of the sales funnel to provide alternative actions. For example, a blog, guide download, or relevant piece of content.
Leverage Email Marketing to Nurture Leads
Even with all the new marketing strategies and technologies that are available, email marketing still remains one of the most effective ways for of getting new customers. This is because you can create targeted, personalised messages for each lead which increases the chances of a response.
But, how does it work?
Email marketing involves collecting customer leads through an email opt-in form, which gathers the potential customer’s information – like their name and email address. This information is used to nurture relationships with potential customers in order to eventually convert them into paying customers, or at least that’s the hope.
There are many benefits to email lead generation, including:
- Growing brand awareness and trust
- Building relationships
- Provide customers with value
- Convert prospects into loyal customers
As long as you target the right customers, entice them to share their contact information, and create gripping emails, email marketing for lead generation can be an effective marketing tactic.
Overall, the key to a sustainable lead generation system for your small business is planning and consistency with a focus on long-term value for potential customers over quick wins.
