As inbound marketing extraordinaire Kipp Bodnar once said, “Leads are the metric that, as marketers, we rely on. Because leads mean money.” In the past 15-20 years, many of these leads have moved online, but not everyone’s tactics have changed along with the shift in technology.
We recently put together an eBook to help your business enhance its online lead generation. The 30 Greatest Online Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas addresses how media channels have changed, and how to build a killer online lead generation campaign to reach your target market effectively (PS, that beautiful orange image above is the cover). These tactics have been developed by our inbound marketing software partner, HubSpot, and have been test over the past 7 years by 8,000+ customers.
A Little Bit of Background Information
While these tactics work wonders, generating millions of leads per year for HubSpot clients, they don’t mean anything if you can’t take the information and apply it to your own efforts. Many of these helpful suggestions refer to Offers, Call-To Actions, Landing Pages and Forms. Here’s the lowdown on what they mean:
• Offer: An offer is a piece of content that is perceived high value. Offers include eBooks, whitepapers, free consultations, coupons and product demonstrations. Pretty straightforward, right?
• Call-to-Action: A call-to-action (CTA) is either text, an image or a button that links directly to a landing page so people can find and download your offer.
• Landing Page: A landing page, unlike normal websites is a specialized page that contains information about one particular offer, and a form to download that offer.
• Form: You can’t capture leads without forms. Forms will collect contact information from a visitor in exchange for an office.
Our eBook includes four chapters devoted to each of these crucial elements, and a fifth chapter discussing multi-channel lead generation that can help you generate the most amount of leads through a variety of outlets (social media, websites, email, text message, etc.).
Some of Our Favorites
Direct from our eBook full of tips, tricks and ideas, here are a few of our favorite recommendations for generating online leads:
#6 Avoid Corporate Gobbledygook
A professional image is necessary but you still want to avoid the dreaded corporate gobbledygook. What is gobbledygook you ask? Great question. These are jargon terms and phrases that have been over-used and abused rendering them meaningless. Cutting edge, ground breaking, best of breed, mission critical, scalable, robust…they are meant to add more emphasis but often times just make people roll their eyes.
#17 Less is More
You are most likely aware of the rule “keep it simple, stupid,” and the same applies to landing pages. A cluttered page makes for a distracted visitor. Be brief and to the point, as it is the offer itself that gives the reader more information. In addition to a headline, including a brief explanation paragraph and a few bullet points. That’s it!
#19 Encourage Social Sharing
On your landing page, don’t forget to include buttons to enable your prospects to share content and offers. Include multiple social media channels as well as email, since people have different sharing preferences. If you don’t have multiple social media channels, then make them. The more an offer is shared, the more leads you get!
#25 Blogging Brings in the Leads
According to a recent HubSpot report, companies that blog 6-8 times per month double their lead volume over non-blogging companies. This proves that blogging is a highly effective channel for lead generation. In every blog post, include hyperlinks to landing pages within the copy of the post, as well as a prominent call to action.