12 Effective Lead Generation Strategies: A Beginner's Guide

To generate revenue, you need to have a steady flow of customers who will consistently purchase and use your company’s goods and services. To gain a customer, you first need a lead—a person with a genuine need for what your company markets and sells and who has reached out to you and provided their contact information.

This concept is called lead generation—a vital concept for any business, but particularly small businesses. Certain lead generation strategies are more relevant than others, but finding the right solutions and metrics to support your tactics is crucial.

Podium’s Lead Drive can help your business find qualified leads and convert them into customers. As a SaaS platform, Podium understands lead generation best practices. With Lead Drive, all your leads are in one spot. Key decision-makers will see every customer inquiry come to one source, so you can more easily respond to them and get started on converting them to customers.

Because speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed. Podium’s conversational AI is outcome-driven—it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads, it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business. Beat your competition faster than ever with Podium’s AI Employee. Watch a demo today.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is all about attracting potential customers to your business and increasing their interest to buy through nurturing. The end goal of lead gen is to convert leads into paying customers. Wondering how to generate a lead? There are a number of ways, including writing blog posts, offering coupons, hosting live events, posting on social media, reviewing job applications, and more.

What is a Lead Generation Strategy?

Getting new leads for your business does not happen automatically and without any effort on your part. Lead generation is the process businesses follow to get more potential customers interested in their products or services. At the foundation, lead generation marketing strategies focus on collecting contact information from potential customers.

Lead generation strategies serve several purposes. First, with a proper strategy, you can have viable sales prospects and personas—people you will contact and with whom you will share your products and services. The right lead capture strategies let you build an email distribution list, identify ideal customers with the most likelihood of buying from you, and use sales and marketing efforts to get leads to opt in. The chief goal of lead generation techniques and strategies is for salespeople to eventually and continuously grow your customer base.

Developing a lead strategy for your small business is a serious endeavor. It takes deliberate action and commitment. When you have an effective plan, your business can benefit tremendously. To begin with, with a good strategy, you can expand your target audience and market, giving you a wider range of potential leads. The people who display interest in your company will therefore grow. Your legitimacy as a company can improve, and you can get more customer reviews and testimonials.

Lead generation is not only a smart way to augment your revenue, but it is also an essential method for increasing your company’s bottom line. If you are struggling with visibility and people being aware of who you are and what you do, lead gen is an excellent way to mitigate these concerns.

Another benefit of having an effective lead generation workflow is that the process not only produces more leads but also gives you access to high-quality inbound leads that have a better chance of becoming customers.

12 Lead Generation Techniques: A Beginner’s Guide

There is no shortage of possibilities when it comes to lead generation tips and techniques. As you review these lead generation how tos, consider your business needs. Some techniques might work more effectively for one business than another. Each tactic has a specific purpose and has advantages that can benefit your business and drive customers to you.

1. Improve Your Lead Response Times

Perhaps you have had this challenge before: leads come to your email, but they pile up in your inbox and get lost among the dozens of other emails you receive each day. As these inquiries remain unanswered, potential customers may lose their interest. Worse, they may move on and check out a competitor instead. This is a scenario you cannot afford to have in your company.

Improving the time in which you respond to leads can help you convert these inquiries into customers. The faster you respond, the more likely the lead is going to take action and become a step closer to becoming a paying customer. Podium’s AI Employee helps your business engage with leads immediately—whether your team is in the office or not, Podium is there to communicate with customers. Transform your business with Podium’s AI Employee.

2. Collect and Manage Online Reviews

When people are interested in a particular service or product, they want to find a company they trust to purchase the product. Reading online reviews is a common way that consumers decide which business they can rely on for quality and dependable service. In a review, customers detail their opinions on the company’s service and product offerings. They may relate experiences on what they liked or disliked about a product or about how the company treated them.

Positive reviews can drive people to your business. Similarly, having more reviews about your company can be beneficial. For example, if you have few Google reviews about your business, but a competitor has hundreds, a prospect will be more inclined to send an inquiry to the competitor.

Increasing your reviews can drive more traffic to your website and ultimately get you more customers. Podium’s review tools can help you get more reviews and improve your star ratings on Google and other review sites.

But what do you do when you get a customer review? Companies without the right solutions might do nothing and leave comments and questions on a review without a response. This can hamper possible lead generation.

Tools such as Podium’s AI Response Generator take care of this issue for you. The solution reduces the time you would spend on responses, answers reviews quickly, and personalizes the messages in a way that potential customers appreciate. Slow responses typically equal a lost lead and potential customer. AI Response Generator helps solve this problem by writing a near-instant response to leads. The responses are not robotic but are personalized, which helps develop trust and create loyal customers.

3. Gather Customer Feedback

You can’t improve your service and meet customers’ needs if you don’t know what they’re looking for. Moreover, it’s difficult to convert leads and gain trust if you don’t solicit and implement feedback. Using an email list and gathering feedback from customers is one of the most important lead generation strategies your business can use.

However, it’s not enough to simply send out surveys and ask people to tell you what they think about your business. You need to personalize customer communications to gather genuine feedback. Then, you need to organize the feedback so you can properly analyze trends and take next steps.

With Podium, you can send surveys to customers via text message—the preferred method of communication for most consumers today.

What’s great about these surveys is that they are more like conversations than stale, stuffy corporate-speak messages. These surveys are more personal and can help you with your lead generation efforts.

4. Optimize your Google Business Profile

Prospects want a good overview of your company before they inquire. If they can’t find out enough about your business—like where you are and when you’re open—they’ll probably skip you and go to your competitors instead.

Good lead generation techniques include making sure your Google Business Profile is up to date, stands out, and is accurate. If you have the right information on your profile, chances are better that you’ll have more success in generating leads for your business and eventually increase your customer base.

Your Google profile should have the name, address, and phone number of your company. You should also include your company’s business hours as well as quality photos and videos. Importantly, have a call to action, or CTA, urging people to leave reviews of your business. Always respond to these reviews, whether they are positive, negative, or anywhere in between. But before you do anything with your Google profile, use Podium’s Google Review & Rating Calculator. This tool will show you what your profile will look like after using Podium for 90 days. The tool will show you what your star rating will be as well as how many calls, site visitors, and listing views your business will get.

5. Engage Users Through a Web Chat

Leads and customers appreciate quick responses and easy access to answers. When people have a problem or issue with one of your products or services—or if they have a simple question—they want prompt service they can trust. Rather than sit on hold on the phone and wait for help, people prefer web chats. Podium’s text-based web chat can help you generate more qualified leads from your company’s website. Web chats not only resolve customer issues quickly, but they can also help your sales team close sales and improve a user’s experience.

6. Prioritize Mobile Communication

Today, more than ever, people are on the go. Busy schedules and the prevalence of mobile devices have made communicating from smartphones and tablets the norm among most consumers. Fast and convenient, this method of communication is now more widely preferred over talking on the phone or even sitting at home or the office on a laptop or desktop computer.

B2C and B2B lead generation strategies should include making sure you have mobile solutions in place that allow digital communication — such as cold calling or text message campaigns. Your business needs to have the capacity to both accept mobile communication and deliver it. Doing so can help you get sales leads and convert them, thus helping you stay ahead of the competition.

7. Leverage SMS Marketing

Speaking of mobile, on-the-go communications, text messaging is increasingly faster, more effective, and easier to use for most consumers. The days of cold calls are fleeting. When it comes to lead generation marketing strategies, your business needs to be able to send personalized messages to your customers via text.

Text messages have a significantly higher open rate compared to emails sent for email marketing. Consequently, when you connect with a lead by texting, you can quickly and seamlessly make sales.

Thanks to Podium and its text marketing innovations, you can create sales campaigns in no time. Podium has various text templates and other free tool options available so you can quickly create and send text messages to leads and customers. Don’t worry; these aren’t form-letter messages but are instead customized and personalized to reach out to specific customers. You can target certain groups and get responses within minutes. Leads can sign up to get special offers with your company or receive information to learn more about you.

8. Engage on Social Media

Though not everyone loves social media, it is a viable way to connect and communicate with potential customers. For a business, having a robust social media presence is critical. Many interested prospects will first learn about your business on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

If you have one of these or other platforms for your organization, be sure to maintain a consistent presence. Make sure you post valuable content and that it’s fresh, relevant, and engaging. You don’t need to publish posts or updates on the hour, but you do need to follow a consistent posting schedule, update information as necessary, and always respond to people promptly.

Your lead gen B2B tactics greatly benefit from the power of social media marketing. Through your business’ social media profiles, you can answer questions, provide important updates, clarify issues or any confusion, and even close sales.

You can post updates on new products and services and even links to webinars and whitepapers your business has published. If executed correctly, posts on your social media accounts can be effective lead magnets. From these platforms, you can link to your company’s webpage and landing pages as well.

9. Enhance Local SEO

Any lead generation marketing plan needs to include search engine optimization. When a prospect Googles a product or service you sell and offer, you want your business to be high on the list of search results. If your company doesn’t appear near the top of the first page, you probably won’t get nearly as many leads as your competitors will get. SEO and Google ads can help you achieve the Google ranking you want so you show up first or nearly first.

Local SEO is even more important than SEO in general. When you use this strategy, your business will be more visible in local searches and reach the local demographics you want. Your brand awareness and website traffic can grow. With local SEO, your business will show up on Google Maps, including your contact information and hours of operation. Make sure your information is accurate and up to date.

10. Implement Referral Programs

Advertising and PPC (pay-per-click) strategies can be a crucial part of your business’ lead generation campaign. However, you don’t have to go to great lengths to do this. Instead, use your current customers to generate leads for business. You can do this by setting up a referral program. Simply ask your customers to refer family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, or anyone they can think of to your business.

Customers who are happy with your service and outreach and who love your products are generally happy to share their experiences with others. When you get referrals from customers, reward them for their loyalty. You can provide discount pricing, free purchases, gifts, or any reward you think is appropriate.

11. Manage Inbound Calls

Many businesses get more emails and text messages than phone calls. Still, even though the trend is heading more and more toward these forms of communication, phone call volumes can be high in some companies. If your business experiences a lot of calls, lead generation tips need to address how to manage these effectively. Unfortunately, some businesses are stuck in the past and have archaic phone systems that are not user-friendly. Podium Phones has the solution your business needs.

With Podium Phones, you can engage with leads and customers more quickly and correctly send each call to the right place. This tool has some useful features. For example, when a call comes in from an existing lead or customer, you’ll have information about the person such as when they last contacted you, whether they have left an online review, and when they last made a payment. Plus, with Podium Phones, you won’t miss a call and an opportunity to connect with someone who could end up being a longtime customer.

12. Automate Lead Nurturing

If you want to convert leads into paying customers, you need to cultivate a strong relationship at every stage of the sales funnel. This includes consistent communication and strong follow-up strategies. Fortunately, you can do this, even in a personal way, without requiring too much time from your sales reps and marketing teams.

A good lead generation strategy is to automate your responses and messages. This way, you’re communicating with and closing high-quality leads without taking valuable time away from other important tasks. The use of chatbots or automated messaging tools can help with this.

Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns

Now that we’ve talked about the importance of lead generation, let’s talk about effective ways to generate leads. Below are a few ideas for lead generation campaigns:

1. Follow your data.

Regularly analyzing your customer metrics can help you refine your targeting, identify high-performing channels, and optimize campaigns. Following your data also helps you make more informed decisions.

2. Use the right lead generation tools.

The right lead generation tools can enhance your ability to capture and nurture leads. Advanced lead generation tools, such as AI-powered solutions, can help you automate lead scoring, segment your audience, and personalize your outreach.

3. Create offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.

Leads at various stages of the buying cycle have different needs and motivations. To address those needs, create offers tailored to each individual stage—from awareness to decision.

4. Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.

Consistent messaging keeps audience trust high and helps to increase recognition. Ensure your messaging stays consistent across all your channels—from social media to your website.

5. Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.

Well-crafted calls-to-action (CTA) should lead your audience to a dedicated landing page that’s designed to convert. Make sure it’s focused, uncluttered, and directly related to the CTA they clicked on.

6. Get your sales team involved.

Finally, get your sales team involved in lead generation tactics—especially in nurturing and converting leads. They should be involved in the process early and often to ensure team alignment and to boost conversion rates.

Grow Your Small Business with Podium

If you’re not sure what a lead generation methodology or strategy is, or if you think the process is overwhelming, let Podium help. Podium has some effective tools you can use, including Lead Drive. By harnessing the power of AI, Lead Drive brings all your leads into one easy-to-access, easy-to-use inbox so you can manage them effectively. As a result, you can respond to inquiries quickly and beat the competition. Your leads and potential customers won’t fall through the cracks.

Customers who use Podium tools see a 120% increase in web traffic. Review tools can double your review volume in just 60 days, while the web chat tool helped one pool and patio business increase revenue by 128%. You can have similar success as you use Podium for your digital marketing and content marketing campaigns.