Lead Generation For Digital Marketing: The Guide To More Clients

We’re moving to a more digitalized world so everyone is trying to figure out how to generate leads in an online setting. 

Fortunately for you, I’ve been in this business for half a decade and I’m finally sharing the same methods I’ve personally used to build 12 businesses and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales.

I’m here to provide you with an actionable plan to generate thousands of leads. 

Time is of the essence so let’s get right to it. 

What is Lead Generation: Breaking Down Misconceptions

In digital marketing, lead generation is the process of identifying, attracting, and converting people into prospects for a business. You can do this through a variety of online channels and strategies that include email campaigns, paid social media ads, or even free resources on your website. 

Remember, the ultimate goal of lead generation is to start building relationships of trust with potential customers.

There are many ways to start building a loyal following but not all of them are right. Let’s break down common misconceptions about lead generation:

Myth #1: Lead generation is about casting a wider net

While casting a wider net may lead to more people seeing your product, that doesn’t mean that they’ll buy your product.

So many digital marketers get caught up in the number of impressions, or the number of views, that a commercial or ad gets. 

But remember that the goal of lead generation is to build a relationship. 

When you see a badly targeted ad on a Youtube video, are you more or less likely to check out the company’s website? No, but you saw the ad so this satisfies the goal of a marketer looking to cast a wider net.

Instead, focus on quality marketing efforts that involve providing information to a targeted audience that will answer and resolve any questions or problems they may have. Look to build relationships, not increase views. 

Myth #2: Lead generation is a one-time setup process

Lead Generation requires you to nurture your audience. It’s a constant back and forth between the audience and yourself. 

You have to pay attention to the needs and pain points of your audience and keep addressing them. 

Your goal when marketing is to create a system that allows you to be proactive when creating relationships with your clients. Learn to customize and adapt your message, tone, and format when necessary. 

Myth #3: Having a website will automatically generate leads

This may have been true 20 years ago when the internet is only just beginning but these days, having a website does not mean visitors and leads will just automatically show up, especially when they don’t know you. 

You need to create a compelling reason for them to check out your website through your marketing efforts. 

Make sure that you take the time to understand your ideal customer and their pain points. Leverage this knowledge in your marketing efforts and effectively communicate how you can solve their problems. 

This method will ensure that visitors will keep coming to your website.

7 Ways To Generate Leads Through Digital Marketing

We’ve established what lead generation is and what it isn’t. 

Nurturing a mutually beneficial relationship and creating a loyal customer base is the lifeblood of any business.

But what are the different methods you can do today to start generating leads? Check them out in the list below: 

Strategy 1.) Build A Loyal Social Media Following

The easiest thing you can do to start connecting with your target audience is to create social media accounts.

Get on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. 

These platforms will be the bread and butter of your lead generation campaign. 

Consider that there are 4.2 billion active social media users across the globe, the presence of your brand on social media gives you the amazing opportunity to connect with customers and engage in discussion within a community. 

The best part about social media is that it’s absolutely free unless you pay for ads. Creating an account, getting started, and putting up your first couple of posts are all free no matter which social media platform you end up using. 

If you’re a small business, this is the perfect avenue for lead generation and growth. It exposes your brand to a wide audience and provides you with the opportunity to scale through paid ads and partnerships. 

The problem, though, is that you will have to take the time to cultivate and grow your audience. It’s been found that 81 percent of consumers said that they need to be able to trust the brand before they can order from them.  

But that’s not a problem, here’s the most effective tip that I’ve used to build a brand:

Don’t Advertise On Your Feed

Instead of using your social media feed to SOLELY advertise your products, create sharable content that people would want to see. By creating viral content, you gain exposure and build brand recognition with thousands or even millions of users. 

If you sell desk mats, for example, show work from home setups using your desk mats.

If you sell camera gear, share tips on how your users can maximize the value of their purchases.

I see too many eCommerce pages looking to sell their products but they never provide free value and build a relationship with the customer. 

Look to share infographics, stats, and fun facts that your viewers will want to share – it will pay off so much more than simply creating product posts. 

Strategy 2.) Run ads that fascinate your customers

“But you just said…”

I know what I just said but you also can’t rely on your followers to keep on sharing your content. 

Sometimes, you have to take matters into your own hands and paid advertising is one of the surefire ways to get your product in front of your customer’s computer screen. 

Unfortunately, it’s also extremely to lose money with paid ads.

To avoid this, I recommend you to run ads that fascinate your customers – and fascinating ads do three things:

• Tell A Story
• Identify A Pain Point
• Communicate The Solution Clearly

Through storytelling and problem solving, we leave a lasting in print of the positive impact that your product or service has. Present life’s problems as the conflict, get them to relate to the commercial or ad that you’re putting up, and convert them into high-paying clients by presenting your product or service as the only solution. 

These are all basic principles of an art form called “copywriting”. I’ve talked about this in the past but for new readers, all you need to know is that copywriting is the process of persuading and convincing potential leads to use your product and, ultimately, generate sales. 

Copywriting is an extremely difficult process as it involves understanding human psychology and leveraging emotions, stories, and statistics to create revenue for businesses.

That said, I suggest you find a copywriter (like me) that not only understands how to develop and create content that sells but also understands the values, principles, and inner workings of your business. 

Strategy 3.) Build A Blog

Building a blog takes two steps: having a website and creating targeted content.

If you’re reading this, I’ll assume that you’ve finished building the first part and you’re now looking to generate traffic through your website – so that’s step 1 down.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that traffic will suddenly start coming into your site.

Let’s move on to creating targetted content, which will require you to learn SEO – something we’ll cover in the next section. 

A blog is a perfect way to generate leads through a “soft” introduction of your products. Through content and blog posts, businesses are allowed to push their visitors to take action and encourage them to share their contact information, where you can put them further along the buying process.

Here’s how you can attract potential customers through a blog:

• Write Google-Ranked Content. Whenever someone does a google search, your ranked content will come to the top of the results and instantly bring in clicks and leads.
• Create Valuable Lead Magnets. Lead magnets are downloadable pieces of content that help you push your visitor further along the sales funnel. For businesses, this could be a newsletter or an ebook where you free resources without revealing too much about your process. Remember, you’re still the expert here.
• Include A Call To Action With Every Post. A lot of businesses with blogs make the mistake of not including a call-to-action in their blog posts. This is incredibly important because it presents the next step to solve a customer’s problems. A call to action could be to set up a free consultation that pushes your lead further along the sales funnel. 
• Get Signups For Your Email Newsletter. Another option for a call-to-action would be to sign up for an email newsletter. An email newsletter allows you to get up close and personal with your customer base – it allows you to engage with your audience, convert paid subscribers, and mostly, retain readers. 
• Share Comprehensive Resources. One of the hardest things to do online is build trust and authority. By sharing comprehensive resources, you come off as an expert and therefore build trust with your customer. 

Perhaps the best part about having a blog is that the content you create for your blog is sharable on social media. It’s great because it hits two birds with one stone. 

To give you a better understanding of how much a website might cost you, I recommend you check out Digital.com and their guides on web hosting.

Strategy 4.) Learn Basic SEO

There’s another thing that you should do to generate better and more leads: learn basic SEO. 

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of creating targetted content for Google searchers by writing keyword-dense content and answering common questions that people may have about your product. 

No matter the type of business you run, you want to boost revenue, right?

That’s the general purpose of SEO – to improve your site ranking on Google and allow you to rank at the top of the search engine results page, or more commonly known as SERPs in the digital marketing world.

With Google already receiving 720 billion searches this year (and counting), you’d want a piece of this pie and some traffic into your site. Pair that with the fact that 67.60% of all clicks come from the first five organic results and now you see the need to learn and utilize basic SEO.

Here’s a basic breakdown of what you need to learn to master SEO:

Writing Optimized Headlines and Tags

Headlines and tags are extremely important in SEO. It’s how Google mainly determines what the piece of content is about. Make sure your headlines and tags fit into the Google Search Results Page, that the headers stay relevant with the topic at hand, and that Google understands exactly what you’re writing about.

Learning To Do Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into the Google search bar. Using the data you collect from keyword research, you can figure out exactly the type of content you write about and exactly what to include in your content. 

Building Links and Outreach

Backlinks are how Google knows that your content is reliable. The Google search engine is a lot like humans who rely on social cues to identify credible sources except this time, Google Search relies on links from other websites to figure out the credibility and reliability of the information on your site. You can build links through partnerships, outreach, and just people organically linking to your site. 

Strategy 5.) Email Newsletters

Another immensely useful lead generation strategy is email marketing through newsletters. This strategy might be the highest converting strategy on this list – it creates a direct way to connect readers with content, it’s no wonder that publishers tend to earn more engagement from email than from other channels. 

According to benchmarks across all industries, newsletters have a 19.8% open rate. Newsletters from publishing houses average even more at around 30% open rates. This then translates into paid subscribers for your website or your business. In fact, the New York Times has reported that visitors are 2x more likely to become paid subscribers if they subscribe to a newsletter first.

But why does all this happen? Well, for two reasons:

Customer Engagement

64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers and marketers who used segmented campaigns for their newsletters note as much as 760% increase in revenue. 

This is proof that email newsletters leave a positive lasting impact on your customers. It leads to more content consumption from your brand and increases brand recognition. Every marketer in the world will agree to this: email newsletters lead to more customer engagement. 

What will increased engagement lead to? Well, subscribers and sales. 

Customer Reengagement

While email can help you convert paid subscribers, you have to do the work to keep these subscribers around. If you do this successfully, reengaging with your customers will lead to constant repurchases on your site. 

Here’s how you can write the perfect customer re-engagement emails:

• Create Customized Offer Options 

Everyone loves a sale. So if you believe that you’re losing a customer and a potential lead, send them a special email that gives them a sense of urgency. Gifts and sales like these make customers feel appreciated and provide them with an incentive to stay engaged with a brand. 

Check out this reengagement email from Pinkberry:

It’s great, right? It gives the customer the option to reengage with the brand by offering them an irresistible sale and it gives you an idea of what a re-engagement email should look like.

• Make it easy to unsubscribe.

Now, this may sound kind of counterintuitive but making it easier for your lead to unsubscribe is good for your brand for two reasons.

1. Basic human psychology tells us that we fear losing something more than gaining something else.
2. You want to keep a positive relationship between you and a customer. Sending them uninvited emails might just lead to them hating you more. 

Check out this opt-out email from Psyblog. It offers reengagement by having an obvious Call-To-Action in the centre but it also keeps the break up amicable, leaving a positive last impression from you and your brand. 

Strategy 6.) Build A Referral System

You’re aware of the power of word of mouth, right?

That’s exactly what a referral system is built on.

“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral is the holy grail of advertising,” Mark Zuckerberg once said. 

Referral marketing has always been known to be the best and most trusted marketing approach applied by both small and large businesses on a global scale. It’s the reason why affiliate marketing is still an extremely lucrative and profitable business to this day. 

Here are three reasons why you should set up a referral/affiliate system for your business:

• People trust people. Affiliate marketing accounts for over 15% of all digital media revenue. That’s a billion-dollar business that you’re tapping into here. With 76% of individuals saying that they’re more likely to trust content shared by normal people rather than content shared by brands, gain trust and a positive reputation through referral marketing.
• Ads don’t work the same anymore. With up to 30% of all internet users using ad blockers, affiliate marketing is a means to tap into a new market and gain more revenue growth.
• You don’t want to be left behind. Based on reports and research from FindStack, 80% of brands have affiliate programs and affiliate marketing spending is set to grow by 10% over the next couple of years. 

Strategy 7.) Claim and Optimize Your Free Google My Business 

Finally, the last lead generation strategy I present to you is this: claim and optimize your Free Google My Business.

I talked about Local SEO in a different post but I cannot stress to you enough the importance of optimizing your free Google My Business account. 

That said, you should log in, create, and optimize your Google My Business info.

Through this, we look to achieve three things: 

• Local Brand Awareness. Did you know that 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else? Yeah, you should work on building your local SEO if you want to maximize your community market share.
• Allow Nearby Searchers To Find Our Business. According to Hubspot’s marketing survey, 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If you’re not on the internet, how would people find you? 
• Engage With Our Local Community.  A key feature of Google My Business is the ability to leave comments and reviews to a company. Make sure to build your profile and engage with your customer reviews. Make sure that you’re treating every review equally – address the criticisms and be grateful for the praise.

Plus, it’s free so there’s no reason for you to not set up your Google My Business account. 

On Digital Marketing Lead Generation

I’ve spent the last half-decade learning about different methods to market your business through the internet. 

These are exactly the tools and strategies that I’ve used over the past 5 years to build and market over a dozen of businesses for my clients.

While many of these strategies take time to build and turn effective, they will pay off in the long run.

Marketing isn’t easy but it’s an essential part of your business.