Multi-Channel Lead Generation

Your website isn’t a silo. Marketers must utilize many other channels in order to maximize their lead generation efforts. In this sense, a channel might be a retail store, a website, a social media platform, an email, or a text message. The objective is to make it easy for buyers to research, evaluate and purchase products in any way that is most appropriate for them. It’s all about having the right marketing mix.

In this last chapter, we will briefly cover a few channels that help businesses generate the most amount of leads.

Blogging Brings in the Leads

According to HubSpot’s recent Benchmarks report, companies that blog 6-8 times per month double their lead volume. 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.

Email Marketing

Many businesses may think that email marketing is only best used when communicating with existing prospects and customers. Not so! Email can be a great channel for new lead generation. Here are some ways you can use email to generate more new prospects:

• • • Focus on an opt-in strategy. If you’re buying email lists and spamming your prospects, no one will want to share your email with others. They will only want to unsubscribe! The first step to email lead generation is to make sure you have happy subscribers that enjoy receiving emails from you.
    • Send people valuable offers. If you send really interesting or valued offers – whether it’s downloads, discounts or educational content – people will more likely share your emails with their friends or colleagues.
    • Give people the tools to share. Don’t forget to add a “Forward to a Friend” link or social media sharing buttons within each email so people are encouraged to pass it on.

Social Media

Social media isn’t just for liking funny pictures or tweeting what you ate for breakfast. Social media is an emerging channel that many businesses are taking advantage of. Here are some great tips for generating leads on social networks.

• • • Build a loyal following. Building a relationship with potential customers is a critical first step. Social media connections are really about people-to-people, not always company-to-individual. Get to know your audience online, communicate and share information. In order to generate leads, you need to have human interaction with others.
    • Remember, social media is a dialogue. Companies that only use social media to blast out messages about themselves aren’t using social channels effectively. The goal is to interact with others and be helpful. When you share content on social media, don’t always post something that relates to your company. Share links to other interesting things you’ve found online. People will be very thankful you are noticing their work, too!
    • Influence connections for content sharing. Publishing and sharing content that directs traffic to targeted landing pages is the single biggest lever to increase lead generation through social media. Share your new content offers by posting links to landing pages, and in addition, share blog posts, discounts, and other great resources.

Organic Search

While promoting your offers in many channels is crucial for lead generation, it’s also equally important to make it easy for people to find your landing pages through search engines. To do this, you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to your landing pages, such as:

• • • Pick a primary keyword for each landing page and focus on optimizing that page for that word. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about.
    • Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
    • Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant with the rest of your content.
    • Include keywords in the file name of images (e.g. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
    • Include the keywords in the page URL.

Use Links and CTAs within Offers

Your offers themselves are great channels for lead generation. For example, in this ebook I have included links to other content offers you can download. As people share this ebook, they may discover other resources that we offer by the links within the content.

A/B Testing

While this isn’t a channel per say, it is a great way to increase leads across all channels and tactics. A/B testing can be used in calls-to-action, landing pages, email marketing, advertising, and more. According to HubSpot research, A/B testing your landing pages and other assets can help you generate up to 40% more leads for your business. When done correctly, A/B testing can provide a huge competitive advantage for your company.

Conclusion

Generating leads online has the power to transform your marketing. Using great offers, calls-to-action, landing pages and forms – while promoting them in multi-channel environments – can reduce your cost-per-lead while delivering higher quality prospects to your sales team.

The basics herein are just the beginning. This guide contains many best practices for every aspects of lead generation to help bolster your conversion rates, but these tactics are only the tip of the iceberg. Continue to tweak and test each step of your inbound lead generation process in an effort to improve lead quality and increase revenue.

Now go, young grasshopper, on your way to becoming a lead generation master.