7 Lead Generation Strategies that Work for Business

Have a look at how these two successful startups generate leads, based on what We learned from observing the processing of over 4 million opt-ins a month and how we used PPC to increase revenue and clients ten-fold over the years!

What is lead generation?

Real quick—before we dive into the strategies you can use to grow your business, let’s make sure we’re on the same page as far as terminology goes.

A lead is simply someone who’s demonstrated interest in your business in some way. Basically, you can think of anyone who’s given you their contact information—to attend a webinar, to download a free guide, to sign up for your newsletter, etc.—as a lead. Because this person has engaged your business’ website and given you permission to contact them (typically through email, but sometimes over the phone), they’re now inside your sales funnel.

Accordingly, lead generation—often shortened to “lead gen”—is simply the process of filling your sales funnel with people who are interested in your business. Anything that gets someone to give you permission to contact them or remarket to them is a lead generation tactic.

For example, let’s say you’re the in-house digital marketer for a company that builds backyard decks. One way you can generate leads is by creating a free, downloadable PDF guide to deck maintenance. Because the people who want to read the guide are required to submit their contact information, this piece of content serves as a lead generation mechanism. Quite simply, it’s a way to help people while simultaneously filling your funnel with leads.

Got it? Great. Now, let’s shift from contracting companies to startups and talk about the seven lead generation strategies you can use to fill your funnel with prospective customers.

7 lead generation strategies for your startup

Disclaimer: You absolutely do NOT need to try all of these. In fact, doing so would probably be a bad idea. Why? Because no two startups are the same. Although these seven lead generation strategies have worked wonders for our companies, that won’t necessarily be the case for yours.

You may only find success with one or two of these strategies. That’s OK. Evaluate each one carefully in the context of your revenue, your resources, your marketing goals, and your competitive landscape. As much as we believe in the effectiveness of these lead generation strategies, there’s no universal formula for growth.

1. Create a LOT of opt-in opportunities and make them irresistible

Webinars, free reports, live demos… don’t stop at just one or two opt-ins. Turn every blog post into an opt-in page. You can give away recipes, PDFs of your blog posts, worksheets, resource guides and more.

Lead generation strategies blog post with opt-ins enabled

Get the opt-in box out of the sidebar and make a pop-up. Force users to make a decision. Do you want this or not? It’s easier to say no when the option is just sitting there in the sidebar and saying no is as easy as ignoring it.

In testing, this increased conversion by 32%.

You can’t make them say yes, but you don’t have to make it so easy for people to say no.

2. Always be testing, but test the right way

Getting great advice is a good thing, but it’s dangerous to think that because it worked for someone else, it’ll work equally well for you. That doesn’t mean you should ignore great advice, but that you need to test, test, test – and do it right.

Split test even where you think you don’t need to. Sometimes the results amongst your audience will seem counterintuitive, but this is why testing is critical. In this test, for example, you might think the use of “my” or “your” would have little effect.

Lead generation strategies AB split test example

The treatment actually resulted in 24% fewer conversions!

Point of view can be impactful. In this test, changing “your” to “my” resulted in a 90% increase in conversions:

Lead generation strategies AB testing point of view

Other aspects you’ll want to test for are immediacy, concreteness, images, and more. Split test your headline, your button copy, and your background image. The results might surprise you, but you’ll be making better, more informed optimizations.

3. Make landing pages clear and easy to take action on

Tim shared their best-ever converting landing page; check it out:

Lead generation strategies best converting landing page example

Why is this so effective? Tim explained that it doesn’t require the user to process very much information, like a 3-minute video or a whole page of copy would. It outperforms a free report because a lot of people are feeling information overload and don’t want to download something even longer to read.

Video lead magnets have suffered an image problem lately, in part because of the proliferation of launches and lack of time. For these reasons, this landing page was a hot performer. It also helped that people genuinely want to know which tools other people are using and this fulfills that desire. Anyone can do this – dentists, plumbers, architects, whoever. This type of lead gen landing page can be set up in under a half-hour and is definitely worth trying out.

4. Write better ads!

I’ve been saying this for a long time and it’s still true – most ads just suck. They’re boring, they’re all the same, and one isn’t any more compelling than another.

Take a look at these ads:

If you’re the searcher, you really have no reason other than price to choose one over the other. This is what I call an AdWords Jackpot for an advertiser. When everything looks the same, there’s a huge opportunity to come in with something different and blow the competition away!

Writing better ads can raise your CTR above the expected average, giving your Quality Score a boost. Learn more about writing killer ads and how doing so can lower your costs per click in Going Unicorn Hunting: The Secrets Behind Ads with 3x the Average CTR.

5. Give better offers

Unless you’re one of the very top advertisers, there’s a ton of room for conversion rate improvement. In fact, the top 10% of landing pages have conversion rates 3x to 5x the average. How do they do it?

One creative way is to give better offers. This is far more meaningful than your typical, run of the mill optimizations – changing button color, font type, spacing, etc.

Every software company offers a free trial. Every plastic surgeon offers a free consultation. What do you have to offer that is unique, compelling, and offers real value to the visitor?

For us at Dunn Enterprises, we recommended it meant rethinking the standard free software trial offer. We decided to offer a free AdWords Grader, instead.

Lead generation strategies WordStream AdWords Grader

Conversions went through the roof! We had found something non-committal that people could actually use and weren’t asking them to take all the steps of downloading, installing, and then actually using our software. To date, this has proven to be one of our most effective lead generation strategies.

If your conversions are 2% or lower, you need to try something drastic like changing up your offer big time. Small optimizations will beget small results. The top 25% of advertisers have an average 5.31% conversion rate and the top 10% are hitting over 11%, on average! You have a ton of room to grow.

6. Go nuts with remarketing

Remarketing enables you to tag site visitors and get back in front of them as they go about their business around the web, checking their email, watching YouTube, searching Google, and even hanging out on Facebook.

Lead generation strategies remarketing diagram

It helps turn abandoners into leads, which is huge considering that 97% of people will leave your landing page without converting. Remarketing amplifies the effect of all of your other business marketing activities – content marketing, social media marketing, etc. – by positioning you in front of your audience again.

Remarketing using the Google Display Network gives you 92% reach in the U.S., across millions of websites, videos, and devices. We’ve found that remarketing ads fatigue is about half the rate of regular ads, so be aggressive! Use our Remarketing Cheat Sheet to get started.

7. Use Gmail ads to target competitors’ customers

Here’s another tip for generating tons of leads, at the expense of your competitors.

Gmail Ads are powerful tools for getting right in front of your target audience.

For a Business startup, no audience is more valuable than your competitors’ customers. With Gmail Ads, you can target your AdWords campaign to only ever reach people who receive emails from your competitors, giving you direct access to people that already use similar products.

There are several ways to do this. One is to target keywords that your competitors are likely to use. Sign up for your competitor’s email lists and take note of any words and phrases that they use frequently, then add them as target keywords.

A more accurate solution is to target your competitors’ domains. Below is an example of a Gmail Ad from DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider. I receive emails from other cloud storage companies, which Digital Ocean is clearly targeting using domain placements.

Expanded, the ad looks like this:

Using Gmail Ads like this lets you reach the same audience that you’d reach through a search engine marketing campaign, all at a fraction of the cost.

Rapid growth needs serious lead generation strategies

We have seen great success in our respective companies and at a far faster clip than average. If you want to grow and grow fast, you need to prioritize your lead generation strategies and use tactics like the ones we’ve recommended above to get as many qualified prospects as possible into your funnel.

If you want to improve, expand or grow your lead generation contact Mach 1 Design at [email protected] or call us at (469) 536-8478.

How To Add Internal and External Links That Get Clicks And Conversions

Internal and external links play an important role in SEO. Find out why they matter and how you can use them to enrich the customer experience.

Internal and external links have a significant role to play in guiding website visitors to the answers they seek about your products and services.

Each link should lead your audience to the next relevant piece of content they need to continue their information gathering and/or customer journey.

Links are the lifeblood of the web, connecting each piece of content to the next. Search engines use both internal and external links to determine, in part, which pages are most authoritative on any given subject.

As such, both internal and external links play an important role in SEO.

Why Are Internal Links Important?

Internal links are used by Google and other search engines to better understand the structure of a website.

They enable site owners to let their visitors and the search engines know which pages are most important.

For example, the top-level sections in a website’s navigation (e.g., Products, Services, About Us, Resources) tell the search engines what the site owner believes to be the most important content.

Search engine spiders crawl the various links within a site to determine its structure, and those pages closer to the top of the hierarchy are naturally considered more important.

After all, you wouldn’t want to bury your most important content several layers deep within your website where it would be difficult to find.

Always keep in mind that you are ultimately creating your website and all of the content within it to provide readily accessible answers to your target audience’s questions.

Why Do External Links Matter?

Google and other search engines value links. If you link to an external website, search engines perceive this as an endorsement of the content being linked to.

External links can be used to cite a source, provide verification for information, and offer further context for the reader.

Again, Google’s modus operandi is delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. It doesn’t really care where the answers live, so sometimes it makes sense to link to the right piece of external content. You can’t be expected to have all of the answers.

For example, there may be an excellent article published on a highly relevant and well-respected industry website that directly or indirectly relates to a product or service offered by your organization.

If the information in this article will benefit your audience by answering additional questions they may have or shedding more light on a topic, it certainly behooves you to link to such an article.

Where, When, And How Should Links Be Added?

When you’re looking at adding links to new or existing website content, put yourself in the shoes of a member of your audience. Think about how they will want to engage with it and where a link might help.

If you have not already, take a step back to map out your typical customer journey. This will help guide which pieces and/or types of content you control should link through to other pieces, from awareness to consideration to intent, and on to conversion.

Do not be afraid to incorporate clear calls to action (CTAs). These are helpful for those customers who are ready to click through to the next logical step in their journey and/or those who are not ready and may require additional information.

Today, most customer journeys are not linear. It’s important to provide options depending on where your customers find themselves in their search for answers, products, or services, and you do that with links.

Are there topical keywords and/or concepts within your new or existing piece of content that require elaboration or raise questions?

Do you have additional content to answer those questions (in blog posts or FAQs, for example) or do you know where the answer lies? Can you conduct some research to find it?

By linking to content that provides relevant answers to these questions via the actual keywords (a.k.a., anchor text), you provide the search engines with an important signal to help tie the questions and answers together.

Your most prominent links and calls to action can naturally be tied to a button or image, such as a banner, and placed strategically to better catch the attention of your website visitors. Visual UX analytics tools like click heatmaps can and should be used to monitor how visitors are engaging with your content and which links they are (or are not) clicking on.

Open In A New Window/Tab

When linking externally, you may want to have the link to the external web page/content open in a new window or tab.

This way, when the reader is done looking at the “related” content, they can easily close this second window, navigate back to your original article, and continue on with their journey.

Internal links generally do not need to open in a new window as you are not directing your reader away from your property.

However, there may be instances where this makes sense; for example, when linking to an associated Help documentation on a software website.

Far too often, I click on a link and am taken to an external website within the same browser/window, then click on another link that takes me to a second external site.

Suddenly, I’ve lost track of where I started.

Yes, I could hit my browser Back button or review my browsing history. But I am not making an extra effort to find the original article if the author didn’t think it was important enough for me to stick around in the first place.

Follow Or Nofollow

As a website owner, you have the option of designating your links as Follow or Nofollow by tagging the link with a <rel=”no follow”> attribute.

All other links are Follow by default.

Using Nofollow tells search engines that support it not to assign any value to the link in relation to the page it has been included on. It literally means that you do not want Google to follow that link and crawl the corresponding page.

It’s worth noting that Google has clearly indicated they take this attribute as advice and not as a directive.

Virtually all of your internal links will be Follow links, but there may be circumstances where you choose to have Nofollow external links on your site.

There are also attributes for links to paid, sponsored, or user-generated content where you cannot confidently vouch for it or have control over it.

See Should You Use Nofollow, Sponsored, or UGC Links? to learn more about when to use each one.

Add Links, But Don’t Overdo It

While using internal and external links adds value for your audience and the search engines, as with all things SEO, it is also important not to overdo it.

In fact, Google recently indicated that having too many links on any given page can actually have an adverse effect, as it will dilute the value of those links.

Google uses links to understand the structure of a website and if there are too many, it can become a jumbled mess.

However, if you’ve done a proper job of reviewing your content and incorporating links to other relevant complementary content, a logical structure should reveal itself.

If you review your content and it feels like there are too many links or links that do not really add value for your audience, reevaluate and edit with that in mind.

To Recap Strategically adding and managing internal and external links remains an important SEO activity.

Links help guide Google, other search engines, and ultimately all website visitors through the logical structure of a website, highlighting those pieces of content deemed most important as they go.

A good linking strategy will roughly follow a customer journey, answering searchers’ questions or elaborating on topics with awareness content through to conversion via links and clear calls to action.

Always keep your user’s experience top of mind with linking, and you’ll naturally optimize for search, as well.