Sarah launched her business today. It has been a long four months leading up to this time. At the lunch, she hosted her parents and siblings who are all extremely proud of her. She also had a couple of friends from school who pledged to invest in her little but promising startup. 

Aside from these handful of people, Sarah was able to serve a couple of new faces who stumbled across her business and decided to give it a try. This is a promising start. She knows that. Nevertheless, she does not like the idea of waiting for people to come by whenever they happen to come by so she does what is called lead generation. 

Lead generation involves a number of activities targeted at reaching new, potential clients and customers in an effort to turn them into active and recurring clients or customers. 

Here’s What It Takes To Perform Lead Generation

Lead generation is all about reaching new leads; prospective clients and customers. It is the first step in a customer acquisition process. The remaining steps; nurturing and conversion, help to ensure that a customer becomes a recurrent user of a startup’s product or service. 

The process of lead generation is as important as any other aspect of client acquisition. If you’re chasing the wrong leads, then you will certainly not make any customers out of them. 

Additionally, as part of the process, startups get to learn about their customers even before they make their first purchase. The most interesting part yet is that many lead generation techniques are inexpensive. Let’s go through a number of those result-promoting techniques. 

Build a Social Media Presence 

After the pandemic hit, everyone - well almost everyone - reclined to social media. It was a convenient way to connect with people and spend quality time without violating the social distancing restrictions. 

The huge social media usage meant that businesses could put themselves out there too and gain a lot of new leads by simply providing great content. That hasn't changed since. In fact, building and maintaining a social media presence is a solid lead generation technique as of today. 

It creates an avenue for businesses to display their expertise in a particular field, to educate or inspire the general public, and to inform potential clients and customers about their products and services. 

Deliver Reliable Customer Care Service 

As a customer, nothing is more frustrating than needing directions with a product or service, for example enquiring about price or membership plans, and not being able to access useful help. Startups must be careful to avoid this. It is an easy way to lose clients no matter how long they’ve been around. 

Worse than losing existing clients, however, is the fact that poor customer support drives away new leads. Imagine that a potential customer calls a business’s hotline in search of directions to their office and they receive a misleading or an unhelpful response. Of course, the frustrated customer will likely turn to another business or product. 

Customer support services must be easily accessible and have a track record of responding on time - in order to stand out. Without this, the startup may repeatedly provide information when it is no longer necessary to a customer. 

Be Out There in The Street

Having a storefront is not enough. Startups need to be out in the streets. They must go beyond the glass doors that beckon clients into their office and live among the pedestrians. 

This lead generation technique creates a real bond between a startup and its customers. It gives the startup a physical presence that is much better and relatable to than the distant, dissociated feeling customers get about big businesses. 

Sales outreach teams are tasked with making this physical contact with customers. The benefits of doing so is that they hear what people are saying about the startup, for example their public image, they get real feedback on user experience, and they receive customer suggestions and recommendations. 

Run Thoughtful Promotions 

By thoughtful promotions, we mean promotions that take into consideration; a current season or holiday, the stage of the business or particular product, the types of customers or target audience, and more. 

A good example of this would be creating a promotion with the Christmas season in mind. Such a promotion could be designed to relate visually by making use of the season’s peculiar red and white colors or aurally by making use of the popular bell sound or “ho-ho-ho” phrase of the legendary character Santa Claus. 

Host A Social Event or Show

From trade fairs to fashion shows, there are a number of events that work excellently for lead generation. These social events can be hosted as a small gathering or a large convention. What is even better is that they can be programmed to attract either low-end or high-end customers or a blend of both. 

A startup that wishes to utilize this lead generation technique must be sure that their event will spark the interest of the public or target audience and that it will produce a positive impact overall. 

Employ Opt-ins

What exactly are opt-ins? They are services that customers or clients of a business opt into in order to earn one or more attractive offers. An example of an opt-in is a newsletter registration. On the other hand, the incentive for this could be a product discount or access to a new membership plan. 

This means that a startup could place an opt-in of registering to their newsletter and then reward new leads who take the opt-in by giving them a discount on or some preferential treatment for one or more products or services. 

The idea behind creating an opt-in is that it entreats potential customers and clients to take a step at knowing or connecting with the startup. 

Perform Email Marketing

Email is a medium of communication that involves the exchange of email messages. Businesses have long utilized this channel in reaching workers and partner businesses alike. Interestingly, the idea of email marketing is an extension of this. 

In email marketing, a startup typically presents its products, services, ideas, and even its brand in an email message to new leads. The process of collecting the email addresses of these potential customers is the very first step. Once this happens, the startup can then send emails of select products or services based on the behavior and researched preferences of the lead. 

Leads that become clients are put on the business’s email broadcast list. With this, they are sent regular emails highlighting new products, news and events within the company, and exciting offers or opportunities. 

Encourage Referrals

All the work of generating leads shouldn’t come from the efforts of the marketing team and the business alone. Instead, startups can utilize a smart way of reaching new prospects through referrals. 

Referral is one lead generation technique that is certain to bring a high number of leads to client conversions. The reason why this technique works so much is because the referral action is taken by active or concurrent clients or customers. 

These people are in the best position to convince their friends, associates, and the general public that a business is trustworthy and their service or products are worthwhile. And that’s exactly what they do. 

They then direct their referrals to respond to a call to action (CTA) for example, registering to a newsletter or buying a product. 

Invest in Partnerships 

Partnerships in business is no new concept. Fielo accurately describes it as a collaboration between two or more businesses where the goal is to build a mutually beneficial relationship that will sustain growth and add significant value to both parties involved. 

An aspect of the benefits of partnerships in business - which hasn’t received so much attention - is that startups can both share leads. Truly, businesses in a partnership come together to drive productivity so they have to integrate their ideas and resources. 

The symbiosis here often results in the delivery of wide ranging products and services. This variety allows customers of one business in a partnership to develop interest in a product or service owned by the other business in the partnership. These new leads can grow to patronize and become long-term customers of both businesses in the partnership.

Implement Social Proof

A social proof is any instance of influential psychological tuning. In simple terms, it is the acceptance and embracement of an action or a course of actions as a norm or as appropriate for a particular situation. In simpler terms, it is doing something because others are doing it too.

Startups utilize social proof in their lead generation and conversion to urge new leads to take an action by confirming that other satisfied customers or clients have also taken the same action. 

Some of the best ways to do this is by featuring audios, videos, screenshots or excerpts of client testimony, reviews and feedback. 

Conclusion 

We can break our findings on lead generation into two; costly and cheap techniques. Obviously, the size and capacity of a startup will determine how it sees these techniques. However, investing in partnerships, providing opt-in incentives, and hosting an event might be costly for an average business. 

If you find this so in your business, you can start your lead generation journey with the cheaper options including creating a solid social media presence, implementing a social proof, encouraging referrals among others. 

Whatever technique you use in generating leads, be sure that it targets people who have interest in your field of operation, have or currently purchase products or services similar to those of your business, or are willing to try new products or services. We hope to hear which of these 10 techniques proved most effective for your business. Kindly let us know by using the comment section below.