If you are looking for ways to generate leads without spending a fortune, rest assured, you are at the right place. In a small business, repeat customers account for a partial percentage of all of your sales. For your brand to grow, you are always in need of new potential customers who keep the sales funnel running thus ensuring your long-term success. SMEs these days are focusing on cost-effective and budget-friendly ways to get leads because not every start-up can afford to sign up for expensive leads generation tools available online. Here in this blog, we will unravel some of the most effective and cheapest online ways which you can employ to grow your business and to create your brand awareness.
1) Leverage the Power of Social Media:
YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media platforms like these have an organic audience in abundance. These platforms have transformed the way people used to get leads because these are offering great potential to generate and monetize new business. Harness the potential of advertisement campaigns, create polls and get your message delivered right into the subscribers’ emails. When it comes to YouTube, all you need is a perfectly filmed video to get the attention of the viewers. Once they start viewing your content, convincing them to subscribe to your blog for further interaction becomes easier.
2) Co-Host Webinars:
Co-hosting resourceful webinars have turned out to become one of the trendiest yet most economical ways to promote yourself, your brand or the services which you are offering. A great thing about webinars is, the people who take interest in watching you speak about a certain service or a brand, are actually those who are interested in what you have to offer. The chances of blind leads are quite low because those who are not interested in a webinar can leave any moment. Such viewers or subscribers are pre-qualified as your new customers. So, gear up, create an awesome invite page with a little email field for the subscribers!
3) Create a Blog:
Don’t forget the impact of a well-written and properly structured blog. Present days’ online audience is very detail oriented. People love to read about a certain product which has been introduced recently. They are eagerly waiting for user reviews before they finally decide to buy the product. Due to thousands of brands out there, people often get skeptical as which brand’s product to buy. Not that they can’t spend a few bucks extra rather they are concerned about what’s inside that product which is making it expensive than it’s other counterparts. Now, imagine you own a brand and you have created a blog which informs people about every single product that you list on the store along with the exciting features, the pros & cons, the material used in manufacturing, it’s durability in a structured manner, don’t you think people would rush to your online store? Of they would!
4) Creating a Newsletter:
Now that you have created a blog, it’s time to link it with an awesome email newsletter. Again, it’s another cheapest of the ways to equip your branding strategy to not miss out any opportunity that leads to bringing in more customers. Once your newsletter is ready, drop the links all over your website and encourage the visitors to sign-up for it every time your site loads. Don’t make it feel like you are desperate enough and really want them to sign-up for your own good. Rather you should design the subscription pop-up in a way that appeals to the viewers and they feel like subscribing would also benefit them in case you offer discount deals at some point. Be honest and tell us, does it seem expensive?
5) Automating Your Social Posts:
Before you start wondering, let us explain how automating your social posts certainly qualifies as an awesome way to generate leads quickly. Nowadays, the content being uploaded on social media posts has a very short shelf life. People are scrolling down really fast and they only get to take a pause on relevant posts. Scheduling your posts by following a certain strategy skyrocket the leads in a very short period of time. All you have to do is to pick the most influential times when people are using social media, automate your posts in the region of your choice and unleash your ads! Be consistent with this activity and do the same technique in different time zones and you will be amazed to see the results.
6) Keep a Critical Eye on UX:
Interactive pop-ups continue to convert millions of random visitors to potential leads as we speak. The importance of UX in leads generation cannot be undermined and there are several ways to retain a visitor on your store or site if pop-ups are employed after careful analysis. Since we are talking about interactive pop-ups, it’s imperative that when triggered, their overall design should not be annoying or un-appealing at all. These pop-ups can be shown at the following moments:
- If the user tries to leave the site.
- If the user is scrolling down to seek further information.
- In case if the user has been idle for a specific amount of time.
Likewise, there are different scenarios where you can program the pop-ups and have them triggered the moment they are needed. Remember, for improved user experience, no pop-up should contain direct information, rather the content within the pop-up should ignite the element of curiosity.
7) Always Attend Networking Events:
Nothing can beat the impact you generate while having face-to-face interaction with the people you meet during a networking event. For many tech-oriented nerds, this may seem a little hard to accomplish but you need to get out there and present your brand the way it deserves to be presented. You will be able to generate a decent number of leads if the people whom you are talking to during a conference or a social event, happen to like you. The cycle of generating leads via participating in events goes like this:
Attend -> Interact -> Exchange Details -> Generate Leads -> Repeat
8) Offer Free Content Downloads:
People generally love freebies and your email subscription list will grow like crazy if you compile some valuable content and share it for free. Writing quality content takes almost zero investment. Try coming up with such ideas which are widely being discussed but the information about a certain topic is scattered all over. It’s your chance to generate leads if you manage to compile a content series and share it with those who are looking for it. Think of some useful guides, or “secret recipes”, do some brainstorming, create a content plan, finish the write-up, add some classy images and broadcast the compilation to the entire mailing list.
9) Improve Your Conversion Rates:
This is another super-effective and budget-friendly technique to generate leads online. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an economical way to track and compare the performance of every page on your website in order to have an idea as which version of a page performs well in generating leads. Also known as A/B testing, you create a couple of views for any of your website’s pages and make them live. Later on, you track the performance and make changes accordingly. To create an impact, you should make yourself prepared to evaluate all of your pages frequently. Root out the pages with poor performance and perform A/B tests to check if your audience likes the changes.
Final Words:
At the end of the day, it’s always quality that matters and not quantity. The budget-friendly ways we have mentioned above aren’t meant to skyrocket your leads overnight. What we guarantee is the fact that they will help you in bringing qualified leads with business potential and market growth.
