20 Smart Ways to Generate Leads for Your Business

Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the ultimate goal of converting them into customers. There are many ways to generate leads for your business, and it's important to understand the different strategies available. Did you know that the audience on LinkedIn has twice the purchasing power of the average web audience? B2B marketing with LinkedIn is especially effective and can yield very profitable results. Facebook ads are one of the best ways to generate leads.

If you're willing to “pay to play”, you have access to specific targeting options, such as age, location, interests, and more. If direct mail is part of your marketing budget, also use it as a way to distribute discounts and coupons. For inspiration, check out Yesware's handy list of 10 unanswered email formulas. You can start sending quickly with free email marketing tools like HubSpot, Omnisend, or Mailchimp.

If you need to increase your email subscriber list, add a subscription form as a pop-up window on your most popular landing pages. In an incredible example, Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich said he reached 100,000 customers by blogging regularly as a guest. This strategy not only generated sales leads, but it quickly earned backlinks that increased the ranking and credibility of your website.It's also important to consider partnering with a macro-influencer instead of a micro-influencer. A macro-influencer is defined as 10,000 to 1 million followers, and a micro-influencer has between 500 and 10,000 followers.

Keep in mind that your content should be approximately 90% useful and 10% persuasive. Most of the work to attract potential customers is done online today.There's a good reason for that. Therefore, you should spend a significant amount of time and energy tracking potential customers on the Internet. Not sure where to start? Try these 14 unique ways to find new leads from members of the Forbes Coaching Council.

Create value-based, people-centered content across multiple mediums based on your buyer's unique journey.Companies spend too much time focusing on the product, its content, and not enough time correlating their products with how a customer's problems can be solved. By taking a values-based approach to content marketing, companies will be able to close the trust gap and shorten the sales cycle. To differentiate yourself, start by understanding your “why” and lead with passion for what you can bring to an organization. When you lead from a place of passion, it will be accepted as something genuine and can lead to trusting relationships.Many successful small business owners are continually looking to expand their customer base and grow their businesses.

However, business growth can be a difficult and long-term process. One of the fundamental elements of growing a business is having access to a constant stream of sales opportunities.A potential customer is a person, or company (if you have a company that sells to other companies - B2B), that has an interest in the products or services you sell. Let's look at 20 smart ways you can generate more leads for your business right now:

• Write with these readers in mind.
• Respect readers' time and be concise.
• Think ahead about traffic and use target phrases.
• Pay close attention to formatting and internal links.
• Select images and create videos that build credibility.
• Do your best but be humble.
• Use survey questions to optimize other free methods of lead generation.
• Try new approaches away from standard practices.
• Ask customers to share your work.
• Buy leads instead of generating them organically.
• Explain what you do in terms of lead generation.
• Automation will become an important part of lead generation strategies.
• Implement both organic and paid approaches in balance.
• Do lead generation analysis on your blog posts.
• Capture potential customer contact information.
• Schedule interviews and request contact information.

Moving away from standard practices to try new approaches can help you generate leads in unexpected ways.

Asking your customers to share the work you do for them and the value it brings to their business is a great way to generate leads. Buying leads, rather than generating them organically, is much easier and requires much less time and effort, despite being more expensive.Every time someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can't just say that I create content for lead generation. Forbes predicts that automation will play an important role in this increase, as automation will become an important part of lead generation strategies, specifically when it comes to rationalizing lead scoring and predictive scoring. Seek to implement both approaches in a balanced way, as this will be useful for generating leads and ultimately your business.You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to find out which posts generate the most leads, and then make sure that you regularly link your social media posts to them.

When it comes to lead generation, you're usually trying to capture a potential customer's contact information such as their name, email address, phone number, and other eligible attributes that will help you in your sales process. You can even consider scheduling interviews and requesting contact information to improve your business's lead generation.