To generate leads means attracting potential customers through a contact- or marketing system with purpose to help them through their customer journey. Most companies today are well aware of the importance as well as challenge that comes with attracting leads. Both in regards to how you create them, and also how you retain them. But despite current strategies, some leads still tend to go unnoticed. This often consist of those who leave shopping carts with items, those who enter their details for a newsletter but closes the window, and those that save the website in their bookmarks. In all these cases, they’re potential leads, and these should be regarded as just as important as those who directly contact you. We have therefore listed a few useful tips to create and retain potential leads
1. What does your strategy look like?
First and foremost it’s important to oversee your current strategy. How do you work with lead generation? How do you evaluate your strategy? And what has worked best? A tip is to start off by going through these short steps;
- The website is oftentimes the most common important lead generating outlet. And here it’s extremely important that customers are able to move smoothly through a purchase and completely unhindered. These road bumps often consist of a slow website, or that it’s not optimized for mobiles. Here you can use useful tools such as Website Grader that allows you to see if your website is discouraging customers in any way through their purchase journey.
- Many companies today use some form of statistics tool. But here it’s important to read between the lines and make an effort to figure out who these leads really are. It can truly help your company form more targeted strategies in order to attract and retain more of these leads in the future.
- Don’t be afraid to just test it out! If you currently have different strategires, make time to analyse how it works and what delivers. If you on the other hand don’t have a set up strategy, try setting up a form in several formats and see which one generates the most leads.
2. Create meaningful content
With this we mean that it’s important to attract leads to your website through engaging content that can be shared across all given outlets. This may example take shape in a blogpost, PDF’s, photos, or infographics. Also make sure that you distribute this evenly across all your sociala media and potential places where your leads might be. Another tip here is to create successful customer cases to attract leads that are already looking for similar services. And for those that aren’t familiar with your products at all, make sure to post a live demo and possibility to test a product out for free.
3. Nurture current leads
When a lead is part of a system or an e-mail list, it’s crucial to have continuous contact and to make sure that they move forward. Here it’s important to motivate and encourage them, and when the time is right you may even suggest another purchase. Keeping the interest is what’s primarily important here in order to build a long lasting contact. Maybe try setting up a system that triggers emails when a lead downloads something from your website, tests a product, or when they leave something in their shopping cart. Or simply any other type of interaction on your website. And don’t forget that this process may take anything from a few months to more than a year. Don’t loose your patience and actively work to maintain interest and meaningful content as well as interactions that help leads forward.
4. Rank your leads
To rank your leads means that companies can acquire meaningful insights on what leads are most valuable to create a strategy that better attracts these. By continuously profiling these over time can really help you create a clear picture of who these are and how qualified they are to make a purchase. By focusing on the highly valuable leads can also have a much bigger impact in sales since it’s obvious they’re interested and able to actually purchase anything. Here it’s also important to look for deviations whereas lead’s rankings fall or increase. This may help you continuously improve your strategy.
5. A collaboration between marketing and sales
To implement a strategy to manage leads is important to keep the flow from start to finish. To generate, reach, create interest and make sure no one falls behind is primarily the focus for the marketing team. And as soon as leads have taken a few steps through that journey, it’s the sales team to bring them to the finish line and make it a meaningful experience in order to create loyal customers.
6. Time to evaluate!
When a customers has decided to buy something, and is satisfied, the process doesn’t stop there! It’s important at every instance to analyse what worked and didn’t. Make sure you analyze where customers tend to fall behind and where you can potentially pick them up again. The most common here is that customers don’t develop a desire from their initial interest. The positive here is that you can oftentimes reignite that first spark but it takes time and effort from the marketing team. It may also be useful to implement a system to analyze stastics to help your team further understand what needs to be improved in the traffic flow.
Conclusion
A good lead strategy may look different for any type of company. But what’s important to remember here is to always experiment and test new iterations to see what works best for you. Be open to new insights, because this will ultimately help you create creative strategies that may catch their initial interest. And whatever path you may choose, always come back to questioning your strategy in order to always improve.