Want to generate higher quality leads? You’re not alone.
I’ll break down several strategies to help you not only find quality leads online but also how to improve your lead quality.
Over the years, we hear a ton of business owners complain that the “leads are weak”.
All Glengarry Glen Ross jokes aside, the leads could be weak, but most likely it’s a different issue.
Let’s dive in to see how to generate higher quality leads and improve your overall lead quality with the following lead generation strategies.
Table of Contents
Step 1 – Identify Your Ideal Customer / Client
Generating quality leads should begin with identifying your ideal customer.
A good marketing strategy includes defining your buyer personas and making sure all the information you provide to those leads is accurate.
You will want to focus on the best prospects and not waste your time.
Don’t assume you know who your customers are. Really dig in and find out. Don’t be lazy about it 🙂
The fastest way is to survey your past and current customers.
Create a quick survey in something like google forms, or use our lead form builder to create a form that asks several questions about why they bought from you.
Here are some survey question we’ve used in the past:
- Why did you buy from us?
- Why did you choose us over another product?
- What is the #1 issue or problem you wanted to solve?
- What solutions are you interested in most? (list your solutions)
- If you could wave a magic wand and solve one big problem instantly, what would it be?
Example Survey:
You can also include typical demographic questions such as age and gender to gather more data on your audience and customers.
If you ask a ton of questions, you may see a low survey completion. I recommend motivating them to fill out the survey by offering an Amazon gift card to anyone who fills out the full survey or some type of discount on your product/service.
If you don’t have past customers or leads, then you will need new ones.
Step 2 – Go To Where The Best Leads Are
This might seem like common sense, but it’s easy to make this mistake when there is always some new traffic source or platform that everyone is hyping up.
If you want to generate more quality leads, then go to where they hang out.
Use LinkedIn To Get Leads
If you’re in the B2B space, then LinkedIn is the place to be. You can join LinkedIn groups and network with other business owners.
You can also use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find and message other business owners directly that are in your target audience. Don’t be spammy though. Lead with value by checking out their website and offering something of value to what they do.
Take Part In Facebook Groups
Facebook is a significant source of B2B leads, mainly in Facebook Groups.
Join a Group – The same rules apply on Facebook when joining groups. Join groups where your target customer is hanging out and provide value. Don’t spam and hard promote your stuff or you’ll quickly find yourself banned.
Be a good person, focus on delivering value, and network with the right people who will benefit from your product or service.
If you solve people’s problems in groups, they will reach out for more help to know that you are the expert.
Start Your Own Group – This is another great way to attract leads into your business.
- Create a new Facebook group around a topic you solve.
- Invite past clients or customers into the group to seed it with people, and so it doesn’t look empty.
- Start posting helpful content and free resources daily.
- Post links to your landing pages for webinars, freebies, and other resources that are helpful.
- Use the Facebook Authority Post Strategy below to attract new leads.
Facebook Authority Post Strategy
With Facebook, you can post on your newsfeed about your service to attract new leads from your current friends and followers.
There’s a powerful strategy we’ve used for ourselves and our clients in the past that attracts leads like crazy. Post it on your personal feed or in a group feed. Here it is:
- Post – Write a post telling people you’ve created something of value. Then ask them to comment or message you to receive it. Here is the exact template we use:
“I just finished creating {Insert your freebie PDF, Video, Template, etc}, that shows you how to {tell them the exact result they can expect}. We’ve used this to get {mention the results you or a customer has received}. This is something we’ve never shared before, but I figure there are a lot of you who might benefit from something like this. If you comment ‘YES’ below, I’ll get it sent over to you.
- Message – You should have several people commenting on your post with YES that they want the freebie. So what you’ll do is simply direct message each of those people with the freebie and then start a conversation about what they are trying to solve and ask if you can help them.
“Hey John, I saw you wanted access to the free training we posted about. Here is a link to access it: yourlink. Also, what is the #1 challenge you’re having right now with {your business, health, life, etc}?”
- Schedule – Now that you have their attention, they should reply with their #1 challenge and issue. Talk with them about how you can help, don’t hard sell here. The goal is to book the meeting. So do just that.
“I would love to get on the phone with you later this week to do a deeper dive into what we do here and to see if we’d be a good fit for you. To see if we can help you {repeat what they said was their #1 challenge}. How’s that sound?”
Use this authority post strategy to attract new leads today.
It works, try it.
Moving on to the next strategy…
Run Facebook Ads for Leads
Facebook Ads can generate high quality B2B and B2C leads. The key is to create an irresistible offer that gets people to want to give you their info.
This topic alone could be its own article, and we’ll be writing up a detailed one soon. To get started with Facebook Ads faster and easier, I recommend creating the post above on your business page, and then boosting the post as an ad.
It’s super easy to do, and you will start generating leads from people who’ve never heard of you before.
Instagram Strategy That Generated Over $20K In High-Ticket Sales
Instagram is another great platform for generating B2B and B2C leads.
Since Instagram limits how many people you can direct message, we use another strategy to get people to direct message you instead (which has no limits).
We’ve used the following strategy with past clients as well to bring in new leads and close high-ticket deals:
- Value Posts – Post valuable content on your Instagram (if you already have content, then great, you should have at least 9 posts). If you don’t have a lot of followers, this still can work.
- Result Post – Next, create a post that has a direct call to action. Post an image showing before and after results or a big result, you got a client. In the post description, ask them to message you if they want to learn how to get the same result.Example:
“This is client X. They just {mention the specific result they got}! I just finished creating {Insert your freebie PDF, Video, Template, etc}, that shows you how to {tell them the exact result they can expect}. We’ve used this to get {mention the results you or a customer has received}. This is something we’ve never shared before, but I figure there are a lot of you who might benefit from something like this. If you message me, I’ll get it sent over to you.”
- Follow-Up Message – Like our Facebook posts strategy above, do the same on Instagram and follow up with your leads.
“Hey John, I saw you wanted access to the free training we posted about. Here is a link to access it: yourlink. Also, what is the #1 challenge you’re having right now with {your business, health, life, etc}?”
If you don’t have a ton of followers on Instagram, create a post and boost it with ads. This will help you reach people who don’t know who you are and build your following.
Create Content To Attract More Leads
By creating content that is useful to your target audience, you can set your business apart from competitors. You should also be consistent with your social media presence and create fresh content for your website and social media pages.
If you’re business to business, you probably shouldn’t be wasting time on a site like Pinterest, where it’s mostly B2C and people planning their weddings. However, if you’re in the wedding business, this would be a great place to be.
So, the key is to do what’s best for YOUR business and go where the customers hang out.
Using social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can help you distinguish yourself from the competition (if your customers are there) and increase your lead generation effectiveness.
You can create content in many forms and share it across digital marketing channels. The key is to understand your target audience’s needs and interests so you can make content that matches their interests and needs.
Keep it simple, and master one marketing channel before moving onto more.
Step 3 – Nurture & Follow Up With Leads
You should now have leads coming in organically or with ads.
Most business owners think lead generation is the problem, but the main issue is the follow up.
44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up (source).
That means almost half of the deal pipeline is being lost. Not because of lead quality, but because of lack of followup.
As a business, focus on improving your lead response time.
Studies show that businesses who respond to leads in five minutes or fewer are 100x more likely to convert opportunities (source).
That’s why we built LeadEngines, to help you reduce your lead response time, while also helping you convert more leads through lead nurturing.
This will increase the conversion rate of your leads and improve the quality.
Whether it’s by email, SMS, or phone call, reaching out to leads faster than your competition is the game you need to win.
Using the right tools is crucial to doing this. This will help you improve your lead quality and business performance. Analyze your sales process and see how long it takes for you to get back to your leads.
If it’s over 5 minutes, you could lose out on lots of potential sales.
And if you’re down to try us, check out our marketing automation tools to help you cut your lead response time in half.
Automated Email Follow-Ups
Whether you use LeadEngines or another tool, set up a series of emails that automatically follow up with your leads over several days, weeks, and even months.
The fortune is truly in the followup, so don’t skip this.
Once you import your leads to LeadEngines, a CRM, or another marketing tool set up a flow to engage with your leads.
I recommend you write a series of emails that will nurture warm prospects over time and turn them into sales.
Make sure that you use tags and triggers to segment your leads based on their actions, so that you don’t annoy people who already said yes or told you no.
The last thing you want to do is send an automated email asking if they still want to buy when they already told you to take a hike, or worse, bothering a high value customer who already said yes with an automated email for something asking if you can schedule a call when you already did.
Automation, when implemented the right way, can save you and your team a ton of time.
Next Steps
Phew this article was a beast, but I hope you got some value out of it.
All this is great information, but unless you implement nothing will happen. So keep taking action friend and start improving your lead quality!
This is just the tip of the iceberg on what’s possible, and in future articles we’ll dive deeper into more strategies.
