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Originally Posted On: https://www.powerhomebiz.com/marketing-tips/getting-customers/essential-tips-for-generating-leads.htm

 

Having a home business is now one of the newest trends in the business industry. The reason for this rising trend is because doing work in your primary residence can save you from rental fees and other miscellaneous expenses.

Some home-based businesses are interior decorators, truckers, and software trainers. While some are even licensed professionals. Whatever industry you’re in, you can grow your business while staying at home.

How do you do so? This is where lead generation comes in the picture.

What’s A Lead?

To understand what lead generation is, it’s vital to start with the most used word – lead. The term refers to someone who shows an interest in your service or products in any way.

A person becomes a lead when they’ve willingly submitted any personal data that you can use to communicate with each other. For instance, a person who voluntarily entered their personal details, like email or contact number, for a subscription or trial is considered a lead. As a result, you can directly call them using your business dedicated phone, such as call cowboy.

However, not all leads are the same. That’s why it’s essential to understand them so you can use the best lead generation strategy accordingly.

Here are some of the types of leads you’ll encounter:

• Service Qualified Lead – This type of lead is someone ready to pay for your product or services. In fact, service qualified lead is the one who initiates contact with your service team regarding your product or services.

• Product Qualified Lead – This type of lead has tried your free trial products then inquires on features available for paying customers. Thus, a product qualified lead shows the interest of availing your products.

• Sales Qualified Lead – In here, the lead also shows the interest of becoming a paying customer. Unlike a service qualified lead, the sales qualified lead uses your forms to ask questions.

• Marketing Qualified Lead – This last type of lead is someone who may have engaged with your marketing team but not yet ready to become a paying customer.

What’s Lead Generation?

Now that you know the different types of leads, it’s time to learn more about lead generation. To put it simply, lead generation is a marketing process where you capture and stimulate the interests of the leads. But, lead generation doesn’t stop there.

You must convert your leads to become a paying customer, which can create your sales pipeline. As with home-based business owners, lead generation is a way to increase your sales. What’s more, you can do lead generation online or via mass text apps!

With mass text apps, you can build a list and send them your offers while attaching your landing pages.

To give you a glimpse of how lead generation works, here’s a simple step by step process:

• First, a person finds your social media page, blog, websites, and other marketing channels that are in line with the person’s needs or wants.

• Then, the visitor clicks on the call-to-action (CTA) forms, such as a message, button, image, or other forms that invite the person to visit your website.

• After clicking the CTA, a landing page will welcome the visitor. The landing page then contains your offer that’s valuable to your visitor.

• If your content or offer interests your visitor, the person may grab the offer after willingly filling up a form. Now, you’ve gained a lead.

Importance of Lead Generation

Lead generation is vital for every business, whether home-based or not. Lead generation targets the right or specific group, which increases the chances of having buying customers.

To make your business brand known online, you also need lead generation. Because you need to bring in traffic to your website, you need a good lead generation strategy.

When you have heavy traffic on your website, it’s highly probable to convert them into buying customers. That’s why having a superb lead generation strategy can do so much.

Lead Generation Tips

When you’re unsure how to generate leads for your home-based business, fret not. Here are some tips that you can use so you can start right:

1. Optimize Your Web Page

Remember when your visitor clicks on your CTA that leads them to your website or landing page? Well, if they’re on the landing page, either they’ll leave or continue their transaction with you.

One way to let your visitors stay on your landing page is to optimize it. By letting your sign-up form short, simple, and easy to fill, you’ll attract more visitors to fill them up. But, before your visitor trusts and gives you their personal information, you need to convince them that your products are worth it. Do this by highlighting your customer’s testimonies.

You can also include a pop-up form, especially for your valuable offers. Pop-ups are effective to catch your visitor’s attention. But, to keep from annoying your visitor, use pop-up in a timely manner, with an actionable message. It’s more effective for pop-ups when you personalize your CTAs so you can get their attention quickly.

2. Develop Informative Content

Not only should you optimize your web page, but you must also create high-quality content, which means that it must be informative. Something that’ll appeal to your visitors and relevant to what they’re looking for.

For instance, if your product is on hairstyling, then the content must be related to styling the hair or hair products. Imagine this: you’re looking for tips to make your hair smooth and straight, and when you find a related CTA, of course, you’ll click it. But, if you landed on a content talking about tips on how to choose the best shoes, wouldn’t you feel annoyed?

When you’re creating your content, you must also use keywords that your target audience is using when searching. By doing so, people using such keywords can find your content and web page easier. As a result, you’ll attract more traffic on your webpage.

3. Maximize Your Social Media Accounts

After producing high-quality content, spread it on your social media accounts using the links of the content. That way, more people interested in such content can click on the link directing them to your content.

But, to get leads out of it, make your content gated, which means a virtual gate keeps the content hidden to visitors. Only when your visitor provides information can they open the gated content. That’s why your content must be valuable so that people will divulge their information.

Aside from using your social media accounts to share links of your valuable content, you can also use social media advertising. That way, it’ll target a highly specific audience. Although you’ll pay for the lead ads, it can reach out to people who are potential leads or buyers.

As a result, you can increase your web page traffic even more.

4. Answer Questions Or Comment On Blogs

Not only should you focus on your webpage, but you should extend your efforts outside your site. For instance, you should answer questions on sites relevant to your product or niche. But, when you’re answering queries or giving comments, it must be valuable.

This means that you should leave answers that’ll answer or solve other people’s questions.

If you amaze people by your answers or comments, you’ll leave a great impression. With such, they’ll get curious about who you are, prompting them to visit your profile and website.

Since people who are commenting, answering, or reading the questions and answers are people with similar queries, you can attract more leads.

You can even put a comment section on your blog so that people can share their thoughts on it. But, you should also be responsive to any of their comments so that people will feel you care for their opinions or queries.

5. Participate In Forums

Aside from commenting on relevant blogs or queries, you must also join group discussions of the same niche. This way, you’ll get to meet like-minded people or potential customers. For instance, you can join forums regarding home-based businesses.

When you do, you can gather insights on how to grow your business as most advice can come directly from home-based business owners. Or, just like the tip above, you can also contribute to people needing help. That way, you can also build your network.

Most importantly, when you participate in forums, you’ll know what’s trending and what your potential customers are looking for. Because you can find topics that people post on the forums, you’ll also know what content to write. Using the keywords they use on the forums to search for answers, you’ll know how to optimize your content, too.

6. Use Email Marketing

Now that you’ve built your email list through subscribers on your site, it’s time to use email marketing to create leads. Email marketing is easy to implement and becomes effective when you know how to do it right.

Here are some tips when you’re using email marketing to generate leads:

• Subject Line – Even when you have a fantastic offer, if your subject line doesn’t arouse interest, your receiver won’t bother opening the email. That’s why you should make your subject line as intriguing as possible so people will open your email.

• Offers – As intriguing as your subject line is, you should also provide your receiver a great deal. For instance, give your receiver a big discount, freebie, and other enticing offers they won’t find anywhere else. That way, they’ll be more likely to click on your link.

• Length – When making the content of your email, you should keep it as short as possible, especially when they haven’t subscribed to receive blogs or newsletters. Your email should be direct to the point in which the reader can get your message with just a scan.

• Link – Lastly, the most vital thing you shouldn’t forget is to add in the link to your landing page. That way, when you have enticed the reader with your offer, you can direct them immediately to your site. Thus, you won’t lose a potential lead as the receiver may lose interest if you don’t attach a link.

7. Use Your Youtube Channel

Besides content, landing pages, and emails, you should also maximize your YouTube channel to generate leads. If you’re creating informational videos to complement your website’s content, then the better.

Or you could use the videos to direct your viewers to your landing page. You can do so by doing the following:

• End Screens – When you’ve uploaded a video that answers people’s issues, you’ll increase the person’s curiosity about who you are. Or, you can make them more interested when you leave other options for their queries through end screens.

So, before you finish your YouTube video, you must insert buttons that’ll link to your services, products, or sites that can give them more answers.

• Search Engines – Not only do you use keywords on your content, but incorporate it with your Youtube video’s in-depth descriptions. So, instead of just putting on the title of your video, you must include multiple relevant keywords. That way, your video can rank higher on search engines.

When this happens, more people will get to see your links or CTAs on your videos.

• YouTube Cards – With these cards, you can use a link or CTAs to direct your viewer on other videos you’ve created. Or, use it to your advantage by linking into your product’s landing page.

That way, when viewers click on the teaser of your YouTube card, your link will appear depending on where you’ve decided to make your card show.

• Influencers – To make your videos more appealing, partner with influencers. But to keep your vlog credible, you must choose influencers who are experts on your products or services. By doing this, the influencer is like advertising you to his/her followers.

As a result, the influencers’ followers will visit your site or buy your products since you’ve been recommended by someone they trust.

Conclusion:

When you’re home-based, the more that you need proper strategies to generate leads. Since you rely on online marketing to let your business grow, you need lead generation techniques. You can do it yourself or hire lead generation experts so you can focus on other important business matters.

Nonetheless, make your lead generation work by doing the tips mentioned above.