How to Get Sales Leads for Free
Quick Read When your business needs more sales leads, you have to know how to best generate and qualify them. See how your lead generation begins with your website and how to: Learn what sales leads are, how to qualify them and the best way to keep the leads flowing in!
Businesses rely on a consistent influx of new customers to sustain their market share. So, how do you get sales leads?
Sales lead generation in today’s digital age, consists of having a great website for potential customers to learn about your company and what you provide and a way to bring those opportunities to your site and close them.
In the past, you could rely on methods like cold calling or email blasts. Today you have to be innovative using a variety of strategies, including:
- SEO Best Practices
- Social Media
- Pay-per-Click
A high-quality sales lead generation program can help increase your brand awareness, build relationships and generate quality sales leads.
What is a Sales Lead?
A sales lead is an opportunity for your company to do business. This can be a person or another company you try to win as a future customer. Typically they are classified in three ways:
- Cold Lead: A prospect who is at the very beginning of the buying cycle and is not ready to purchase yet.
- Warm Lead: Someone who has an interest in the product or service, and has some brand awareness. This can be indicated by filling out a form on your website or who called from your site.
- Qualified Lead: These are the customers that are ready to move and have the right characteristics.
Sales and marketing teams can work hand-in-hand to generate leads online and qualify them. A lead generation strategy can utilize inbound and outbound methods to bring them to the website and eventually close them.
Getting Online Sales Leads
The best way for businesses, large or small, to generate more leads from their target audience is through a website and social profiles. This allows you to begin building trust with your audience online and provides them a place to see more about you.
Your website is the hub for your sales generation, you want to make sure that it is in tip-top shape. Be sure to:
- Have an uncluttered layout
- Easy-to-use navigation
- Keep your information current
Using search engine optimization (SEO) best practices helps your website rank higher on search engines, like Google. This provides visibility, driving traffic to your website and helps you increase inbound leads.
Generate Leads Online With Your Website
Whether you’re a small business starting up or an established business looking to amp up your marketing strategies to get quality leads, your website is a crucial point of contact for customers. This is where a potential customer can see who you are, what you can do for them and leave their contact information.
If you’re running a marketing campaign to bring in leads, having a polished landing page for them, hosted on your website is a great way to generate leads and improve your SEO rank.
Maintaining fresh content, that is relevant is another way for your website to help you generate leads. This can be achieved by:
- Hosting Webinars: Where one of your thought-leaders or sales teams present topical information on your product or service for others to learn about.
- Publishing Whitepapers or Case Studies: These provide potential customers an authoritative report on a subject that is relevant to them.
- Blogs: A more informal way to continually provide new content that is easily marketable across social media.
You can also get inbound links and brand visibility through press releases, whether your team does the leg work to get them published or you use a third-party service to push them out. These will provide excellent links back to your site and put your brand’s name in the mind of customers who are going to become qualified leads.
Other Ways to Generate Sales Leads
Reviews and referrals are some of the strongest assets that businesses have. When current customers say that you’ve provided a 5-star service or your product has changed their life, people take notice.
You can:
- Target prior customers for a review
- Ask current customers for referrals
- Set up a referral program
Word of mouth, reviews and recommendations are great ways to close a warm lead. Having these displayed prominently on your website for potential customers to see gives them confidence in knowing that other people trust your company and the services you provide.
No matter what you’re struggling with, your website is going to be the first point of contact with a potential customer. You need to make sure you’re doing everything you can from the first impression to encourage your lead through the funnel and close them. A stunning, easy-to-use site that gives them the information they need, when they need it helps qualify and close sales leads.
