Top 9 Lead Generation Tips for Small Businesses

Small businesses need to be creative and smart when growing their business. Established brands and big box stores have name recognition and market share, making it harder for small businesses to expand their customer base. 

A key component for small businesses to grow long term, is to invest in their lead generation process. We have compiled some of the best tips to create and expand a system to identify, bring in and close your leads.

Know your Audience

In order to create an effective funnel to convert your prospective customers, you have to know who to look for and what they need. Be sure to thoroughly research your audience to determine:

• Who your ideal customer is
• What they do 
• How much money they make
• What their lifestyle is 

Having a clear picture of who you’re looking for will allow you to develop the right mix of strategies. It can also help you develop new services or products to better serve your audience, or even bring new ones in.

Make your Website Work for You

In today’s world, a website is a must for all businesses. Having a site that is easy-to-use, fast and mobile-friendly allows prospects to learn more about your business and serves as a hub for you to gather additional information about them.

You can add contact or quote forms to obtain customer information to market to them later. If your business is a retailer, an eCommerce site may be best for your customers to easily purchase directly from your website.

Entice Prospects on Your Site

Now that you’ve got a website that is engaging for your user, you need to encourage them to give you their information and time. Give them an incentive to give up their phone number or email.

This can be a starting point for your sales funnel, or the landing page for other lead generation tactics. Be sure to have a customer relationship management (CRM) database to help keep track of, and follow up with your leads.

Engage on Social Media

For a small business, using social media to connect with customers where they’re at is a great way to get eyes on your business. This allows you to have conversations with prospects and generate new leads. 

Creating a Facebook or Instagram page gives you the opportunity to create highly shareable and eye catching visuals of your store, product or service. If you have a powerful knowledge base, videos on YouTube or promoting your blog posts can help draw people to your website from your social media.

Social media is another touchpoint for customers and another point where you can create a positive experience for a prospect to remember.

Google Ads for Small Business Leads

As tactics continue to change, Google Ads positions your small business at the top of search engines for specific keywords. Instead of the hard-sell techniques of the past, this allows your business to be seen at the top of where your customers are searching.

There are four primary options:

• Search Ads: Your ad appears next to the list of relevant results when a specific keyword is searched.
• Display Ads: Using plain text or a banner, your ad will pop up in Gmail and across a network of over 2 million sites.
• Video Ads: A short video ad runs on YouTube as a pre-roll or a mid video break.
• App Ads: Some Google Play apps allow advertisements

Facebook Ads

To optimize your lead generation strategy, its important to appear where other strategies won’t get you. While social media helps you engage, Facebook Ads can help you appear across Facebook and Instagram where users already are.

Ads appear as formatted posts within Facebook and Instagram. For businesses with stunning visual images or products that have visually appealing products this is perfect to get people to stop scrolling and interact.

Facebook Ads supports your campaigns with analytics, and can assist you with learning how to most efficiently use and tailor your ad approach.

SEO-Enhance Your Search Results

Our top tip for any small business with a website is to utilize best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) to gain free traffic. Also known as organic traffic, implementing SEO practices to boost your business’  search ranking is a great way to ensure your customers can find you, even if you aren’t advertising.

These include creating high-quality, original content that your customers care about and implementing proper SEO practices to position you as close to page one as possible. This strategy should be implemented early, so that as your site gains traffic and authority you can use other strategies more sparingly.

Blogs are a great way to create new, consistent and original content that is relevant to customers and what they’re searching for. These can also be reshared as a part of your social media strategy.

If you get stuck, don’t be afraid to look for lead generation companies for small businesses. They’ll be able to audit your site, help you generate ideas and know exactly how to get leads flowing in.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the simplest ways to communicate with your customers while keeping them engaged. It provides a quick link back to your website while aggregating the right content to keep them coming back.

Year over year, email marking continues to grow, which is why there are a variety of great tools to send, track and analyze your campaigns. Some key metrics to monitor are:

• Open Rates: How often your email was opened by the recipient
• Read Rates:  The number of times your email was read in full
• Click-Through Rates: how often links in the email were followed

These metrics help determine the overall success of a campaign and can indicate issues within your copy. They also can help with marketing strategy testing. A good open rate is anywhere from 15% to 25%.

Your subject line is the first thing your customer will see, spend time perfecting it before a campaign launch. Avoid using flashy or spam-like phrases, as they tend to have the lowest open rates. 

An email newsletter can keep customers engaged and provide you with a way to continue to remarket to them. Your newsletter provides consistent and easy communication with your customer. Remember to follow all government regulations regarding email marketing.

Referrals and Reviews

Nothing beats word of mouth advertising. After you’ve sold a customer, ask them to leave you a review on Google. Previous customers or clients may even ask what they can do – ask for a referral or to share your posts. Happy customers can be the best source of new leads!

Putting these Lead Generation Tips to Work

Lead generation is a long-term and ongoing process. Figuring out what systems and strategies apply best to your small business and determining the right implementation for them can take time, but it will reap big rewards. Lead generation is an investment into your business growth.