
If you’re a small business owner or manager and need to generate more leads then this guide should help you. Everything wants more business right? Well, not everyone. Some are at capacity and can’t take on any more clients or customers. But this is a topic for another blog post. If you have this problem then it’s a matter of putting systems and processes in place and looking to scale up. Unless you are happy with the amount of business you have, and that’s fine too.
So how small businesses can generate more leads today is as follows:
- Know your target audience – if you don’t know your target audience then this is a problem and you need to do something about it fast. If you’re a new business then just decide who you want to sell to. If you already have clients then take some time to discover who your best clients are and start to target more of this type of customer. Ultimately you don’t want to try to be all things to all people or you’re going to trip yourself up. It’s never ideal to try to be everything to everyone. You’ll end up spreading your self too thin, you’ll have trouble hiring real specialist staff to do what they do best. This is because your work will be too varied. I’m not necessarily saying just offer one service to one niche, but this can certainly be very profitable.
- Test your marketing – find out what has worked really well for you so far and target that. Put most of your marketing budget into the things that are working well and stop spending on the marketing tasks that aren’t generating a return on investment (ROI). Try new things and keep them up. Give everything a good chance, don’t stop doing them until you’ve given them a fair try.
- Once a web visitor has found your site keep marketing to them – use subscriptions, opt-ins, anything to keep your visitors coming back for more, and build trust before they buy from you.
- Use a sales funnel – if you don’t understand this then it’s all about conversions. This starts by collecting contact information and the best way on a website is by having very target contact forms, lead magnets and opt-in forms with downloadable incentives such as a PDF ebook.
- Using popular sites to bring more traffic to your website – use social media, forums, other blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn. Basically go where your target audience are and pull them into your website using engaging, unique and useful content.
Building yourself up as a thought leader in your industry is challenging and it isn’t for everyone. But if you can do it, you’ll be onto a winning formula.
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