In marketing your service business online, lead generation is often the first step. Learn how to integrate it into your marketing and why it is priority.
In marketing your service business online, lead generation is often the first step.
It can prove to be the most difficult, and oftentimes, it comes with a lot of drama.
Why? Being that there are so many ways to generate leads online, it can get confusing as to which one to use.
In reality, only a few of these are effective.
And only a few actually work.
So yes, it is confusing.
However, this post isn’t your resource kit of one million ways to generate leads. You can see this post for that.
Here, I’m simply going to show why you shouldn’t ignore this first step and how to get started.
What Is Lead Generation?
I don’t want to assume that you know this, so I’ll say it anyway. Lead generation simply means attracting and building a list of potential clients who might be interested in your service and hire you.
For more complex definitions, check Wikipedia :-).
As a service professional looking to work with clients, what do you think is the most basic way to attract these leads — potential clients who might hire you?
By simply talking about what you do.
However, talking about it isn’t enough. You need to talk about your expertise in the right places. That’s where guest blogging comes in. I’ll talk about that later in the post.
But here’s a post to help you know more about how guest blogging would greatly help your service business.
The Lead Generation Problem
Like every other thing in life, lead generation comes with its own pitfalls. Businesses are always faced with the problem of having hundreds of people on their lists who aren’t even interested in their products or services.
You don’t want this to happen to you.
Also, you could have very few leads, say 50, who will be very interested in your services and would actually want to hire you.
In my opinion, the second one is better, but is still not the best.
I’d rather eat my cake and have it by having hundreds of leads who are crazy interested in what I have to offer.
If this is also your goal, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be, then you have to be choosy about the lead generation methods you use.
Your chosen method must;
- Give you lots of leads
- Increase the chances of each lead hiring you in future.
How To Integrate Lead Generation Into Your Marketing System
I’ve talked about the importance of having systems. I’ve talked about why you should have your own professional website. I’ve talked about why you should build a list of potential clients.
Now I’m just going to tell you how to get it started.
1. Sign Up With An Email Marketing Software
In my free blueprint for service professionals who want to generate their first few leads online, I wrote about the best email marketing providers you could use. I often recommend Aweber and Mailchimp to clients. While Aweber is not free, it comes with functions that the free version of Mailchimp doesn’t have. Despite this, Mailchimp still rocks.
How does this help you with leads? These software actually help you stay engaged with all your leads in one place. While they don’t help you generate leads, with the software, you can monitor your leads, and know which ones are the most engaged with your content.
However, before these tools can work for you, you need a way to get these leads.
2. Have Lead Generation Forms On Your Website
Now I’m assuming you have your professional website setup already. If you don’t have one, you can read about why I recommend Studiopress as the best website theme for service professionals looking to attract leads online.
In this post where I talk about 4 website elements to help you generate leads online, I said that to start attracting leads, you need to have signup forms in visible places on your website. This includes on the sidebar, below each blog post or even just beneath your blog header, like Fizzle.co.
Why all the specifics? Well, according to this post by Kissmetrics, only 20% of visitors scroll down to read. While this doesn’t mean all your forms must be above the fold (i.e. visible before visitors scroll), it only informs your decision of how effective you want your forms to be.
3. Create A Landing Page
While you may have several lead generation sign up forms on your website, on a landing page, there’s usually nothing but a few words and your sign up form. No sidebar, no sliding images at the top, no navigation, and sometimes, no header. The purpose of this is to ensure visitors don’t have a reason to move away from the page.
What goes on your landing page? Landing pages that give away something free often get more leads than those that don’t. This means that for your lead generation system to be effective, you need to create a free giveaway that you would offer in exchange for the email addresses of your visitors.
This free giveaway could be a manifesto of what you believe in, a blueprint (like mine) that shows your readers how to implement something from start to finish, or simply a one page cheat sheet that provides a checklist on how to do something. For more ideas, check out this awesome blog post on Boost Blog Traffic.
4. Drive Traffic To Your Landing Page
Notice I said to your landing page and not your homepage. Your homepage would have lots of distractions and so you’d lose most of your visitors.
Driving traffic is often where lots of headache comes in. However, here’s a post from quicksprout that is really actionable.
As I mentioned earlier, guest blogging is one of the most effective ways for driving traffic to your website. Not just because you get your name out there, but because you also get to share your knowledge with people outside your blog audience.
The idea is to contribute content to authority blogs in your area of expertise. Most bloggers would allow you a bio at the end of your post. Depending on how you write your bio, there would always be link back to your landing page and/or services page. When the readers of that guest blog are interested in knowing more about you, they’ll click on your links and come straight to your website.
If you linked to your landing page, these visitors, after clicking on your link would land on that page (see why it’s called a landing page?). If your giveaway is enticing and relevant enough to them, they’ll want it.
Now this is where your email marketing software comes into action. If those visitors want your free giveaway (called a lead magnet), they’ll have to put in a few details in order to get it.
All this is setup through the email marketing software. And once they’re done putting in their details, the lead magnet lands in their email inbox. That’s one extra lead for you :-).
What If You Choose To Ignore Lead Generation In Your Marketing?
Well, one of these three things would happen. Feel free to choose anyone:
- You’ll keep putting in effort for a very long time with no results.
- You’ll have a service business that only relies on word of mouth. While word of mouth is one of the strongest forms of marketing, it can only be effective if you’re known for providing that service for a long time. And I don’t think that’s the case for you.
- You’ll have an inconsistent monthly cash flow due to the absence of a pool of potential clients to convert at will.
- You’ll go broke, hungry and frustrated due to no clients for a long period of time.
Out of the top of my head, these are the four I could think of.
With all I’ve said so far, there are only two very important things:
- Don’t just go after loads of traffic, but loads of relevant traffic. Ensure you only target traffic sources where your potential clients hang out.
- Ensure you convert more of that traffic to leads. Don’t rest until almost 100% of people who come to your website sign up to get your lead magnet. Don’t think it’s possible? Well, you’re probably right.
Do you have any lead generation questions? Or perhaps you’d like to share how you integrate lead generation in your marketing. Share your thoughts in the comments below.