How to Generate Leads through Online Marketing

The number one question business owners, sales execs, and enterprise marketers ask us is, “How do I generate leads online?”

It’s an important question. Sometimes online marketing can feel like you’re talking to no one. Sending content out into the ether hoping it will strike a chord with a prospective customer, but unsure if your efforts are really paying off. With intentional digital marketing strategies and consistent high-quality content, you can improve your inbound marketing and generate effective leads.  Read on to learn how you can generate leads through online marketing.

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Table of Contents

1. Integrated Approach to Lead Generation
2. Inbound Marketing Tactics for Lead Generation
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Paid Media and Digital Advertising
5. Email Marketing

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How Does Your Business Get Noticed Online?

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of turning your website into a lead generation machine, let’s discuss why digital marketing is so important to your lead generation tactics.

Before someone searches for a product or a solution, they’ll likely conduct a bit of research on the problem they’re experiencing. First, they’ll turn to their trusty friend, Google. They search for something like “How do I generate more leads for my product webinars?” and an entire world of possibilities opens up to them. They’re presented with articles, videos, and infographics, and get a glimpse into how other people are solving the same problem.

If your company specializes in lead generation for webinars, but you aren’t consistently creating content and showing off your expertise with digital marketing, you won’t show up in their search results. Simply put, you are opting out of being on their shortlist of solutions.

To get noticed online, you need to be online.

In marketing, the rule of seven explains that someone needs to see your business and brand seven times before they will even remember your name. In today’s digital world, many marketers say it takes double that for a prospect to remember your company.

There are several tools you can use to be noticed online by your ideal customers:

• Content marketing (including blogs, videos, and podcasts)
• Consistent branding and messaging
• Social media marketing
• Paid media and advertising
• Email marketing

To get started, you’ll need to understand how to incorporate all of these marketing tools into an integrated strategy.

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Why You Need To Take An Integrated Marketing Approach To Lead Generation

Lead generation is not a one-size-fits-all affair. It takes an integrated marketing campaign to be successful. An integrated marketing campaign builds a unified experience for your audience. It pulls content marketing, advertising, sales, social media, email marketing, and media relations toward a single goal – cohesion.

No matter how many marketing strategies and tactics you use, you want your brand and your offer to be clear and consistent across all channels. Consistency builds trust. When people see consistent branding across multiple channels, they move from knowing your company to liking your brand to trusting your business.

Every successful lead generation campaign should be multi-channel and integrated to be effective. Your buyer profile will give you a clear idea of who your customer is and how they spend their time online. This profile equips you with the insights to create a more targeted campaign that performs better, so it’s worth working with an expert to create one.

But a buyer profile is not foolproof—people are still people, complex and layered. Some prefer Twitter over LinkedIn or articles over videos. An integrated marketing campaign accounts for these differences by using multiple types of media (e.g. videos, articles, infographics, podcasts) and various channels (e.g. social media, digital ads, email, blogs, traditional media.)

When a prospect sees consistent messaging through multiple channels and media, they know what to expect and can begin to trust you. They go through a journey that builds the “Know, Like, Trust” factor for your brand.

Know

First, they get to know you. Maybe a follower liked your post and it showed up on your prospect’s feed. The person clicked through and read your article. Your article was a hit, jam-packed with engaging and useful information so they followed you on social media. That’s great news! But this relationship is just getting started.

Like

Now that your prospect is following you, it’s important to offer them content that delights and engages them. Does your brand resonate with this person? Does your offer appeal to them? Just because they know you, doesn’t mean that they like you.

This is where strategic branding comes into play. From the beginning, your messaging, brand personality, visuals, and everything in between need to appeal to your ideal customer. You can learn more about this in the section on Branding & Messaging.

Trust

After your prospect decides that like what you have to offer, it’s time to earn their trust. They’ve read your emails and listened to a few podcasts where your brand’s mentioned. Because you deliver an on-brand message, strategically placed yourself in front of them online, and offer consistent value, you’ve stood out as an expert in your arena.

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Now the prospect has shifted from casually encountering your brand to actively seeking out your brand for information. They trust your business to solve their problem.

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Inbound Marketing Tactics for Lead Generation

Inbound marketing is a lead generation philosophy that flips the traditional business dynamic of chasing customers on its head. Rather than pursue your prospects (think robocalls or pop-up advertisements), inbound marketing is about being there when your customer needs you.

Your prospect has a problem. They head to Google to find an answer. They come across your content which gives them a solution. As a result, they come directly to you for future problems.

Content marketing, email nurturing, social media, targeted advertising, and authority marketing are all examples of inbound marketing that aim to educate and solve problems.

Inbound Lead Generation System

1. Attract: A visitor finds your website via an article, video, social media post, email, or other marketing channels.
2. Convert: A visitor clicks on your CTA, where you offer a content upgrade. This CTA button or link takes them to a landing page with a form to convert (expect 1% to 4% of visitors to convert).
3. Nurture: You add the newly converted leads to an email nurture campaign and begin scoring them.
4. Close: You identify your most qualified leads. These are the people engaging with our content the most, and the best candidates to forward to the sales team to close the deal.

Set-up a Lead Generation Campaign

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Content Marketing

At the center of an effective inbound marketing strategy is content. Content marketing drives SEO, email marketing, social media, and brand messaging. Remember: Inbound marketing is about positioning your brand as helpful to your target audience, so they seek you out for answers and eventually become customers.

You want your ideal customers to find you through a quick Google search. If they aren’t, it’s because of a lack of content. At Aimtal, we create educational and impactful content in the form of guides, eBooks, blog posts, videos and more for our clients.

Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Types of Content Marketing

There are different types of content—Video, visual, written, social media, and email content are just a few examples. When you’re developing your content, the most important classification is whether it is traffic-generating content or lead-generating.

Traffic-generating content typically drives visitors to your site and helps your brand build awareness.

Lead-generating content helps your brand convert views and visitors into potential customers. It is valuable enough that a visitor is willing to exchange their email or other contact information to access it.

When creating and distributing lead-generating content, don’t think about it as a single asset. Think about it as part of the larger, integrated marketing campaign. Your lead-generating content needs to work in conjunction with content clusters and social media. It also needs a ready-to-go nurture campaign that follows visitors from their initial interaction with the content to their conversion.

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Traffic-Generating Content

This type of content usually drives visitors to your site and helps your brand build awareness.

• Blogs
• Customer Profiles
• Case Studies
• Testimonials
• Live Streams
• YouTube Videos
• Social Media Posts
• Infographics
• Influencer Partnerships

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Lead-Generating Content

This type of content usually generates leads and helps your brand convert visitors into potential customers. Visitors exchange their contact details for access.

• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Guides
• Research Reports
• Webinars
• Template/swipe Files
• PDF Download Of An Article
• Cheatsheets
• List of Resources
• Challenges
• Formulas
• Trials
• Free eCourses
• Email Courses

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Branding & Messaging

Branding and messaging are often misunderstood. Frequently, when people think of branding, they think of a logo, colors, and maybe a tagline, but branding and messaging are the essential parts of your entire brand personality.

What to consider when building your brand:

• How you speak to your audience
• Your tone, voice, and messaging
• The imagery you use throughout your website, digital channels, and campaigns
• Your unique value proposition
• A solid understanding of your audience
• Your brand story – if your business were a superhero, what would its origin story be?

Your branding and messaging strategy are what make you unique. There may be hundreds of companies that do what you do, but it’s your brand that sets you apart from the competition.

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Empathy in Branding

At Aimtal, taking an empathetic approach to branding and messaging is our priority. Empathetic messaging means that you focus intensely on your customer.

• What makes them tick?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What are their goals?
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We research and analyze our client’s audience and build a content and lead generation strategy around them. Each client gets a completely customized plan that meets the needs of their customer.

We believe that the reason for our success in campaign strategy and management stems from the intrinsic need to know our client’s audience inside and out.

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Social Media Marketing

Content marketing is only king with a proper distribution plan.

Social media is crucial for distributing your content to a new audience. But mastering social media is no easy task. To be successful, you must have a solid social media marketing strategy.

• Set SMART social media goals such as increasing channel traffic to your website by 50% or increasing LinkedIn engagement by 25%.
• Use your content strategy research for the:
• Target audience research
• Competitive analysis
• Branding and messaging guidelines
• Key content topic clusters
• Engage with your audience and identify accounts with which to partner
• Optimize your profile to generate leads with a strategic call to action

When it comes to generating leads from social media, engagement reigns supreme. Automating social media without engaging with your comments or audience will get you nowhere. Lead generation happens from facilitating community within your comments, getting to know prospects on their preferred social media platform, and responding to direct messages.

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Paid Media and Digital Advertising

Paid media and online advertising provides a quick boost of traffic to your site. If done correctly, you can convert those fleeting clicks into subscribers.

It’s easy to begin running ads on social media or Google’s Smart Campaigns. But it takes skilled hand to build and manage successful advertising campaigns that get results.

Even with a small budget, you can generate great results – so long as you have the right management. The difference between ads that convert and ads that fail is excellent copy, imagery, offer, and targeting. When you target a particular audience, be sure the ad resonates with that audience.

Paid placements mean that every click to your site costs money. Because of this, you want to track results weekly. Set up pixel tracking to gain in-depth insights into the actions taken on your ad. If you aren’t getting the results you want, a simple change can make all the difference.

SMART goals are critical to a successful paid media or digital advertising campaign. A few examples of SMART goals are:

• Increase traffic to the website by 15% after 3 months with a Google Ads spend of $1,200
• Increase purchases of our carry-on suitcase line by 40% after 5 months with a Facebook and Instagram ads spend of $2,500

Aimtal excels at building and managing advertising campaigns. Learn more here.

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Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a vital part of a lead generation campaign. It is the step that warms up a subscriber and moves them through the sales funnel to become a sales qualified lead (SQL). Once a prospect is a SQL, they are ready for a discovery call, product or service demo, or sales call – the last step before becoming a customer.

Email Nurturing Campaign

A nurture campaign is based on behaviors or actions that a visitor takes with your marketing tactics. For example, if a prospect downloads a guide on Instagram, they would be added to a specific list that says they’re interested in social media marketing. From there, they would begin receiving nurture emails about social media marketing. Throughout the series, you’ll want to teach them new strategies and tactics as well as introduce your business and paid offers.

How do you set-up an email nurture campaign?

1. Write a series of 2-3 emails that educate, enlighten, and inform about a specific topic.
2. Create an active list that automatically adds anyone who downloads a specific lead gen or content upgrade.
3. Use a marketing automation platform like Hubspot or ActiveCampaign to build a workflow of emails that are automatically sent in specific intervals to that active list.
4. Track your lead’s progress through scoring. For example, an opened email gives the lead 1 point, and a clicked link gives them 5 points.
5. Run your nurture campaign and re-evaluate quarterly. Are your analytics showing you email #2 is performing poorly? Make some tweaks and run an A/B test to strengthen your campaign.

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Additional Resources

5 Easy Steps to Better Buyer Profiling, Content Marketing Institute
The Ultimate Guide to Integrated Marketing, Hubspot
How to Generate Leads Through Digital Marketing, Aimtal
Using the Rule of Seven to Radically Grow Your Business, The Balance
30 Ways to Build the “Know, Like, and Trust” Factor that Grows an Audience, Copyblogger
22 Inbound Marketing Strategies Your Startup Needs to Start Using Today, Neil Patel
What is Content Marketing?, Content Marketing Institute
Unique Value Proposition, Unbounce
5 Elements of a Successful Brand Messaging Strategy, Growth Marketing Conference
5 Steps for Creating Successful Lead Nurturing Campaigns, Hubspot
How to Set SMART Social Media Marketing Goals for Your Business, Medium.
How to Get More Leads on Social Media: 7 Effective Tactics, Hootsuite

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How To Generate Quality Leads For Your Business

Lead generation is the lifeblood of any business and it’s easier than you think. With an integrated marketing campaign, lead generation becomes

1. a) targeted, so you get the RIGHT leads for your business and offer, and
2. b) automated by systemizing your lead generation process

Learn more about how Aimtal can build and manage your online lead generation, making it easier than ever to fill your pipeline.

Contact us