Generating a steady supply of new leads and building your pipeline is a critical part of developing a profitable startup.
However, it can be a challenging process. The upside to resource-intensive campaigns, constant A/B split testing and content-marketing initiatives is often a marginal improvement in your conversion rate, which can be frustrating. A small difference can mean a big difference in the long run, but getting to that point can be arduous at best.
To this end, we share some lead generation tactics for your startup.
Build your social media presence
This might seem pretty obvious, but social media costs you nothing unless you’re using it to advertise, which means free off-site promotion for your startup.
In particular, focus on visual marketing your startup. Use platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest to catch the eye of consumers and prospective buyers. Share attractive-looking photos, not just of your products and services, but also of your team members, corporate events and other aspects of your business that your potential leads might be interested in.
Increase the number of opt-in offers on your site
If you have more opt-in opportunities on your site, and they are actually valuable to your audience, that you’re going to get more signups. You don’t have to rely exclusively on the signup forms on your sidebar or at the end of every blog post, although those are great places to focus on.
You can turn every piece of content into an opt-in offer. The key is to make the offer so attractive that your website visitors can’t help but click to download the resources you’re making available to them. PDFs, ebooks, reports, white papers, webinars, demos, and other assets can all be leveraged, and by increasing the number of offerings, you can also test to see what your website visitors like most.
Remove friction from your signup forms
Even willing leads are going to abandon your forms if they aren’t easy to fill out. They should be so brainless that anybody that comes to your landing page doesn’t have to go back to correct errors after hitting the “Submit” button.
At the very least, you need to do a good job of highlighting the errors so that your visitors know exactly what they need to correct. Fortunately, this is not a complicated process. All you need to do is install some simple JavaScript on your site. This will enable your visitors to make corrections in real-time rather than after they’ve already filled out the entire form once.
Offer Coupons or Exclusive Discounts for Your Product/Service
Coupons are great ways to promote not only signing up for your email list but also create urgency to purchase your product/service.
There are many different ways to offer your coupons. The most effective way to find out what coupons work best is by doing split tests, or A/B tests to see which type of deal and what copy used gets the most sales conversions.
Many e-commerce websites will use a top bar that sticks on the top of your website with an incentive for a coupon that’s received upon subscribing.
Free trials and quizzes
Free trials and quizzes that generate leads are both excellent lead generation strategies. You can lower the entry barrier for your target market and increase their comfort level with your brand by providing a free trial or quiz. For instance, you can create a Lead Generation Quiz using ConvertCalculator to engage your visitors and gather their email addresses.
They will learn more about your product or service by taking the quiz, increasing their likelihood of considering a purchase. In order to further tailor your outreach efforts, you can use the quiz’s data collection for behavioral marketing.
Use Facebook and/or Instagram Live Streams
While you cannot directly get leads by doing live streams, you can indirectly get leads from them.
One huge advantage of both Facebook and Instagram live streams is that they notify the people following you about it.
They rank high on people’s feeds too, so your audience reach is higher than any other type of post. However, you only have about a minute to capture people’s attention before they close the feed, so you ought to make it interesting.
On Facebook, probably the best place to do a live stream is in your Facebook group, that way you can generate leads from people who are already warmed up to you.
Instagram, however, does not have groups. Instead, you can spread your live stream by posting it with hashtags of the relevant topic and by sharing it on your profile after the video has ended.
Create a Free Trial for Your Product/Service
Free trials are an awesome lead generation tactic that will help you get more than your foot in the door with your target customer.
If you can offer your visitors a free trial, then you just reduced their barrier to entry. Meaning, you brought them one step closer to buying your product or service.
Not only do you get their email address, but the visitor took a crucial step in terms of behavioral marketing.
Behaviorally, for every additional action they take on your site, they’ll become more comfortable with you every time they perform an action.
