How To Generate Leads With Your Digital Marketing

The lifeblood of any business is its customers and for your business to continue, grow, and foster, you simply need to find more customers.

In a highly competitive business climate with so many options for consumers to choose from, how do you stand out from the pack to make your brand attractive in finding new leads?

Truthfully, leads are only the beginning. There are different types of leads, and those leads can be at various stages of their purchasing decision. The stage just after finding your leads is where the money lies. It’s known as the conversion stage, or simply the sale.

Conversion is the process of acquiring a lead and helping them become a consumer of your product.

Before we get too far into the weeds of all the strategies to convert leads to consumers, we must figure out the most effective way to find leads.

This step-by-step guide is designed to help you find new leads and convert them into customers while developing brand loyalty to improve your future sales.

4-Stages Of The Buying Process

Before discussing your lead generation’s best strategy, you need to understand the consumer’s buying process stages.

There is a principle in marketing known as the AIDA model and is one of the most crucial things to understand about your potential customer and their buying process. The AIDA model discusses the four stages a potential customer is within the buying process. Your messaging should pinpoint every one of these stages depending on the type of leads you’re working to acquire.

The four stages of consumer purchasing are based on the following psychological principles;

• Awareness: A consumer is not likely to purchase a product they aren’t familiar with, how it works, and why it may benefit them. Consumers like familiarity and comfort when making a purchasing decision, which depends on the brand’s awareness. The first step in lead generation is also improving your brand’s awareness.
• Interest: Generating interest in what your product is and the benefits a consumer will receive is the next step in getting them to explore your brand and product. 
• Desire: This step moves your potential customer from interest into wanting to make a purchase. 
• Action: This is the sale, and moving from current to future sales is sometimes referred to as “retention,” which is a way for you to develop relationships through your product that results in future sales.

Now that you grasp the fundamentals of the sales process, you can target your lead generation strategy to find prospects at all four stages of the buying journey.

Ask yourself, do you understand who may know what your brand is and what you offer? Is there something you can create that will help them better understand the core benefits of your product?

 Understanding these questions is foundational to you creating a successful marketing strategy.

Once you understand who may not know about your brand, you can create a strategy to increase exposure to these potential consumers. You can accomplish this stage of awareness through paid and unpaid opportunities here.

Content Marketing

If you’re in the market to sell digital products, knowing how you craft your content in the Business-to-Business market is different from selling in the Business-to-Consumer sphere.

Content marketing is the process of communicating your brand and product through various media, from written to visual and auditory. You can create content to post on a website, publish an eBook, film YouTube video tutorials, or podcasts, whichever format makes the most sense for where you will find your target audience.

Content marketing can serve multiple purposes, from increasing awareness about your brand to establishing you as an expert. How you craft your content and what you want as the objective after the content is consumed is entirely up to you and your strategy.

There are five main ways that your audience will consume your content.

Whatever platform you choose should be based on finding your potential prospects and choosing to consume content.

For example, if you publish video content, but your target audience prefers to consume most of their content through a podcast, you may find it challenging to gain traction.

The 5-main content sources your audience is consuming is:

• Blogging
• eBooks
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Social Media

Blog: Blogging is a great way to get detailed content published and read by a wide range of potential prospects.

You can collaborate with similar blogs to cross-promote, create backlinks, and even guest blogs to increase your exposure. With a blog, you develop brand awareness, and if done strategically, through a series of educational blog posts, you can position your brand as an authority in the space.

Including a CTA or call-to-action in your blog, whether it’s designed to lead to a sales page or contact form, is an excellent way toward generating leads in addition to establishing your bona fides.

eBooks: eBooks are another way you can write content to share with an audience. You can use an eBook as part of your enticement to get contact information from your prospects by way of a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is something you offer, usually for free or very low-cost, in exchange for something of value like a prospect’s contact information.

Often you can repurpose blog posts or other content you offer into a quickly shipped eBook that you offer your readers as an incentive to give you their contact information.

Podcast: A podcast is a way to get a broader reach than with just written content. In a podcast, you can craft your messaging to discuss common problems in your niche and discuss how there are solutions, including your own products.

Interview guests and experts increase subscriptions and downloads, which increases your brand’s exposure and reach.

Podcasts are popular as a way to increase brand awareness and build your brand’s authority because they are easily consumed forms of entertainment and information.

However, the problem with this platform is that they’re a little more complicated as a way to capture lead information. Finding creative solutions on how to best capture lead information is entirely up to you.

Videos: So much of what is consumed online today is video. In fact, over 80% of content consumed is video. It is without a doubt the most popular and influential form of content.

Tutorials, product reveals, and customer reactions are some of the most popular videos right now, and you should consider incorporating at least one of these into your video content offerings.

Some videos have contact information capture forms, and you need to include this stage in your video production.

Other possible suggestions include DIY videos on fixing a problem, unveiling a new product, and having a step-by-step guide on the best practices. Your content creation comes down to the type of video your audience will be most receptive toward and the type you’re most comfortable creating.

Social Media: Creating a dedicated social media page that cross-promotes your various content channels to your audience and finding engaging ways to interact with your prospects is a great way to increase your brand awareness.

With a dedicated social media page, you can utilize paid advertising and find creative ways to get your audience to promote your brand to their sphere of influence.

Use creative ways to get people who like and engage your content to share it on their pages.

An excellent idea to get engagement with your social media is to host a contest.

Selecting the right type of competition, one that positively highlights your brand, and utilizing dedicated hashtags that tie-in with your brand will create ways to link back to your social media page.

Be sure to make personalized responses to your audience as they share your content.

It shows that you’re engaged with your community and are aware of what they are doing as well. This small step can go a long way toward building brand loyalty and future fans of your social media pages.

One other way to increase your brand awareness and lead generation is through the use of webinars.

A webinar is a small, online seminar that you can create to show your expertise and highlight your product benefits. One caveat, be sure that your webinar is helpful and informative for your audience and not “spammy.”

With a webinar, you create the format to broadcast it live or as a recording and promote it through your various content marketing channels.

You can structure your webinar to give some outstanding solutions to common problems and leave just enough that you can include a call-to-action for more solutions in the future for those interested. As you promote your webinar, the goal is to get contact information during the sign-up phase, and often this works best if paired with a lead magnet.

Optimize Your Content For Localized SEO

As you craft your content for your various channels, your strategy should expand your brand awareness and highlight the benefits consumers will receive from purchasing your product.

Smart content that addresses concerns and solutions is an effective way to get your message across and position your brand as an authority in the field at the same time.

Choose to utilize video as a platform for your content. You can do interviews, product launches, and other engaging ways that a viewer can see your product as the solution to the specific issue they have.

Optimize Social Media

As you educate your audience on your product’s functions and benefits, you need to do some “backend” work.

“Backend” is the jingo for all you do to get your readers through the purchasing process effectively without the customer knowing about it. The “backend” is the part of your blog and website that you optimize and set up to capture, drive traffic to a landing page, and links to other pages.

Part of this process is where a prospect may land if they click a link contained in your content, whether it’s more directed toward more content or a landing page designed to convert a sale.

The administrative “backend” ensures that your pages and content are optimized, whether on social media or your blog. Optimizing your content for SEO purposes helps you narrow your target prospect more effectively and get your message in front of the right audience.

You can create content on social media that highlights a particular personality profile or location to help the algorithm that runs that specific platform gets your message to the people most impacted by your messaging.

Paid Social Media Ads

To generate more leads with your digital marketing, you can utilize the popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram through paid ads.

The benefits of these platforms for advertisers are that you can narrow your target audience down to a very defined prospect, and the algorithm handles it from there.

As Facebook owns Instagram, you can run integrated or separate campaigns that target different audiences. And with over 2 billion Facebook users, you can reach a broad or as granular an audience as you wish.

Localized SEO

According to research by WordStream, over 50% of keyword searches include long-tail keywords of over 4 words. That means that creating focused keywords optimized for your location is a great way to get more brand exposure and generate more specific leads.

This research shows that localized SEO is a great way to optimize your content for an audience looking for your services and products specific to a region. When you localize your keywords, you’re taking a high volume keyword and adding a local tail, like the city you live in.

These localized keywords may not have the quantity of search traffic but are more specific, meaning that someone searching with those keywords is much more motivated to find a solution.

Let’s say, for example, you’re a plumber in Los Angeles, keywords in your content and on your blog should be more than Los Angeles Plumber, which is too broad of a term.

For this example, you create content that educates, addresses, and resolves some common plumbing problem and target an audience in a local area. When you incorporate keywords into your article, you narrow your keywords to a more specific term, such as Pacific Palisades Bathroom Plumber.

 In that case, your content is more targeted to an audience located in Pacific Palisades and looking for a plumber that specializes in bathrooms. What you lose in overall traffic volume is made up for with highly targeted people looking for that specific result.

Deciding on what stage of the buying process you’re targeting for your lead generation strategy will help you craft the type of content you need. As you publish the content on various platforms and optimize how your audience will find it, you guarantee better quality leads as a result.

There you have it, a more effective strategy for generating leads. Utilizing an emphasis on localized SEO and social media, combined with various lead magnets, will guarantee your success in your lead generation strategy.