If you forget about your product for just a second, you will realize that the most important thing is for people to know you and be aware that your product is on the market.
Without awareness, your website is doomed to fail within the huge number of startups that crash and burn within the first five years. But this happens because people are too in love with their idea. They are mesmerized with it. They think that people will automatically know about it and that it’s so good, it will basically advertise itself. However, this never happens. You need to work hard to make people aware of your product. Here are some smart ways to advertise your product to generate leads.
Engage with leads directly
Direct engagement is probably one of the best ways to raise awareness and it should be one of your top priorities. Most businesses that fail make a mistake because they don’t want to communicate with their audience directly. But directly is a better way. You can make use of live chats, forums and other direct engagement ways to make sure that you get plenty of leads. Good word of mouth is better than any F.A.Q.’s.
Email marketing is also a great way to engage with clients directly. You can create really great email campaigns for engagement with your audience or send personalized emails to each and every one of your clients that are loyal to your brand. You will be able to tell which clients are worth reaching out to in such a personal way by analyzing their previous interactions with your company. They could be loyal brand advocates, returning customers or someone who wasn’t quite satisfied with your product or service.
No matter which group they belong to, it would be good to send a personalized email. For example, for the group of people who are not satisfied with your product, you can send some sort of re-engagement email and get them to work with you again, asking about what you could have changed or what can be improved in their opinion. Send personalized thank you emails with new offers to your returning or loyal customers. All of this brings immense benefits to your brand in the sense of more conversions and engagement from your clients.
Use outbound and inbound marketing
Stats say that outbound marketing is more effective than inbound marketing. But this doesn’t mean that you should exclude one or the other. Balance both approaches in order to generate leads and boost your business. Personalize email communication and be active in online communities, share informative content and so on.
Inbound marketing has its benefits in the sense that it’s not openly promotional. So, you give out free content that can help people on social media, your own website, blog, forums and other publications. You can also employ the techniques that can help you get more audience like search engine optimization, analytics and branding. All of this works in your favor and needs to be applied in order to attract as much audience as possible.
The point is to be on top of their minds when they need a product or service of the type you are selling. Of course, outbound marketing is necessary as well, as a way to complement the inbound marketing. This would mean putting yourself with open promotions in front of an audience through paid advertisements. Combination of these two can help you get the authority and loyalty of your audience. One can exist without the other and companies may often use just one or the other but they work best when combined. It allows people to get to know you in different ways. Some of it will be building brand awareness and setting yourself up as an authority, a friend to the customers, and some of it will be openly selling and advertising your products.
Invest some money in new technologies
Your marketing efforts should match the technological trends on the market. For instance, because people consume most of their content, including email, on mobile devices, you should make sure that you have invested in making your marketing efforts compatible with that. This will enable you to reach many people. You should do this with all of the new technologies and trends.
Mobile is just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to new things and trends. Of course, it’s really important because most people use mobile devices and Google itself is prefering websites that adapt their websites to mobile devices. In fact, Google is employing the mobile first rule so the websites that are responsive to mobile devices will appear higher on the search results. People are now building the websites with mobile devices in mind before adapting them to desktop devices. This shows just how serious this trend is.
You can also invest in virtual reality and make it easier for your audience to experience your product or service from their own homes. This is a really great thing that many companies are using for their own benefit. It’s fun for users, simple to use and it makes your brand that much more interesting. When we’re at virtual reality, you can also invest in augmented reality because it can be really interesting for your audience to see themselves with your product or in some way benefiting from your product before they even bought it. Both technologies helps them get to know your product better and you can seriously benefit from this. It’s also compatible with mobile.
You can also get on the trend of chatbot technologies which would enable your consumers to contact you at any time and get the information they need from you. Chatbots can be as simple or as elaborate as you need them to be. Some of them can even send promotional messages, useful tips of content, funny things that would start a conversation or anything else you want them to send besides the regular conversations.
Go to Twitter or leads
Twitter is a social media website but a great resource for your company as well. You can analyse your followers, get information and so on. This is a great resource for all businesses that want to raise their awareness. You can reach your audience associated with your niche and get more leads from Twitter.
How do you do that?
Well, one obvious way is to use hashtags to reach different people from different industries. You have to be engaged within those communities, retweet their tweets, comment on their posts, like their posts and generally, stay in the conversation within the communities you choose on Twitter.
The good news is that people on Twitter love it when brands get involved and you can benefit from that. Make sure that your best people are on that and that your DMs are also open for all of your clients and customers, whether it’s about their problems, questions or anything similar. Share interesting content that you like and that you think they will find useful in their lives.
Make your Tweets powerful
Tweets with images are powerful and interesting. They should also be entertaining to people and be relatable to them. So, your Tweets should be amazing – get a great social media manager or a Twitter specialist or learn the secrets of Twitter and how to use them. The important thing is to use an appropriate hashtag – keep in mind that on twitter, only first two hashtags matter and more is not that favorable anyway. You need to be brief but interesting as well. Entertain your audience and share a mix of different posts. You can be relatable, fun, interesting, informative and a bit of all of them. Just like real people sometimes share articles, sometimes something witty they thought of, sometimes about their problems and so on. You can do the same, just adapt it to your brand.
Develop informative content
It’s hard to miss how important content can be as a resource of web traffic and leads. High quality content is crucial for everyone who wants to build awareness. So, makes sure that you are producing plenty of powerful, informative content that will help your consumers solve their problems.
First, do the proper amount of research when it comes to content. There are some things that will inevitably be more popular due to the simple fact that people will be interested in them more. So, do keyword research and trend research before deciding on the topic. Next, make sure that the quality of content is high whether you are working on blog posts, images or video, infographics, ebooks and so on. It needs to be really good and informative – it can’t be something that’s already been done before so many times, it needs to be powerful and valuable.
Use the data
Use the data that huge databases provide to gain potential leads for your business. This means getting a list of companies with their accurate information. You can do this in no time and you will have plenty of several leads.
Data can help you really understand what makes your audience tick and what they want to see. You can also understand who they are and what is interesting to them.
Advertise on LinkedIn
The best social media for businesses and professionals, it can help you find an amazing number of leads with your product. LinkedIn allows you to publish the content from your website to LinkedIn so this will be no trouble for you. It’s really powerful in reaching a wide range of professionals. You can use LinkedIn publisher to repost all of the content from your website and reach your audience in that way. LinkedIn publisher is a powerful resource for all professionals so it will gain a lot of attention, as long as your content is good and useful to people in your industry or your customers.
Get a tool to get more leads
Drip is one of the best applications that will help you get the automation that you need. It offers various features that will help you collect the information of your prospects and help you turn them into leads.
You can use that to personalize and make your approach more targeted to that specific lead, making it much easier for you to get to the conversion.
Go to Quora
Quora is seriously underused – but it’s a great tool that can help you get many leads by simply answering questions. Users who get your answers and many more who read them will most likely check your website out. This is a great promotional tool for you through useful answers and a great research tool as well. So, while answering questions can get you leads, looking at the questions that are most asked within your niche can help you learn what to create the content about. That content can then again, bring you more leads.
Comment on blog posts
Commenting on other blog posts in your niche is a great idea because you can bank on someone else’s audience. People will see your comment and click your links but only if your comment is relevant to what they need and to the blog post. Leave your comments on posts you care about and have something relevant to add to. Simple answers usually don’t lead anywhere – for example, you can’t say “Thank you for this great post” and then expect people to follow you. This is not meaningful or important. It’s merely there. So, make great comments and leads will follow. It’s an excellent opportunity to show how much you know.
Start guest posting
This is a useful technique because you get someone else’s audience as well and you can spread information about your product easily. Make sure that your articles are all high in quality.
Gathering leads may be the most important thing you’ll ever do for your product. It can help you get more sales and boost the future of your company. So, make sure that you follow these tips to get the best leads out there.
Here’s another great resource: Lead Generation in 2019.
About the Author
Katrina Hatchett is a business blogger at Origin Writings. She has been involved in various business projects, where her main aim is to define project problems and propose solutions, as well as improving overall communication effectiveness.
