Small Business Lead Generation Techniques That Actually Work
Small business lead generation can be tough, time-consuming, and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. You first have to identify your top target audience. Then, you can get potential clients to contact you when they need help.
Every small business is the proverbial “Needle in the Haystack.” This means small business lead generation is critical to an entrepreneur’s survival. The better your sales team gets at lead generation, the faster your small business will grow into a big business. You need to create a strategy for finding new leads that become new customers.
Remember, it’s a lot easier to turn a lead into a customer if they call you rather than you call them. It cracks me up when I see titles of articles, seminars, or books about how to “Make Effective Cold Calls” or “Warm Up Cold Calls.” Below are a few best practices that are great ways of generating leads. The best part is you won’t have to create an email list or make cold calls.
However, you have to keep in mind what we covered in How to Network at Business Networking Events. That is that business-to-consumer sales and business-to-business sales are totally different. So, developing qualified leads for consumers is totally different than generating qualified leads that are other businesses. So, as we go through the process, I’ll give examples of each type of lead generation strategy.
Identify Your Target Market and What Problems They Have.
The first step in small business lead generation (or any lead generation campaign) is identifying your target market. All your marketing efforts will fall flat if you try to sell to everyone. The more vague your target market is, the harder it will be to find out what problems you can solve for them.
For instance, let’s say you are a realtor. If your target market is “anyone who wants to buy or sell a house,” you will fight for scraps against every other realtor. However, if you focus on just rental houses, that is a more niche market. By making that slight alteration, finding new potential ideal customers is much easier.
Here in Texas, homeowners can apply for a Homestead Exemption to reduce their property taxes. They can only use that exemption if they live in their own home, though. So, getting a list of homeowners who don’t live in their homes is pretty easy. Making that slight alteration to the target market allows for a whole new marketing strategy.
Another example might be a web designer who just finished a new website for an event venue. They may have done a lot of custom coding to allow the venue to sell tickets or create ticket queues. So instead of marketing their services to other industries, they could target other event venues in cities worldwide. The best part is that each additional website gets easier and takes less time to develop. So profit goes up.
For each of those examples, the problem solved got easier once the market became more targeted. When the realtor focused on rental properties, the problem solved was keeping rental tenants and collecting rent. With the web developer, the problem was keeping track of sold and available seats in an event venue.
Once You Identify the Target Market, the Problems Solved Are Easier to Identify.
Years ago, my wife and I bought a duplex. After a few years, the whole process became a real pain. We had tenants who sometimes didn’t pay rent. We had to evict someone once. In addition, every time someone moved out, we had to remodel the place. It was a hassle. Eventually, we sold the house for a profit. But the memories of all the challenges still lingered.
Years later, we bought another piece of rental property. This time,I found a realtor who specialized in rental properties. They were able to find tenants, collect rent, and clean and remodel the place between leases. He was solving specific problems for me, and I happily paid him a premium fee to do it.
The same goes for the event venue owner. Selling the same event ticket to two different people is a huge challenge. A venue owner who can avoid that challenge will pay a premium fee for that service.
The key to this step is putting yourself into the shoes of your prospective customers. Then figure out what challenges they hate the most. Once you figure those challenges out, move on to step two…
Create Brand Awareness Using Blog Posts and Social Media Platforms.
The Internet is the great equalizer for small businesses. Big businesses have websites. But their bureaucracy forces them to implement new technology very slowly. They can easily miss new opportunities. However, a nimble small business can capitalize on these opportunities immediately.
So once you identify these potential challenges for customers, write blog posts about the solutions. Then, once you have a well-written blog post, share a link to the post on social media. No need to create a “landing page” that promises the world and collects email addresses. Instead, just put a form at the bottom of the post so prospective customers can request information.
This is really the best way to increase your customer base. If potential customers in your target audience search online for a solution to their problem, they find your information. This valuable content increases the conversion rate of generating new customers exponentially.
Logically, this is why this is your most important goal for your small business. When someone has a question, where do they go for an answer now? In decades past, if you had a challenge or a question, you might ask a friend or coworker. Or if it was a really big problem, you might go to the library and search for an answer. Today, though, people go immediately to Google. The listings at the top of the first page have a lot more credibility than the ones on the second, third, or four-hundredth.
If your business is at the top of the results when they enter their question, they’ll click on your website. Then they click through to your website and get the answer to that question, your small business is now at the top of their shortlist for solution providers.
How Do You Use Digital Marketing to Garner Small Business Lead Generation?
The number one rule for content marketing is to create good content. Web developers use search engine optimization techniques to get blog posts to rank higher in search engines like Google. Good websites that load quickly, use dependable servers, and are optimized for the user always rank higher. So a high-quality web developer can be an asset for business owners. Let’s assume that the website itself is of the highest quality. If that’s the case we just want to focus on how to write a post that ranks well.
Search engines use three things to determine webpage rank. First, they look at how many other web pages on the internet are linking to that website. When another website links to a page on your website, it is saying that you are a credible source. Second, they look at how long it takes the page to load and become interactive for the user. Slow webpages are annoying for users, so they don’t rank as well. Finally, they look at how long someone stays on a webpage before hitting the back button and searching for something else. This is the big one when you are posting solutions to problems.
The longer you can keep someone on your webpage, the higher the page will rank on Google. We’ll cover more tips to get to the top of search engines in future posts.
Getting customers to find you on the internet is critical. If your prospective customers call you, you have a higher chance of turning that lead into a customer. In contrast, imagine your small business is listed at the top of page two in search results. To have someone contact you, they will have already looked at listings from at least 10 other competitors. Most potential customers will not be that thorough.
Catalog Your Small Business Success with Case Studies and Customer Successes.
Your happy customers are your best lead-generation tools. Thanking your customers in social media posts can spur them to engage with your content. They may share the post, comment, or just talk about it to friends. This can create the elusive word-of-mouth advertising that we all covet.
Since we sell out team-building services to other businesses, our case studies can be an effective marketing tool. For instance, we lead dozens of activities like this every week. So, we have hundreds of case studies posted on our website. (See Team Building Case Studies.) Since we have so many, we can now target them for specific types of clients. For example, a client can share the post on their Facebook page, Instagram feed, or LinkedIn profile. Now other departments within that same company will see the post.
My wife, Laoise, owns a bakery. (See Emerald Door Bakery.) When someone wants custom cookies for a wedding or special occasion, she always posts the completed order to her Facebook page. Within hours, she gets additional orders for new versions of the same type of cookie. Keep in mind that the social media accounts are her only lead-generation channels. She spends no money on Google AdWords or any other type of advertising. So with the right kind of business, your customer success stories can be one of the best lead generation tools available.
Referrals and Repeat Business Will Help Bolster Your Small Business Lead Generation
According to Harvard Business Review, it costs up to seven times more money to find a new customer than to resell an existing customer. So looking for repeat business is way more profitable than trying to find new customers.
For the last couple of years, one of our biggest clients has been JP Morgan Chase. It is a huge company with hundreds of thousands of employees. However, having so many employees may create an extra hurdle. It can make it very difficult to find the appropriate title or department to market our service to.
My instructor who works with them noticed that one of the locations has hired us for three consecutive meetings. The woman who organized each of the events had a specific title, “Senior Administrative Assistant.” He also knew that she was an assistant to a specific title in the organization as well. So, we just went to LinkedIn Navigator and searched for everyone with both of those criteria. We ended up with 97 people. This was a much easier list to market to than the hundreds of thousands of employees of that company.
In the old days (pre-smartphone,) pizza companies and hair salons figured this out. They gave everyone a punch card with a get your 10th pizza (or haircut) free. Now with mobile apps, it is even easier. Between you and I, I use two fast food apps all the time — McDonalds and Chick-fil-a. If you want to pattern a repeat business app for your small business, look at these two apps. They know how to get people to come back over and over.
If You Have to Cold Call in the Digital Age, Call to a Targeted List Who Already Knows You.
Marketing like cold calls, email spam, popup windows and forced subscribing just don’t work well in this digital age. (I’m not sure any of them ever worked very well for very long.)
For instance, I get email blasts from companies guaranteeing they can get my website to the top of Google. And they claim they can do it in just 48 hours. Seriously? Do you think if they could do that they’d be wasting time spamming millions of people to buy their service?
In one month, 165,000 people went to Google and searched for the term “Google search optimization.” If they could get to the top of Google with just that one term, they would have about two million potential leads every year. So why would they need to spam people?
If you are so good at what you do, why are you spamming me? Why are you cold calling me? Why are you trying to force me to subscribe to your newsletter? The truth is that cold calling and spamming people shows desperation, not success.
So, instead of cold calling or sending out email blasts, look for patterns from your buyers. Once you find that pattern, a more targeted list is easier to use as a small business lead generation tool. For instance, the JP Morgan Chase list that we found is an ideal cold-call list. We have a conversation starter — the administrative assistant who has bought from us over and over. And we know the specific needs of new potential buyers because of the other contracts we have already fulfilled.
So if you have to cold call, do it in a smarter way. If you do, you’ll have much more success.
Small Business Lead Generation Has Never Been So Simple.
So forget the cold calls and spam, use your website to get more leads to call you. First, identify who your target market is and what problems they have. Next, post solutions to these problems on your website and social media. Share your customer success stories with the world. Focus on referrals. And finally, if you do have to cold call, make your calls to a targeted audience.
If you do these things, you generate tons of new customers!
About Doug Staneart
