How to generate leads for free
Do you know how to generate leads? If you want to succeed in your business, you need to keep in mind that buyers don’t fall from the sky, but rather from a list of likely customers, which we call “leads”.
If experts say that “content is king” and recommend that you “create valuable content”, it is because it is through content that lead generation happens. But be aware that, in practice, content is not the only way to capture leads. Even a conversation can be an excellent method of getting potential customers.
Lead generation is an activity that is part of the digital entrepreneur’s life. Results from ad campaigns, email marketing, videos, and social media strategies… all converge to answer the question: how many leads did this practice generate?
How to generate leads: know the main factors
Before knowing the strategies to capture leads for free, it is interesting to know what must be overcome, first of all.
Defining the target audience, qualifying leads and producing quality content are steps that, ideally, should be optimized so that you can capture leads without much effort later on.
Avatar definition
Understanding who your audience is based on your business model, in theory, doesn’t seem to be difficult. The obstacle appears when you reach the digital sphere, especially social networks, and you are faced with challenges — similar audiences, but with other pains.
The creation of the avatar can best guide the process, but always focus on real people who represent their leads.
Prioritizing people more than representations, especially on social networks, is essential. What’s more, it’s with your avatar that you have the most valuable information: what is a need? What makes someone your lead?
The peculiarities of a good lead
After all, what is so special about this user that arouses such attention from professionals who work in the most diverse areas of the market and who believe in digital marketing?
This user is more than just a visitor, he is an interested person who fills out forms and provides personal data in exchange for a possible contact or content.
He was open and interested in establishing a dialogue. Therefore, you must pay special attention and invest in this potential customer.
Understand that, like any relationship, it is a process of attracting attention and gaining the trust of someone who is willing to connect with your business.
Then offer valuable content so that interest is not lost along the way and the conversion actually takes place.
You need to know your audience
To connect with someone, the first step is to gather more information about them.
First, you need to start with basic data, such as: what do you like to do? Do you practice physical activities? Are you in the habit of reading? Where do you live?
Afterwards, it is necessary to go to deeper knowledge.
Create stories to impersonate that person. What are your motivations? Life Goals Concerns? You will create a screen of your ideal customer.
Be clear in communication
A common mistake is to forget to adapt the language to different audiences. You cannot communicate with a young student the same way you communicate with an adult woman who is already in the workforce.
The more personalized your communication, the better the result.
Qualification of contacts
Qualifying leads is basically nourishing them with new content that is consistent with the phases they are in in the sales funnel.
Marketing automation software helps to overcome this impasse, but if you don’t know what drives your lead through the funnel, the results will be virtually nil.
The rationale for qualifying leads to generate more leads is as follows: the more cold leads you generate, the less you will capture those leads.
Resources are finite, and if you don’t see sales happening, you’ll probably try to readjust the whole structure of your business, and sometimes the problem would just be the lack of hot leads.
Download this post by entering your email below
Don’t worry, we don’t spam.
Create quality content
So far, you have understood that you need to come up with a strategy and that, for that, it is essential to know your persona and your main interests. Now, you’re at the moment to fully qualify your lead. For this, the production and sharing of valuable content is the tactic of the great success stories.
For your content to catch your persona’s attention, it needs to be unique. Rich materials must have relevant content.
Valuable content is not a copy, it is the end product of your research, creativity and accumulated knowledge.
We’ve been in the Information Age since the 1950s. Do you really believe that retrieving that content from Google, copying and pasting it is producing quality content? Anyone has access to basic information. You need to create something else related to your personality and authenticity.
No wonder that creativity is one of the skills of the future, according to the UN (United Nations).
Search, through its digital content, to connect knowledge from different sectors and create something new from that junction. If you respect the peculiarities of your audience, this uniqueness is what will solve any problem for your potential lead.
We believe that with valuable content, it is possible to generate lots of leads every day! In this video, we explain how it is:
After all, how to generate leads?
Create strategies based on your persona’s interest
Understand the behavior of your website’s traffic sources. Have you thought about using ratings and comments productively? Seek to identify the main needs of your audience. What is he looking for?
Offer discount coupons
Study how e-commerce entrepreneurs use discount coupons if you are not already one.
They generally function as add-ons, while marketers develop other, more complex strategies for generating leads.
That’s because promotions are very simple strategies and focus on the customer’s pocket
Perform SEO audits
We’ve already talked about content in this article, but as incredible and relevant as this content is, if the site’s structure doesn’t collaborate, it’s unlikely to be found in search engines. Improving SEO is the solution.
A clean and organized website is much more likely to convert visitors into leads. So regularly check the elements below your page:
- Coherence of heading tags (headings and subtitles of Home, About, Contact…);
- Indexing in Google (just type, in the Google search field, site:your site and see if unwanted files appear, such as pdf documents, with a private nature);
- Robots.txt operation. It is a robot exclusion protocol that also generates information to Google’s algorithm;
- Use of social login on your page. This solves two problems: agility for the visitor and capturing leads for you, the entrepreneur.
Create A/B tests
What if the public doesn’t get along with logging in through social media? Or what if they prefer to log in with Facebook instead of a Google account? The best way to be sure about this is to perform A/B tests.
Use tools that create two versions of your website and, thus, a test which one the traffic for lead generation is more favourable.
Turn assessments into leads
It is believed that a grade for a product or service from 3.3 onwards is the minimum necessary for a visitor to consider engaging with it.
So, your business rating and review can be a surefire way to get leads, as long as you take advantage of this statistic.
Try to optimize your profile on review pages and promote the highest-rated opinions.
Create a landing page
It is through a landing page that the visitor will be able to obtain more information about your business. Take advantage of the space to clarify the public’s main doubts and objections regarding your digital product. Thus, the chances of conquering and converting the lead are greater.
Don’t worry about creating a complex page.
A simple formula with main call, a summary of what is being offered and a form to generate the Lead (with name, email and the custom fields you deem necessary) are enough! Also, it is essential to include a Call-to-Action (CTA), the famous “call to action”.
If you are interested, you can create a free landing page with HeroSpark. Learn more in this video:
Offer quality materials for the exchange
Lead generation works from an exchange process. You deliver some material (e0book, discount, and training, among others) in exchange for the user’s contact.
The material offered on the landing page is decisive for getting a good conversion rate.
Thinking about it, we brought some ideas of “digital baits”, which are the content/products that you will offer in exchange for the lead.
E-books
The classic that doesn’t go out of style. The main advantage of producing an e-book is the possibility of going deeper into a certain subject, in a way that you couldn’t do in a blog post.
One strategy for creating an e-book is to split it into several posts and then put them together in a single material format.
The important thing is to offer an experience, information, something that is really useful for the user who is already willing to connect with you.
Webinar
In the Tikka era, those who don’t record videos can be left behind. In an increasingly robotic and technological world, remote events have become an excellent and very profitable opportunity to share experiences and broaden horizons.
Thanks to the use of voice and image, webinars have a more personal structure, bringing the user and the company closer together.
Another important point is that the webinar can be done in recorded or live formats. This allows you to use this content in other strategies, such as short videos to send in your email campaign or even to publish on your social networks.
Serial Content
A more in-depth video lesson, a long interview or a series with several videos on a certain subject can be combined into a material to also be used as bait for Lead generation.
You would certainly be interested in acquiring serial content for free, right? Your future leads too!
Online training to qualify your audience
T odor world wants to win something. And knowledge is the best product. Bet on training, marathons and immersions. So, in addition to providing rich content for your future customers, you gain an even closer relationship with them.
The ideal is to propose more specific, less generalized subjects that talk to each other. Choose what you are truly qualified to teach that will add value to your brand, product or service.
Once you define this, do a survey to identify what is the market demand to validate this theme. So you’ll be able to define the target audience, dissemination strategies, and format, have ideas for themes, etc.
Then create a script. Separate each video lesson into topics and prepare activities for your audience.
Finally, you need to prepare to launch this course. You can work with the open course format (always open applications) or closed (one that has a limited number of places or works with an application deadline).
To use online courses as a lead generation strategy, the ideal is to opt for the open launch format, in which the main focus is dissemination;
At HeroSpark you’ll find everything you need for your lead generation process: host online courses, automate email marketing campaigns, and create landing pages and much more in one place!