Online Lead Generation Techniques for 2021 and Beyond
With most businesses being hard hit by the recent nation-wide restrictions because of the 2020 health pandemic, a focus on lead generation and sales is vital during 2021 and beyond, for each business owner and the economy.
The good news is that you don’t need to hire sales staff or dedicate more of your own time in order to double down on certain marketing and sales tasks so you can drive more qualified leads into your small business. Modern Technology offers many low-cost tools and techniques to help you scale and refine your sales and promotion processes for lead capturing, nurturing, and conversion.
This year presents SMEs with a wide range of options to capture new leads and drive them down the sales funnel, from website optimization and chatbots, through to paid Social Media campaigns, and even a new take on Google advertising.
Below, we will provide an intro to the top 3 online lead capturing techniques SMEs can get started on today, to improve the quality and amount of leads they receive in 2021 and beyond.
Lead Capturing on your website
Did you know that your website is your most valuable lead capturing tool? It has the potential to attract an organic, ready-to-buy audience on a consistent basis. Every day there are customers and clients searching the internet for brands, products, and services, just like yours. Now that’s what we’d call a qualified lead!
In 2021 every business should invest in lead capturing techniques for their website, to increase their business and brand’s rankings in search engines, so customers come to them. This could involve implementation of one or all of the following:
SEO
Starting with identifying the best target keywords for your site, optimizing your website content, generating high-authority backlinks, and optimizing your business’s online listings.
Chatbots
Facilitate real-time or automated conversations with website visitors, widen your marketing reach, and obtain new leads. Forbes predicts that “brands that master two-way conversational marketing and commerce will also deploy chatbots and AI” in 2021.
Lead generation pages
Create high quality landing pages that offer truly valuable and professional resources to your most preferred potential customer, in exchange for their personal and business information. This information can be used to nurture them through an email sequence and share more valuable content consistently, until they are ready to purchase.
Google Ads
Contrary to popular opinion, advertising through Google is not for those stuck in the 1990s – Google Ads are not dead. What PPC advertisers called “Google Ads” or “Google Banner Ads”, will be largely replaced with the “Google Display Network” and “Google Retargeting Ads”, also called Adwords.
If you are new to these terms, here is the 101:
Search Ads
Search, the most familiar of paid online advertising, appears directly in a search results page – above and below the organic results. Search Advertising reaches people who have shown an interest in something you’ve designated as a good match to what your ads are selling, immediately after viewing your ad.
Display Ads
Display ads are shown on websites that sign up to the Google Display Network. The person being shown the ad did not see it as a result of entering a query into a search engine. Google Display Network ads are like background players – they are shown on external or non-search engine pages where a person is engaged in some other type of activity. Depending on the targeting you choose, there may or may not be any type of recognizable connection between your ads and the site being viewed.
Remarketing / Retargeting Ads
This refers to a method of display advertising that is only triggered if a person has previously visited your website or landing page or is targeted for being “similar” to people who visited your site.
It can be set up to be very general – show my ads to anyone who has ever visited my site. Or it can be incredibly specific – show an ad to a person who visited your site and looked at boots but didn’t buy them, about those specific boots for 36 hours after the initial web site session. Or any number of different scenarios in between.
Remarketing ads can be just the nudge you next customer/client needs, to convert from browser to buyer.
FB Ads
Small Businesses who are spending money on Facebook ads in 2021 want to get real value for their money. Considering all of the talk that the reach of posts on Facebook pages has decreased considerably, it is important to be smart and focused when planning your advertising campaigns. While it may seem like Facebook’s influence is waning, the truth is that there’s no social media platform that has more reach or number of active users than Facebook.
A recent study has shown that of the total number of Facebook users, 70% use the app daily. The second most popular platform for daily Social Media use is Instagram, averaging at 58% daily users. Even Twitter retains only 38% of its total users daily. This data goes to show that if you’re running ads, Facebook is the best platform to focus on, as it ensures more eyes on your ads more often.
If you are concerned about your ad’s conversion cost, know this – your conversion cost depends solely on your ad itself. Every element within your ad, from the headline to the targeting system to the copy and even the image used, affects how well it will convert.
While there are countless tutorials and free resources on the internet that could teach you the basics around creating a Facebook ad campaign, it would be wise to consider outsourcing this task. An experienced Online Advertising professional will have up to date working knowledge into the finer details and different creative or content writing techniques, to help you increase your FB ad conversions, increasing the quality and amount of leads with a more conservative budget.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing in-depth knowledge and advise about each of these online lead generation techniques.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, for our recommendations on the tools and strategies to incorporate into a cost-effective and time-efficient marketing strategy, for 2021 and beyond.
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