4 Essential Online Channels to Maximize Lead Generation

Your website is not a silo. When used effectively, your company website can be the hub of your online marketing channels, instead of simply an electronic brochure. A deliberate inbound marketing plan takes full advantage of several online channels to drive traffic and generate leads through your website. The objective is to make it easy for buyers to research, evaluate and purchase products in any way that is most appropriate for them.

Here are a few online marketing channels that can help generate leads from your website.

Blogging Brings in the Leads

According to the recent benchmark report from Hubspot, companies that blog 6 to 8 times per month nearly double their volume of leads. This proves that blogging is a highly effective channel for lead generation.

To increase the effectiveness of your blogs to generate leads, include hyperlinks to landing pages within the copy of the post, as well as a prominent call-to-action.

Email Marketing

Many businesses may think that email marketing is only best used when communicating with existing prospects and customers. Not so! Email can be a great channel for new lead generation. Here are some ways you can use email to generate more new prospects:

Focus on an opt-in strategy. If you’re buying email lists and spamming your prospects, no one will want to share your email with others. They will only want to unsubscribe! The first step to email lead generation is to make sure you have happy subscribers that enjoy receiving emails from you.
Send people valuable offers. If you send really interesting or valued offers – whether it’s downloads, discounts or educational content – people will more likely share your emails with their friends or colleagues.
Give people the tools to share. Don’t forget to add a “Forward to a Friend” link or social media sharing buttons within each email so people are encouraged to pass it on.

Social Media

Social media isn’t just for liking funny pictures or tweeting what you ate for breakfast. Social media marketing has emerged as a channel that many businesses take advantage of. Here are some tips for generating leads on social networks:

Build a loyal following. Building a relationship with potential customers is a critical first step. Social media connections are really about people-to-people, not always company-to-individual. Get to know your audience online, communicate and share information. In order to generate leads, you need to have human interaction with others.
Remember, social media is a dialogue. Companies that only use social media to blast out messages about themselves aren’t using social channels effectively. The goal is to interact with others and be helpful. When you share content on social media, don’t always post something that relates to your company. Share links to other interesting things you’ve found online. People will be very thankful you are noticing their work, too!
Influence connections for content sharing. Publishing and sharing content that directs traffic to targeted landing pages is the single biggest lever to increase lead generation through social media. Share your new content offers by posting links to landing pages, and in addition, share blog posts, discounts, and other great resources.

Organic Search (SEO)

While promoting your offers in many channels is crucial for lead generation, it’s also equally important to make it easy for people to find your landing pages through search engines. To do this, you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to your landing pages, such as:

Pick a primary keyword for each landing page and focus on optimizing that page for that word. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about.
Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant with the rest of your content.
Include keywords in the file name of images (e.g. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
Include the keywords in the page URL.

Conclusion

Generating leads online has the power to transform your marketing. Using multiple online marketing channels to drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into leads can reduce your cost-per-lead while delivering higher quality prospects to your sales team.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

4 Essential Online Channels to Maximize Lead Generation