Small business lead generation is not a one-size-fits-all affair. For instance, you may find that a strategy that works for one company may not necessarily work for another. When marketing for B2C, it’s vital that you go where your target customers are.
In this article, we take a look at some of the most effective strategies that you can use to generate leads for your business and the pros and cons of each to help you determine which one would work best for you.
PPC Ads – Facebook Ads and Google Ads
Different industries all have their individual quirks when it comes to PPC Ads, but Google Ads and Facebook Ads still have a lot of things in common. In this section, we’re going to take a look at these lead generation methods and how they can help you generate leads for your B2C business.
Benefits of Using PPC Ads
1. Scale Quickly – These methods of online marketing allow you to be able to scale quickly as opposed to inbound marketing strategies where there’s a ramp-up period prior to seeing results in your lead generation efforts.
2. Reach New Audiences – Whether your B2C business wants to expand into new markets or increase your presence within your existing market, paid ads are the way to go. Trying to shift an audience organically would take a lot of time and effort. Also, a drastic shift of keywords includes some risks to your rankings.
3. Remarket to Existing Leads – As most marketers well know, generating new leads is costly, and another major advantage of online advertising is the ability to remarket to existing leads and nurturing them toward a sale.
Drawbacks of Using PPC Ads
As with all things in online marketing, there are pros and cons to using Google and Facebook ads. Listed below are some of the drawbacks of using online ads.
1. Ad Prices can be Expensive – Prices for online advertising ranges from one end of the spectrum to the other, and this can wreak havoc on a company’s budget.
2. Consumers Ignore Ads – People are so used to seeing ads everywhere they go that they are now averse to clicking banners or watching video ads, and they close pop-up ads as soon as they come up on their screens.
3. Technical Viewing Problems – Lags in video loading, website downtime, and browser complications are just a few of the technical issues that can keep your viewers from seeing your online ads losing you a lot of potential leads.
Using Your Website for Small Business Lead Generation
Most consumers don’t ask about your products or services over the phone, instead, they go directly to your website and get all the information they need from there. And with less than 2 percent of visitors leaving their contact details on websites, trying to get leads with your B2C website is one of the hardest things to do in today’s digital era.
Luckily, there are many ways to turn your website into an effective B2C lead generation machine.
Your entire site has to be designed for generating leads, which means that ‘brochure websites’ are definitely in the past. Now you need to have different landing pages for different segments of your audience as well as blogs filled with educational content – both of which will serve your B2C lead generation purposes.
Within your content, you need to include calls to action in as many places as possible. Make sure your CTAs are clear and compelling. Make sure that the majority of your content (about 80 percent) is helpful and the rest can be promotional.
But there’s no point doing all that if no one can find your website!
In addition, you also need to ensure that your website is easy to find by focusing on your search engine optimization. SEO has changed over the years and it continues to evolve. It offers a vast array of benefits for any B2C lead generation strategy.
Benefits of Search Engine Optimization for B2C
- SEO is effective for the B2C buying process in the long term
- Content marketing offers you increased visibility online
- SEO also offers increased brand visibility on mobile (assuming a mobile-friendly site)
- You will also be able to stay ahead of your competition
Social Media Marketing
There are many ways to get leads on social media. The main advantage of using this channel to gather prospects for your business is that when it is done correctly, it offers massive opportunities to B2C companies.
One of the major benefits of using social media marketing – particularly Facebook and Instagram to generate leads for your B2C company is that it allows you to synchronize your efforts.
Social media offers you an opportunity to synchronize all your marketing efforts including sales and support. Most consumers use social media for communicating with brands and so doing this helps you generate B2C leads more efficiently.
As long as all departments are aligned or if all teams cooperate, what benefits one aspect of the sales funnel will benefit all of them, and everyone wins. For instance, the support team will likely know what issues your prospects and customers are having, this will help the marketing team come up with great ideas for helpful content, which, in turn, leads to improved, targeted social media posts that impress your audience and brings value to them, hence building trust and impressing prospects.
This will not only improve your target audience’s understanding of what your business is about, but it will also help you attract more qualified leads as well as to accurately track your lead generation campaigns.
Conclusion
As you can see, when it comes to small business lead generation, there are a lot of tactics you can use as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Choose one and get started right now. If you need any help with any aspect of your online marketing, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help.
