In today’s world, the path of purchase can be anywhere. As the purchasing process and modes have changed, the marketers’ task is to develop useful marketing techniques to attract customers. Despite reaching an audience through mass advertisements and email newsletters, marketers now need to learn new methods to create long-term relationships.

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One such method is Online Lead Generation, which contains the potential customers’ contact information, gathered based on customers’ requests. This information can be call back requests, products added to the basket, and didn’t make a purchase, signed for the newsletter, and many more. According to Stats.com, more than 95% of the customers visiting the website will not make any purchases but can be potential customers in the future.

This showcases how vital online lead generation is for businesses to turn visitors into buyers. Since the market is moving more towards online purchasing, companies need to have useful lead generation techniques to stay in a better position.  

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Top Lead Generation Techniques

The increasing importance of online lead generation has led to the advancement of many lead generation techniques. For a technique to effectively impact the business, it is essential to choose potential lead indicators. Below are the top used  lead generation techniques:

1. Search Engine Optimisation

Your website is mainly directed by the popular search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Social media websites and advertisements are also used to land users on your website, which will be discussed later in this article. 

In simple terms, SEO is a process of moving up the website’s visibility by improving web search engines’ ranking. 

Search engines follow three functions,

1. Crawling: Web page is found using the links. Crawlers are enabled to search for the new link, and once found, they are added to the index called Caffeine, which is later used to retrieve the website in relevant future searches.
2. Index: Nameservers have relevant website URLs stored in their databases. Upon search, the relevant link is retrieved, and the required web page is displayed.
3. Search engine ranking: Not every user remembers the relevant URL or the website’s name of their interest. Most of the search will be based on the related problem search; now, if your website ranking is low, your URL may be displayed on the 2nd or 3rd page of the search, making it unnoticeable. By using relevant SEO tools, your ranking can be increased. Higher the SEO ranking, the higher the visibility and the number of visitors.

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Read: 8 Best SEO Practices for B2C Companies

2. Lead Generation Using Content Marketing

Content marketing is about using relevant skills to attract users towards the company by providing resourceful content. Content marketing ]aids companies increase their SEO ranking and are quite adaptable in engaging customers. 

1. Content marketing works effectively when a new product is introduced, a new audience and popularity need to be gained.
2. You need to provide adequate technical guidance or when your product is quite technically complex and needs detailed information.
3. When there are many competitors, you need to provide an exact technical footprint on how your product is the best.

To overcome all this listed above, the solution is a well detailed and relevant corporate blog. After providing correct details of their product and showcasing skills, this will be the best time to request the contact details to establish a business.

3. Pay Per Click Advertising

With the rise in digital marketing and its wide usage, digital platforms are the best media to gain website traction, market your products, and connect with customers.

Hence, it is essential that businesses establish an effective online presence to reach their target audiences. For this, you require expert SEO implementation tools, should choose the right social media platform, websites, and have better advertising strategies to spread brand awareness and engage target audiences to increase customers. 

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the efficient digital marketing strategies to reach massive audiences. It is an advertising technique in which the business earns its audience by directing users to their website through advertisements on relevant websites and paying platforms for every click.

In PPC advertising, companies choose the platform with the required budget and share the relevant content to be advertised. There is competition for a keyword to achieve the quality of the content, extension, and site links to aid to gain a better score. A keyword is the central part of a PPC ad campaign; once the keyword is provided, the relevant ad is displayed on the targeted websites. With a better PPC ad campaign, you can get constant traffic and a broad audience.

4. Lead Generation Using Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are social media platforms with the most traffic. So, businesses make great efforts to utilize its broad audience to promote their business platform. Also, one of the significant sources of income for social media is advertising making it the perfect way for businesses to reach their target audiences. While the early web didn’t allow user-related content creation, Web 2.0 applications allow users to create, edit, and store user-generated content.    

Key ingredients are matching the trend, user interest and start showing graphical contents to attract users. Social media platforms and blogs, rating websites, forums, and many more websites use user-related content. 

The gaming industry claims a whopping $91 billion worldwide in the marketing arena. One of the major sales in gaming is derived from consumer-generated content posted on gaming websites like Twitch, YouTube, etc. as gamers depend on their ratings. Because playing games is very engaging and reaches targeted audiences efficiently, companies pay popular gamers to play the game and talk to the audience about their product.

Also Read: Social Media Marketing Salary in India

5. Lead Generation Using Newsletters

In marketing, there are three types of leads,

1. Cold leads- No relevant information of customers is known, but their interest in the product is known via clicks and site visits.
2. Warm leads- User contact details are known via forms, call-back requests, etc. It’s the sales team’s responsibility to change subscribers to potential customers.
3. Hot leads- User has left products in the basket or customer left page while making payments. Companies need to reach customers to make that successful purchase.

 Whatever the lead is established, the task of the company is to generate sales. One of the well-used techniques is signing up users for the customer newsletter. It leverages companies to reach customers in their domain with no further investments. The responsibilities that the organization needs to undertake are,

• Building trust by sharing achievements.
• Creating constant relevant blog content.
• Segment targeted discounts for quick sales.
• Send out personalized emails on birthdays, anniversaries, and win trust.  

Customers should be able to subscribe to newsletters on the company’s website and other related websites and social media platforms to reach more sets of audiences. Everything said, newsletters are considered outdated, and companies are migrating towards messengers to spread brand awareness.

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6. Website Optimisation and Landing Pages

Now that you know the importance of online lead generation, it is a no-brainer that a company’s website should be well-designed and provide adequate information. If the website ranks well on search engines, there will be no need for a company to spend on other lead developing techniques. But it is not easy and will make companies deviate from core functionality. Poor website design will lead to lesser website traffic. Designing the virtual home is essential for gaining trust and to get the contact details of the customers. 

Playing a vital role in online marketing campaigns, landing pages are specially designed to increase website traffic and gain more leads. Here companies spend a lot of resources and budget on online marketing. Companies perform A/B testing and many other steps to optimize landing pages. Some of the well-known types of landing pages are,

1. Click-Through Landing Pages– These sites are funded by companies to provide resourceful content, tools and announce discounts to convince customers to make the purchase using their gateways or direct them to the payment page.
2.  Lead Capture Landing Pages- It’s cold leads-based pages. Plans such as free subscriptions, short term subscriptions are used to gain customers’ interest.     
3. Viral Landing Pages- This is based on word-of-mouth marketing. Aim of this page is to create trendy content and spread information on social media websites.
4. Microsites- It’s a supplementary website with short information and attractive product description, aiding for easy understanding. They are classified as landing pages because they direct back to payment gateways.

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7. Instant Messaging and Chatbots

This is one of the modern ways of lead development and a powerful marketing weapon. Here, the company should have expertise in both technical and sales front as this is 1-1 communication. The executives need to learn the customers’ needs for a well-tailored program and pitch sales quickly. Now, AI-based chatbots are used for better content delivery and uniformity.

Some users establish trust through communication. They would rather have a quick chat with the team than read long pages for information. But chatbots and executives need to be trained to provide precise details about new products, discounts, and provide proper segmentation and establish clear flow. Landbot, Zapier, and Google sheets are the popular tools used for online lead generation.

Must Read: Digital Marketing Tutorial: A Step-by-Step Guide To Become an Expert

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What Next?

If you wish to explore and become an expert in Digital Marketing, check out MICA and upGrad’s Advanced Certificate in Digital Marketing & Communication. Become an expert in social media marketing, content marketing, branding, marketing analysis, and PR.

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