How to Get Leads for Your Business

The world of business ownership, especially small business ownership, hasn’t gotten any easier lately. Covid spawns new variants every time it looks like it’s winding down for real, to say nothing of inflation. Plus, budding entrepreneurs in 2021.

With wallets tightening and more competition, boosting your revenue means finding new customers or at least snagging new leads. Of course, if you don’t have a system in place for that, it leaves you with the troubling question of how to get leads for your business.

If you’re hungry for fresh business leads but aren’t clear on how to get them, keep reading for some key tips and strategies to bring fresh customers to your business.

Referral Marketing

A lot of business owners forget that one of the best sources of new customers and leads is your existing customer base. After all, people typically know other people who are similar. So, it follows that at least some of your customers’ friends and family members would also want your products or services.

You can ask customers directly if they know someone who would also benefit from what your business offers. This approach works best for businesses with a small volume of customers purchasing high-ticket items.

For businesses that focus more on the volume of customers over high-priced products and services, you can incentivize your customers with a referral program.

Referral programs can take several forms, but they often prove the easiest when set up online. You give customers a referral code that they can pass along to friends and family.

The referrals enter the code for a discount or coupon. The code lets you track how many people your customer refers. Then, you give your referring customer a gift or a huge discount based on how many people they send your way.

Search Engine Optimization

A web search is often a potential customer’s first and last action when searching for a product or service. They run the search and buy from an online vendor or call whichever business comes up first in the search rankings.

It’s an easy fix for everyday issues, which is why it happens so often. That means you need to do everything you can to ensure that your business website pages rank well. That begins with some solid SEO on your website.

SEO has three major wings to it: technical SEO, non-technical SEO, and local SEO.

Technical SEO focuses on under-the-hood elements of your website, such as how much Javascript you use, mobile readiness, or the size of image files. Fixing these issues generally makes your pages load faster and function better.

Non-technical SEO focuses on areas like user experience. For example, poor navigation options can drive someone off your website in a hurry. Not providing contact information is another big user experience no-no.

Local SEO focuses on making sure your brick-and-mortar business shows up on things like Google Maps. It also places more emphasis on things like geographic keywords, like city or neighborhood names, showing up on your website.

Content Marketing

Depending on how you look at it, you can see content marketing as either its own thing or an outcropping of SEO. Since search engines now assess the value of the content on your website in determining page rank, it’s a gray area.

In essence, content marketing functions as a way to attract leads by providing them with high-quality content. High-quality content has a specific meaning.

It’s content that provides visitors with helpful or useful information that is credible. Just as importantly, you need content with high relevance to your audience.

For example, let’s say that you run an accounting business. A high-quality blog post might cover something like tips for filling out your 1040. It shouldn’t just lean on your expertise but link out to good sources, such as the IRS and finance publications.

While many small businesses stick with blogging for content marketing, that isn’t the only applicable format. Other ways you can do content marketing include:

Reports
White papers
Videos

You must choose your content type based on your customers. Professionals might value a white paper, while teens might respond better to something like a TikTok video.

Podcasts

There’s nothing wrong with a little self-promotion, and podcasts are huge right now. You can find podcasts about almost any topic. Do some online research and find podcasts that cover your industry or focus on your target market.

Contact the podcast host and see if they’re accepting new guests. Good news, though. Most podcasts are hungry for fresh guests.

While you are somewhat subject to the questions the podcast host asks you, most will give you a little breathing room to promote your business, brand, or product over the course of your appearance. Just look for ways to work that self-promotion into other answers.

Paid Advertising

A lot of people focus solely on organic marketing tactics because it’s often less directly expensive, but paid advertising does have a place in attracting new leads. Paid advertising will often reach customers that you might otherwise interact with under normal circumstances.

One of the most common types of paid advertising online is pay-per-click. There are some PPC tactics that can boost your results, such as using ad groups and negative keywords.

One major key to good PPC results is that your website shows up well in relation to your chosen keyword or keywords for the campaign. In other words, don’t use keywords you don’t also use on your site or in your blog posts.