Our 6 Top Tips To Help You Generate Leads In Your Small Business
Small businesses typically have limited budgets, support, and time. Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any small business and yet it is also one of the most challenging aspects to master consistently. It’s not surprising that most small businesses feel that struggles with lead generation and attracting clients in a reliable way is their biggest risk to their business.
There is good news here, though: client generation is a skill that can be learned and improved upon. There’s no doubt that you can generate leads for your small business in a way that not only helps your business withstand the test of time, but also helps you to continue positively impacting the world with the services and products you offer.
Within this article we will breakdown our 8 top tips to help you improve your lead generation for your small business. Lead generation has been an area of my own business that I haven’t had to worry about for many years. I have been solidly booked with clients, and at many times waitlisted out for months in advance, to the extent that I have not had to actively promote my offers to the public. This is possible for you, too. Let’s discuss what I’ve found to be tried and true methods for generating leads!
The Customer Journey
Before we get into our tips, I find it important to first ensure that we clearly understand the lead generation process. I am a big fan of working closely with customer journey sequences, something that I actively develop and manage for many of my clients. Your customer journey, when properly planned out and overseen, can help you create a consistent flow of leads within your business.
The core customer journey touch points you want to be familiar with:
Awareness: The first stage of your customer journey and thus lead generation process is the awareness stage. In this stage, your brand enters the discoverability arena. This is the area where you want to focus on developing strategies for how your brand and thus business becomes known by your target audience. Without this stage, generating leads becomes nearly impossible! This stage typically is formed by things like your social media presence, networking and outreach methods, and collaboration or partnership efforts. We can track the progress of our awareness phase by tracking our website and marketing platform analytics. By measuring our Reach metrics, we are able to determine how our awareness stage is forming.
Explore: The next stage of your customer journey process produces things that your target audience can begin to explore so to help them start making an informed decision as to whether your brand and thus business is the right fit for them. This exploration phase is when your target audience gets exposed to content that helps them begin to clearly understand what it is you do. In this stage, your target audience should be able to get a feel for how you are different in comparison to others in your industry, what your unique proposition and selling points are, and what your brand stands for. If done well, your target audience will continue moving through your journey. We can track our explore stage growth by measuring the analytics of our brand presence and public content. When we see things like our content reactions go up by both new audience members and current audience members, we can determine that our reach is growing and our audience is exploring our brand presence.
Interest: After exploring, the next stage of the customer journey experience brings forward the aspect of interest. This stage is incredibly important because your potential leads begin to turn into warm leads. To build interest, we typically will offer things like high value free resources in the formats of content, blogs, podcasts, lead magnets, free downloads, and so on. When a potential lead opts into interacting with something you’ve created specifically for the interest stage, you’ve now begun to develop a warm lead. We also can tell that we are beginning to form warm leads in the interest stage when we begin to see our analytics go up on our chosen marketing channels. Receiving things like comments, saves, and shares of our content are good signs of the interest phase.
Trust: The next stage of our customer journey highlights how we are building brand trust. In this phase we will start noticing our warm leads start turning into hot leads, where we may notice more inquiries come in about our offers, more questions pop up about our business, more curiosity develop, and more traffic to our services pages come in. We may also notice more opt ins for our freebies, email lists, and discovery calls. This part typically happens after stages 1-3 are well developed. We can track the trust stage by measuring our website traffic, email inquiries, profile visits, and opt ins.
Conversion: The final stage of our customer journey process is typically the stage that most people jump to and primarily focus on. Yet, if the above stages of the customer journey are well planned out and managed, this final stage can begin happening naturally and organically— with little effort on your part! The conversion stage showcases opt ins of your offers, most often starting at the beginning (lowest hanging fruit) part of your service suite. When you begin to see folks inquiring to book in with you, purchase from you, or work with you, you now have turned hot leads into potential clients.
Now that we have overviewed the customer journey process, I hope this helps you gain a better understanding of how leads are actually generated. Let’s now begin discussing ways in which we can generate leads within our small business. Lead generation is most likely your most important task for your business.
Here are 6 ideas to help you kickstart your customer journey and transform your lead generation process into a fun process!
Revamp your email list: When I began putting more emphasis on the approach I was taking to my email list, I began seeing my customer journey process work its magic. When approaching your email list, consider how you can add in touches of unique personalization, high value, and clear call to actions. Your email list acts as gated content, where someone has to opt in in order to receive the content. This, therefore, helps you build the interest and trust phases of your customer journey.
Revamp your website and track your traffic: I have been prioritizing website optimization for over a year now and I cannot tell you how much this has helped my customer journey process. By emphasizing your website, you help your business build search engine presence that can support you in generating organic leads. This can support you in developing many parts of your customer journey process, from the awareness stage to the trust stage. You may even be able to move someone through your entire customer journey experience all from your website!
Improve your visual and verbal brand aesthetics: I’ve always been someone that really loves design and puts a lot of time into the visual look of our brand presence. This has paid off time and time again. When you have a strong verbal as well as visual brand presence that is clean, easy to understand and navigate, and clear… it can help you start the entire customer journey experience because your brand is what connects folks to your business!
Optimize your owned media with strong copy: I have been blogging consistently for about 2 years now. Over that time, I have spent a great deal of energy on learning SEO, keywords, copywriting, and blogging techniques to help my content get better and better. This has, in turn, supported me in continually driving traffic to our brand, website, and offers. Your optimized owned content can help you build interest, trust and conversions!
Prioritize partnerships: One of my most tried and true ways of generating leads has not been by doing everything alone. Over the years I have consistently partnered with other brands and businesses for things like events, workshops, classes, interviews, and more. This has helped our brand recognition tremendously! Partnerships with other aligned industry leads or brand expanders is beneficial for everyone involved and can support you in pretty much every stage of the customer journey process.
Increase referrals: Referrals are so underrated but as I type this they make up a huge amount of the leads we receive in our business on a monthly basis. The key with referral generation is to provide impeccable and unforgettable customer experiences. If you give great service or deliver great products, you will typically start generating leads! You can also build in a specifically designed referral system into your business. This tip often moves folks through the customer journey quite quickly.
Over the years I have found that the most impactful ways to generate leads comes down to something you may not want to read: Consistency. When you are consistent with your brand positioning and discoverability… When you are consistent with building interest and trust… When you are consistent with the delivery of your offers… And when you are consistent with your marketing, networking, and customer experience…. Your lead generation will also begin to become a consistent flow.
I hope this article helps you better understand what lead generation is and how to begin developing leads with the customer journey process. You now have some tangible ideas you can walk away with and start testing to help you start improving your lead generation process! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you find yourself needing more support or having questions. We are just an email away.
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Until next time…
Natalie Brite — DoGoodBiz Studio
