Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Is Lead Generation Still Profitable?

Table of Contents

In the market today, lead generation remains profitable but only if used correctly.

If your business relies on true lead generation tactics, 2022 presents a fantastic opportunity to try new tools and leverage new technology.

In addition to being more effective at driving leads, trends like automation, personalization, video, and sales and marketing alignment can improve the quality of leads.

Fifty-three percent of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. But while it may be more difficult, it’s no less important.

Marketers are still focusing heavily on lead generation, with 53% spending half or more of their entire budget on lead gen efforts.

Only 34% of marketers spend less than half their budget on lead generation.

You should create and implement a strategy outlining how to make all aspects as smooth as possible.

This should include things like how to hand over payments to the buyer or handle any existing clients renting your site.

With this blog, we’ll make sure you know everything there is to know about setting up lead generation businesses.

What Is Lead Generation?

Almost every business in the world needs a constant stream of new clients. So, is it any wonder that lead generation services have exploded in recent years?

To stay ahead of your competitors, you must create a powerful, strategic, and efficient lead generation strategy.

This will help you generate qualified leads and convert them into customers.

Lead generation is a powerful and efficient method of bringing in new customers for your online business.

Generating leads has changed significantly since the dawn of the Internet. This digital transformation has impacted the way that leads generation is done.

As a result, it is important to understand the latest trends in this space so that you can adjust your marketing strategy.

If you know how to do lead generation and sell leads to local businesses, you already win at the first step.

Startup Costs

The start-up costs of a lead gen business are low. Besides purchasing a domain and web hosting, you don’t need to invest in many other expenses.

You can use SEO and backlinking to rank your page highly on search engines, driving free traffic to your site.

If you decide to go down the paid traffic route, you may need to budget for this down the line.

Defining Your Target Audience

The most important part of starting your lead generation agency is deciding who your customer is – i.e., who you’re selling leads to.

This affects everything, from your branding to your sales tactics, to how you generate leads.

As we have discussed, any traffic that is not the RIGHT traffic, is useless.

If you are looking to buy a lead gen site, check that the traffic coming is highly targeted for the offer at hand.

If it does not work for the offer and location, you will not be able to generate leads of any value.

Start filling your sales pipeline today

Lead Nurturing

Once you’ve captured leads through your marketing channels and lead generation campaigns, you want to make sure they are likely to convert.

You can do this by enrolling them in a nurturing program. Lead nurturing is a way to exchange more information with your lead and help them get interested in your clients’ products.

Better Alignment

Do you know what one of the largest revenue killers is? It’s not meetings that totally could have been emailed (sorry), but rather the lack of alignment between sales and marketing.

Backlinks

Never underestimate the power of high-quality backlinks from others in the industry.

You may be able to use Facebook groups to find similar contacts where you can backlink each other’s sites.

Qualified Leads

One of the best things any lead generation company will do is give you qualified leads. A qualified lead has an active interest in what you are offering.

This, therefore, enables your sales team to get people on the phone and get them closed.

It may sound simple, but you will at least have a warmer call with this prospective person or individual.

Local Paid Traffic

To boost traffic and get more leads, you may also consider investing in paid advertising.

Similar to the uniqueness of local SEO, you have a unique opportunity here to run local paid traffic.

It will often have less competition, especially in less competitive cities and smaller towns.

This can be a huge opportunity for the right buyer looking to master the paid traffic learning curve.

Social media ads can help you drive more traffic to your business and increase your results.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are a simple and effective way to generate leads.

You’ll need to spend money to get started, but once you find a formula that works, you can slowly scale it up and have a predictable way to generate leads.

Facebook Ads work well for local lead generation because it’s simple to define your target audience. You can direct your leads to a landing page, or use Facebook Lead Ads.

Your call-to-action can say “Add your details to get a callback from us,” and anyone who needs your clients’ services will be happy to do so.

Email Marketing

If you thought that email was dead, you were wrong.

Despite the hype around content marketing and social media, email continues to be one of the most effective lead generation channels.

Seventy-nine percent of B2B marketers think email is most effective for demand generation.

In a 2018 study by the Content Marketing Institute, marketers surveyed credited email as their most effective channel for demand generation.

Email drives higher ROIs than any other lead generation tool. You can expect to earn a whopping $42 back for every dollar you spend on email marketing.

That’s an incredible 4400% ROI, higher than any lead generation tool.

Start filling your sales pipeline today

Beef Up Your Website

Regarding digital real estate, it doesn’t get any better when you own and rent out a website. Here are a few reasons why:

  • Very low overhead compared to other business models.

  • The process is easily repeatable over and over again.

Ultimately, your assets can make you money anywhere in the country and the world.

Expand Relative Offers

It is unlikely a website has expanded into every local area with its offer. Even if they have, they could want to add a second offer.

In any case, this is a great growth strategy for most lead gen websites.

If you can find an offer related to your offer or even adds value to the original offer, you might be able to create new content around it.

Attract Local Area Leads

Everyone always asks whether or not the local lead generation business model works.

The local lead generation business model works because you get leads coming to your website, and you make money by selling leads to local businesses (business owners/service providers), or you just rent them the website so that they can grow their business.

Your website will focus on a specific service in a local area, then pull in traffic that will either make phone calls or submit forms.

Regardless of how well you’re able to generate local leads, if you can’t create a campaign specifically designed to get local clients and do it repeatedly, that campaign will be short-lived.

So, what’s the magic formula to generate leads for small businesses? It’s all about the website.

Local Client Takeove

While they mainly talk about building lead gen websites directly for clients who then rent those sites, their process works whether you decide to do direct partnerships with local businesses or go the affiliate route.

The local lead generation business model is simply finding customers for local businesses when you think about it.

So, as long as local business owners are still in operation, they will always need new local leads.

And if you know how to create a lead generation business and can generate leads for them, you can pretty much write your check.

In 2020, over 30 million small businesses in the United States generated trillions of dollars in revenues combined.

So for small business lead generation companies, there’s an almost never-ending stream of opportunities to make commissions off of.

While affiliate marketing is different than lead generation, there is still a lot of overlap between the two models.

Some of the better lead gen programs that will pay you out also operate similarly to an affiliate offer or network.

Build A Referral System

To get more qualified leads, emphasize the quality of your leads again but this time, scale your lead generation channels.

Referral sales happen to be the best converting( 2X better ) sales channels. If your leads can refer to more leads like them, it effectively doubles your output without any effort.

Digital Outreach/Digital Marketing

Digital outreach or online lead generation is the first step, leading customers towards the immediate call. Voice communication escalates trust among both parties, increasing the chance for B2B sales.

Digital outreach through email campaigns and social media platforms differs from cold calling.

However, things change fast, significantly since technology is improving rapidly, and the difference between the two will soon be minimized.

Currently, experts decline the need for direct calling, but the future holds something else.

Meeting potential clients becomes mandatory when a request comes from their side. B2B clients utilize 17% of the time from their quest of purchasing to meet a salesperson.

You can start by making a list of companies operating in the niche you wish to work with.

Then using networks like LinkedIn, you can find people in sales and demand generation roles that could be approached to sell leads to.

If you’re starting from scratch and haven’t generated leads before, you can simply start reaching out to potential clients via email.

If you already have a list of clients to reach out to – you can use an email outreach tool like Saleshandy to nurture and build these relationships.

Landing Pages

Sixty-eight percent of B2B businesses use strategic landing pages for leads. Strategic landing pages continue to be critically important for conversion optimization.
Start filling your sales pipeline today

Search Engine Optimization

To successfully improve and grow your lead gen website, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key. This can help you rank highly and drive more traffic and leads to your site.

Search engine optimization is the central pillar for bringing organic traffic to the webpage. Content optimization is praised by experts believing it to be best for business.

If your leads can’t find your website or e-book, you will never be able to capture them.

You can post links to your content on relevant forums and communities where your leads might spend time.

You can also work on SEO to help your content rank on search engines for your lead’s queries.

Personalized Videos

To build a personal brand, send personalized follow-ups, and sales follow-ups.

Combine the growth of video consumption with the lack of in-person meetings, and you have the perfect recipe to see video usage for lead generation explode in 2022.

For example, videos could increase the efficacy of landing pages and lead forms.

LinkedIn Automation

There are automation tools available for LinkedIn to speed up your prospecting. Some useful ones include:

  • Zopto for automatically connecting with leads.

  • Alfred for messaging and follow-ups to leads.

  • Lusha to extract emails from LinkedIn.

If you’re in B2B, LinkedIn will likely have the highest ROI of any social media platform, continuing to grow.

HubSpot research found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3x higher than Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%)

Account-Based Marketing

ABM flips the sales funnel on its head — rather than targeting everyone. Companies are targeting specific companies they want to convert.

Brands that focus on customer needs will be more dedicated to the right leads than the sheer number of leads.

Lead qualification and personalized marketing (and sales) strategies will become more crucial than ever.

Traditional vs. Non-traditional Marketing

There are two main marketing groups: traditional and non-traditional.

Although the two are impactful, they have their differences which makes them more appropriate for certain audiences and platforms.

Traditional

Personally, email businesses, call them (and try not to leave voicemails). We run cold outreach campaigns for our clients, which has proved very successful.

Non-traditional

Video, SEO, blogging for tutorials on how to grow your own business with content marketing success stories. It doesn’t matter what you do – just make sure people will notice!

Affiliate Marketing

There are a couple of main ways this business model runs; through affiliate lead generation programs or finding and working directly with local clients.

If you go for the affiliate route, you can use many affiliate programs.

These have various offers to choose which payout per lead based on leads completing a form or making a phone call.

Once you choose an offer that works, you can build out a website around this offer.

Direct Clients

You don’t have to go down the affiliate route with a lead gen business model. It is also possible to reach out yourself to local clients and charge them directly for generating leads for them.

You might sell the leads or rent the lead generation website to your client.

You may charge these clients a monthly flat fee, a set price per lead, or you could even charge a percentage of earnings.

This method has more involvement from you but can have much higher profit margins and earning potential.

Start filling your sales pipeline today

Automation Tools

In the beginning, automation was a clunky process that felt robotic. However, AI and machine learning are making automation more useful and, in some cases, much more human.

Automation can make it easier than ever to nurture leads through strategies like retargeting and email drip campaigns. Automation is growing fast.

Nurturing leads ensures you’re only passing on quality leads and helps your client convert more.

Nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities. According to a DemandGen report, lead nurturing drives 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads.

Especially if you’re dealing with high-value leads, you will need to be extra careful in passing on a lead, since your clients are paying you more upfront.

By 2028, the automation industry is expected to be worth more than $350 billion. If automation isn’t already part of your lead gen process, it’s time to get on board.

Here are a few ways automation will drive lead generation efforts in the coming year.

Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots can answer questions, share resources, and even qualify leads by asking prospects about the company they work for, their job title, and what pain points they are looking to solve.

Content Strategy Lead At Kennected

Wherever you are at, whether thinking of creating your lead gen sites from scratch, improving your existing ones, buying a lead gen business, or selling yours, make sure you choose the right strategy and make smart moves.

Stephen-Twomey is the chief marketing officer at Kennected.

Over the past decade, Twomey has successfully developed and implemented online marketing strategies, SEO, and conversion campaigns for several businesses.

He enjoys the outdoors, including wake surfing, snowboarding, and hiking. Now that you’re here, let’s give you a quick rundown of Cloud Kennect.

We believe that lead generation companies are worth it if you choose the right one and use it alongside other organic methods or marketing.

Cloud Kennect generates leads, offers insight into your customers, and can help you increase your marketing ROI.

If you liked this blog post, you’d probably love Cloud Kennect too. Sign up today!

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