Generate Better Marketing Leads: 5 Strategy Ideas

If you want to make more money, then you’re going to need more customers. There’s only so much business you can do with your existing clients, so you’ll need to attract more in order to increase growth. This article explains some ways you can go about how to generate better marketing leads.

What are marketing leads?

Marketing leads are potential customers that you’ve attracted to your business. This doesn’t mean that they’re a guaranteed sale, but there’s interest. In a traditional shop, a lead is like getting them in the door and browsing the aisles.

If you were to ask yourself, someone from marketing, and someone from sales for what they want from a lead, you’d probably end up with three different answers. It’s always recommended to get feedback before making any important decisions from the people who work in that area every day.

Where to start

If you were to ask an expert: what’s the method for generating marketing leads? You’ll probably get the answer: it depends. There’s no clear-cut best, so you need to find what works for your market.

As with any important decision, lead generation requires planning strategy. Agree on what you want to achieve with the means at your disposal and from there explore the options to get your sales pitch out.

If you sell a general household cleaning product to the public, you may need to approach your marketing differently to how a specialised hazardous waste cleaning business would. It never hurts to seek advice and guidance when trying something new.

Lead generation ideas

The following are possible ideas to change how you do lead generation. Not all of them will fit your market, but you can take inspiration from them to create your own strategy. 

1. Strengthen your messaging

No matter what method you use, it’s important to make your message as strong and gripping as possible. You need to communicate your value proposition by standing out from your competition and selling yourself quickly. If you need an entire page of text, you’ve probably already lost them. 

Entrepreneurial skills and content writing skills are very different things, and it’s ok if this isn’t your strong suit. Don’t hesitate to seek support in writing your message. It may be that hiring a great copywriter is a marketing challenge that a part-time Director could help you with. 

It will vary depending on how you communicate to the customer as to the best kind of message to use. Remember to always include a call to action in your marketing. For example, if you’re sending out an email make sure to include a link they can follow with instructions to do so.

2. Improving cold marketing leads

The most direct way to generate marketing leads is to simply ask. You don’t expect many of them to come to anything, but you can reach a large number of people and maximise the odds of catching the ones that you do want. This process is easily automated, so only needs some set up and supervision.

The best means of reaching out will depend on your audience, so you need to keep up to date with current trends. Find out what platforms your market uses the most and focus your efforts there.

Don’t hesitate to talk to your most reliable customers to see what they use. 

3. Consolidate into a campaign

A campaign is a larger scale marketing task that brings together a set of individual activities. By tying the different activities to each other, it reinforces your message and makes a stronger connection between you and your customer. It can also allow you to reach a larger audience whilst keeping consistent branding across the mediums.

There are likely adverts that you can recognise simply by the presence of the characters in them. A strong campaign can really boost your brand recognition. Again, you need to think about what fits your market, but there’ll likely be something your marketing team can establish. 

4. Use your networks

Make use of your connections to expand your reach. It’s common for businesses to have partners that are complementary to their company. Each time a client has an issue that you can’t solve, but your partner can, you can refer the client to that partner. 

By building mutually beneficial partnerships with your network, every lead they generate is a possible lead for you too. As with writing your message, marketing is commonly outsourced to marketing agencies. Your network can help you find the right agency without spending as much time on research.

5. Don’t forget your customers

Just because you’ve converted them once, a customer doesn’t stop being a viable lead. Don’t flood them with emails, but reconnecting with past leads both successful and failed can help you generate new ones. Maybe they weren’t in a position to convert at the time, but things change and that doesn’t rule them out forever.

Satisfied customers can be great advocates. Don’t worry about asking your clients for referrals and references, and just do it. If you solved their problem well, chances are they’ll be glad to spread your message for you.

Not only does using your customers to generate leads function without oversight or you needing to spend much, but it also acts as social proof.

A claim that comes from the public is often seen as more trustworthy than one direct from you.

To summarise

There are many ways to get your name out there, and you have to find what’s best for you. No matter what route, make sure your message is as strong as you can and don’t forget your call to action. This is, after all, what presents the marketing leads to sales so they can get a conversion.

If you think your business could benefit from expert marketing support, our Part-time Marketing Directors are available with the flexibility to fit your workload and budget. Contact us and speak to one of Regional Directors if you have any questions on how we can help you.

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Written by: John Courtney

John is highly ranked in the Top 100 UK Entrepreneurs list by City AM and is winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from techSPARK. He has been a Board Director himself for over 40 years and first started placing Non-Executive Directors over 25 years ago. John founded and ran seven of his own businesses including a Management Consultancy for 10 years, a Corporate Finance offering for 10 years and a mid-sized Digital Agency for another 10 years.