Improving Small Business Lead Generation

Most small business owners understand the importance of generating a consistent pipeline of prospective customers, but many made the mistake of approaching lead generation haphazardly or without a sharp focus on prospects who are most likely to convert to customers.

Fortunately, a small amount of planning and focus can improve your company’s lead generation efforts and, ultimately, its sales results and revenue.

Effective Targeting

One of the most effective ways to improve your small business lead generation efforts is, somewhat paradoxically, to stop trying to market to everyone. As tempting as it may be to cast as wide a net as possible in your marketing efforts, it’s more productive to narrow your focus to the potential customers who are most likely to invest in your products or services.

Some important questions to ask include:

• What am I offering my customers and prospects?
• What challenges do they face?
• Where do they get their information about those challenges?
• How do our products and services help with those challenges?
• Why do they buy from us?
• What demographic characteristics do my customers and prospects share?

Answering these questions will help you understand your best prospects and current customers more intimately, which in turn will help you target your marketing efforts more effectively. For example, if you are offering accounting services that are purchased primarily by other small business owners, it makes more sense to try to reach people on LinkedIn than targeting a consumer-focused audience on Instagram. Either platform can work, but LinkedIn offers a higher likelihood of success.

Develop Informative Content

Once you understand your potential customers and their concerns more effectively, you can develop content to answer the questions they are asking and explain the issues they are facing.

Content-based marketing will help improve your lead generation in several aspects. You can, for example, create a white paper and ask prospects to supply their contact information to download the report for free. Similarly, you can invite prospects to sign up for an email newsletter that will allow you to contact them on a consistent basis.

Producing content on a regular basis will also help improve your company’s position in search engine results. This, in turn, can result in more prospects contacting you for assistance with their business challenges while raising your profile among potential customers as your sales team reaches out during its prospecting activities.

And as you share content on the social networks most popular among your prospects, be sure to react to any comments or questions. This will help add a human dimension to your company that makes people more likely to interact with you, and more receptive to your sales and marketing efforts.

Ask for Referrals

One of the oldest and most effective ways to find effective leads is asking your existing customers to introduce you to their industry peers. The combination of their experience in dealing with your company and their understanding of their peers’ business issues can be a powerful way to enhance your marketing efforts and sales opportunities.

As new marketing opportunities emerge on social media, word of mouth remains one of the most effective endorsements that’s available.

While each of these efforts is likely to make gradual contributions to improving your overall lead generation and marketing efforts, together they combine to produce powerful results in increasing your company’s sales and profitability.