Drumming up new customers is essential for every business that wants to grow, while businesses should continue to cultivate new customers to replace those that leave. Yet discussion on this matter tends to focus on mailing lists, email marketing, cold-calling and trade shows – techniques your rivals are already using. Here are three original lead generation techniques.
Q&A Blogging
Q&A blogging is writing blogs that answer a potential customer’s questions. This type of content is considered valuable by search engines because it is answering the questions they are asking. It readily ranks high for conversational queries. And it demonstrates your expertise on the subject. You can either answer questions on your own blog while leading people to other sections of the website. Or you could answer questions on open user forums, answering the user’s question with a lead-in to your own business. On these sites, your business’ website and company social media profiles need to be part of your personal profile.
Don’t forget to document user questions to tech support and create question and answer sections on your website to capture this traffic. You can find good examples of this at salespromotions.org.
Product Videos
Videos have a far higher conversion rate than written content since they fit humans’ inherent visual nature. You should create product videos that answer questions that written content doesn’t answer so well, while subtly promoting the product. For example, create videos on how to update the operating system of your electronic devices, how to connect various pieces of hardware, the right type of technique for using your product, or what to do in response to a particular error message. You can also create product videos that literally show the differences between your product and your rivals, though you have to be careful to keep your search engine optimization for the content focused on your brand and not your rivals’.
Provide Proof of Your Success
Industry whitepapers are a popular type of publication because you’re publishing a technical paper that talks about how much your product or service benefited the customer. Or you’re bragging about how your latest Six Sigma or Lean engineering project streamlined your operations and improved the quality of your product. And unlike press releases, white papers are often picked up by industry publications and given heavier weight for their backlinks than the average backlink.
If you don’t have whitepapers, you can still provide free resources that your customers may appreciate like checklists they can follow to try to solve a problem themselves, but with clear criteria on when they need to contact an expert like you. Or, create educational slideshows on the industry you’re in or give an overview of a technical paper.
Conclusion
Think outside the box next time you’re running out of lead sources. Something as simple as creating informational product videos or writing whitepapers and technical papers to promote the benefits of your product or the innovative technologies your business is implementing could bring more leads than you could ever imagine.
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