Looking to step up your lead generation game for your digital marketing agency? Here are 10 powerful techniques to help you earn more leads and grow your business.
Reach potential customers on the messaging app they use the most
If you want to get in touch with your leads, engage them, nurture them, answer their questions, and win their trust, you need to reach them on the messaging app that they open up 23 times a day - WhatsApp.
Use a WhatsApp chatbot to answer all their questions 24/7, in their own language. You can also deploy a button on your website that leads to your WhatsApp bot, or display your WhatsApp QR code on your digital and physical properties to make it easier for your customers to find your bot and interact with it.
After prospects reach your bot from your website or other digital & physical properties, you can even use your bot to get them to book appointments and consulting calls by integrating your bot with Google Calendar, Google Sheets, and your sales CRM, allowing you to store their contact information.
The coolest bit? By integrating WhatsApp to your CRM, you can use WhatsApp message templates to automatically send them appointment reminders so that they don’t miss their appointments and you get to have a proper conversation with them and sign them as clients.
Ask for referrals
Studies have shown that people trust reviews and recommendations from their peers far more than they trust the claims made by companies. So, asking your existing clients for referrals is the most effective way for you to drum up more business, whether you are an SEO agency or something else.
Referrals are the best because prospective customers get these from people whom they know and trust, but even if you can’t get a referral from your customers, at least ask them to give you a testimonial (preferably ask your customers to make videos to make it feel real), or a review. In a recent survey, 71% of customers said they were likely to leave a testimonial if the company made it easy for them to do so. That way, even if you can’t get a personal recommendation, you’ll get some about of social proof which you can display, and that’s a rather powerful tool to win your leads’ trust as well.
Step up your content marketing game
Your content marketing should evolve from the purely salesy tone that you have right now. It’s time for you to give your prospects the information that they are looking for. Companies aren’t going to want to do business with you unless they trust you, but putting out valuable information is a great way to win their trust. You want them to start seeing you as marketing experts who are ready to give them all the information that they need in order to succeed.
When these folks start going through your blog and keep getting value from it, they become more likely to want to work with you. And once you establish yourself as an expert, you can even justify slapping a higher price tag on your conversational marketing services.
With great power comes great responsibility and with great content marketing success comes increased risk of content theft. This happens more often than you can ever imagine. Here’s such a case study of MentorDial that gives tips on how to deal with content theft.
Write guest posts
Don’t limit yourself to your own audience, try to establish yourself as an expert in front of other audiences as well. Reach out to other blogs and publications asking them for the opportunity to write for them. You aren’t doing this just for the SEO boost that you’ll get because of the backlinks because of the importance of backlinks for SEO (although that’s rather useful as well).
Your aim is to establish yourself and your digital marketing agency as experts, people who know how to get stuff done, and are ready to help. Rather than being happy with the link just being there on the guest blog, you want to give so much value that readers are compelled to click on the click and check your website out. if your content game is not strong, you can onboard a agency that can help you identify convert your weakness into strength.
Start an email list
Once again, you don’t want this to be super sales-driven. This has to be something that your prospects look forward to receiving and reading as 4.14 billion people use emails at least once a day. Create a newsletter of sorts sharing the latest digital marketing tips and tricks. Educate them and give them value. The idea is to push out multiple value-driven emails, then hit them with a sales inducer, then send another bunch of educative emails before you send your next sales-focused email so that they don’t get annoyed and unsubscribe.
Create lead magnets
Just adding a ‘Sign up for our newsletter’ CTA at the bottom of your blog won’t cut it. If you want to win with your newsletter, you need to create an extremely valuable resource and use it as gated content. Even if you don’t make it necessary for them to share their email to get access, you should, at the very least, ask them to sign up for your newsletter while they’re trying to get access to the resource.
Lead magnets like these are extremely effective ways to build your email list and win with email marketing. That being said, you don’t want to gate all your content. Give your audience access to quite a bit of ungated content so that they gain value from it and can see that you’re an expert. If you don’t do that, it’s more than possible that they won’t consider it worth sharing their email ids for access to your content.
Run webinars
If you want another powerful way to get your prospects’ email ids and build up your email list, you should start running your own webinars. These shouldn’t be focused completely on your services, just like your other content, these should be educational, your prospects and leads should see very clear value in attending your webinars.
That being said, you can (and should) include a pitch for your services within the webinar, but don’t make it too long, your audience is attending the webinar to learn from you, not to listen to an enormous sales pitch.
Another way to add value to your webinar (and pull more attendees in) is to partner up with a well-known marketing influencer or industry expert whose insights your audience would appreciate.
You’d also want to make it a free webinar, you’re not trying to make money out of ticket sales, you’re looking at the big picture and are aiming to turn these attendees into clients, so you want to lower the barrier of entry and let them attend the webinar in exchange for sharing their email addresses. To make a good first impression, create an appealing webinar email template for your next webinar. There are several expert tips to maximize lead generation. For example, utilizing social media platforms to promote your webinar and offering incentives for attendees who sign up can significantly increase your sign-up rate. Additionally, following up with attendees after the webinar can help keep them engaged with your brand and potentially turn them into clients. Overall, by offering a free webinar and creating an attractive email template, you can establish a strong foundation for generating leads and ultimately converting attendees into loyal clients
Get on a podcast tour
Look for marketing podcasts that you could add value to as a guest speaker and start reaching out to the hosts to get on those podcasts. Podcasts are taking off as a medium right now because they allow people to multitask, and you definitely want to get yourself (and your team) on as many as you can.
Once again it’s a chance for you to get yourself established as a marketing wizard and attract more clients.
Get listed in directories
If lead generation is a major concern for you, it would be a good idea for you to get yourself listed in as many marketing agency directories as possible. There are several directories that you can try getting your marketing agency listed in. Some of these directories are created by technology partners and custom software companies that build marketing tools, while others are created by publications and other organizations that focus on helping organizations improve their marketing activities. Companies tend to do a lot of research when they're looking for new vendors, so getting listed in directories is a great way for you to generate more B2B leads.
Here's an extensive guide on B2B marketing for your reference!
Mobile optimize your website
You might be thinking that you can operate the chatbots for B2B lead generation in pace and your prospects will be looking at your website only on desktops or laptops. But that’s isn’t true. Quite often, the first impression that these prospects have of your website is on mobile. That’s especially true if you’re carrying out marketing campaigns or running ads on social media.
Only if they’re impressed while checking your website out on mobile view, will they come back later during work hours and go through your website in a thorough manner on desktops or laptops.
If you don’t mobile optimize your website and it takes too long to load, your CTA is below the fold, or your prospects just can’t see certain parts of your pages or click on them, they’re just going to drop off and run away to your competitors.
Bonus tip
You can even generate more leads by expanding your offerings. In addition to your existing digital marketing services, you could also provide your clients with AI powered chatbots to engage with their leads and customers over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and 10+ other channels by partnering up with Engati.
