Digital Lead Generation - A Brief Overview
Digital lead generation is a process of capturing and converting leads into customers through digital channels such as website, email, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and more. Digital lead generation is the primary step in customer acquisition, and usually at the top and middle of your sales funnel.
Lead generation strategies help you to capture leads from multiple sources and build a database of potential customers that can be used for future marketing campaigns, or make instant sales. This allows businesses to target their ideal customer segments quickly and effectively.
By leveraging digital lead generation techniques, businesses can create highly targeted campaigns that will help them convert more leads into customers while also saving time and money.
Which Digital Lead Strategy Should I Use?
Your overall business strategy and budget will determine the most effective digital lead generation strategy for you to use.
For example, we at Davis Digital have found that Facebook and Google paid advertisements are the most effective way to sell ecommerce products as a startup. As that same company grows to scale, SEO is the more effective strategy long term, in conjunction with a stable budget for ad revenue.
If you don’t have much of a budget or revenue yet, we recommend building an email list and directly running email and ad campaigns to the list with recurring newsletters and promotional marketing.
What if your business is profitable, but has minimal digital presence, and you want to start spending money on marketing? We recommend building out a website with landing pages, retarageting past clients (and similar profiles) with ads, and starting on the content building process with SEO. Overall, we have found posting on social media is great for establishing credibility for your business, but is usually a lot slower in getting your first lead digitally.
If your company has a well established brand, website, is running ads, and has a good social media presence, you are likely already getting digital leads. Managing the leads, citations, reviews, profiles, and keeping up to date with SEO changes and SERP ratings need to be the things you pay most attention to. All ads need to be refined and updated at least weekly with new experimental designs and videos to get the best ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
Building an Email List
There are three ways to build an email list: get or scrape the emails from the web (cheapest/fastest), exchange relevant content for email addresses (time consuming but effective), and use previous client’s emails for retargeting.
DISCLAIMER: If you want to scrape data, make sure you abide by all Federal and State regulations before attempting to use the data.
Scraping data can be done using a number of paid data services or done yourself using a Chrome addon or the Python library BeautifulSoup. The Chrome addon method is most likely the easiest, and you can easily get over 1000 email addresses in a matter of minutes.
Building Content or Offers in Exchange for Emails
If you have a website, or use a funnel servicing company like ClickFunnels, it is relatively easy to set up a content exchange program. A content exchange program involves creating a valuable piece of content for an end user like a checklist, guide, printable, infographic, spreadsheet, video series, or tutorial, and only allowing access to that content in exchange for an email address.
So how would you go about creating that content? Check out our content guide for email marketing here.
If you have ever seen a popup window on your favorite website offerieng a piece of content, the company providing the offer is collecting your email for retargeting. Popups are one of the most effective ways to create an information exchange and collect emails for your email list.
If you are in a business that content is not really useful to your end consumer, you can alternatively offer a discount on a product or service in the popup.
You can create this same content offer and advertise it on social media or through paid ads to get the results faster if you don’t have much traffic to your website.
If you do not have a website or funnel service, it is much more difficult to get emails in this manner, so we recommend having at least a landing page style website with your branding and information.
What to do with the Email List
Send emails of course!
We recommend building out and planning a newsletter so that customers are concurrently reminded of your products and services.
Remember to always have a promotion and offer for new valuable content to your customers. If you are not outputting a lot of content, increase the time span between newsletters.
If you are constantly creating content like blogs, promotions, videos, etc., the newsletter is a great way to make sure your customers are involved and don’t forget about you. New product highlights or industry innovations are also great additions to newsletters.
Getting Traffic through Paid Advertisements
Paid advertisements refer to paying a company such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. to display a keyword or creative such as image, carousel, video, or GIF to a targeted audience.
SEO refers to enhancing your ranking on one or more search engines to improve organic traffic.
Paid traffic through paid advertisements offers a quick way to learn if your target market wants your product or service. We suggest starting on Facebook or Google Ads due to ease of use if you have no experience running advertisements.
The first thing you need to do if you want to run paid ads is make sure you have a landing page established. Using the same branding as your website, use a graphic design tool to build creatives that are appealing to your target audience.
If using Google Ads, you want to make sure you know your targeted keywords and phrases by doing keyword research in lieu of building creatives. Lastly, you’re going to want to schedule your ads using a predefined budget.
Getting Traffic Through SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an inbound traffic technique that brings traffic to your website or landing page by optimizing it for Search Engine Results Pages. For example, if I want to increase traffic to my blog website about basket weaving, I can use SEO to rank in Google search by optimizing for the keywords “basket weaving”, “how to create baskets”, “DIY Baskets” and so on.
If you are at the top of the results pages in Google, you have greater traffic. If you have more traffic, you have the ability to make more sales through your funnel.
SEO involves understanding the algorithms of search engines, analyzing keywords, and creating content that meets the needs of both users and search engines. Generally speaking, SEO is a constantly evolving field, with new techniques emerging all the time. It takes dedication and hard work to stay up-to-date with best practices to ensure success for your website.
If you are willing to do this, it can pay off long term. By having an effective SEO plan implemented, a steady flow of traffic will be reaching your site, rather than in segmented bursts with paid ads.
Here are some basic things you can do to for SEO that may increase the visibility of your site:
- Perform an SEO audit to get an idea of where your site stands
- Create a Google My Business listing and connect it to your site
- Have a backlinking plan and build citation profiles (Yelp, Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing, etc)
- Optimize headers and compress images
- Make sure your site is secure and protected by SSL
- Create content around rankable keywords
- Optimize your sitemap and have effective internal linking
Conclusion
Digital lead generation is an essential part of any business’s marketing strategy. Paid ads, SEO, and email marketing funnels are all effective methods for driving leads to your website. Paid ads can be used to target specific audiences and get immediate results, while SEO and email marketing funnels can help build relationships with potential customers over time. With the right combination of these three strategies, businesses can generate leads in a cost-effective way that will help them reach their goals.