By Doug Brown 
If you are a business owner, you must be aware of the importance and benefits of business leads. It is not possible for businesses to survive without customers therefore, it is essential to keep your sales funnel full of potential customers. Now, not only the number of business leads is important for the success and expansion of a business, but also the quality and type of business leads play an equal and active role in defining and shaping the future of your business.
What are business leads and why are they so important?
Business leads refer to a person who is interested in your services or products. There are many ways companies generate business leads. If you are not much aware of how this whole process works, you might be surprised to know the amount of homework and efforts that go in to track business leads and finding out ways to pursue and convince them to turn into customers.
Tracking down business leads is perhaps the easiest and first step in the sales cycle. It gives you an insight into your potential customers, which lets you decide if a particular customer is worth your efforts, or not. Just imagine you have launched a business that is sure to be a hit in the market. In the initial months, you get organic clients; people who are drawn to your products and services because they are genuinely interested. What next? You need a bigger clientele for your business to expand and for this, you need to reach out to people and let them know about your products and services. The key here is to reach out and put in efforts on the business leads that have higher chances of turning into your customers.
Even with the best products and services and a team of top-notch professionals, a business is clueless about its growth direction in the absence of a proper sales plan. Business leads are the key players in a sales plan.
Without much ado, let us talk about ways of generating business leads.
- Lead magnet software:
If your business has been up for quite some time, you must have had a lot of content created for its marketing purpose. However, with time the content becomes stale and dead. Lead magnet software lets you repurpose the old content by tweaking it a bit and turning it into attractive eBooks, flipbooks, show notes, pdfs, and web pages that are sure to attract leads. You can check out designrr lead magnet software to find out how the software actually works to help you!
- Social media:
In this day in age, it would be a surprise if using social media for your business has never occurred to you. Use different social media platforms like Facebook for business, twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for your business leads. Attract potential customers towards your business platforms and then gather information by making them fill out short forms or surveys. This will do you a double benefit. You will be able to convey your business message to your customers as well as know about the potential customers.
- Optimize your website for conversion:
Conversion means turning a lead into a customer. Having a website for your business is as important as the social media presence. The web content laid down on your website should be easy to understand and convincing enough for the leads to turn into customers. Having interactive chat sessions and help forums is also an effective way to do so. If a customer believes that his concerns are being talked about and gets satisfactory replies, he is sure to think about becoming a regular.
- Outbound and inbound marketing:
Implement outbound and inbound marketing for generating leads. The stats tell us that outbound marketing is more effective than inbound marketing but, why take chance and lose whatever the number of clients may be interested in your business.
Inbound marketing means content published by the company for marketing purposes, which can attract potential customers. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, refers to content created to reach out to the customers for the purpose of lead generation.
- Keep up with the changing technology trends:
The fast-changing technology trends demand to keep your marketing game updated. In recent years, smartphones have taken over the technology ground. It is therefore essential to ensure that the marketing content is compatible with the latest technology trend. Also, be vigilant about new marketing tactics circulating in the market. Using the latest and trendy marketing techniques gives out an impression of an active and happening business to your clients, which helps a lot in the longer run.
- Use social network smartly:
As mentioned earlier, the social presence for a business is important for lead generation. Using the social network smartly is equally important. You may be posting many meaningful posts a day but, if your posts get lost in your clients’ newsfeed, what is the use? It is therefore important to gather basic information about your followers. Followerwonk is a software that lets you know a lot about the followers of your page. For example, the time at which your followers tweet, basic information about them, etc. With this type of information, you can be sure that a useful group of people is reading your posts.
- Make your posts stand out:
Everything is just a click away. These clicks have made lives easy yet difficult also. With so many options available at clicks, it becomes difficult to attract clients, make them notice your posts and keep them wanting more.
Enrich your posts with interactive content like lively questions, polls, and views of your customers. Incorporate videos, images, and Gifs, as they are sure to attract attention and leave a mark for a longer time. Add meaningful hashtags to your posts that may help in finding your posts.
- Databases:
Databases maintain complete information about people and businesses. One such example is Data.com. Use databases to gather information about potential customers and reach out to them.
- Use blogs:
Comment on relative blogs quite often. This will catch the attention of potential customers and they will visit your website, which must be ready with strong content ensuring the conversion. Guest blog on different blogs having the same niche as yours to attract customers towards your page.
- Influencers:
Use influencers to endorse your products and services. You can also interview an influencer and post it on your website or social media page to attract potential clientele. Ask the influencer to share it on their page as well to reach out to a larger audience.
Conclusion
The growth of a business highly depends upon generating business leads and pursuing them. The ideal scenario is to have organic clientele approach your business for the products and services but this does not work always and does not promise huge footfall. Therefore, incorporating the aforementioned ways wittily into your business plan is sure to generate promising leads.
SME Paid Under
Adam 
Editorialist Team 
Headlines Team