The importance of generating leads and building a database

Your database is one of the most important assets your business will ever have.

That’s true for your list. It’s an email database of all the people who’ve ever engaged with your business.

If someone comes into contact with your business, there’s a very good chance they’re interested in what you’ve got to sell. Even if they’re just browsing or checking you out, it doesn’t matter, they are there and they’re familiarising themselves with your brand.

They may not buy from you right now, but if you know who they are, you can start building a relationship which means they will be more likely to buy something from you in the future.

So, whatever you do, before they leave your site, make sure you’ve swapped details.

Here’s your step-by-step guide to generating leads for your business:

Driving traffic 

How do you get them to your page in the first place?

You’re offering them something useful and irresistible and all they have to do to enrich their lives with this - is give you their email address. More on this later.

Whatever you’re offering you’ll need to promote it via one of your marketing channels with a Call-To-Action (CTA). This link will take them directly to your landing page where they’ll sign up for the amazing offer and you’ll capture the data.

There’s a number of ways to do this, depending on your budget and who you’re targeting:

Paid Ads

You can run paid ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. With these you can customize the features and budget, then the information you entered is used to show your ads to your target market.

Your database is one of the most important assets your business will ever have. 

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing gets your current customers spreading the word about your business, and gets your business in front of more potential leads.

It also reaffirms the relationship you have with your existing list. If you’re creating something that’s of genuine interest to your customers, they’ll want to share that with likeminded friends.

Social Media

Social media platforms make it really easy for your followers to take action. You can create posts to promote your offer and then use swipe-ups and links in bios to drive traffic to your landing page.

Content

Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. The more engaging the content – the more likely they are to click on your CTA and move to your landing page.

Blogs

For people starting out in business, or who don’t have any experience with you, your blog will help them to gain more knowledge about you. Once you’ve added some value on your blog, you can offer something else to the reader in exchange for their details.

Data capture 

What are you going to offer them to get their data?

An offer could be a free guide or competition. It could be inspirational tips, advice, templates or a report.

The first thing is to imagine who your customer is. Think about what interests them. What do they want to know, what do they need help with?

Once you’ve worked out what that is, work out how you can deliver it to them for free, in exchange for their contact details.

Again, it doesn’t matter whether or not they’re buying yet - you’re building a database for the future.

Consider how much information you can reasonably ask for in return for your offer. If you’re offering a free software trial, a service or a competition – it’s appropriate and no doubt necessary to ask for more details than if you’re downloading a free template or subscribing to a blog.

Whatever your offer, once they’ve followed the CTA and you capture their data you will then have a database of potential prospects that can be converted into new customers.

Nurturing data 

Once someone has found their way into your database, you’ve got to keep in touch with them regularly.

Remind them you’re there. Then remind them again.

It’s not the hard sell, you don’t want to scare them off, it’s building a relationship and level of trust so when they are ready to buy, you are the business they come to.

In order to do this, you’ll want to set up an automated set of emails to keep the conversation going.

Make sure you’re using highly personal language in every communication you’re sending out.

We all receive so many daily emails and most of the time when they’re from the big corporates, we make an assumption on what they’ll say and then decide not to open them.

You can be different. Whatever you’re sending, if it’s not valuable or fun, it won’t get read.

Selling to the list

Once you’ve followed all the points above, you’ll have built trust with your leads and be in a position where customers give you the opportunity to work with them.

At this stage, your sales technique will kick in. You’ll know what pages they’ve visited, what content they’ve engaged with and you’ll be able to sell to them based on those stats.

If you know what they are looking at and frequency, you are in a good position to offer an incentive with a deadline to encourage them to close.

So how are you going to do all this?

In order to keep track of your database’s behaviour and habits, you’ll need a great CRM. Using a tool like Keap will help you to track behaviour and set up your automated marketing campaign.

It can deliver your personalised content to your leads at the right time taking care of all the repetitive tasks. It will keep a complete activity history for everyone in your list so you can trigger automation based on their recent activity. Which will leave you more time to make the kick ass content that gets them to your list in the first place.