5 fast ways to generate leads on your website

Generating leads is one of the most important responsibilities of marketers in every industry. Without leads, there are no sales, and without sales, the business doesn’t survive.

So how do you generate leads fast using your most important resource: your website?

5 fast ways to generate leads on your website

1. Giveaways
2. Discounts
3. Downloads
4. Gamification
5. Referral programs

Let’s break the list down and see how you can leverage every one of them to get leads for your business. If you’re looking for other ways to get leads, here are two ideas for you to explore: 3 efficient lead-generation tools and conversational marketing.

1. Giveaways

Giveaways are a great way to generate leads on your website.

What should you do to generate leads through giveaways?

You do a brainstorming session with your marketing and sales team and come up with a few ideas of what your prospects would like to receive in exchange for their email.

To turn prospects (potential customers fitting certain criteria) into leads (prospects sharing contact information with your company), your giveaway has to comply with a set of requirements.

First of all, your giveaway can be one of your products or services. If that’s not possible, your giveaway can be anything that speaks to your brand values and is in line with your customers’ interests.

Here’s an example:

Beauty and makeup brands give away beauty products, but they could also give away a makeup session with a renowned makeup professional or a skincare course with a dermatologist.

Once you have decided upon the prize you are going to give your prospects, it’s time to create a dedicated landing page on your website.

The architecture of your landing page should include the following elements:

1. An eye-candy or an appealing image of your prize;
2. Powerful headline;
3. Enticing body copy;
4. Description of your prize;
5. How your prospects would benefit from your prize, when applicable;
6. Contact information form for your lead’s name and mail address;
7. CTA button;
8. One or two questions you would like your lead to answer (refrain from including too many questions or asking for too much information);
9. The time period over which your giveaway will take place (at least 7 days);
10. When and how you will choose the winner/s;
11. How you will announce and contact the winner.

2. Discounts

If your product is of high value or running giveaways is not included in your brand strategy (Louis Vuitton does neither sales nor giveaways for example), you can still generate leads fast by offering your product at a discount price.

It’s a way to attract prospects who didn’t buy your product because of its price. Now they get the opportunity to buy a high-value product and become a recurring customer.

Your discount price campaign landing page should include:

1. An enticing main image of your product or hero (lead);
2. Your discount price clearly communicated;
3. The product carrying the discounted price;
4. The net price (the price the customer will pay after the discount has been applied);
5. Description of your product/service;
6. Benefits of your product/service;
7. Contact information form for your lead’s name and mail address;
8. CTA button;
9. The time period over which your discount price campaign will take place (at least 7 days);
10. Any other details your lead should be aware of.

3. Downloads

Generating leads with downloads is one of the most widespread ways to send prospects to the bottom of your company’s sales funnel.

But it’s not the easiest. Before creating the landing page, your copy team and your graphics team need to work together to deliver a PDF file that your leads will be prompted to download. We see this type of lead generation at tech companies like Hubspot and Adobe or research companies like Gartner and PwC.

Don’t be discouraged! Any company, no matter how small, can offer relevant information for its leads to download. It’s a matter of having an in-depth understanding of what your customers need from you.

A great benefit of download campaigns is that they are not time-limited as are the giveaways and discount campaigns. Your company can generate leads throughout the entire year.

Your download landing page should include:

1. An enticing main image of your product or hero (lead);
2. Description of your PDF;
3. How does your PDF file help your leads (benefits);
4. Powerful headline;
5. Download button;
6. Contact information form.

4. Gamification

While giveaways, discounts and download campaigns also support brand awareness because they foster a certain level of engagement, gamification campaigns increase lead engagement tenfold.

Again, it’s not one of the easiest ways to generate leads, but it’s more powerful than the first three.

What is gamification in marketing?

Gamification marketing is increasing engagement by incorporating gaming principles into your campaign. Gamification is psychology-based and taps into your lead’s reward centre of their brain.

Essential key points that you should take into consideration when developing your landing page:

1. Bright and attractive colours to pique the curiosity of your lead;
2. The game should be simple enough to understand and complex enough to stimulate the lead’s innate competitiveness;
3. Invite your leads to complete the contact information form only after they’ve entered the game and are eager to finish it;
4. Refrain from making the game too long;
5. Give your players incentives to move on to the next stage by unlocking rewards or achievements.

Here’s a great example called Wheel of Security, a lead-generation game developed by Juniper Network:

5. Referral programs

Referral programs work splendidly in two ways: they delight your customers and provide them with a mechanism to send you new leads.

Basically, your existing customers are doing your work for you. But you need to provide them with the right tools.

Your referral program landing page should include:

1. An enticing image;
2. Headline and body copy;
3. Clearly list what your customer will get by sharing your brand or product with their friends;
4. Clearly state what their friends will get;
5. Allow your customers to share your offer easily;
6. CTA button.

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10 websites you should know about

Noisli

Lots of people struggle to concentrate without some kind of background noise – especially in noisy offices and public spaces. Noisli lets you mix together random sounds to create your perfect environment.

Word Frequency Counter

If you’re writing an essay, blog post, or a lengthy email, you sometimes get the feeling that you’re repeating yourself – using the same words over and over. In this case you no longer need to worry, as just by pasting in your text it will tell you how many times you’ve used each word and you can decide on your own if one or some of them are too much.

Open Library

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. To date, it has gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way. You can find over 1,000,000 free ebooks to read.

FridgeFood

Tell the website what all you have in your fridge and it will give you some recipes you can put in practice.

Sleepyti

This is a great place to go if you have problems sleeping or getting up. It will calculate the best time for you to sleep that you don’t wake up at night and help you get organized.

Unsplashed

You can easily get high resolution photos from this site that too free, 300,000 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. This is so amazing for all those who love photography.

A Soft Murmur

Ambient sounds to wash away distraction. “I like to work in public spaces like libraries and coffee shops, but they can be noisy and distracting. Listening to ambient helps me focus, and I like being able to mix different sounds together to match the environment I’m in,”wrote its creator, Gabriel Martin.

One Look Reverse Dictionary

This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words.

RipeTrack

The website helps you avoid that disappointment you feel when you buy a fruit that is too hard, or one that is not sweet. Just enter the fruit or vegetable that you want to check, and it will tell you when it’s in season in different parts of the world.

Curiosity

Curiosity is on a mission to make learning easier and more fun than it has ever been. The website’s goal is to ignite curiosity and inspire people to learn. Each day, the people behind it create and curate engaging topics for millions of lifelong learners worldwide. “We designed Curiosity with your busy life in mind. Our editors find interesting and important topics that you’ll want to know more about, and introduce you to the best ways to keep learning,” explains the website.

More examples you can find here.

Top 5 marketing campaign that failed in 2016

Sometimes, no matter how big the budget is, some marketing campaigns go completely wrong. There are a large number of reasons for those situations, some of them being the lack of proper research, of attention or just simple the agency’s use of juniors. Here are some of the last year’s biggest marketing mistakes:

Microsoft and the Millennials

Microsoft’s latest attempt to recruit the next generation of engineering talent has backfired, as its rather awkward attempts at ‘Millennial speak’ have been roundly mocked on social media. In a bizarre effort to look hip, Microsoft promised “dranks,” “noms” and other buzzwords at a party for “bae interns.”

Jägermeister and the pool party that turns into chemical warfare

In Leon, Mexico, Jägermeister hosted a part in which its staff poured liquid nitrogen into the pool to ‘create a cool effect,’ an act which created a poisonous cloud, hospitalizing eight and putting one man into a coma. And that while the campaign’s tagline was: party responsibly.

Scott Disick’s Instagram fail

“Keeping Up With The Kardashians” star Scott Disick has become the subject of web ridicule after mistakenly including all the instructions his advertisers sent him on a paid Instagram post.

Microsoft AI Chatbot gone wrong

In March 2016, Microsoft created an artificial intelligence chat bot that talked like a Millennial and learned from humans. But its good intentions backfired, with rogue web users getting it to cite Hitler and support Donald Trump. The conversation extended to racist, inflammatory and political statements.

McDonald’s and the fitness tracker 

McDonald’s fitness tracker happy meal toy was claimed to bring out its users in a rash. A McDonald’s US representative said the firm had decided to remove them “after receiving limited reports of potential skin irritations that may be associated from wearing the band”. Reports of skin irritation have derailed plans by McDonald’s to give out fitness trackers instead of toys in its Happy Meals. According to The Guardian, McDonald’s was hoping the Step It! Activity Band would be a means of getting kids to be more active, Digital Trends reported. The colorful plastic device strapped on like a watch and tracked steps. It blinked as the wearer walked and blinked more rapidly the faster they moved.

Warner Brothers reports its own website as illegal

Film studio Warner Brothers has asked Google to remove its own website from search results, saying it violates copyright laws. The requests surrounded movies like The Dark Knight, The Matrix and The Lucky One. In each of these instances, Warner Bros requested that its own official pages be removed from search results. It also asked the search giant to remove links to legitimate movie streaming websites run by Amazon and Sky, as well as the film database IMDB. The request was submitted on behalf of Warner Brothers by Vobile, a company that files hundreds of thousands of takedown requests every month.

Some more examples during the years, here.

How to attract new, relevant consumers to your business online

Having your own business is like having a baby. It’s the best out there, the most beautiful and interesting and you wish everybody would see it and picture it in their minds as you do. But how do you actually get to that point? The first and most important step would be investing in increasing your company’s online visibility, through its website and social media accounts. You must take into account that the competition out there is very strong and it’s only getting stronger, so make sure you are always a step ahead of your competition. Easy to say, but hard to accomplish it, isn’t it?

Well, here are some elements that you should most definitely must keep an eye on and work on every day:

The traffic. While it’s not the only attribute that will help you see your profits increase, is very important for turning curious visitors into paying customers. If you cannot keep a steady stream of visitors coming to your website on a daily basis, the chances that your company and its products will remain successful becomes much less likely. An absence of new visitors can lead to little or no growth in sales and, ultimately, a decline in profits.

Unique visitors, new customers and people who visit your site regularly are all of equal importance. Each one of these groups is responsible for supporting your business and keeping it afloat. The more consumer groups you can bring in, the more likely word of your company and its products will seep into various social groups, extending your influence in your industry further.

Always keep in mind you have a brand reputation to sustain, one that will be kept while having good products and a smooth client service operation. When people associate your company’s name and image with an industry or product as a whole, you know that your reputation and reception in the marketplace is in a healthy state. Additionally, a strong brand reputation helps a company’s website stand apart from competitors in the same industry.

Make sure that your content has its right place in the search engines. Invest in good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that will take your products and brand to the right target. “Digging through search engine result pages and on-site links to find an appropriate company can be frustrating and time-consuming for the average person. Thankfully, SEO provides the perfect tool for helping to ensure your future customers never search in vain for your product,” said the Ballantine specialists. More pieces of advice from them you can read here.

Build long term continuous connections with your consumer base through social media marketing, testimonials, recommendations, guest posting and online PR.

Create relevant content that provides valuable information to the consumers, while inviting them to visit your website for your valuable services. Content helps businesses generate more search engine results, offers a connection between consumers and brands, delivers valuable information that may not otherwise have the opportunity to be shared and strengthens overall brand awareness. Additionally, content helps to keep brands and businesses relevant. All of these efforts, especially when they are combined, will help generate customer attention while also leading more clicks to your website.

Share the content as much as you can on relevant platforms. It’s not enough to create and have a great content on your website. You must be able to share it and help it reach the right people.

Partner up with other businesses that think like you, from other categories. “The key is to identify the right partners for your unique business that cater to the same target market you do, then work together to support each other in gaining visibility and sales among each other’s customers. To maximize your efforts, aim to create more long-term partnerships versus one time experiences. This can help both sides of the partnership in gaining customer attention, sales and overall success,” explains Nicole Leinbach-Reyhle for Forbes.

Connect on LinkedIn groups. They are a great way for quickly connecting with others in your industry or niche to help spread your message, you can add value to a conversation or discussion before trying to drop your links. LinkedIn groups are also a great way of contacting people who you might not have mutual connections with. You can message any other member in the group without being connected, which can become a huge asset depending on the particular circumstances. Share updates often in the group, and be sure to stay in the spotlight without oversharing.

Offer a free product or service to customers. According to entrepreneur.com, studies have confirmed that people are more likely to accept something for free than they are to pay a nominal price for it. So, why not providing a free service or product to your customers? “Maybe you offer a free 15-minute consultation or an entry-level product that you want to give away. Whatever you offer, be sure to secure the customer’s contact details so you can get in touch with them later. If you’re giving away a service for free, you have an opportunity right then to upsell those customers to your paid services. People are more likely to feel like they owe you when they accept something for free as well,” shows entrepreneur.com.

Use business listing sites like Yahoo Local and Google Local. If you’re running a local business and looking to attract nearby customers to a brick-and-mortar location or offering some professional service that’s geographically-specific, you should list your business on local business listing sites such as  Yahoo Local and  Google Local. Google Local is an especially powerful way to list and verify your business information, providing public details such as your company’s address for Google Maps appearances, store hours and other information related to your business. Ensure that you keep this information accurate and up-to-date. More ideas from them you can find here.

Moreover, in order to make sure you actually have the right new people coming to your place, you must identify your buyer personas, develop a persona-driven keyword strategy and then appeal to social media tools and services.