This blog is a continuation of marketing funnels and how they can help you better organize your marketing efforts by visualizing your potential customers’ journey from discovery to purchase. 

If you missed our first blog in the series on how to set up your funnel, you can read it here. 

This week we are going to look at the top of the funnel. The top of the funnel is where your potential customers are made aware of you and your business. This is where leads are generated. 

Lead generation is obviously a very important part of the process. Without a strong flow of leads you will struggle to grow your business. Being able to generate a steady stream of leads is essential for any growing business. 

Let’s examine how you can begin to generate more leads for your business.

Outline A Funnel

The first step to generating more leads is to understand where those potential customers could be coming from. This is why we like to use the visualization of a marketing funnel. At the top of the funnel we list all of the places where a potential customer might come from. 

It could be from Instagram, our Facebook group, someone we met networking, or from our email list. We call these touch points. There are instances where our audience has a chance to interact with us or our content. At these points we want to be prepared to engage them with either an offer to make a purchase, schedule a meeting, or sign up for more information via email or social media. 

Our goal is to keep them interested so we either move them towards a sales or further down the funnel. Your goal when outlining your funnel is to understand where and how you might interact with your potential customers and be prepared to engage them appropriately. 

Utilize Social Media

Social media is a great place to generate leads. The key to social media marketing is to define your audience and engage with them. That is what makes social media “social”. And the key to engaging your audience on social media is to be a resource, not a salesperson. 

Nobody wants to engage with someone that appears to be only interested in a sale. However if you demonstrate a true, authentic desire to connect with your audience and help them address the issues they face each and every day, then you will begin to develop a strong and loyal following. 

Over time, the leads will come naturally because you have shown the ability to connect with your audience on a personal level. 

Optimize Your Website For Conversions

This is a big one here. Your website can be such a valuable tool when it comes to generating more leads — if you use it properly. To do this you must understand when and where your potential customers will be interacting with your website and optimize it to either convert leads to sales or generate leads by collecting the users contact information. 

This can be done the following ways:

• If you sell products online, have a shopping cart in good working order. Nothing is worse than being ready to make a purchase and having an online cart that malfunctions. 
• Setup a contact form that asks people to sign up for your newsletter. This can be a static form on your homepage or a pop-up form.
• Offer a free giveaway like an eBook, white paper, or other offer in exchange for their email address, phone number, or even physical mailing address. 

Again, your goal here is to either make it easy for someone who visits your website to make a purchase or for you to be able to continue engaging with them in some manner. 

Retargeting

Retargeting is an often overlooked method of generating leads. There are two primary ways to utilize retargeting. 

The first is to look at people on your email list who have made it through various funnels but have not made a purchase. Ideally you want to single out the email addresses which you have not contacted in 3+ months. These individuals showed an interest once but were not ready for one reason or another to make a purchase. Circumstances might have changed and reengaging them might jumpstart their interest again. 

The second way is to contact customers who have already made a purchase. There are many ways to do this. You can send an email asking how satisfied they are with their purchase. You could offer a product or service that pairs well with a previous purchase. Or you can offer a discount for them to come back in the future. Whatever this case might be, the goal is to keep them interested in what you are offering. 

Ask For Referrals

This is a tried and true method for generating leads. Ask your current customers, business associates, or friends for referrals. You can offer incentives for any one who sends you a customer or certain number of customers. The key here is to keep track of where your referrals are coming from.

Lead generation is so vital to the growth of your business, that it should be one of your most important goals each and every month. The above tactics will help you develop a lead generating strategy that will set your business up for success.