11 marketing strategies to nurture your leads effectively

Ask any entrepreneur – generating a sustained flow of quality leads and traffic for a business is hard. It’s a task that needs constant out of the box thought and creativity. When you think about the various channels that bring you leads, the options are many – search marketing, email, social media, ads, webinars, your content and even the customers themselves. Yet often we find ourselves overwhelmed, unsure and at a loss of ideas on how to maximize these channels.

The following ways will show you that there’s plenty a small business can DIY to increase organic leads to their business for free. This article is part 2 of our extremely popular blog post 15 content tactics to grow your organic leads for free. With over 3500 views on Pinterest alone, within the first week of publishing, you’ll get some great ideas to make your content work for your lead generation, so be sure to check it out.

Here are great marketing strategies to nurture your leads effectively?

Content can give you leads but additionally, creatively evaluate and harness the channels that you currently use as well as your customer approach. Let’s examine how we can do this.

Channels

Optimize and monitor traffic sources

The standard version of tools like Google Analytics or Bitly is free and helps you measure the visitors to your website, content or marketing campaigns. Commit to evaluating your analytics as a weekly exercise.  

At the very least, this will help you make informed business decisions to optimize current or future efforts. E.g. if your main traffic is coming from Google or say, Pinterest then you know that investing more focus on that will drive positive leads.

You can also list your digital products in our marketplace and gain leads, traffic and business!

Messenger marketing and Chatbots

Chatbots help you engage in spur-of-the-moment, conversational commerce, especially when you can’t be omnipresent. Utilize this feature on the social media platforms that offer it, as well as on your website with specialized plug-ins.

The simplest way to use them is to task the Chatbots with collecting the same details as a lead capture form, albeit in a more conversational manner. E.g. The regular Name & Email field can become ‘What is your Name?’ followed by ‘Nice to meet you’ and ‘Could you please share your email so we can send you our newsletter for creatives.’

The back-and-forth, two-way nature of a chat is a far more interactive way to capture the same information a form does.

Utilize data smartly from social listening

Social listening is the practice of monitoring the various conversations happening around your brand, your customers pain points and your pertinent keywords to extract the key insights from them. As a brand and a business, it is our job to hang around on social media, not just to post content, but engage in active listening. Not only does this allow you to create content that your audience needs, but also make better product and marketing decisions.

Facebook groups, real time Twitter conversations, product forums etc. are all examples of great places to learn more about your audience. We used the insights from conversations and questions by our members on our various Social Media accounts as well as our Facebook group, to create social media related content  on our blog.

Optimize your social media

Before you pay to play, make thoughtful edits to your social media. On your Facebook page, pin current offers to the top as well as change cover photo to highlight current offers.

Maximize your Facebook group to increase visibility for your business, by asking the right questions at the onset, when participation intent is high, i.e. when they ask to join.

Update your Instagram bio periodically to focus on your USP or the next big thing with an attention grabbing headline, a call to action and your hashtag if you own one.

Periodically involve your audience with a question, contest or sweepstakes. Asking your audience to participate in creative tasks like these invokes a healthy sense of competition allowing the best entries to rise to the top. It also creates user-generated content to use for promotional purposes in the future.

Evaluate your email nurture sequence

Your emails should meet people where they are—rather than moving straight to the hard sell as soon as they first agree to subscribe.

If you have the resources, an extremely rewarding practice is to spend the time to identify and qualify prospects as they move through the sequence.

On Maroon Oak, when a customer first subscribes to a digital product from our Business Freebies and Tools Marketplace, they receive a second email within 3 days that offers them more goodies to check out.

Use your Webinars to up lead generation

While 73% of marketing and sales leaders say webinars are one of the best ways to generate high-quality leads, most business owners end up spending disproportionately more time and resources in creating webinars, instead of maximizing them for leads.

Offering your upgrades and freebies or conducting polls during the webinar, rather than in a post-webinar email, yields a much higher response rate.

Follow up within 24 hours with a replay, or better still show notes and related content, giving attendees more ways to engage with your brand and the ability to keep learning with additional resources.

Even better  – a webinar is not just one live event, but in fact the beginning of long term content you can create with it. From our webinar on Designing a Better Website for your Business, we shared a short teaser video, to give our audience a small taste of what to expect in the webinar. Not only has that given us great content to share across Social media, but it also drives constant traffic to our webinar. 

Customers

Read on for some great way to weave your customers into your monthly marketing & lead generation strategy.

Focus on garnering reviews

Positive reviews and comments are incredibly effective in building consumer trust. In fact, they serve as a strong Call to Action as they encourage customers through to a product or brand website that they might otherwise not try. One happy customer can give you a review with a long, long shelf life. When simply asked, 7 out of 10 customers say they will leave a review for a business. At a time when 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, reviews are a big deal in lead generation and need their due attention.

Testimonials can also serve as shareable content to be displayed on your website, social media as well as even used in ad copy.

Make your existing customers feel (even more) special

Don’t wait for a special occasion, to keep your customer top of mind. Holidays or not, in the world of business, it’s always customer season. Use every opportunity to make your customer feel special, in fun and memorable ways.

The reward? Positive goodwill, probable repeat business and even a best case social endorsement.

Create a video on them, send a personalized thank u note or gift, offer a surprise upgrade, feature or spotlight them or share their wins.

Turn  the negatives into positives

Got a bad review, an account cancellation, order refund request? Be swift in your responses and maintain friendliness in voice, tone and copy. Customers who receive a successful first-contact problem resolution are twice as likely to buy from you again.

Eg: In their email apologizing for an incorrect webcast date, Extensis responded with humor.

Giving 5 star customer service on social media not only allows you to effortlessly resolve your customers’ inquiries, but it places your business in a positive light.

Address your customers’ ‘Now What?’ moment

The confirmation email that accompanies a purchase or a subscription often catches the customer at their most receptive point. Make the most out of the excitement and apprehension that comes with online purchases by optimizing your order confirmation email as they do have the highest open rate. You might even consider offering a cross sell of additional opt-in to increase loyalty.

Personalize it as far as possible

According to research, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. So how do you make every customer feel like they were meant to be the centre of your universe?

As a starting step, include it by personalizing your emails, as those outperform non-personalized emails by a wide margin.

If you have pop-ups on your website, create page specific ones that address the content on that particular page rather than a generic, one website pop-up.

At the end of the day, there is science, creativity and persistence in generating free organic leads for your business. What lead generation strategies can you share with our readers?

Articles by Aditi

You can’t use up creativity. The more you create, the more you have.

A Designer and Entrepreneur, Aditi graduated from a top design school and subsequently started her own design and merchandising business. Co-founder at Maroon Oak, she has over 17 years of business experience with Two Dotts, her design consulting company and an Etsy store which serves as an outlet for her gifts and patented product designs.

A mother to a teen and a tween, she enjoys running, dancing and raising her newest baby, a Bichon named Miltie.