Does Your Business Need Lead Generation Services?
If there is something common between all businesses, despite their niche, it is the need to get leads. In the cut-throat competition of online businesses, the enterprises that have consistent and quality leads get far ahead of others, much faster.
But despite these generalizations, how do you make sure your business needs leads or not? After this quick read, you would have the answer.
If You Are Starting Out
Start-ups and new small businesses need sales to boost the morale of the team, besides obvious reasons for growth and sustenance. With businesses already doing what a new company intends to do, it becomes all the more important to have a well-defined lead generation strategy leading towards tangible goals.
If Visitors Do Not Convert
If you have no trouble getting visitors to your website and engagement on your social media channels but struggle with conversions, it is high time to elevate your game.
Unless a high percentage of those visitors are not converted, there would be no point in it all. Professional services can help you target just the right markets with specific keywords, rich content, and power-packed ads.
What Kind of Businesses Need It?
If a business needs buyers, it needs to get leads – it is as simple as that. Unless your business runs on auto-pilot and you get a certain number of customers month on month, without moving a muscle, you need to get leads!
While lead generation is not selling per se, it is the most aspect of selling because it gets you the prospects that when nurtured, would buy from you.
Should You Get Lead Generation Services?
Every business needs sales to generate revenue and make profits. Without leads, it is extremely difficult to get sales, especially if you are not a well-known brand operating from decades of experience.
Lead generation is often misunderstood and perceived as a costly and time-consuming exercise. It does not have to be that way. In the online world of powerful competitors, getting a slice of the customer pie has become ever more difficult. This is where professional, high-quality lead generation services can chip in and save you the arduous trial and error process.
A reputed service like Branding Xoom will help you get the best bang for your buck, and get your business on track, faster than you can imagine.
If you are serious about the long-term success of your business, schedule a free consultation call with our lead-generation experts by clicking here.
Traditional Vs Digital Branding – Which One Should You Choose?
‘If you keep doing what you’ve always been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always been getting – this famous quote puts the dilemma of many business owners today in good perspective.
If you struggle to choose between the good old, time-tested ways of branding that you have always relied on, and the new digital hype that everyone seems to be joining, you are not alone. The world is rapidly shifting right before our eyes, to the point that it is almost scary for many of us not accustomed to sudden changes.
But when these feelings of doubt and second-guessing creep into your business, it is time to take a moment and go back to the drawing board of branding.
But fret not – in less than the time you take to finish your coffee, we would help you decide which way to go.
Target Audience
While there are pros and cons to each form of branding, they are contingent upon the demographics of your ideal target market. For instance, if you are a brand with seniors as its ideal target market, traditional forms of brand communication are more suitable.
People from older age groups would have an easier time associating with physical, tangible branding through newspapers and magazines.
On the other hand, these mediums of communication would not have any impact on younger audiences. Most of the millennials and Gen Z had more access to new technology growing up than previous generations, and hence, would not relate much to print media in the traditional form.
Brand Values
What does your brand signify through its principles, values, and code of conduct? This is important to understand because you do not want to be conveying your core values through products, and the opposite through your branding.
For instance, if you are a brand serving certified organic food products, energy-consuming billboards would not be a great choice for an advertisement.
The typical audience can be easily targeted through digital mediums in this case. Additionally, some of your customers might find it hypocritical to use non-renewable energy sources while promoting organic products.
Correlations
Large brands like Apple, Sony, or Nike do not even need to create powerful digital branding or marketing. A mere billboard with their logo and the product does the job! The large user-base, multinational recognition, and decades of customer trust come in handy for them.
For a small or medium-sized local business, it may not be a great idea to purchase the most expensive billboard spot in town, despite the attention it provides. For a much lesser cost, they can get into digital branding and get great results.
Digital branding lets you play within your budget – no matter how low it is, you can get results in proportion to it.
The Verdict
While there is no universally acceptable winner for branding, digital branding methods give you far more flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and control over the entire process.
Traditional branding has worked very well in the past but the future is digital!
Want to make the switch effortlessly? Let our experts handle all the heavy lifting for you. Get in touch with us for a complete, step-by-step approach to digital branding, the right way.
Social Media Advertising – Top Tips That Get You Great Results
To the uninitiated, social media is just a tool to connect with people around the world, stay in touch with the ones you know, and keep tabs on global events. However, marketers and business owners view social media as the greatest opportunity to create brand recognition and eventually, sales!
With ever-evolving digital platforms and their infamous algorithms, how does one go about reaping the benefits from social media?
In this listicle, we uncover the top ways you can use social media to your advertising advantage.
Choose the Right Platform
Although your brand should be present on all major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the foremost question you need to ask yourself is, ’Where do most of my customers spend time?’.
For instance, if you are a photography company, most of your users would be active on Instagram, because it is primarily a photo-sharing platform. This gives you the answer on where your paid advertisements and other efforts should be focussed. This is not to say that you leave incoming messages on other platforms unseen for weeks on end, it simply stresses the importance of one over the other to complement your target market and business niche.
The demographics of your customers are also pivotal in this choice. Facebook, for instance, has dropped off the radar of young folks lately. While it was all the rage a few years ago, platforms like Twitter and Instagram have taken over.
Powerful Content
Do not make mediocre content. Period. Millions of companies and influencers are fighting for the coveted 10-second attention span of customers, despite creating captivating content. Anything sub-par would be outright rejected by the audience and would not even give you a fighting chance, let alone growth.
Poor content also gets punished by search engine algorithms through low rankings and distrust – it gets recommended in lesser searches until it is reduced to the corners of the web.
The Call to Action (CTA), if needed, has to be subtle – anything too salesy is already on its way to failure.
Ease of Purchase
Too many complications make people lose interest. Advertising on any social media channel should be accompanied by an easy and quick way to purchase.
This does not only mean payment gateway integrations for smooth transactions, but also refers to a clear placement of the product options, shopping cart, and other functionalities. For instance, Pinterest makes this process exceptional for its users through its ‘Buyable Pins’ feature.
Utilization of Features
Now and then, social media platforms come up with new and exciting features to keep the users hooked. A few years ago, Instagram added the Stories and later, Carousels. Business profiles that use the latest features automatically reach more users, even organically.
This is because the algorithm favors the usage of features and showcases their benefits through users already utilizing them. Instagram posts, user-bio, and stories can have tags and links to help users buy your product in a few clicks.
Groups
A widely underestimated tool within any social media marketing arsenal is groups. Groups do an excellent job of warming up leads, without pushing. Even with paid advertisements, people from your groups are likely to buy your products easier than direct customers.
LinkedIn does a great job in providing a platform for mastermind groups where industry experts can share information – the groups are a great way to establish your industry expertise and brand authority. On the other hand, Facebook groups can get you leads in the form of members looking for help and information.
If the group provides value to members through answers to common issues, troubleshooting guides, brand connections, and other communications, they develop a high level of trust in your brand.
When an advertisement is rolled out, these members can relate to the value proposition much faster and purchase from you.
Consistency
Stick to a schedule for posting. When the audience gets a new post on a regular day and time, they feel good and in turn, engage with your content. High engagement makes the algorithms recommend your posts in search feeds and voila, you get more visitors!
Haphazard scheduling hits you negatively – you lose a loyal audience who genuinely believe in your cause, but do not see you around, and the low movement causes the algorithm to recommend your competition instead of you.
Influencer Marketing
You can save thousands of dollars and gain much better ROI by tapping into the influencers’ market. If an influencer has good engagement despite the size of their audience and you can work with them, it is often a great idea to leverage their platform for your brand’s product or services.
In contrast to traditional, platform-based promotions, influencers can bring in much better results at a much lower cost. However, it is important to work with influencers that your brand has similarities with. If a brand selling healthy living, meditation, or yoga equipment worked with an influencer known to be an avid smoker, they might be perceived as a great fit by the audience.
Social Proof
Showcase some evidence of your brand’s success through customer testimonials and Subject-matter-expertise. Building trust through timely engagement with customers via live videos, replies to comments, and videos help gain traction.
Profiles with verified accounts, recommendations, and credible partnerships get a better response from customers.
Paid Ads
This may be the oldest trick in the book, but paid advertisement is one of the fastest and most effective ways of getting results. Make sure you understand the platform’s ad management system, your target audience’s demographics, and have a budget in mind before venturing into the world of paid ads.
The algorithms of major social media platforms are notorious for updates now and then. This makes it difficult for newbies to hit the bull’s eye with their targeting and retargeting. It is often a good idea to go with a professional ad management company if you want to delve into paid ads.
This way, you can be sure of getting high-quality leads and good ROI on your paid ads, despite the algorithm changes happening in the background.
Sounds too much to handle? Let our industry-hardened professional account managers handle your social media. We are backed by years of experience in the trade and hundreds of delighted clients attest to our capabilities in generating life-changing results. Click here to schedule an appointment.
Top 10 Lead Generation Methods That Work Like Magic!
Let’s face it, every online business that wants to thrive needs sales, and you can not have sales without leads.
With any information readily available for free, the online space is oversaturated with offerings, and this has changed the entire lead generation mechanism. Contests, Referral customers, and other traditional ways may have worked 20 years ago, but the online world has evolved to a point where they are not relevant anymore.
Read on to find 10 trendy and high-performing ways to get leads in today’s digital landscape.
PPC
Pay Per Click puts your brand in front of potential customers, without having to worry about the rankings of your website. This is a quick and effective way to get more leads and get better insights through customer data obtained via tracking. When executed properly, PPC can be cost-effective because you would only pay the search engine if and when your links are clicked.
When your ad shows up on searches on keywords that you attach your brand with, the leads garnered are generally high-quality.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization consists of a plethora of activities that make it easier for search engine algorithms to crawl through your website, index its pages, and rank it favorable within their ecosystem. When the website’s blogs, meta-descriptions, headers, and other content are written using keywords relevant to the business niche, they tend to show up higher in the search results pages.
The higher your website ranks, the more traffic it receives, and that increase the probability of getting leads from these visitors. A healthy combination of on-page, off-page, and local SEO can bring out the best results. The best part is, unlike advertisements, this can be done for free!
Free E-Books and Guides
Who doesn’t love freebies, right? With free-to-download informative ‘how-to’ e-books and guides, you can collect leads with ease. This is a great tactic especially for those with a very specific business niche. For instance, an e-book on growing cherry tomatoes in your backyard is a good lead magnet for a gardening supplies store.
Even with a few pages of content, e-books and guides can get you a bucketload of leads.
The data obtained goes into your funnels and can be nurtured through automated e-mail programs.
Articles and Blogs
While blogs are time-consuming, they are practically free (unless you outsource them) and their benefits outweigh their disadvantages by large.
Blogs are one of the most powerful methods to gain visitors to your website. They offer unlimited online real-estate that you can use to build backlinks and keyword-infused content to attract search engines. Regularly posting high-quality blogs gets the readers up-to-date with the company’s products and services.
This consistency is also picked up by search engines and they reward your site with better ranks, which gets you more clicks and vice-versa. Comments on these posts and their subsequent replies build a personal rapport with consumers and a combination of all these elements leads to greater domain authority.
E-mail Newsletters
Contrary to popular belief, newsletters are not just for nurturing ongoing leads and keeping current customers updated. Once integrated into an informative website or email, newsletters act as a potent magnet for obtaining new leads as well.
Another benefit they offer is direct sales – when your brand comes up with new updates, offers, and products, these regular newsletters encourage customers to visit the website. Once the customers are tuned in to your brand’s frequency, it isn’t hard for them to grow from cold to warm leads and buy from you.
Website
This is one of those things that most business owners ignore, despite it being so obvious. A website does not have to be sophisticated for it to generate leads – a good design with quality content that is easy to read can get the job done.
Most business websites are too ‘fluffy’ and repel customers elsewhere. A website where the visitors can easily understand what you are all about and the problems you can solve for them can generate leads without even trying hard.
Social Media
Facebook and Instagram have over 3 billion active users in total. With the former’s acquisition of the latter, the statistics are getting better every day. Inquiry forms, CTA buttons, and links to your website can easily be set up on social media accounts to bring in organic leads. A Facebook group is another great way of networking with your potential customers, answering FAQs, or engaging in meaningful conversation that shines a light on the industry authority of the brand.
Both these platforms are built in ways that make it super easy even for a layman to set up systems and advertisements. This presents every brand with a powerful opportunity to showcase its products to such a large number of people.
Online Seminars and Conferences
Web-based seminars aka Webinars have taken over the marketing world by storm. They are a highly engaging way of delivering information, both live and otherwise. A webinar requires a customer’s information for registration, which goes into the funnel systems of your brand.
Webinars revolve around the problems faced by the target audience and based on the presentation, can do a great job at bringing in leads.
Videos
More than 80% of the total traffic on the internet comes from videos! This statistic is large enough to consider the value of videos in today’s age. Landing pages with videos are automatically ranked better by Google than the ones without them.
With videos, there is so much to experiment with – you can have product explainer videos, demo videos, short ads, or animated videos. Videos are fun, require little effort from the viewer, and act as great tools for lead attainment and conversion.
Surveys
Surveys give you the two-fold benefit of knowing your current customers better and understanding the expectations of prospects. A little incentive like an exclusive membership, special discount code, or a club membership can propel your audience into becoming leads.
The results can give you great ideas for your upcoming blogs, ad-targeting, and changes in sales strategy.
Want to know which lead magnet would work the best for your business model? Click here for a free consultation with our marketing experts and discover how you can formulate a customized strategy to achieve leads like never before!
Organic SEO Strategies For Small Businesses
Small businesses have limited resources that make it difficult to compete with large corporations, especially without a big ad budget. This is partly the reason why small business owners worry about digital marketing ROIs. However, if your website does not rank well in search engines, it is unlikely to get noticed and grow online. Organic SEO fits perfectly in this mix, making it easier to acquire leads without breaking the bank!
If rightly done, it can turn things around completely for your small business over a period. But it is imperative to use the right strategies, or you would just end up wasting even more time and money on poor results. Use this piece to discover the best SEO strategies for your small business that you can start using today!
Keyword Analysis and Implementation
Credible surveys report that targeting and keyword research is the primary choice of over 70% of small businesses. Millions of them can not be wrong and there is a pretty good reason behind this.
Keyword research lets you discover what your potential customers are looking for when they search through the web. When you find the best keywords that work for your business niche, you can target those customers. This is one of the simplest ways to get your site noticed by Google and get higher rankings.
Keyword research also has an additional advantage – it lets you know what your business rivals are using to rank. Based on this information, you can edit the Meta Descriptions, Title Tags, URLs, and other elements on your website.
Technical, Local, and On-Page SEO
Small businesses need to be known locally. While generic SEO strategies are great for overall reach, location-based optimizations put you on the radar of people searching for products or services ‘near them’. Google’s analysis suggests that around a third of all searches performed are based on location. Recent changes in its SERP (Search Engine Results Page) algorithm provide local results on top, without the need to add location. While this is great news for local small businesses in general, this also means you need to get synched for local searches, if you desire to show up there.
On-page SEO works towards streamlining the website through industry-standard tactics. Several elements on web pages decide how easily search engines find and index it.
If the page titles are too long, they would appear incomplete in search results. The page misses out on attracting visitors this way. Similarly, meta-tags with irrelevant descriptions become bottlenecks for algorithms, and they end up penalizing the website with poor ranks.
Using relevant tags on meta discerptions, headers and streamlining the content makes it better for both readers and search engines.
Design and Audit
A website is your home online – the overall design of your website should reflect the essence of your business and products. While a professionally designed, high-quality website adds to your online presence, ones with poor designs get pushed away from the top results.
This generates a feedback loop – the customers end up clicking the sites showing up on the first page, and search engines recommend them even more based on the traffic visiting them.
Audit your website to look for dead URLs, erroneous webpages, inconsistent texts, and images. Search engine crawlers periodically move through websites to see what they are all about. A website that is difficult to crawl through, gets ranked significantly lower than its competitors. Optimizations remove these roadblocks, making the job of algorithms much easier, which in turn gets rewarded by google as higher site ranks.
Device Compatibility
Your website may be armed to the teeth for performance on PCs, but is it well optimized to deliver on an iPad?
If you answered no to the question, there are high chances that you are losing website visitors and subsequently, customers without even knowing it!
Let’s face it, the future is mobile! The percentage of customers performing their searches, visits, and purchases through handheld devices is ever-increasing. Statistica reveals that the number of searches in the U.S. from mobiles has more than doubled over the years.
Having a great website that works efficiently regardless of the device, is crucial to online business success. Having a conversation with your developers about appropriate themes and functionality to make this happen pays off very well.
Content Quality
Google does not look kindly upon low-grade content. Whether it is videos, blog posts, or articles, make sure everything is plagiarism-free, high-quality, and informative. Most customers that look for information have no intention of buying, however, when you provide quality content, they turn into repeated visitors and this makes a positive impression with search engines.
One of the fundamentals here is to answer the burning questions posed by customers through informative blog posts, FAQs, and videos. Non-specific content would get you nowhere, while a problem-solving approach builds E.A.T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Backlinking
Building backlinks is vital to the long-term success of every SEO strategy. Backlinking accelerates the trust scores of websites and despite its far-reaching implications, it gets ignored.
A report on small business surveys suggests that less than 25% of small businesses utilize the power of building effective backlinks. The process is indeed time-consuming, but if you want to excel far beyond your competition without spending on ads, backlinking is the way to go.
You can use guest posts and articles through mutually complementary businesses, testimonials from past customers, and business outreach programs to build links. You can also offer a free sample product or service in exchange for backlinks.
Social Media Management
SEO does not have to be limited to websites! Businesses that harness the potential of social media create a powerful presence that customers acknowledge.
Regular posting and optimizing your social media posts work favorably for every business. Posts do not even have to take a lot of energy and time – using your recent blog post title for a social media post, with a link to your website is a simple but powerful strategy. This makes your social followers aware of your website, puts repeat visitors into your funnels, and allows you to gain more traction without much hassle.
SEO has always been an invaluable tool for small businesses to make the most of their online presence. Branding Xoom can help you assess your business niche, and design optimum SEO strategies that take your online presence to the next level!
SEO vs PPC – Which is best for your brand?
Costs and Budget
Your online strategy is contingent upon the efforts you are willing to put in, and that depends on the budget you can allocate. Businesses that are struggling with leads and conversions prefer PPC because it provides quicker results. It can increase the cash flow because you can expect customers as soon as the ads show up online.
If your cash flow is steady and you can wait, SEO can be the better strategy. While it is a long-term approach, its effects are long-lasting as well. Usually, it takes between 3-12 months for the results from SEO to fully reveal themselves. However, that gets overshadowed by the inexpensive cost of customer acquisition.
PPC gives you an instant boost in revenues with the downside of higher customer acquisition costs.
Buyer Journey Analysis
What stage of the sales funnel do you most struggle with? Do your customers abandon carts or is there an issue with brand awareness, to begin with?
Questions like these would help you understand where to focus your efforts. For instance, if you want to retarget old customers who probably bought from you but did not return, retargeting through paid display ads is the better way to go.
Organic SEO takes a more informative approach – customers looking for information end up visiting your website and entering your sales funnels. After cold leads are warmed up, you can expect sales.
It is necessary to deep-dive into your sales, marketing, and customer support systems to extract reports that give you data-backed insights.
Time Constraints
It is not easy to rank high in the list of keywords through organic SEO. It is also way more time-consuming than PPC. If you are short on time and need a jump start, opting for PPC is the clear choice because of its innate ability to generate leads quicker.
However, this does not translate into the inability of good old SEO strategies. In fact, they are ideal for small or medium businesses that thrive on local customers and do not have many adversaries. The leads they would get through these tactics would be much better quality and there is a higher chance of returning customers, without additional spending.
While there cannot be a unanimous agreement between marketers on the pros and cons of each model, there is a consensus about their suitability according to the nature of business and preferences.
Ready to take charge of your business lead generation? Click here to schedule a free consultation call with our experts.
What is Lead Magnet and How it Can Help Your Small Business?
If you are a small business owner looking to grow your online audience without spending a fortune, what options do you really have?
If you have experimented with Facebook ads to no avail given up on all the blog posts you thought would bring massive traffic to your website that failed miserably; Lead Magnets are to your rescue!
What the heck are these and how can they help you? This quick read would give you all the answers.
Gather Customer Data Without Hassle
Everyone loves free stuff, and this is where lead magnets come in. They incentivize the entire play of giving up information, where the customer gets a freebie and you get their data – win, win!
A modest e-book that is free to download can be a lead magnet. Well, given that it is set up to be downloaded after a customer enters his name, e-mail, and any other data you need.
Lead magnets are so much more effective than traditional lead collection methods because they play on the basic human psychology of wanting something for nothing.
How Can They Help Your Business?
Minimum Investment
Countless Options
Choose from a plethora of options, from peppy infographics and charts to checklists and e-books. Lead magnets are the optimum growth tools for small businesses because despite being mostly free, they offer high value and no risk.
Depending on the type of business you run and the target market you want to capture, a lead magnet can be selected and altered. For instance, if you sell electrical supplies, you can share a free downloadable electrical checklist with your readers. The electricians who visit your site get value for free, and you collect the contact details of every single of them who downloaded it!
Automated Leads
All you need to do is design the lead magnet, sync it with a landing page and it is ready to go! It is versatile, in that you can put it up on your website, link it with a YouTube tutorial or share it on your social media profiles, it works regardless.
With a little e-mail marketing or other methods of outreach, you can have customers sending you their data, in no time! The entire system works like clockwork, all the time.
Whether it is a business tool, software, or something as simple as a PDF checklist, lead magnets can get you from zero to unlimited leads in no time. Click here to check out our free lead-magnet templates to help you get started.
