10 Low Cost & Powerful Lead Generation Ideas to Flood Your Sales Funnel with High Quality Leads

If you have sales people working for you, it’s vital that you constantly feed them with high quality leads. With so many low cost and effective lead generation methods available, you shouldn’t have to ask your sales people to waste valuable time doing cold calling anymore. Their time is better spent on engaging with leads and closing sales!

So, here are some powerful and low cost lead generation ideas that are gonna rock your sales team’s world!

1. Get Targeted Leads with PPC Advertising

More and more people are relying on search engines like Google to search for solutions to their wants, needs, problems, or pains. When people perform a search on the search engine, they are actively looking for a solution or answer. As such the leads from the search engines such as Google are usually the most targeted and high quality.

So, it is vital to have a presence on the search engines. With PPC Advertising, you can have your ads shown to thousands of target audience within 30 minutes or however long it takes for you to setup your campaigns.

Here are some good practices to follow:

• Bid on long tail keywords. Long tail keywords (keywords with 3 or more words) usually result in higher quality leads.
• Start with exact match. Exact match ensure that your ads get shown for more relevant searches. Then cautiously experiment with phrase and broad matches to get more impressions. Be sure to use negative match to weed out irrelevant searches.
• Write compelling ad copies. Use clear and concise words that convey the benefits of your products or services.
• Don’t just send traffic to the home page. Instead, create a few landing pages and write compelling messages that are follow up on the messages mentioned on the ad copy.

2. Network on Twitter

There are all kinds of conversations and messages that are being broadcasted on the twitter sphere. Your potential customers could be tweeting about a particular problems they are having and they could be asking for guidances or recommendations.

Use the twitter advanced search feature to search for keywords (be sure to enclosed them in quotes) that are related to your products and services. Twitter will list all the twitter messages that contain that particular keyword. If you find someone that might be a potential customer, follow them, engage with them and try to help them out.

Be careful not to come out with a full blast promotion! Instead, try to engage, offer advices or insights, and build relationship. When the opportunity arises, you can send them to your website so that they can learn more about your business and services.

You can also use the services of Twellow.com and wefollow.com sites to find prospects or influencing figures in your industry to follow.

3. Linkedin for B2B

LinkedIn is a great social networking site to find B2B leads. Here are some ways to use Linkedin for lead generation.

• Join groups that are related to your business and industry. Once you’re accepted to the group, it’s time for you to jump in and participate in the discussions. Once again, don’t begin selling and promoting right away! You should first listen to the conversations and contribute your ideas, thoughts, and insights. Establish your expertise and authority first then promote your business and services later.
• If you want to target a certain company, leverage your networks and get them to refer you to your target prospect at that particular company.
• Check out Linkedin Advertising – Linkedin has a pay per click advertising program that you can experiment with.
• Create a page for your company on linked.com and share relevant news and articles that may benefit your target audience.

4. Write blog articles

Writing blog articles is one of the best ways to generate leads.You can use a keyword research tool and find “long tail” keywords that are related to your business. Keywords related to prospects’ problems or pain points are ideal. Be sure to follow SEO best practices to ensure you get good ranking on the search engines for your blog articles.

What can you blog about? Ideally, you would want to blog about topics that are relevant to your target audience.

• Tips to solve your target audience’s pain points of problems.
• Share industry news and updates
• Book reviews
• Interviews with thought leaders in your industry as well as partners and customers.
• New products or services launch
• Changes to your business or products/services

To make your blogging efforts more effective, you should encourage your readers to comments. Be sure to respond and engage with them promptly after they leave a comment. You should aim to add at least 1-2 fresh articles a week. If you don’t have the time, you can always hire free lancer writers to help out or you can also request guest bloggers to contribute.

Blogs are easy to setup and easy to maintain so there’s no excuse for not starting a blog!  WordPress is one of the most powerful and easy to use blog platform. You can use one of many free themes or you can purchase professional a wordpress theme from Wootheme or Studiopress for a low price.

5. Send Post Cards with a compelling offer

Sending post cards to your prospects is an affordable and effective method of generating leads for your business. With an attractively designed postcard and a compelling offer, you can quickly generate awareness and interest among your prospects. Be sure to follow direct marketing best practices by creating an attractive design, strong benefits laden copywriting, and a compelling offer (free trials, new customer discounts, etc).

 

You can use the service of a post card marketing specialist such as Postcard Mania. Postcard Mania can help you design high impact post cards as well taking care of the full color printing and mailing of the post cards. You can use your own mailing list or get a targeted mailing list from them. They have mailing list for consumers as well as businesses in the categories and locations you want. Request for some FREE post card samples from Postcard Mania Now!.

6. Video Marketing is Hot

People love watching videos, especially if they offer entertaining or educational value. You should create some videos and upload them to Youtube. Again, try to come up with creative ideas that make your videos entertaining and educational and subtlely promote your business. Follow these video marketing tips below:

• Keep your videos short (3-5 minutes).
• Show your personality and be genuine. In other words, don’t be boring and rigid!
• Teach, entertain, provoke.
• Make sure you incorporate your main keywords in the title and description field after you upload your video on Youtube.

7. Get referrals from your clients, friends, and partners

Your current clients and partners could be valuable sources of leads for you. Be sure to ask them to introduce you to people they know who could be potential clients. Better yet, if your clients or partners regularly send out emails or newsletters to their subscribers, you could ask them to send out a short email to help introduce your business. You might want to offer them a meaningful gift for their efforts.

8. Join a local BNI Chapter

By joining a local BNI chapter, you and other business owners can help each other refer clients to each other. This has been a very cost effective lead generation strategy for many businesses. You’d have to attend meetings on a weekly basis. Each meeting usually has an agenda and also gives you the opportunity to educate and share with other members about your business. Check out the BNI website for more info.

9. Attend Networking events

There are professional networking events and conferences going on all the time. Look for events where there is a high chance of finding your target audience. Be sure to bring your business cards, dress to impress, and be actively talking and engaging with people.

10. Syndicate your content

Syndicating your content on free sites such as Scribd.com, Slideshare.net, Ssquidoo.com is a great way to get exposure for your business. You may also use paid content syndication services from sites such as netline.com, techtarget.com, and bitpipe.com. Make sure your content is high quality and provide educational value. A research report that is relevant and appealing to your target audience would be ideal.

Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Machine!

I’ve given you some powerful and proven lead generation tips that you could use to find hot leads for your sales team. After your prospects have heard about you, they will likely visit your website to learn more about you.

Now, it’s very critical that you have a professional looking website that is optimized for lead generation.

• Make sure your website has a clean and professional look and feel and have important features that convey trust and credibility.
• Make sure you have offers and call to actions sprinkled through your site. Call to Actions such as “Sign up for free Trial”, “Call Us Now for Free Consultation”, “Sign Up to Get Your Free Report”, “Fill out Contact Form to Get Quote” must be prominently placed on your webpages.

Got Any Other Lead Generation Ideas?

If you know of any other good lead generation ideas, please share below!