In an increasingly competitive digital marketing landscape, the customer journey continues to pose new challenges. Even down to its fundamentals, ensuring revenue that fuels sustainable growth is far from easy. First, you can learn how to generate more leads from your website through blogging, PPC, or other means. Then, you must actually acquire them. In turn, you need to lead them down your sales funnel to complete a macro conversion. And even then, new challenges emerge in the forms of customer retention as the funnel model approaches the flywheel model. This long and arduous process gives birth to the vast array of digital marketing articles online today. Here, we couldn’t possibly cover them all – but we could start with the first step of lead generation. Thus, let us discuss some unconventional ways to generate more leads whose benefits will affect the rest of your funnel.
First and foremost, let us preface this article by distinguishing “lead generation” for “lead acquisition” as we did above. These two terms, because they sound similar, often see interchangeable use. However, that’s not the case in marketing terms, and that’s a crucial distinction to make.
ActiveProspect identifies this distinction quite accurately. It holds that “lead generation is about buying media and converting web traffic into a lead”. Instead, “lead acquisition is about what happens after a lead is generated on a form”. This is the terminology we’ll be using here ourselves; lead acquisition will need to follow these suggestions.
What Are 7 Unconventional Ways to Generate More Leads for Your Website?
Now, let us explore seven commonly overlooked or underused ways to generate more leads.
1.) Humanize (and personalize) your landing pages
Landing pages are often the very first contact a potential lead has with your business. This is such a crucial lead generation avenue that it yielded the current practice of Landing Page Optimization (LPO).
In this article’s context, landing pages need to fulfill two primary functions; generate leads and encourage conversions. “Humanization”, as much as it’s now catching on, is still a rather unconventional way to achieve both. In essence, it entails leaving behind the cold, professional, “salesy” tone of old, over a more natural, human tone. As long as it fits your brand identity and industry, humanization can also pave the way for more effective personalization.
2.) Add live chat to increase website sales
Similarly, live chat bridges the two worlds; it inspires trust through professionalism while also seeming personal. What’s more, it’s incredibly easy to set up, given all the live chat vendor options that exist today.
In terms of lead generation, the above aside, live chat helps reassure visitors of a pleasant potential conversion. It thus fulfills the goal of “converting web traffic into a lead”, as defined above. In turn, as research shows, it helps boost sales in no time as well. Understandably, buyer confidence is a primary factor that affects final sales, and live chat specifically intends to inspire it.
3.) Add Lead Generation Video
Once visitors have found your pages, they still have not become qualified leads, even if they choose to stay. A popular practice to remedy this, although unconventional for this specific purpose, is simply integrating video wherever appropriate.
The potency of video marketing should be unquestionable. Consider how social media marketing hinges on it, especially for such visually-focused platforms as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Similarly, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) insists on the efficiency of media material throughout the written content for lead generation. In much the same way, you may use video, from product demos to customer testimonials, to enrich content and incite engagement in order to generate more leads from your website.
4.) Host a Giveaway to Generate Leads
On to more unconventional ways to generate more leads, you may consider giveaways. This practice does carry the risk of generating unqualified leads, but you can minimize it through proper audience insights.
Specifically, you may host giveaways that interest your intended audience. In doing so, you will ensure you’re generating more leads off your existing traffic while also creating some referral traffic. Achieving this is simple; offer the option for users to participate through email or their social media profiles. That way, you will acquire emails for your email lists and social media information for your targeted marketing efforts. Finally, users will typically continue to engage with future giveaways, increasing your pages’ engagement rates in the process.
5.) Offer an Email Course
Similar to the above, you may offer an email course if your brand and industry allow it for the purpose of generating more leads to your website. This largely falls in line with giveaways and free resources, but it also helps retain leads that you’ve already generated.
For example, consider offering a 14-day course on your subject of choice. You may create material for it from scratch or consolidate and repurpose existing valuable content for it. In this case, you’ll be generating an initial lead to your website through them opting in for it. At the same time, they will continue to engage with your content over days, warming up to your sales funnel.
6.) Use Pre-filled Forms to Generate More Leads
However, the most challenging part of getting visitors to opt-in seems to be convincing them to fill out the form. There’s a reason why many such articles insist on simplifying the process and forms; audiences value their time that much. To remedy this, you may consider simply using pre-filled forms.
This one isn’t among the most unconventional ways to generate more leads, but it seems to still see little use. That’s arguably unfortunate because it does offer a way to reduce friction and make opting in all the easier. Therefore, you may use third-party API services to present your visitors with pre-filled forms, reducing their expected effort.
7.) Use an Interactive Quiz
Finally, in much the same way, you may consider another unconventional lead generation method; interactive quizzes. This practice, too, is starting to gain traction through such famous assets as Neil Patel’s LeadQuizzes tool. Moreover, it can understandably complement existing social media strategies.
At a glance, it may seem that quizzes may not fit many brands or industries. However, some. innovation in adapting one to fit your brand can suffice to use it effectively. Consider how quizzes see use from airlines, universities, and make-up companies; these have nothing in common, industry-wise, but it works. Simply consider what your quiz offers in exchange for a sign-up that your audiences will value, and offer it generously. Finally, you may also promote your quiz on social media for even more traction so that you can generate more leads from your website.
Photos used
https://pixabay.com/photos/analytics-charts-graphs-traffic-2606963/
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/chatbot-bot-assistant-support-icon-4071274/
https://www.pexels.com/photo/faceless-woman-using-laptop-while-sitting-on-bed-3975589/
https://www.pexels.com/photo/android-app-blog-blogging-267389/
