5 Lead Generation Tips for 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Lead Generation|5 Lead Generation Tips for 2021Let me be straightforward – there’s no magic list of lead generation strategies that will make you a fortune in 2021. When it comes to generating leads, we don’t get a magic button to push. Still, there are certain things that you can try and do, many of them regularly, that will boost your odds at bigger success by the end of this year.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation comprises marketing activities that result in collecting information and using it to build a list of potential clients. This data can be collected both online and offline. Offline channels include cold calling, direct mail, hosting events, print ads, etc. Online channels include websites, blogs, ads, social media posts, and SEO.

What does this mean for you?

It means that this year, you should take action as soon as possible. Roll up your sleeves, collect the necessary data, check out some presentation templates, send out emails, and get out there to make your brand more recognizable than ever. With all this being said, here are the 5 most promising tips to follow this year.

5 Tips for Lead Generation in 2021

Have you been looking to expand your brand and make it bigger? Here are some excellent ideas for generating leads these days.

1. Knowledge Base Software

Knowledge base software is an essential lead generation tool these days. This applies to a database where you store a wide range of information. Such bases are located online and in most cases, based on clouds.

How can you use such software?

Essentially, this software is the brain of your company. You can use it for both internal purposes and communication or external support and communication. By using free knowledge base software, marketers can manage, store, and organize the documentation and information they need to take any further steps into branding their business.

You’re probably a very busy person and as such, you need to find a single solution to most of your problems. Rather than having all your data spread across systems and platforms, apps, email chains, tools, widgets, and notes – you should have them placed in a central, easy-to-access place.

When you have it all organized and gathered, you can create better planned and carefully executed lead generation strategies.

2. Email marketing

For many years now, email marketing has been one of the top priorities of business managers and owners when it comes to lead generation. Research shows that over 80% of marketers already use it in their strategies. Seeing how email marketing stands right beside content in terms of affordability, this is one of people’s favorite methods to find more leads.

According to BtoB Magazine, 59% of marketers consider email to be their best channel for generating revenue. Chances are, you are already aware of this and have built your email marketing to some point. This year, make it your priority. Create quality content to send to potential customers and use cold email outreach to generate new leads. If you do it properly i.e. with quality content and by targeting the right people, it will surely get some leads flowing in.

3. Automation

On average, 51% of companies use at least one automation feature or platform. This comes as no surprise – people are busier today than ever. Lead generation used to be much simpler when you needed to offer a downloadable product or white paper, create an email funnel and simply pass it off. Now that the competition is much bigger, this takes long hours that many marketers don’t have at their disposal.

In 2020, most companies opted for automation in at least one project in terms of marketing. Some automated the tasks for employees, others used this to schedule their online presence, etc. As long as you use accurate and carefully collected data to prep the automation process, this can save you a lot of time and yield amazing results.

If you don’t know where to start when testing for your brand and lead generation, use this usability testing guide. It will help you find out which parts of your business can be automated and how this can be achieved.

Some of the most prominent ways that automation is driving lead generation efforts in the past few months include chatbots, tool integrations, and of course, nurturing leads. Estimates have already shown that by the end of this year, the automation industry will be worth over $83 billion. This number sure gives you a push in that right direction, doesn’t it?

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Lead Generation|5 Lead Generation Tips for 20214. Content Marketing

Content has always been the strongest tool in marketing. This applies to lead marketing, too. This year, when you think content, think whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and videos. But most importantly, focus on quality content.

Creating quality content demands a magnitude of resources, experience, and planning. You need it for your email funnel, website, blog, social media posts, and even the conversations you have with potential customers. They don’t say that ‘’content is king’’ without a reason.

High-quality infographics, whitepapers, videos, eBooks, webinars, and podcasts have been in high demand these past few years. This year, you should make it your brand’s priority to create only original, quality, and planned content across different platforms and for different purposes.

One of the most promising content types is a video right now. Experts have predicted that by next year, 82% of the internet traffic will be dedicated to some kind of video content. This shows that video marketing:

  • increases engagement
  • provides more accurate, visual, and detailed demonstrations
  • is an amazing tool for spreading word-of-mouth

How does this apply in the lead generation world, you might ask?

In this sense, videos can be used to get your brand’s name recognized, make it memorable, send more personalized follow-ups, and reach a wider audience.

5. Social Media Communities

Social media doesn’t always have a good reputation when it comes to lead generation. In reality, this can go both ways. But, if you know where to look, social media can turn out to be the best place to find new potential customers.

In addition to social media advertising, try tapping into online communities and social media forums on different platforms. Find out where your target audience hangs out. Some research on your current audience will help you narrow down a buyer persona, information that you can use to find the right groups and reach out to them.

When you find them, how can you use them to generate leads?

First, make sure that the group allows for promotional content. Hunt down the groups that are relevant to your brand and mention the problems you aim to and can solve. Second, check the group’s post. Go through their history and decide whether or not your target audience hangs out there.

Once you find those groups, get subscribed and slowly build yourself a name in the group. Answer people’s questions to establish yourself and your brand as experts in the field. Provide people with solutions and ask them questions that could help you improve your strategies. Reply to their comments and messages. This is how you will generate new leads.

Final Thoughts

Trends like video, automation, and knowledge base software can easily become a win for landing new customers, sales, and leads. Even though these tips aren’t written in stone, they have proven to be very effective in the past couple of months. Research shows that their effects will only grow, which makes it undeniable that you need to use these tactics in your lead generation strategy.

Essential Elements Of A Business Website in 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Essential Elements Of A Business Website in 2021

Early adopters of the internet will remember just how odd our early engagements with the web were. While there was increasing access to the web from the middle of the 1990s, Google didn’t arrive until 1998, and wasn’t in particularly widespread usage for a while after that. Often, as an early adopter, you would type in a URL from a piece of paper you’d scrawled it upon, and this would take you to a website with a background that made overly heavy use of graphics. It was probably a GeoCities effort, built by someone hoping to drive business by using the new, exciting World Wide Web.

How far we have come, when most businesses now have their own websites, and few of them are as migraine-inducingly messy as they used to be. Now, the issue is less one of wholesale changes, and more one of details. If you want your website to be all it can be now, it is a matter of finding a few tweaks here and there. However, those changes are still important, because everyone is on the internet these days, and a small change in the way your site works can give you a change in traffic that looks small – but which, in such a competitive atmosphere, can be monumental for your business. Such changes include the following:

Hooking the viewer within the first few seconds

There is something to be gained by remembering the eyesore websites of the mid-1990s when you are designing a website for the present day. One of the issues with early websites is that there was simply too much going on, and it wasn’t very well organised. The chances of someone staying for long on a website that does that today are next to none. If you want someone to stick around on your site, then the first thing they see needs to be clean, uncluttered and at the same time somehow informative.

Ideally, the home page will operate as a menu in the first instance. From here you should be able to navigate to anywhere else on the site within two clicks, and it should be easy to see how you do that. Here is not where you use a lot of pictures, text or graphics, because that can be visually off-putting, and the one rule of a decent home page is to not give anyone a reason to click away to something else right away. All you need on the first view of your site is a navigation menu, and potentially the basics of some content – if your site is an online store, perhaps have a banner that takes visitors straight to some of your most popular products or ranges. Nothing flashier than that, though – don’t overwhelm anyone.

Getting the ideal Content Management System in place

Continuing the theme of how different the internet was a couple of decades ago, it’s worth remembering that the websites back then were designed and often coded by people who put a lot of time into teaching themselves the tricks. While there were some drag-and-drop options that allowed you to build at least a home page, making a website was a labor of love – much though that may surprise a few people.

In the present day, it is easier than ever for someone with no real coding experience to create a website themselves. It’s still not necessarily always a good idea, but it is easier, and the range of options that we have for making it work is greater than ever. The level of choice we have is impressive, but you have to make sure that for you it is a blessing rather than a curse. Modern content management systems offer you the chance to radically change the look of your site and what it offers – but they can quickly become confusing if you try to do too much. Ensure you’re using a CMS that is easy to work with – because quite apart from anything, if something goes wrong and knocks your website offline, you want to be able to fix it without having to dig around for the fault.

Content is still king

A website is your own corner of the internet that allows people to learn about your business, communicate with you and maybe make a purchase or two. When people land on your website with the intention of engaging, there is a truth you need to recognize: they could, with a change of luck, have landed with any of your competitors. And if you don’t give them a user experience worthy of the name, there is still a very good chance that they will find your competitors after navigating away. You need to keep them interested with useful content, which takes time to create.

You’ll hear it said of website creation that “content is king”, and that’s an undeniably true statement. An attractive website with bad content is probably worth less than a garish website with good content, because if you can get past the visual assault at least you can enjoy reading the latter, and you’ll come back to it. If a website bores you, you’ll navigate away and not have a reason to come back. This is why website creators, or SEO agencies should focus on user engagement primarily. It could be informative blog posts, relevant video content or useful widgets, but you need to make sure your site hosts items your target customers want to see.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Business Website|Essential Elements Of A Business Website in 2021Everything needs to work

This rule might sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often you’ll find a site that includes broken links, features red Xs where you should be seeing pictures, or just seems to have gone wrong somehow. This website is, as we have noted, your little corner of the internet, and it is more or less constantly receiving visitors (if the SEO basics have been done right, anyway). Now, if your home was repeatedly hosting visitors, most of them strangers to you up to now, would you feel comfortable if the carpets hadn’t been hoovered, or one of your chairs was upside down? Of course not, but it’s all too easy for the digital equivalent of this to damage things for you.

A regular audit of your site, picking up on and removing broken links and images, will make the site work faster and look better. Perhaps more importantly than either of these points, it will likely ensure that your visitors are more likely to return – and when they do, they’re likely to have brought money with them. If the broken links and images are in blog posts they will usually be very simple to remove, but remember that if they are generated by the CMS backend that they may take a lot more work to either fix or remove. Also, once removed, you need to make sure that they don’t leave a glaring empty space.

Old broken links and missing pictures have much the same effect for your site that boarded-up windows would for a brick-and-mortar store – you might be open for business, but it won’t look that way.

Your “About us” page isn’t just filler

If you’ve ever used WordPress or Joomla or a similar CMS, then you’ll be used to the presence of an “About us/me/the author” section in the backend of the system. It is possible to delete this from your site, and some people choose to do so thinking that it is an unnecessary addition to the bandwidth the site will need to use. They are mistaken.

The About Us section is where people will go if they are looking out for information that isn’t immediately obvious from the rest of the site. You can include an FAQ here, but of primary importance is that you set out some information about your company. When was it founded, how many people work for you, where are you based? All of these will be useful information for someone looking to learn more about you and potentially become a customer.

Equally, this is the chance to lay out something of a mission statement, or at least lay out certain policies that your business has. If you are selling cosmetics, for example, you can include in the “About us” statement that you only handle products that are cruelty-free. If you sell coffee, you can make clear here that all of your coffees are grown under Fair Trade rules. In a market that is increasingly concerned with living up to strict ethics, this is the kind of thing that people are going to want to know – and including it in the About Us section also makes you more likely to show up when people search for “fair trade coffee” or “cruelty-free cosmetics”.

We’ve come a long way in 25 years when it comes to website building. If it sometimes feels like we have a lot further to go, it’s because the internet is so powerful it can allow us to create wonderful things. It’s worth taking the time to ensure your website has everything it needs to succeed, because the results are worth the work.

Top Three Digital Marketing Strategies For Your Business Campaign

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |PPC Agency|Top Three Digital Marketing Strategies For Your Business CampaignOne of the best methods to grow your business is by having a strong online presence. It doesn’t matter what the size of your company and what type of industry it is. The best way to grow your business is via digital marketing. Read on to learn more about the top three digital marketing strategies that are still relevant to consumers in 2021.

PPC Advertising

If you are looking to build your business via digital marketing, getting in contact with a top PPC agency might be a vital step towards it. If you have never heard of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing method before, you need to know that it refers to using a search engine advertisement that generates clicks and links to your website. With that said, instead of organically earning those clicks from your potential clients, the sponsored ads displayed at the top of Google SERP will generate those clicks for you.
You bid on specific keywords that you want the ads to display and show up for. Subsequently, when a user uses those keywords in their search, your ad gets triggered and appears on SERPs’ top. Then, if the user decides to click on the displayed ad, you pay for it. It is essential to know that you only pay for the ad results and not for the ad space. PPC can include advertising on platforms other than search engines, such as social media.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy for companies. In this strategy, the companies focus on connecting to, engaging with, and reaching out to potential clients via content. It hasn’t to be written or textual content alone. The content can include infographics, which are essential for backlinks, videos, and blog posts. It can also be picture tutorials. Anything that provided value to the readers about the services or products. The content, however, needs to be informational and not be produced from a selling-oriented perspective.

For instance, if you run a business that sells organic weed, you should be writing about the health benefits of organic weed. You include specific keywords while writing/ producing individual pieces of content. Irrespective of the content format, it is essential that it stays relevant, informative and benefits the audience in one way or the other. This digital marketing strategy’s overall goal is to provide valuable content to the audience and generate conversions through the increase of website traffic.

Email Marketing

The objective of email marketing is to retain your existing clientele while gaining additional customers. This digital marketing strategy is an effective technique for increasing brand awareness and encouraging continual purchases. The primary part of email marketing is to develop and refine your business campaigns while your consumer base grows. You can think of email marketing in terms of content marketing, where you provide informative value to your clients. Otherwise, you will only lose clients, and people will unsubscribe from your business emails. The underlying idea is that clients will remember your products and services when they need to make a relevant purchase.

The Foundations Of Business Growth

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Business Growth|The Foundations Of Business GrowthTrying to expand your business during a global pandemic may seem like madness. However, you are an entrepreneur and you don’t want to rest on your laurels. Your ambition means that you want your startup to be able to compete with the already established industry rivals and you are eager for your venture to have a global presence. However, when the world is on more of a go-slow, people are less likely to part with their cash, and the economic markets have plummeted, it can be a challenge to see how you can grow your business. Follow this guide to the foundations of business growth.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Business Growth|The Foundations Of Business GrowthWebsite

Your online presence will really come into its own as more people stay at home and spend more time on the Internet. Online shopping was always a factor of the millennial market but now all demographics are partaking. If you are a retailer, you need to morph your business model into an online venture. The website that you produce is crucial to attract your potential market. Rather than opt for a flashy all singing all dancing website, you need to focus more time on your SEO. If you don’t know your keyword from your meta tag, you need to consider outsourcing your web design to a WordPress developer who can create a site that will emulate your brand and your ethos while appearing high up the Google search rankings. Make every section of your site within three clicks and easy to navigate to hold a potential customer’s interest. Overhaul your website and you could find your customer base growing.

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the perfect vehicles for online marketing when considering your business. However, you also need to hone your social media platforms to grow your business. If you want more followers, you need to post meaningful and relevant content on a daily basis. The Twitter feed that you craft is the ideal way to communicate directly with your clientele. If a potential customer has a query, they will tweet you. This comment will be in the public domain so it is crucial that you respond promptly. Use an informal and chatty tone. The corporate hard sell doesn’t work anymore. The better the content that you post, the more shareable it becomes, thus increasing your follower numbers and global presence.

Trade Shows

If you can attend a trade show, get registered. These amazing events provide you with a readymade footfall of individuals who are eager to source your services. Go to a niche and industry specific event. By utilizing your pitch effectively, you can show off your wares, products and services. Place branded banners across your stall and encourage people to take a look at your products in action. Enthuse with your ideas and business acumen, and have some on-the-day deals that potential buyers can’t refuse. Ensure that you create an email list and follow up any leads on your return to the home office. With any luck, your clientele will grow.

These foundations of business growth will enable your venture to thrive and not merely survive during this pandemic.

4 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Brick & Mortar Retail Stores

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Social Media Marketing|4 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Brick & Mortar Retail StoresBrick & mortar retail stores are a vital part of the communities in which they exist. By having an established storefront, they’re able to interact with the people who pass by on a daily basis. This interaction makes it easy to improve engagement, as people can stop in when they’re walking by or once they get off of work, walking in to see what this small business is all about or to purchase a product out of support.

Yet, having just a physical location only goes so far. While some small businesses might be staunch about avoiding the digital realm, to the point of being labeled a Luddite, there is a lot to be gained by entering digital spaces. Social media has particularly changed the way that small businesses sustain themselves. In some cases, it has allowed these small brick and mortar stores to survive, as they’ve been able to develop digital audiences that support them in times where the storefront isn’t performing. The benefits are far-reaching, too, where social media marketing techniques like influencer and affiliate marketing measures help to improve the success of business. Interested in how you can start? Here is an explanation of social media platforms and four ways social media marketing can benefit your small business.

The Main Social Media Platforms Simplified

For brick and mortar establishments unfamiliar with social media, here is a basic breakdown of the major platforms and how they can be beneficial to your business:

  • Facebook – For small businesses like brick and mortar retailers, Facebook is the perfect platform for basic marketing and advertising opportunities. If you can develop a following from your local community, you can transform your business’s page into something of a blog, where you can keep local consumers in the loop about products, sales, events, and more. The platform’s “Live” feature also allows you to capture footage from around your storefront, letting you interact with customers by showing off staff and everything going on.
  • Instagram – If your company is more based on aesthetic, Instagram might be the place for you. You can curate a feed where images with a specific color scheme and look can be shared, letting consumers know what products you have to offer, all while hinting at the lifestyle your brand represents.
  • Twitter – Looking for a way to communicate with customers? Twitter can be a good avenue, where the site can be treated as a form of customer service, helping you stay in touch with customers throughout the day.
  • YouTube – If you’re looking to show off the look of your brand, it might be best to move from Instagram photography to video. Minute-long videos can make for great content, where you keep followers in the know concerning your business. You can even take it a step further and film 10-plus-minute videos where you review products or provide educational information to viewers.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Social Media Marketing|4 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Brick & Mortar Retail StoresKnowing which platform is right for you will involve studying your business to better understand what it wants to say to the community, and on which platform your audience is most likely to be found. But, with all of this in mind, here are some of the essential ways that marketing on these social media platforms can benefit your brick and mortar business:

1. Utilizing the Internet to Build a Digital Relationship

One of the greatest things about creating social media profiles for your business is that it allows you to develop digital relationships that can transcend to real-life transactions—if you’ve never had a website, this isn’t likely to happen, so that’s something you should do sooner rather than later.

The best part about starting out is that you don’t have to do much, in terms of marketing and advertising. Rather, work to start following other businesses and begin communicating with fellow social media users. On top of this, start posting content that is going to develop a following on its own: Post pleasing pictures to Instagram with relevant hashtags; follow other local businesses on Facebook to start growing a local community that can grow from there.

Once these relationships are established, you can begin moving onto more complicated features of the apps, all while your initial community continues to provide you with long-lasting engagement.

2. Using Referral Marketing

When starting out, one of the best ways you can get yourself up and going is through the help of referrals. Technically known as affiliate marketing, this is the establishment of relationships with other businesses, where a company/person is paid to endorse and promote a business.

This can be an essential way to get your feet on the ground as a new social media user, as you can utilize influencers and fellow businesses to your advantage, having them promote your business’s page to their own larger audiences. In turn, this will hopefully lead to new followers and potential site visitors, helping you gain traction and a digital following of your own. The best part is that this can still be done even once you have an established following, as there will always be room for growth in the digital world.

3. Posting Content That’s Relevant and Eye-Catching

One of the most important things to gaining a following online, and remaining relevant, is posting content that people want to see. Your posts shouldn’t just be pictures of your products followed by a description of what they do. Rather, a story should be told.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Social Media Marketing|4 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Brick & Mortar Retail StoresIf you’re a local business, you can talk about how your community’s character is a part of everything you do. If you’re promoting health and wellness products, you can craft a story related to how this product is intended to improve a person’s life by developing a healthier daily routine. The options are endless, but you want to find something that will resonate with social media users, as that’s what is going to entice them to follow your business and stick around.

Ideally, you need to make sure that your content isn’t just creative, but is also professional looking. This means building your own skills in photography through photography online courses and honing your creative writing abilities through creative writing courses and workshops or it means using the skills of a professional and expert third party, such as a professional product photographer and a professional copywriter.

4. Making an Inviting Website

As mentioned before, you need a website if you don’t currently have one. While you can rely on getting business in-store from local followers, that won’t translate to the national or global market. Instead, you need a website that is reflective of your business—a place where social media users can be directed to make purchases with your retail store. This will be essential to your business’s longevity, as it will allow you to create a profitable digital audience, giving you an extra level of protection if anything were to ever happen to your storefront.

Improve Your Business’s Security with Social Media Exposure

The methods you explore when developing a social media presence, from affiliate marketing to website development, will vary, but they’re all intended to improve the security of your business going forward. Think about the ways social media can help your business, and begin posting sooner rather than later.