Tapping into your network and relying on word-of-mouth can take your business far, but it’s often not enough to continue to grow a business year-after-year. Plus, it’s kind of scary to not have control over the way you get new customers. If you want to fill your pipeline of customers and land more clients year over year, the fact is that you need to invest in a solid lead generation strategy. 

To learn how to do lead gen well and get more leads, read on. We’ll cover: 

• What is lead generation, and why does it matter?
• How Enji helps you get more leads
• Turning leads into clients
• Lead gen best practices

What Is Lead Generation, and Why Does It Matter?

First, what is lead gen anyway? Lead generation is what you do to capture interest at the very top of your sales funnel, whether you offer products or services. At this stage, you can capture information about the people looking at your website or social media channels and just beginning to learn more about you. 

Lead generation is a super important stage in your sales process, even if you have a short sales process. Sure, there are some people who might see what you have to offer and immediately purchase from you, but we can’t rely on that with everyone (wouldn’t that be nice!). 

Instead, people often need a little more time and information to make their decision, and capturing them as a lead allows you to give them both. 

How Enji Helps With Lead Generation 

Before we dive in, let’s take a look at the tools that can help you simplify your entire lead generation strategy. 

With Enji, you can get started with our Marketing Strategy Generator to get an actionable roadmap for increasing your brand visibility. In just a few minutes, you’ll get a list of tasks and initiatives that will help you get more leads.

Next, you can use the AI Copywriter to create the content for your lead generation initiatives (or marketing campaigns). Coming soon, you’ll also be able to create even more nuanced copy with content pillars for education, promotion, and more!

If social media is part of your lead generation strategy, you can also take advantage of Enji’s Social Media Scheduler to batch-create content that drives more customers into your pipeline. 

Pro tip: As with any strategy, you need to monitor and tweak as needed. With Enji’s KPI Dashboard, you can track your leads by source to see where they’re coming from and better understand the channels that are working for you. 

How to Get More Leads

So how do you actually get more leads? The right strategy will depend on your business and audience, but these options are proven strategies to help get you started.

1. Use content marketing 

Breaking the fourth wall here, but do you see us doing that here in this blog post? Leads are at the very tippy top of your sales funnel, so they’re not ready for a ton of salesy language. Instead, they’ll likely resonate more with education about their problem (and eventually, your product or services). Content marketing in the form of blog posts and downloadable lead magnets are a great way to provide value without pushing your services yet. You can hook leads and begin to show them why your brand is trustworthy—basically, you’re showing them that you know your stuff!

2. Use social media

We often use social media for brand awareness, but it’s easy to forget about conversion. Your social media marketing can be a great avenue for lead capture since you can promote your content marketing and link directly to lead capture forms so you’re not always relying on algorithms (and can better segment the people who are super interested in what you have to say).

3. Capture website traffic 

Optimizing your website for SEO is a no-brainer, but what about all the people who land on your site and never take any action? You could be leaving money on the table if you don’t have anything set up to capture those leads. Tools like BDOW! website popups are a great way to offer something to website visitors even if they aren’t ready to make a purchase. Plus, you can set up popups to show strategically after they’ve been on your site for a certain amount of time or are about to exit. 

4. Test your CTAs

The ultimate goal is to get people to buy from you, but your calls to action can be a little more nuanced than that. Take a look at engagement on your website—are there landing pages where people are more likely to exit? Or, are there pages that get a ton of visitors with no action?These pages are a great place to test changing your CTAs to a softer offer instead of just nudging them to make a purchase. You can drive them to a free offer or even just a place to sign up for your newsletter. 

5. Focus on email marketing

As you capture more leads, you need to maintain your relationship with them. The best way to do that is through email marketing. Whenever someone joins your email list, you should be ready to send them additional resources, information about your business, and value (without overdoing it). This not only helps you get more leads but it’ll also help you turn leads into clients.While you’re building out your lead generation strategy, take a look at the email sequences you have set up and see if you can refine them even more. In an ideal world, you’ll have an email sequence for every lead capture touchpoint, so your messaging is specific and personalized.  

6. Continuously track and refine 

If you’re not sure what to do, let your numbers tell you! Monitoring where your leads are coming from can help you determine where your lead generation strategy is working. That way, you can do more of it! As you invest your time and marketing dollars into different channels, you should also be continuously checking your analytics (like once a month, not every day) to see if your strategies are working or if you need to make some changes and pivot.

Turning Leads Into Clients

Building a healthy pipeline of leads is one piece of the puzzle, but once you have their information it’s time to convert! 

At a minimum, you should be collecting your leads’ names and emails so you can add them to your email lists. From there, you can start a lead nurture sequence to foster your relationship and show them why they should purchase with your business. 

Keep in mind that new leads are still pretty cold—they need to warm up to you before you go for the hard sell. 

Lead Gen Best Practices 

Lead generation for small businesses can be intimidating, but the truth is you probably have a ton in place already that you can leverage. If you want to know more about lead generation, the podcast episode below is a great place to start (we got to interview Davey Jones of BDOW, and it was a really great conversation).

As you build your lead gen strategy, keep these best practices in mind: 

1. Know your audience: This is rule #1 when it comes to any part of marketing. Your leads are still part of your target audience, so you need to know what they want and need to get them into your pipeline. 
2. Be consistent: Your lead generation strategy should be just as important as your sales strategy, meaning you should continuously promote it throughout your marketing efforts. With more consistency on your end, you can count on consistent leads. 
3. Focus on quality over quantity: A huge list of leads might seem like a great goal until you have to sift through them to find the people who actually make sense as a customer. Your efforts should focus on high-quality leads that fall into your target audience. 
4. Test and refine: It’s okay to scrap your lead generation ideas as you go. Just like anything else in business, perfection doesn’t exist–as long as you know when to pivot, you’re making progress. 

Get More Leads & Turn Leads Into Clients with Enji!

Ready to be more consistent with lead gen this year? Enji simplifies lead generation with AI-powered marketing tools that help you create compelling content, track performance, and optimize your strategy—all in one place. Start your free trial here!