How to Generate Leads for a New Business

As someone who has started 3 businesses, and worked with countless startups over the years, I have seen what works and what doesn’t for generating leads for a new business.

In this post I will share some of my insights and hopefully guide you as to some of the best methods to generate leads for your new business.

To generate leads for a new business, consider every available tool at your disposal.

Some avenues to generate leads are:

Analyse each method to establish your return on investment and then double down on what works best.

Now, of course, as highlighted above some methods are more suitable to certain types of business and each has their pro’s and con’s. Next, we shall look at each in turn to decide which will be most suitable for your new business venture.

Blog Content

Of course, we’re biased, our entire business is centred around writing blog content for businesses. But we believe writing consistent, high-quality blog posts for your business is one of the best things you can do to generate leads online.  

First, there is a direct correlation between the amount of content you put on your site and the number of page views your site will receive. We’ve found that on average, a well written and optimized blog post will generate our clients anywhere from 500 to 1000 page views per month. Now just imagine if you had 100 blog posts, what could that do for your business? And because this traffic is coming organically from Google, you can expect your blog posts to deliver you consistent traffic.

Second, you own the content. Unlike the other social media platforms we will discuss, you own the content you post on your blog. You’re building IP, this increases the value of your brand should you wish to sell your business down the line.

Finally, a high-quality blog will establish you as an authority in your niche. Not only to Google, but to your customers as well. This increases customer trust, the likelihood of referrals and ultimately sales.

Blogging is hard, though. It takes time for good content to rank in Google and most give up before it does. Blogging takes consistent effort to think of new topics, research topics, write the post, promote your content and optimise it for SEO. It’s simply not good enough to write the occasional blog post, you need to be consistent.

That’s where we come in!

Generating leads on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site with over 740 million registered users. With so many users on the platform, it’s the first place that comes to mind when many think of generating leads online.

As it’s predominantly used by working professionals, LinkedIn will be an excellent source of leads for your business if you operate in the Business to Business (B2B sector).

Now exactly how you promote your business on LinkedIn is a science unto itself. In fact, we will shortly be writing a blog post that covers that exact topic. Once it is live, we will link to it here.

To cover the very basics of LinkedIn lead generation. First you need to optimize your profile. Then you can perform both direct outreach and/or you can create engaging content to bring eyeballs to your product or service. Of course, direct outreach is a faster method to getting leads. However, the content route will build your audience over time and multiply your efforts.

We believe LinkedIn is a phenomenal source of leads for any sized business. That’s why we offer LinkedIn content and advisory as part of our gold content package.

It’s worth keeping in mind that LinkedIn is a very professional platform. This means if you’re targeting the consumer market, while not impossible, you’ll likely find more success on other platforms.

Quora

Quora is one of the largest question-and-answer sites on the internet with over 300m registered users.

According to Quora’s own B2B marketing guide, 54% of users on the platform report an annual household income over $100,000. Users on the platform are also 37% more likely than the general population to hold a management position.

Finally, 63% of Quora’s traffic comes from online searches, meaning you can start ranking for your chosen keywords fast!

With all this in mind, it’s easy to see how Quora can be an excellent place to generate leads for your new business, especially if you’re in the B2B sector or are targeting individuals with more purchasing power.

So, how do you generate leads on Quora?

It’s really quite simple. Find questions that lots of people want to know the answer to (you can see how many people are “following” a question) … and answer them. You need to provide detailed, helpful answers that stand out. If you do so, your answer will get upvotes. The more upvotes, the higher your answer will appear. If you become the top answer for a popular question, you could end up with 10s of thousands of views on your answer.

That’s great, but how does this convert to leads?

Quora allows you to link back to your website from both your bio and from within your answers. Just be careful not to spam your links or your answers may get removed, or worse yet, your profile may get blocked entirely.

We’ll be providing a more in-depth guide on how to generate leads from Quora in the future. So, remember to subscribe below or check back here to learn more.

Email Marketing

This one should be fairly self-explanatory. After all, we’ve all received emails trying to sell us something.

However, it is a little more nuanced. First you have to consider how you will obtain emails to market to.

The 3 primary methods to gather emails are:

• Building your own mailing list

By producing consistent, high-quality content, you can encourage readers to subscribe to your newsletter to hear more of what you have to offer (don’t forget to subscribe below ?)

Another way you can build your own mailing list is to capture the emails of purchasers of your products/services to re-market new offerings to.

Finally, you can create a “lead magnet”, this can be a free download of something your audience will want to get their hands on. The price to download? Simply enter your email address.

• Purchasing data

This is a minefield. However, many people will look to shortcut building an email list by purchasing data from a third party.

Why do we say it’s a minefield? Well, first, there are compliance issues such as GDPR to be cautious of. Second, if you do purchase data, it’s likely that these people have already had their email addresses sold to many buyers… meaning they will be getting hit with a lot of spam emails and may automatically view you in the same light, regardless of what you’re offering. Finally, it’s worth considering what will happen to your data once you purchase from one of these companies.

• Scraping the web for data

Again, there are difficulties with this. First, there are compliance issues to consider. Second, while you may scrape publicly available data on the web, it’s unlikely many would have consented to receiving an email from you. Try not to alienate your potential customers or clients.

What to do after you have your email list?

You can reach out individually, but it’s more likely you’ll want to reach out en masse. You’ll need to tailor your email with a little personalisation (at least address them by their name) and craft excellent, persuasive sales copy (we can help with that!).

You can also add potential clients/customers into an email campaign, whereby you send follow-up emails based on certain triggers, such as the length of time since you sent the first email, whether the individual has read your email, or whether they clicked a link from within your email.

This all sounds very technical. However, there are a variety of tools out there to simplify this process for you such as Lemlist, SalesHandy or MailChimp.

Pinterest

With over 200 billion “pins” shared by over 459 million active users, it would be wise not to ignore Pinterest.

Pinterest is a platform that allows users to share “pins” which are essentially images that link to somewhere else on the web.

Being an extremely visual platform, it’s no surprise that 48% of user’s list shopping as a primary reason they come to the platform.

If you can create engaging content that gets “repins” from other users, you can gain a tremendous amount of traffic.

Hopefully, you can see the power of using Pinterest to generate new business leads. Of course, this platform will work best if you are targeting consumers rather than businesses.

Instagram

With over 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram can be a fantastic platform for generating leads online, especially in the B2C sector.

Instagram is a platform you’ll want to consider for building your brand and overall following. Outside of paid advertising, as a new business, it can be extremely difficult to generate quick wins on the platform. However, it’s not something to neglect. Because, if you can build a following on the platform, over time, the rewards can be tremendous.

It’s not impossible for a new business to generate leads on Instagram for free, however.

Aside from creating excellent shareable content, focus on engaging with others content. Look for authorities in your industry and get involved in the discussion!

Facebook

The social media behemoth that is Facebook has over 2.8 billion monthly active users. That means around 36% of the world’s population logs in to Facebook at least once per month.

However, again like the Facebook owned Instagram, Facebook makes it difficult to get leads on the platform without paying for ads.

If you are willing to invest in ads, Facebook is a superb platform. The amount of data they have on their users makes hyper-targeting super simple.

Want to advertise to 25 to 30-year-old females with an interest in jet-ski’s? It’s all possible.

Especially in a B2C market, running Facebook ads can be extremely profitable. If you can build a system where you generate more in sales than you do in ad spend, you can scale to the moon.

Twitter

With 330m active users, Twitter is another social media giant.

Twitter is used by both consumers and professionals regularly, so can be a great option for both B2B and B2C leads.

One thing to note is you will be beholden to the Twitter algorithm. Twitter doesn’t display each tweet in chronological order, so you must optimize your tweets to perform best with the Twitter algorithm.

Fortunately, Twitter makes this easy for you to manage. If you head over to analytics.twitter.com you can get all the information on what tweets are performing best. This allows you to double down on your most engaging content.

As with most of the other platforms we have mentioned, you can also direct message certain users on Twitter. This allows for generating leads via direct outreach.

Optimizing your website for search traffic

Search engine optimization is critical for any business that wants to generate organic leads online. You want people to find your website when they search for it on Google. You also want them to find your website when they search for topics related to your offering.

There are plenty of resources to help you learn the fundamentals of SEO online. In fact, check back here as we have an SEO guide coming. To improve from there and to rank for topics related to your niche, we recommend starting a blog… or of course having us write it for you.

Paid advertising

We touched on paid advertising when we discussed Facebook. However, all the social media platforms we have discussed have paid advertising options. On top of that, you are of course able to advertise on Google (other search engines exist too) and across their partner networks. With Google ads, you can choose to place your ad on blogs within your niche too.

Another great source for advertising is YouTube. With YouTube, you can bid for adverts on specific channels or even specific videos. This is of course very useful. We will touch on YouTube a little later.  

Keep your ad spending low to start with as you don’t know what will work. Run test campaigns and iterate. Once you have an advert that is generating more returns than spend, double down.

* Free £75 Google AdWords

Influencer Marketing

Celebrity endorsements have been with us since the 1760s, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. With the rise of social media personalities, and so many people having public influence, the term has been rebranded to “influencer marketing”.

Of course, if you want to strike a brand deal with Cristiano Ronaldo or The Rock, you’re going to need deep pockets. However, influencer marketing isn’t out of reach even to early stage startups. And influencer marketing can be extremely lucrative. In fact, a study from 2015 claims that advertisers gain $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

So, how should a startup approach influencer marketing?

Look for online personalities with small but dedicated followings within your niche. Those with smaller followings will often be happy to promote your product for a very small fee, and often, you simply need to send them a sample of your product.

Making use of these micro-influencers can be a powerful way to build your brand credibility within your niche. And by spreading out your influencer marketing efforts, it’s possible your potential customers will see your product multiple times. This building of social proof and brand touch points can be exactly what you need to turn potential customers into paying customers.  

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry. It’s a fantastic way to drive customers and links to your site, and to generate leads on autopilot. Essentially, you provide your affiliates with a custom tracking URL, that when clicked registers your affiliate as a referrer. If the customer who clicked the link goes on to purchase your goods or service, you then pay a commission to the affiliate.

This can be huge, as there is no upfront cost to you. If you have the margins to spare, we would highly recommend looking into starting an affiliate program.

What holds most small businesses back from starting an affiliate program is the technical complexity to get it setup.

Fortunately, there are companies that make this process extremely simple. If you’re running on WordPress, consider plugins such as AffiliateWP or if you’re using Stripe to checkout, you can consider Stripe partners such as Rewardful.

Affiliate marketing works both ways too. If you have a strong blog that is generating a lot of traffic, you can use affiliate programs to earn a small commission when you link out to recommended products or services too.

YouTube

YouTubeis the world’s second largest search engine behind Google. Therefore, if your customers are searching for something in your niche, it’s likely they are looking on YouTube.

We mentioned paid advertising on YouTube earlier, but YouTube can be a fantastic platform to build organic traffic through content.

What’s better, unlike blog content that can take some time to rank, YouTube videos can be picked up by the algorithm within a week and start ranking for your chosen keywords.

Of course this isn’t direct traffic, so you must do some work to convince your viewers to check out your product or service.

We know it’s daunting to get in front of a camera… and a lot of work too. However, it’s precisely because of this that YouTube is such a fantastic opportunity. Fewer people will get in front of the camera. Less competition = more leads.

Cold Calling

Cold calling has been a mainstay of successful businesses for decades and for good reason. With instant feedback, the ability to overcome objections on the fly and the ability to close the sale on the call, there’s no wonder cold calling is the preferred option for many sales teams. All that without a lengthy back-and-forth email chain too!  

However, just the mere mention of cold calling may have sent shivers down your spine (after all… it’s not called *cold* calling for no reason). Cold calling isn’t for the faint of heart. While there’s nothing like building that personal one to one connection on the phone, that sense of rejection as a potential client or customer hangs up on you can be extremely demoralizing.

Cold calling takes a certain mental fortitude. To get over that mental barrier of rejection, try to understand that if someone isn’t pleasant to you, it isn’t personal. They could just be having a bad day. If you can persist and hone your craft, cold calling can be a great source of new leads for many businesses.

Online forums and communities

Last, but certainly not least, we have online communities and forums. This is a very broad category, of course. However, there is enormous value to gain here.

Think:

• Niche specific forums
• Reddit
• Indie Hackers
• Niche specific Slack groups

… And many more

We can’t be super-specific here, it’s time to do your own research and find the best places on the web to promote your content and get involved.

The benefit of these communities is they are often niche specific, and the engagement is one to one. You’re interacting directly with your target customers. Become an active participant in the community, build trust, and you will be rewarded with loyal customers and clients.

Final action points

That just about wraps up our comprehensive guide to generating leads online for a new business. Now it’s time to implement what you’ve learned. Go forth, create your content, share your content far and wide, and join the conversation with your target customers and clients.

Of course, if you’d like any help in creating and sharing that content. Please reach out to one of our friendly team and we’ll be happy to help. Alternatively, check out our main page to see what we’re all about.

We wish you all the success with your business!