Just like with any type of digital marketing effort, lead generation is the initial stage. The goal of inbound lead generation is to encourage visitors to come to your website by offering content that is appealing and that captures their interest and attention. In fact, this is an important part of any small business SEO strategy.
It’s also necessary to establish your website, so it is poised to receive new leads from different channels and so that you get the biggest benefit from the inbound lead generation strategy you use. With that in mind, here are some effective lead generation strategies you can implement in your business’s digital marketing plan.
Write Quality and Engaging Guest Blog Posts
Any part of a viable small business SEO plan is guest blogging. This occurs when you create content for another website to help increase the exposure, following, authority, and brand awareness of your blog. Guest challenges occur when you attempt to find the right sites, pitch an idea, and get the proposal approved. You can’t forget that actually creating the content is important – it must be a high-quality piece that will be approved and published.
To do this, the first step is to establish clear goals, standards, and expectations for finding the right opportunities. One example will be if your goal is to increase traffic. If so, spending your time writing for smaller niche sites with minimum traffic would be a waste. Try writing for a smaller, industry-specific website to position your business as an industry authority.
You must prioritize the sites that you pitch based on overall relevance. This means trying to find websites that will interest and attract your target audience. It’s also necessary to pitch to new sites that have never connected with you. This is important since connections from the same site, again and again, do not have as much weight as links you get from new sites.
It’s possible to conduct a Google search to determine what sites accept guest posts. You can search for “guest post” or “write for us.” Just remember, there’s more to it than just finding a site. If you want to get SEO “juice” from your effort, you have to consider two things:
- The site’s DA (Domain Authority). This determines the site’s backlink profile or domain authority.
- The total search traffic the site receives.
To benefit your small business SEO efforts, you must find sites with a good DA and significant traffic.
Start Leveraging Video Content
Today, video is much more effective than any other type of media in reaching potential customers. It may offer you a viable way to promote your brand identity and increase public recognition. It also allows you to share concepts faster and more effectively, enhance engagement, develop a personal connection with your visitors, and reach larger and new audiences.
It’s estimated that 86% of video marketers believe that using video is effective in inbound lead generation. Also, 87% believe that video offers a positive ROI (return on investment).
Before producing a video, it’s important to determine who your audience is. Usually, audiences are separated into categories that will reflect your business’s different goals. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to create a list of personals that includes information such as who they are, how they will interact with your business, what problems they have, and anything else that may assist you in shaping the content you use for your videos.
By doing this, you can make the material more appealing to your audience, which will help you better highlight the services and products you have and eventually lead to more conversions. It may be helpful to use keyword research to determine what your audience would like to see in the videos you create. It may also be beneficial to conduct client surveys or even one-on-one calls to better understand their needs.
Consider User-Generated Content (USG)
When it comes to improving your small business SEO strategy, you can’t overlook the effectiveness of user-generated content. It’s a cost-effective and viable inbound lead generation technique. With the increasing use of social media and influencers, USG content has a far reach and can provide results that other types of content can’t compete with.
USG is any content created by a non-affiliated contributor. This includes product users, followers, and anyone else that is outside your company.
You will find there are several creative techniques you can use to get quality UGC. One example was with Coca-Cola back in 2012. The soft drink company released limited-edition bottles with famous names on them. At this point, customers encouraged the company to release bottles with their names or names of relatives and friends on them. If they found a bottle that had their name, they would take a picture and share it via social media with a specialty branded hashtag.
The result of this campaign was Coke selling over 150 million customized bottles. Over 650,000 photos and more than one billion impressions were found on Instagram for the posts that featured this hashtag (#ShareaCoke).
One of the first things you may want to do when creating a UGC campaign is to create a unique, branded hashtag and encourage your fans to use them. You should let your customers know that you plan to feature posts they make sharing their experiences with your business via social media. Sharing user-generated content may even help to motivate others to share what your company offers.
Add a Live Chat Feature to Your Website
Adding live chat features to your site is an easy, effective, and fast way to help you create a more pleasant experience for people visiting your site. However, if you equip your live chat with optimized lead-generation features, it’s another strong channel that comes to you at no extra cost. Besides that, it helps to increase real-life engagement, increasing the inbound lead generation that comes from your website.
If you want to achieve the best results possible from the live chat you set up, be sure you are sending the right message at the right time. You can set up a personalized and automatic message that helps to start a discussion with people when they are on certain pages of your site, such as shopping cart and price pages.
If your business operates globally, it can also include multilingual customer service tools to help you better engage with your customer base by letting them talk to your business in their native language. It’s smart to generate announcements for any new website visitors via live chat and let them know about the latest flash deals, discounts, product updates, and other information to convert these visitors into leads.
Create a Podcast
The use of podcasts is something that has become extremely popular in recent years. In fact, around 64% of people in the U.S. have (at some point) listened to a podcast. Additional data have shown that about 54% of people who listen to a podcast say they will likely purchase from a brand they learn about through an advertisement they hear while listening to a podcast. This makes it clear that podcasting offers a great way to reach more people and new people.
By creating a well-produced podcast, you will further establish your business as an authority or thought leader in your niche or industry. This also gives you the ideal platform for sharing and showcasing your expertise with your audience. You also don’t have to do this on your own. By collaborating with other experts in your industry, you can build your reputation while providing even more value to your audience.
This is important, especially in the B2B field, where decision-makers are much more difficult to please. Covering the right topics on your podcast will also help you build more brand awareness. They will effectively support the multi-channel marketing efforts you have in place as part of your bigger small business SEO strategy. It will also help you when it comes to expanding your reach. In the end, more people will be interacting with your brand, all at different touch points. This helps to benefit brand recognition and helps to improve customer loyalty.
Improve Your Small Business SEO with the Right Inbound Lead Generation Strategies
When it comes to inbound lead generation, there are more than a few factors to consider. If you want to get more leads and improve your business’s presence, then use the tips above. In the end, this is going to help improve your overall small business SEO strategy and ensure you achieve the desired results.