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How many of you have WhatsApp installed on your phones and use it regularly? If I were to guess, I’d say it’s probably more than 90% of you.
But do you know the story of how WhatsApp came to be?
Jan Koum was born in a small village near Kiev, Ukraine. His family came from poverty and emigrated to California, where he started learning about computers in his spare time.
By the time he was 18, he had developed impressive computer programming skills, and in 1997, Yahoo! hired him as an infrastructure engineer. Here, he met his future co-founder, Brian Acton. And in 2009, they legally established the business as WhatsApp Inc.
What stands out in this story is that the founders built the app and grew its popularity with no advertising at all.
So, how did they generate leads and convert them to over 10,000 downloads daily without advertising?
It was through the most powerful form of marketing – word of mouth. Up until recently, the application relied on the premise of users referring WhatsApp to their friends and families.
In short, word-of-mouth marketing led to the rise of a business to a one billion user base.
The founders eventually sold the application to Facebook in 2014. Today, WhatsApp has become so widely used that it has almost fully replaced dated forms of communication, like texting or calling.
Here are ten other ways that you can generate leads for your business:
If you can answer these questions, that’s the first step towards generating business leads. After all, how can you market to an audience that is not defined?
Once you clearly understand who you are targeting, you can move on to determine how to turn them into a lead. In short, you have to first define your lead in order to turn them into a lead.
Let’s put it this way…
When a stranger initiates a relationship with you by showing an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural.
And the only way you can show organic interest is by first knowing your target audience clearly.
As the name suggests, a company’s digital footprint refers to the trail left behind on the Internet, which has the potential to reach millions of users around the world.
It combines social media, websites, search engine optimisation (SEO), emails sent and received, and all the information you submit online.
By creating a uniform and sharp digital footprint, you can quickly generate leads from customers and potential customers who land on you.
When it comes down to it, the important question to ask is, “How can my company have a positive and effective digital footprint that will drive customers to my business and make it grow?”
To start with, optimise your webpage and establish a strong, authoritative presence on social media.
Remember, social media is the easiest way to reach the widest range of customers at the lowest price—free!
Let’s talk about LinkedIn, which is absolutely heaven-sent!
If used correctly, LinkedIn can help you find new connections, connect with people and businesses, and generate tons of new leads.
The audience on LinkedIn has 2x the buying power that your average web audience has. And that’s probably why B2B marketing using LinkedIn is especially effective and can yield very profitable results.
How do you go about this?
At the most basic level, connect with members of your target audience, engage with their posts, and message them directly to offer your product or service.
At Outside ideas, we are just initiating the use of Linked Helper, an automation tool that assists users to generate leads.
Have you ever won a giveaway? How did it make you feel?
What made you think about the brand, and how likely are you to buy from them?
My guess is that you felt REALLY good, and you would probably buy from them again and even refer your friends to them. After all, who doesn’t like free things?
Giveaways are extremely powerful in generating leads for a business. They help people to identify your brand and encourage them to engage with you.
In many giveaways, you’ll be asked to nominate someone else, which subtly increases brand awareness.
Giveaways are a great way to reach a large audience, introduce your product, and generate leads.
Quora is one of the most underrated platforms online, yet it can be a great tool to generate leads.
Over 300 million unique users visit Quora every month. How can you use this to your advantage? It’s simple. Ask and answer questions.
The caveat is that you should only be engaging with topics related to your business offering. You don’t want to answer questions about pizza only for people to click and find out that you’re a business coaching firm.
Out of the 400,000 topics discussed on Quora, you can find a topic that’s related to your business offering.
If you answer enough users’ questions and solve their problems, they will spot your profile and most likely visit your website.
“Competition makes us faster, collaboration makes us better.”
If you can identify websites where your content would be relevant and collaborate with them on blog posts, you’ll achieve A LOT.
From an SEO standpoint, the primary objective of a guest post is typically to get a link back to your site and, hence, get people to know about you.
Make sure that your articles have relevant information for your audience. Your content should have really unique information to keep the users interested.
Lastly, be sure that the site you choose has a strong domain authority and is well-respected by your audience.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a super powerful tool for generating leads.
A few months ago, The Collaboration Junkie, Dave Plunkett, graced us with a FANTASTIC talk, and his three takeaways for getting referrals were:
Watch Dave Plunkett’s talk on referrals.
Coming from the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced almost the entire world into lockdown, it’s clear that webinars work almost as well as physical meetings, if not better.
If you can offer your audience free webinars to help them in their business, you are likely to attract a fresh audience.
If you’re speaking to business owners, they can benefit from webinars about marketing, project management, sales and bookkeeping, and generating leads.
Another example would be if your target audience is people in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. You can offer them a webinar on transporting their goods quickly and affordably.
Webinars allow you to share ideas, educate, and demonstrate your skills to your target audience.
And while you are at it, more and more people get to know about your product and are encouraged to buy.
You’ve probably heard it over and over again…
People don’t buy products; people buy people.
The more you can humanise your brand and make it relatable to your audience, the better.
Testimonials are one great way to do this. They can lead you to an entirely new set of potential customers and increase your sales. Beyond that, they build your brand credibility and help more people believe in you.
You can leverage testimonials in two ways:
“In the time it took you to read this sentence, 20 million emails have been sent.” ~Jon Walton
If you’re still wondering if email marketing really works, here is your answer.
And to put the icing on the cake, statistics show that COVID-19 brought email marketing back from the brink of extinction.
There are a few things to keep in mind when you are generating leads through email marketing.
I’d like to believe that most businesspeople do it to increase sales and their cash flow.
To do this, you must first generate leads for the business and then convert them into customers.
Lead generation is a sensitive process in that you are trying to create a relationship with potential customers. During this process, you want to come off as a credible, strong, and preferred brand.
In summary, there are ten ways through which you can generate leads for your business:
If you need help to set up a business lead-generation strategy, get in touch with us.
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