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Lead generation is the ultimate goal of every digital marketing operation. Without it, you’re going to find it very hard to do a lot of selling. But how to do it most effectively?

Well, as with most things in a constantly evolving marketing landscape, there’s no hard and fast answer to guarantee success. There are a few tried-and-tested methods which have proved productive, but it’s important to remember that what will work for other enterprises won’t necessarily work for your business.

You’re basically aiming at a moving target as consumer trends, legislation and the boundaries of what you can do with different tools and platforms continue to shift.

So as we enter 2019, we thought we’d give you five tips that can make your lead generation strategies fit and ready for your next wave of customers:

Harness the power of social listening

Rather than getting individual snapshots of opinions and pain points as you would with social monitoring, you can use social listening to get an overall picture of your industry, sector or type of product you sell.

This includes not only what people say about what you provide, but also the offerings of competitors, too. There are many social listening tools available which fulfil different functions, depending on what you want to achieve.

You’re probably wondering how this fits into a lead generation strategy, but the reality is that the benefits of using social listening are many. For example, it can give you better insights for shaping messaging in ways that will resonate with the target audience, it can help you engage with influencers (more on those below), and can keep you on the pulse of changing audience behaviours.

Deployed with those purposes in mind, social listening can therefore be immensely valuable to a lead-gen programme.

Set up some social media competitions

Everybody likes winning stuff, right? Well, the same applies in the social media world just as it does in the physical one. And for lead generation, it can be an absolute gold mine for engagement.

Why? It’s simple.

By taking part in a competition and having a chance of winning (even if it’s a small one), people feel more actively involved and invested in your product or brand compared to when they’re just reading something.

By using a specialist tool to run these competitions, you can accurately quantify how successful they are for generating leads and learn how to optimise them for greater success. Do bear in mind, though, that the best competitions are ones that have prizes worth winning – don’t try giving away all your old office stationery!

Don’t neglect content – especially videos

OK, so it’s not a hot new innovation for 2019, but giving someone a meaty piece of content to really get their teeth into is still a very valuable and very effective way of generating leads.

Having someone take five minutes reading a blog about your business and spending time on your website is far more likely to generate interest than if they spend five seconds reading a social post.

If you can build a following of regular readers and subscribers through consistent blogging, then you pretty much have a ready-made group of leads ready to be tapped into.

These same principles apply, and are perhaps even more effective, when producing video content. Forbes research has found that nearly two-thirds of customers say that seeing a video makes them more likely to buy. Going into 2019, it’s definitely worth investigating what video content you can create – either in-house or in partnership with an agency.

Optimize for mobile, now and always

Mobile is a critical part of any business’s digital footprint, and therefore a critical part of any lead generation strategy. Whether at home, on the move, or increasingly when at work, consumers and customers will primarily be using a smartphone or a tablet.

And mobile is not just important for the reason that there are so many mobile users out there. It’s also critical because if you aren’t optimized for mobile, then you’ll quickly fall behind.

Don’t forget that Google assesses websites for how easy they are to use on mobile devices, and will rank sites with a poor mobile UX lower than those that have a good one.

Start 2019 by conducting an audit of every single piece of your web content, checking how good it looks on the page and how much zooming or scrolling is required to reach it. This may sound like an arduous and time-consuming job, but if your mobile web presence is poor, then any other efforts you’re making at lead generation could effectively be rendered irrelevant.

Search for some micro-influencers

Never have influencers been more important in getting messaging out to wider audiences and generating lead. Much like the Roman emperors watching gladiatorial bouts, a thumbs-up (or the digital equivalent thereof) can be hugely powerful. But working with influencers doesn’t necessarily have to mean going right to the top and partnering with the biggest names in your industry.

Whatever your goals, there are micro-influencers out there that can help get your message out in a more focused way. The potential audience may be smaller – think thousands rather than millions – but these niche experts will be talking to more specific and refined audiences that are likely to be far more relevant to the products or services you’re trying to promote.

If you’re looking for expert help in maximising your lead generation, Creation Agency has the services and packages to help you win new business. To find out more about what we do and how we do it, click here.