Every business struggles to generate enough leads. And many businesses are operating on a tight budget, which means plenty of people are hoping to find free lead generation methods which can help them get more customers.
Fortunately, free lead generation is pretty easy if you’re already devoted to good internet marketing. Note that internet marketing itself isn’t free, but once you’re doing it correctly you can get some of the “freebies” I’m going to talk about below.
1. Acquire Social Proof
80% of all customers are jumping online to find businesses, and they’re sifting through a lot of competition. Positive reviews help you stand out from the crowd, generating phone calls from qualified leads.
In the old days, the only way to get a referral would have been through a network of people who know each other. Effective, but slow.
Now, you can get word-of-mouth advertising and referrals from people who just live in the same city, people who have probably never even met one another.
It takes some small effort on your part. You need to send out a simple e-mail to customers after they’re done doing business with you. Of course, you’ll need a way to get the customer’s email address before they leave your establishment.
Doing that will be different for every business. Some will need to do it at the start of the selling process.
This is also the best way to generate reviews that don’t disappear. Read more about review filters if you’d like to know why some of your reviews evaporate, and what to do about it.
2. Build Referral Partnerships
In a previous post I talked about the fact that social media makes it easy to create a very large referral network very quickly. This post was aimed at contractors, but the method could work for just about anybody.
You just have to think about every business that caters to the same niche that you cater to but which does not compete with you.
For example, if you are a cardiologist your patient may well need a dietician, a weight loss center, a pharmacist, and a personal trainer. Your patient may also need other doctors who serve different problems.
And someone who goes to the weight loss center may well need a cardiologist. None of you compete, but you all serve the same customer. Therefore you can work together to send one another leads.
3. Run Offline Events
People love doing things and they love learning things. Just about every kind of business can benefit from running some sort of class, workshop, event, or seminar.
If you decide to do something like this make sure you take full advantage of an event’s potential. They can be amazing avenues for online link building. Events play well on social media, too.
When people attend events you can usually capture their e-mail address and opt-in on paper forms. You can also schedule appointments or sell your goods right on the spot.
In this case, all of your leads are going to be right in front of you, so don’t waste the opportunity.
Stay Focused!
Lead generation takes focused, consistent effort. If you give that effort, the calls will start rolling and keep rolling in.
