Lead Generation For Startups: A Workable Guide

To start a business is hard work. You may have the greatest idea and the best brand, but if you don't have leads, you won't sell. Even the best business won't survive without profits.

At Answer, we've helped all sorts of businesses of all sizes optimize their marketing and we've learned a lot about how to get leads. With this guide, we'll help you decide on a lead generation process that's ideal for your particular situation and consistently produces leads that lead to start-up sales.

unique challenge of generating leads

Generating leads is important for any company to thrive, but it can be a particularly difficult challenge for startups. Why?

Inventory limited. Once you start a business, you'll never have enough time and money to do whatever you want. Each penny counts whether it's paying staff, leasing new office rooms, or even collecting enough cash to survive. Which means you can't throw money at all the various lead-generation approaches you've heard about.

Nobody's name. A brand-new startup is a wall. No good word-of-mouth, no references, no testimonials, no social evidence. You always contend with well-established customer base companies and brands— convincing customers to take a chance on something different will always be hard work.

There's no experience. Each business is as special as the people in it, and no one can come in and tell you the best strategy for your specific situation. It works for others won't work for you. You will be able to look back and see what works to draw leads and what doesn't.

There are two primary leading routes: outbound and inbound. Everyone's own strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, your company would employ a little bit of both, but when you start, you might have to prioritize each other.

Outbound strategies

Outbound is all about reaching out and attracting their attention. It includes strategies such as door-to-door marketing, cold email, billboard and pay-per-click ads. There's an immense range, from traditional to new, from offline to digital.

Outbound strategies Outbound strategies generally require more than inbound strategies, but can also produce faster results. The following method is the perfect way to plan an outbound campaign.

Before reach out to someone, you need to know who they are. New businesses make a common error thinking their product or service is for everyone. When you try to appeal, you end up appealing to no-one. It's a bad business plan, and a poor outbound campaign strategy.

If you have any existing customers, it's a great place to start; give them a survey, or better yet, interviews. If you have no clients, don't worry. Through studying your competitor's customers and reading their posts in forums and public blogs, or sites like Reddit and Quora, you will learn a lot.

Researching your competitor's customers You are looking for solid data that you can use to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Don't base it on your imagination or' best guess,' or your entire strategy can end up useless.

Ideally, you're looking for the following information: industry specifics, specialization, scale, structure.

Demographics— place, age, education.

Psychographics-Industry issues, difficulties encountered, consumer concerns / anxieties.

Often, consider creating a' poor' buyer profile for people you don't want to sell to. You can refine your messaging further.

From this information, you'll want actionable insights: what's the best way to reach your prospects? 

What message attracts most?

With a clear idea of what the customer feels like, it's time to find them.

This meant buying prospects lists, but can be risky. Performance can vary greatly, with obsolete emails and misinformation. While it may seem simpler than building your own list, a high-quality list's benefits make up the time and effort needed.

Hopefully, you got some useful clues in your ICP. For starters, finding your ideal lead work at B2B companies and hanging out on LinkedIn is a great place to start looking. On the other hand, if your target market is Gen Z and you spend all your time hashtagging at Instagram, there's no point in looking anywhere else.

If you're in the B2B market, you can use plenty of resources (like Crunchbase) to create your own lead list. With their filters, you can quickly narrow the requirements to find your ideal customers.

Using resources to create your own lead list. Finally, check at any blogs or news channels that cover your target market. Announcements and press releases will help you find the right leads, but the time to follow them.

Finally, you need to determine which specific method you will use to reach your prospects. Your main choices are: Cold calling Cold emailing Social selling Each one comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Most people hate making cold calls and how it scares people, however quick decisions can be highly effective. Social selling takes much longer, but has the benefit of building a relationship with the prospect before reaching out.

Cold email is our preferred method— after all, it's how we construct our own business — because it has a good balance of focus without being too invasive. Open and answer rates vary by sector, but if you include 1-3 questions, you will increase your chances of getting answers by 50%.

The most important thing to consider is what's most appropriate for your prospects. If you enjoy social marketing doesn't matter; if your prospects aren't on social media, you're wasting time. Even with your research, finding what works best may take some experimentation. Overall, a combination of all three will give the best performance.

Quick tip: Fighting the right contact information? Tools such as Find email address and MailsHunt can help you find and verify email addresses, while enrichment tools can help with other information.

Inbound strategies

 Instead, you can use inbound strategies to draw leads. Inbound is about building and generating interest to prospective leads.

Inbound strategies This is most often in content form, such as blog posts (like the one you're reading right now), ebooks, webinars, and video content. Inbound can take longer, but it costs less (62% less, to be exact). For years, the right content can attract prospects. For succeed, you'll need a clear strategy.

Build relevant content The first step is the same as with an outbound campaign; if you want to create content that attracts your ideal customer, you need to know who exactly that ideal customer is. Once you have your ICP, you are in a much better position to start creating content. Through answering your ideal customer's needs and concerns, people are lining up to test your content.

For example, suppose your ICP, established for your internet security business, is concerned with creating back-ups. Your interviews show they're worried about getting back-up regularly, and finding the whole thing difficult. Through writing a blog post or video on' The easy way to arrange back-ups,' you answer their biggest concern. You give real value.

Check out: 5 Reasons How Personalized Content Drives More Revenue It's worth spending time improving your search engine content. For eg, what exactly are your prospect search terms? What's search language competition? Using a SEO tool like Moz or Ahrefs will answer these questions and make sure your buck content gets the most bang.

Distribute your content

Until your future leads can find it, all the world's content won't do you good. SEO can help organic traffic, but it takes time. And make sure your hard work doesn't go to waste, you need an active way to share it, where your leads hang out.

While you can always use paying platforms to promote your content, there are plenty of free options. This could include creating your own distribution channels, such as social media profiles and newsletters.

If your content is (and should be) important, you should be able to leverage other people's platforms. You could make guest appearances on other popular blogs or podcasts, for example, or encourage people to share content with their followers.

Stay innovative with your distribution channels and try to get original coverage.

Check out: Why Content Distribution Is Ever Before 

Collecting leads

I've seen many sites with great content, but they've sadly overlooked the main goal: collecting leads.

This usually requires several types of content forming a funnel. You may have a free blog post on your page, along with a more comprehensive ebook offered in exchange for email address of the user. If you're a guest on someone else's page, you're normally allowed to include a profile, a great place to connect to your blog.

Make it easy to sign up for valuable content.

Having followers on your social media is fine, but leaves you at the provider's mercy. If Facebook decides to close your profile, you'll lose those leads. That's why we highly recommend getting prospects on your email list as soon as possible.

Quick tip: If people sign up for your list, let them know you're going to submit promotions and deals. Being open not only prevents you from emailing customers who are not interested in buying from you, but is also a prerequisite under the GDPR if you email people in Europe.

Congratulations to you! You've got a list of self-qualified leads.

Conclusion

An effective method of producing lead is important for long-term success and survival.

An efficient lead generation method By choosing the best method for your business, whether through inbound or outbound, you can create a consistent lead stream.

Yet sticking to that approach and continuously improving your performance will get you to your target.