5 Ways to Generate Sales Qualified Leads on a Limited Budget
If you are a small business and feel overwhelmed by the various aspects of modern marketing strategies, not to mention the huge expense behind it; here is something to make your day.
The digital transformation of the marketing sector has opened up numerous scopes for businesses to nurture their leads and develop their brand image. Marketing is an important aspect of an organization’s overall success, irrespective of the size of the business. In this competitive world, if you are willing to compromise on advanced marketing tools, due to a low budget, you might want to fill the gap created by adopting smart and cost-effective marketing strategies.
Just like other flourishing businesses, many small business owners are continuously looking to expand their customer base to grow their revenue and business. However, the average small business doesn’t have a large-scale marketing budget like that of titans of industry. Since one of the foundational elements of growing a successful business is having access to a steady stream of sales leads, you cannot afford to neglect that area of digital marketing. A limited budget requires that you have to be more creative in your approach. Here are a few alternate smart marketing strategies that you can adopt to generate sales qualified leads on a low budget.
Identify your target market
To achieve your marketing objective through your potential leads, you need to find out the section of consumers who will be interested in your offerings. Successful marketers understand how to narrow that exhaustive list by knowing their target audience. In this case, a marketer would need to know their customers’ interests, social media behavior, browsing behavior, and content they typically engage with. Additionally, identifiable information such as; a lead’s first and last names, income, location, and age. It would also be advantageous to understand customers’ purchase behavior. This multitude of insights can not only help create a cohesive image of a potential lead but helps to identify some common traits among existing customers. In application, this information helps marketers decide on which channels they should focus their marketing efforts and determine the type of messages to create to generate sales qualified leads.
Select the right promotional channels
To find the best sales qualified leads, you need to communicate with your potential clients in the most efficient way possible. With the trend of digitization spreading quite rapidly, your target audience might be engaging with several platforms. It is imperative that you utilize these platforms for communication.
Are you currently aware of which marketing channel to use to target your sales qualified leads? Is that channel able to be leveraged to generate the best possible results? If your answer is no, then you must consider how to select your marketing channels carefully. Compare your ideal target audience and compare it to the demographics of the users of the particular platform in question. Depending on your buyer’s persona, they may align with a community on an alternative platform. Make the necessary adjustments needed to achieve maximum reach.
While marketing automation has the ability to send scheduled messages to the potential customers automatically, it depends on the marketer if they are using the right channel to send messages that can attract and engage a wider section of the target audience. Since effective multi-channel marketing can be costly, there is no point in wasting money on channels that will fail to generate customer engagement.
Create a sales funnel
The most effective way to nurture your target audience is to map the right strategy to educate, inform, and nurture leads. This is a delicate balance of the right time and the right message. It helps sales reps convert more leads, spot opportunities for upselling new lineups to existing customers, while effectively saving time in closing deals with buyers. Emails that contain multiple secondary links provide customers with various options to get them to navigate through different ways through the sales funnel. It is then the role of a marketer to test if it is appropriate to eliminate some links or edit the sequence and contents of secondary links; to see which strategy increases sales conversions. A/B testing performed on the sequence and format of all email content can help make more well-informed decisions in these areas. The lead nurturing feature in Marketo enables users to identify qualified leads and those who are ready for the sales funnel.
Social Media Marketing
As social media platforms keep expanding, managing all your accounts manually can be very time-consuming. Additionally, it might not have a beneficial outcome. Social media provides a great number of opportunities for small businesses to create conversations with prospective customers and generate new leads. Modern-day social media marketing involves analyzing a lot of subjects such as customer engagement, rate of success in lead generation, post-release time, and more. To gain a competitive advantage in social media marketing, you need to; complete market research, stay updated on specific platform trends, and build engaging posts accordingly. Thus, integrating a marketing automation tool that will manage some social media activities such as; answering messages, customer service, and scheduling posts automatically is one of the most ignored, but vital features that your tools may already include for no additional cost.
Adopt email marketing
Email marketing aims toward targeted conversion. Marketing automation has turned the tedious job of sending emails into a magic wand for generating conversions by directing your target audience directly to your website. It allows you to customize your marketing messages for every contact on your list, unlike the majority of social media platforms. By analyzing the product or service your potential customers are interested in, you can easily curate an email to grab their attention and trigger a conversion. Moreover, based on the response to your email, you can schedule follow up emails to continue to maintain their interest.
Marketing automation tools have the capability to generate step by step emails to boost your company’s open rate. Eventually building a high conversion rate over time. By analyzing the buyers’ current status of the purchase cycle, you can send guided emails that may assist in progressing them to the next stage faster. All that is needed, is the careful construction of your email content to optimize for conversion. Combine this with a tested call to action and you can earn huge returns for your business. Additionally, email marketing automation tools allow you to experiment with automated welcome emails to introduce potential customers to your brand. This powerful toolset granted by platforms like Marketo, are a great way to handle all your marketing automation needs and stay within a predefined budget.
With the many strategies, we have outlined, you should see an increase in your sales qualified lead generation. These are a few strategies we have implemented over the years with great success. Best of all, they are extremely cost-effective because they do not call for additional labor expenses or require a large time commitment. In these ways, you can experience the same success of a flourishing business on a Limited Budget and remain competitive in this overwhelming market.
About Marrina Decisions
For more information about how marketing automation can build efficiency in your business reach out to one of our experts here at Marrina Decisions. Consulting with our certified marketing operations experts is the easiest way to get a head start of the competition.
You can simply start chatting with us, using the chatbots below, or say “Hello” at experts@marrinadecisions.com. If you want to reach us via social media, then you can simply DM us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter