You want to know how to generate leads that turn into sales (predictably, every time).
B2C leads generation has always been a hard nut to crack for most marketers. It would be nice to believe that with easy access to the Internet, you can get as many leads as you wish. But just because there are plenty of potential leads, doesn’t mean you know how to find them.
The harsh reality is that many barriers — big and small — may make it difficult to reach a targeted lead base. According to a survey of marketers, 61% rank lead generation as their number one challenge.
The best B2C lead generation strategies begin with building a trusting relationship and rapport with your target audience. This makes them feel comfortable with your business and inspired to buy what you’re selling.
Over the past few years, we’ve produced tens of millions of dollars in sales at Scaling With Systems through effective B2C leads generation.
This post will walk you through the top 6 Advanced Lead Generation strategies we’ve tested with clients for generating the most results in the shortest time frame.
Applying these six tips will allow you to leverage sales by combining organic and paid strategies.
Lead Generation Tip #1: Paid Advertising
There are many ways to get your business’s name out there, but paid advertising is one of the most effective. Whether your company is new or established, it’s a dependable tactic.
PPC visitors are twice as likely to buy something from a business than organic visitors.
Here at Scaling with Systems, we’ve seen some great results from paid ads. But there is more to it than just throwing money at an ad and hoping for the best!
The thing is, this one strategy is still considered the most effective when done right.
We have a few clients doing more than $4 million per month online, and they’re making that much by getting a 3-to-5 times return on ad spend in their business-to-consumer (B2C) product.
Also known as PPC (pay-per-click), paid ads are a quick way to reach thousands of people with a specific message. They can be very cost-effective when done right; PPC can have an average ROI of 200%.
You’re probably convinced by now to give PPC a go – but before you do, it’s best to know the common mistakes people make so you can avoid wasting your time and money. Here are two of the biggest mistakes B2C businesses make in PPC:
Target Audience Matters (Find People Who Are Unaware Of The Problem)
One reason for failed ad campaigns is when marketers don’t focus on the right target audience.
I’m going to repeat it.
They’re not focusing on people who are unaware of their problems.
They’re only running ads for people who have typed what they want to buy into Google, i.e., I need to buy a pet brush. So, their ad is based on the term “buy a pet brush.”
It seems like it would work, right? The problem with this is that you are competing against everybody else trying to rank for or run ad traffic for this keyword.
Businesses that benefit most from paid advertising target potential customers who are unaware of their problems and don’t even know they need your product.
Some of the most brilliant businesses in the pet-grooming industry are working hard to bring new customers into their shops. They’re going after people who don’t realize that their pets need to be brushed or haven’t thought about it before.
Hopefully, you’ll understand the value of reaching out to people who don’t even know they want your product. You can make even more money than if you just targeted those who were already searching for the phrase “I need a pet brush.”
Of course, you can use advertising methods to reach out to people willing to buy your product who are aware of what they need. We recommend doing this for the lowest cost per impression (CPM).
At the same time, if you’re trying to generate leads online, it is also advised that you should be targeting someone unaware of their problem to get them to convert into a sale.
B2C Converting Copy (Don’t Mess Up Your Sales Pages)
The second step in getting leads is ensuring your sales page/s are ready to convert. To get leads, you need to have relevant traffic to your sales page, not just any traffic.
If you send people straight to a generic landing page, they may not even know what they are clicking on. If you don’t have a clear goal for that page and guide people through to buy what you’re selling, it will be hard for them to understand what they should do next.
The customer’s goal should be clear on each landing page. Your visitors need to know what they can expect through every step. Where will clicking a certain button take them? Use very simple language. Share what the next steps are with the consumer. You’ll make the whole experience better for them.
There’s no point paying for the customer to land on a sales page that is complex and confusing. They’ll click right off it and you’ll lose that lead.
The clearer it is, the better chance of getting leads.
Analyzing your site’s analytics can help you tailor your marketing to the people most interested in your business. Notice their demographic stats (age, gender, any other data you can extract). Focus on using that specific language and tone of voice. You can put unnecessary links on other pages to not distract the customer, and keep the sales page completely tailored to the lead.
Lead Generation Tip #2: Leverage Social Media
In today’s world, where over 4.7 billion people use social media, it’s the ideal channel for companies to connect with and acquire leads. And that means it’s essential to employ the proper technique at the right moment.
B2C and B2B marketers can benefit from generating leads on social media.
It allows you to identify potential clients who are interested in your products or services, get direct engagement on posts from those potential leads, and convert them directly.
You can amplify your lead generation success by promoting brand awareness, engaging with your audience, and driving website traffic through social media. Let’s take a look at two of the most popular social media pages for B2C leads generation.
TikTok Organic Reach
We can tell you from experience on both the paid advertising side and the organic side—TikTok is one of the best channels for a business-to-consumer business to grow.
This is because you can create short, snappy content anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute. If a trend is popular right now, you can easily notice those trends, try them out, and easily get your products in front of people you might not have seen otherwise.
There are lots of different viral sounds and trends every week and month. We’ve seen many B2C companies do a great job of capitalizing on these same trends by featuring their products or services at the end of the video.
Simply do this by making the first 80% of the video the same as other similar viral trends, and use the last 20% to link it to your product/service. By the time viewers get to the end, they’ve already watched most of the video, which means that they have a little buy-in already.
Instagram Influencers Reach
Do you trust social media influencers over brands for collaborations?
Studies suggest that 37 percent of consumers trust social media influencers more than brands. And Gen Z and Millennials – two very active groups of online consumers – are two times more likely than Boomers to trust influencers.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is about leveraging the trust of your target audience by working with people in their network who have a strong presence and can help you reach more users.
The most obvious example is a celebrity endorsement. Still, there are many other types of influencers that companies look to when they want to expand their reach. These include people who are experts in your niche, famous bloggers with large readerships, or educators offering their own services.
How to do Influencer marketing?
There is a wrong way and a right way to do influencer marketing.
The wrong way is where you just have your product or your business or your Instagram page being reposted on these very random shout-out pages.
Many pages don’t even have followers or have really low engagement, and you’re spending money to get on there. Those aren’t going to help you at all, and you’re just wasting your time and money.
You probably think a shoutout is just a shoutout, and it doesn’t matter where you get it or what it costs because they’re all the same.
But the reality is that not all shoutouts are made equal. You can tell a lot about a company by observing how they handle its shoutouts.
In our experience, you can spend 10X less and get 100X more from doing niche-specific shoutouts where you’re paying influencers for their attention in their own space.
The right way to do influencer marketing is much more niche-specific. You can have a much higher engagement rate and sales rate from that Instagram shoutout from an influencer specializing in your product category.
Lead Generation Tip #3: Email Marketing Is Best
A big mistake that could be killing your cold sales emails’ performance is that email recipients just don’t know who you are.
When people open an email from someone they don’t recognize and see no identifying information, they assume that it was either sent to them by mistake or that it isn’t relevant to them. Nobody will respond to an email if they don’t know what it is about—or even worse, if they think it might be spam.
We’ve never seen cold email work except when you’re selling a high-ticket business-to-business product.
And then you only need one out of a thousand emails to convert for you to make money. But when you’re selling consumer products or services, that doesn’t work. The mistake people make is they try to do the same thing.
But, don’t give up! There’s still something special about email marketing.
Using email marketing as a B2C lead generation tool is a long-term strategy. You can nurture leads for months before asking them for anything at all.
That means you can build trust and rapport before asking your customer for anything.
Once they’ve opted in, you can send them high-quality, relevant content they’ll enjoy reading. They’re much more likely to respond to an email if they like what they see in their inbox daily.
For example: Say you use the B2C leads generation strategy #1 – paid advertising – and you get a three times return on advertising spend, that means for every $1 you spend on ads, you earn $3.
Add a strong email marketing campaign behind it.
You could see your ROAS double – especially in the business-to-consumer sector, where before, you saw $3 in return from every dollar spent on ads. By adding both automated and manual email newsletters, you can have a six times ROAS.
Lead Generation Tip #4: Consider Affiliate Marketing
If you’re unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it’s a type of referral program where you pay the company a commission for leads or sales from your site.
Affiliate marketing can be one of the most cost-effective ways to drive traffic and conversions for your business.
A recent study showed that 38% of marketers agree that affiliate marketing is one of the best strategies for acquiring new customers.
The reality of affiliate marketing is that there are plenty of people who are doing it. Still, they’re not getting the results that they want because they need to realize that it’s a lot more complex than just finding anyone to market your business.
At the end of the day, the reality is that affiliate marketing takes time, effort, and commitment.
It’s also relational.
You need to have a strategy for how you will build relationships with other businesses and how you will market your business to them.
Don’t expect to go into affiliate marketing without first building a sales page that converts and without trying paid advertising.
Affiliate marketing works best when combined with other strategies. One great way to do this is by having a proven sales page to capture leads directly.
Sales pages are beneficial because they can be used even if you don’t have an established audience.
A sales page for your product or service could help you grow that audience by giving you a place to put your affiliate links and driving traffic to your website – which hopefully will convert into email subscribers or actual paying customers later on.
Affiliate marketing, like multi-level marketing, can take time to make a profit from.
However, if you familiarize yourself with the strategies outlined above, you can increase your chances of success.
- It’s essential to offer affiliates a high commission on products they promote; this will make them more likely to promote your products and help you to increase your profits.
- Give them a ready-to-go affiliate offer with a direction to drive traffic to a specific page usually converts at 5%. So, you should pay at most $3 per click to ensure you’re profitable.
Lead Generation Tip #5: SMS Marketing
SMS Marketing is a great way to connect with your customers, but it’s also one of the most underutilized methods.
SMS marketing has been around for many years and is still one of the best ways to reach your customers on their mobile devices.
It’s no secret that text message marketing has taken off in recent years. The open rate of SMS is 98%, and the response rate is a high 45%. Compare this with traditional email (20% open and 6% response) and you can see why people are switching from email to SMS.
We don’t recommend switching out email for SMS entirely; just know that it can be a valuable complementary B2C lead generation tool.
If you’re looking to scale your business and grow your list, SMS marketing is a great way to do so without spending too much time or money. It will allow you to build a list quickly and efficiently while spending almost nothing.
SMS marketing works great for retaining customers and updating them about new products, bonuses, discounts, upcoming events, etc. It allows you to build relationships with your readers by communicating directly through their mobile devices (something they use every day).
Lead Generation Tip #6: Joint Ventures Make Good Money
A joint venture is where you partner with somebody else who offers a complimentary service to what you are doing, and you have them send business over to you.
These relationships form a partnership between two or more businesses with mutual interests.
This is a great way to scale your business and make good money because it allows you to leverage the time and effort you put into building your own business.
Here’s how it works:
You first need to find people doing something similar to what you are doing but with a different audience or niche.
If they have more of an audience than you, that’s great because it means that they’ll send people over to your offer who otherwise didn’t know you existed.
This may seem like common sense, but most people don’t take advantage of it! The mistake B2C businesses make is that they only think about how much money they can make from their site, not how much they can make from other people’s sites!
Find someone with more traffic than you do and then contact them about a joint venture agreement where they send all their traffic over to your site instead of theirs (or vice versa).
B2C Lead Generation FAQ
What is a B2C lead?
A B2C lead is a consumer who has a good chance of buying from a business. B2C stands for business-to-consumer. Converting these consumers into prospects is the lead generation part, and turning them into a customer/client, is the final step.
What are the best lead generation strategies for B2C marketing?
Paid advertising, social media, email marketing, affiliate marketing, SMS, and joint ventures are some of the top B2C leads generation strategies. We’ve gone into each of these points in more detail in this article.
What are the different types of lead generation?
There are two main types of lead generation – outbound and inbound marketing. Outbound lead generation is a one-way communication method to get the potential customer’s attention (pop-up ads, cold email, etc). Inbound lead generation is about creating ways to invite a customer to come to you (through a website, social media post, blog, etc).
Wrapping Up: B2C Leads Generation Strategies
Every effective marketing strategy needs a good set of tools to generate consistent business leads, and B2C leads generation is the same.
When you have a strategy made up of multiple marketing streams, like the 6 B2C lead generation strategies we’ve mentioned in this article, you’re on your way to success.
These six B2C lead generation tips will help you increase your B2C lead generation conversion, no matter the industry you’re in.
You’re obviously serious about client acquisition if you’ve read up until now. Here at Scaling With Systems, we work with companies to boost their business reach and profit through intelligent client acquisition systems.
If you’re serious about finding a winning solution for your business, book a free consultation call, and one of our friendly advisors will get back to you.
