How To Generate Leads Online for Your Business

Trying to find ways to generate leads online, but nothing seems to be working?

This can be disheartening, especially when you need consistent lead flow to keep your boat afloat.

If you go online now and search ‘ways to get leads online,’ you’ll find several lead generation strategies. But how do you know if they’re right for you? 

You first need to understand your revenue goals and test out different strategies.

Lead generation is super important to get clients on autopilots. In fact, 50% of marketers prioritize lead generation over everything else. 

To simplify things, we’ve created this guide that walks you through some of our favorite methods to get free leads. Plus, we will show you how to find out which system will bring you maximum traffic and revenue.

Understand The Difference Between Leads & Prospects

Leads and Prospects refer to potential customers interested in your company’s product or service. Business owners often confuse the two terms and use them interchangeably. 

While they’re closely related, the difference comes down to this one factor: Qualification.

Every business has different metrics for qualifying potential customers. Prospects are leads who have booked a call and are ready to speak with your salesperson. But there’s a catch – every potential customer who books a call doesn’t automatically become a prospect.

They become a prospect only when your sales team confirms them as qualified. 

On the other hand, leads are people who have willingly given out their contact information and shown some interest in your offers. These can come from your website, social media platforms, or ad campaigns. They haven’t booked any calls but just reached out, showing slight interest.

Now the question is, are all leads qualified? Not really. Put them in qualifier systems such as a form or entry-based questionnaire to find if they’re your target group. Lead qualification is based on your revenue goals and online marketing efforts. 

At Scaling With Systems, we have an application form that has to be filled out by every lead before booking a call with us. 

application for SWS

No one can book a call with us without going through the complete application form. If they don’t fill it out completely, leave out some details, or do not seem like our target group, we automatically disqualify them even before having the call. 

So, to become our prospect, the lead has to go through our booking form. That clearly explains how the two terms are different (and why it’s helpful to you when creating your plans for lead generation and qualification). 

Ways To Generate Leads Online

You might be thinking, ‘How do I generate leads online in the first place?’ Lead gen depends on various factors, especially what your sales team is doing. The goal is to not only generate leads but get qualified leads who have the potential to turn into a prospect.

B2B companies use multiple pipelines to get clients. This can be through an opt-in funnel, email marketing, paid ads, organic marketing, or cold outreach. There has to be specific criteria to qualify your lead as a prospect. We’ll get into that later.

First, you need to find out the best ways to generate leads.

We’ll share some top tips to get leads online consistently and predictably for your B2B business. When considering each way to get new leads, how do you choose the path that works best for you? Use the following criteria to make your decision:

1. How To Find Your Target Audience 

You have to know the hotspots where you’ll find your target group. Do they use social media more? Are they more active on emails? Do they use Youtube more than Facebook? When you know the platform, it becomes easy to create marketing campaigns specifically for that platform.

For example, you’re a fitness coach for people over 40. People in their 40s and above usually are active on Facebook more than on any other social media platform. 

Now that your platform and target audience is clear, create a campaign around that. Create an FB community to generate leads online. Post promos, tips, hacks, and other relevant content that your audience might find useful. 

2. Set Your Budget 

How much are you willing to spend on lead generation? This also decides the type of system you’ll have in place. For example, if you’re a start-up, you might not have a big marketing budget. You’ve spent most of your budget on setting up a funnel. 

So, paid ads might not be the best option for you right now. Instead, choose to go with Organic Marketing. Similar to our earlier example, create content that engages your audience and brings more inbound leads.

BudgetMarketing Type Examples (Online)
No budget For MarketingOrganic Marketing– Content Marketing (posting on social media, blogs, etc).
– Creating lead magnets and using an email funnel.
– Word-of-mouth referrals & showcasing testimonials
– YouTube videos
– Podcasting
Higher BudgetPaid Marketing (But Maintain Organic Efforts Also)– Google Ads
– Facebook Ads (& Other Social Ads)
– Paying For VA in LinkedIn Outreach (Using Sales Navigator)

3. Get Clear On Your Goals 

Whenever we set up a lead gen system, we have an end goal in mind. So, finding out what you want from the process is important. Do you want to increase your booked calls? Do you want people to join your Facebook group? Do you want them to opt-in for your email list? 

It is okay to have multiple lead-gen channels. You don’t have to stick to one specific channel for getting all your leads. But it’s important to remember that different lead gen systems will bring different results. 

We’ll look at how to get leads online with the best lead-gen systems that business owners use to generate leads consistently.

Website Optimization For High Visibility

The first thing we recommend is optimizing your website for better visibility. While this might not seem like the best hack, it does play a big role to get more leads online. The best way to do this is by maing sure your website ranks for SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You want to SEO-proof your website; meaning make it super easy for people to find you on the search engine. Your website copy should have phrases or words your target group regularly searches on search engines.

get more leads for business

When your website is optimized, Google will show it in the top results. This’ll save potential leads from looking at ten different websites to find out which one is yours. When you’ve got a lower SEO ranking, you are missing on SO MANY leads.

For example – You run a digital marketing agency, helping B2B companies grow their online presence. Your website should have keywords like ‘Digital Marketing for B2B sector’ or ‘Digital Marketing services for business owners.’ 

These are general examples but do more research into what keywords your target group is writing in the search bar. Put those in your copy. 

A great tool to find keywords is Semrush. It’ll help you find keywords for your niche with search metrics to help you really pinpoint and find the ones you should be using to get leads online.

Beyond just SEO keywords, you need to make the user experience easy. UX (user experience) is actually considered by Google algorithms when it comes to SEO ranking. How fast does your website page load? How easy is it to read information? Does your website include visuals, buttons, and other interactive elements? All of these will play into how Google (and other search engines) decide to rank your site.

Optimize Conversion Rates To Grow Leads

This is a practice that we recommend every business owner does every few months. What do we mean by conversion rates? It’s the percentage of how many people get converted into leads with your existing lead gen system. 

For example, if one out of every four visitors to your website books a call, you have a 25% conversion rate. The goal is to increase this number as much as humanly possible. 

conversion rates optimization

All you need to do is review your website content every quarter and keep improving it. That being said, there isn’t one perfect version of your content that’ll work forever. You have to split-test different versions of your website copy to see which one is getting more leads online.

Now, what do we mean by improving your website content? It can be changing a specific graphic on your site or adding more graphics. Add more case studies and social proof. If you’ve recently worked with some big-shot client profiles, add them to the top of the case studies. 

You would want people to see that as soon as they visit your page. We would recommend testing your call-to-action as well. 

Be direct and clear with what you want your visitors to do. We’ve made it super easy for our potential prospects to reach us.

We have our call to action added throughout the page. This ensures that even though they’re scrolling through our site, they’re hit with a CTA repeatedly. When they’re warm enough, they’ll eventually take action as per your lead gen system.

Targeted Paid Advertising 

Paid advertising is great to generate leads online. Now that print media isn’t as effective as it used to be, it is time to pull your socks up and turn your efforts toward digital platforms. You can run ads pretty much on every platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, Google, or third-party websites.

The easiest way to get started with how to get leads online is Pay-Per-Click (PPC.) This is an advertising program where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The purpose of a paid ad is to get your business in front of people. What happens next is how you’ve designed the ad.

paid advertising to get leads

For example, Andy is an active user of Instagram and loves buying branded shoes. You run an e-commerce store like Amazon. You create an Instagram story ad to make him buy shoes from your website. Instagram’s job is to make sure that your ad creatives show up when he’s scrolling through the stories.

It’ll not magically convince Andy to make the purchase. Your ad copy and creative should be so intriguing that Andy cannot do anything but open the link and check out your website. That is the first stage of your ad.

Now that Andy is on your website, it all depends on how optimized your website is. Andy will not buy from you if you have a plain, boring website that takes forever to open and seems fake without any real reviews. 

Instagram did the job. It brought you as qualified leads as possible. But you failed in the second stage of conversion, which was having an optimized website. 

This is why we talk about targeted advertising. You need to be mindful of all the stages in the process before running your ads. Once everything is ready, run paid ads to generate leads online.

Effective Presence On Social Media

When was the last time you checked your socials and updated your profiles? It’s important to keep your profiles updated with the latest pictures, offers, website links, or CTAs. Datareportal’s studies show that 4.76 billion people globally will be actively using social media by the end of 2023. 

This is how to get leads online without spending a dime. We’ve seen several business owners generate leads through organic marketing in their starting phase. Social media is a beast when it comes to online lead generation. You just need to leverage it strategically.

social media for getting leads

You cannot go out there without any plan of action. Creating a profile on the platform and randomly posting pictures of your cat will bring you dead leads. If you check our socials, you’ll notice that the content we’re putting out there is very intentional towards our revenue goals.

We have a content strategy that’s a mix of lifestyle, business strategy, personal goals, case studies, and tips and tricks. 

Every picture or video that we put out there has a CTA. Some of our content is to get more eyeballs and get them to follow us. We also run promos where our CTA is to get people to click the link in the bio. 

So, really hone in on your end goal with your content and create a strategy around that. Social media has tons of features to get your brand out there and find leads online. Keep in mind that details matter. 

Choose a professional photo for your profile picture that shows your face. Your Instagram bio is a great place to tell your audience about your offer and what you can do to help them. Also, add a clickable link to your website or funnel. 

This makes it easier for people to find more details about your business, like social proof, schedule or pricing.

Read more about building a credible social media presence.

User-Generated Content (UGC)

The term’ User Generated Content’ refers to content that is created by users, not by the business. It can be anything:

  • Videos
  • Photos
  • Podcasts
  • Interviews
  • Product Reviews
user generated content to get more leads

UGC is the best way to get leads online. Let’s put this into perspective. What if you have real people who people trust to promote your brand? You don’t create the content; they do. They love your product or services so much that they recommend them to other people. 

Now, this is interesting. If you post about how your business stands out from the competitors for XYZ reasons, people will be like, ‘Meh, okay, but are they really telling the truth?’ They’ll just scroll past your post.

But if someone they admire and follow says something good about your business, they’ll trust it now. They have seen results coming from someone they trust. 

Now, you might be thinking, how to get qualified leads online with UGC? 

  1. Create content by including your existing customers. Ask them for reviews via text or video testimonials. Take them on a call and record it for a client interview.
  1. Give your customers pre-written scripts that align with your brand’s voice. This makes it so much easier for them to record videos and removes any form of resistance.
  1. Half of the people you contact to create UGC content might not say yes straight away. Offer them promos or discounts on their next purchase or existing subscription so they’re motivated to do it for you.

How To Get Leads Online: FAQs

What are the best sources to generate leads online?

There are multiple sources for getting leads online, like websites, social media platforms, and organic marketing. The key is to split tests with your content to find what your target audience is responding to and what is working more. Double down on the content that’s bringing results and you’ll see leads coming in.

How to get SMS leads?

To get SMS leads for B2B, find out who your target group is and create a message that speaks directly to them. Include a clear CTA that takes them to your SMS marketing opt-in. Ask them for details such as their contact information, email address, or social media profiles.

How to get leads online for B2B?

You need a well-thought strategy for lead generation. Think about your target market and what type of content would really engage them. Start posting valuable content that attracts eyeballs from the right people. Study your website analytics to optimize your website.

Wrapping Up: Getting Leads Online

We’ve seen several business owners create video after video without any real game plan. Content creation is more like science. You’ve to take into account various factors like your target market’s preferences, social media trends, and what’s working NOW. 

Create a strategy to get leads online rather than throwing spaghetti and hoping something sticks. Remember, lead-gen is a long-term game. Look at your website analytics to optimize it constantly. Post content that is relevant and relatable for your viewers. Split-test your campaigns with multiple calls to action to see which one is bringing the maximum leads.

Want more help? We’ve grown to eight figures in less than two years by generating leads on autopilot. We’ve helped thousands of business owners create a client acquisition system that brings you qualified leads without you lifting your finger. Book a free consultation call today, and one of our advisors will contact you.

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