Generating new leads is integral to the growth and success of a business. With a solid lead generation strategy, you can effectively attract prospects to your business and nurture them through your sales pipeline to convert them into customers. One such way to go about this is with organic lead generation.
What Is Organic Lead Generation?
Organic lead generation is a type of inbound marketing where prospective leads — from those at the top of the funnel to those ready to buy — find you instead of you searching for them. In many cases, they come across your business during an online search where your brand appears in the organic search results. The goal is to get them to visit your website and leave their contact details, enabling you to connect with and nurture them through your sales funnel.
Why It’s Important for Business
Consumers looking for information about a particular problem, solutions to that problem, or different brands typically already have an interest in the products or services you offer. Effective organic lead generation encourages you to learn more about your target audience’s needs and goals so you can create tailored content that draws their attention to you rather than your competitors. Your efforts are more likely to help you grow your leads and boost your conversions.
Difference Between Organic and Paid Lead Generation
Paid lead generation is a similar strategy that aims to make you more visible to your target audience and attract more leads. The tactics, however, are very different. With paid lead generation, you might use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and sponsored content to ensure brand visibility. You might even purchase leads instead of generating them yourself.
The Benefits of Organic Lead Generation
Organic lead generation may take more time and effort, but it does yield significant benefits for your brand.
Higher Quality Leads
While lead quantity is important, generating numerous leads won’t do much for you if they don’t actually convert. Organic lead generation helps you reach and attract your target audience more effectively, allowing you to accumulate higher-quality leads. These prospects are more likely to become paying customers.
Cost Effectiveness
Contrary to what some people say, organic lead generation isn’t free. Most notably, it takes a lot of time and effort. You may also invest in services such as content creation, website design, or social media management. However, these costs are generally much lower than those associated with paid lead generation strategies, which can lead to a greater return on investment (ROI).
Longer-Term Benefits
Creating evergreen content and automating your content marketing channels provide long-term results. Evergreen content holds its value over time, remaining “fresh” and relevant longer. As such, one piece of high-quality evergreen content can attract new leads weeks, months, or even years later. You can use automated content marketing funnels repeatedly once you establish them. In contrast, paid lead generation solutions, such as PPC and sponsored content, require you to keep paying for them if you want to use them continuously.
Increased Brand Awareness
With organic lead generation strategies, you can boost your visibility and brand awareness in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace. Many tactics help you rank higher in search results, putting you in front of your target audience and helping you stand out from your competitors. Increased brand awareness can build trust, promote loyalty, and drive more sales.
Best Practices for Improving Organic Lead Generation
When it comes to how to generate organic leads, you’ll want to keep a few best practices in mind:
Detailed Keyword Research and Optimization
Thorough keyword research helps you discover the words and phrases your target audience is typing into the search bar to find information about your brand and the products or services you provide. It can also help you understand their search intent — the motivation or goal behind their online queries. Tools like Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer can make the process easier.
Incorporate relevant keywords throughout your website content to ensure you appear in front of your target market when they conduct online searches. Natural placement is key. If keywords appear out of place, or you stuff them onto a page for the sake of having them there, they could actually harm your organic lead generation efforts.
High-Quality Content Creation
Content marketing is one of the most valuable tools for organic lead generation, as it allows you to share relevant, helpful information with your target audience. Using your audience and keyword research findings, you can craft high-quality content that caters to prospects at every stage of the customer journey.
Write to Your Customer Personas
While you’ll want to optimize your content to rank higher in the search results pages, remember that your audience should come first. They’re the ones you’re trying to convert into leads and — eventually — paying customers, not the search engine.
When publishing content, make sure that you create it with your target audience in mind. Targeted, engaging content that matches your prospects’ search intent and provides relevant, valuable information is much more likely to help you attract and convert leads.
Adherence to SEO Best Practices
Optimizing your content — and your website, in general — for search engines plays a significant role in helping you reach your target audience and generate leads organically. Keyword research and content creation are only the beginning. There are numerous SEO tactics that you can use to ensure that search engine algorithms rank you higher in the search engine results pages. Best practices include:
- Optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs
- Creating structure with proper use of header tags
- Including internal links
- Building quality backlinks
- Making your website intuitive and easy to navigate
- Ensuring your pages load quickly
Social Media Optimization and Promotion
Social media posts can be an effective tool for increasing brand awareness, driving more organic traffic to your website, and generating more organic leads. When you create a new piece of content, share it across your chosen platforms. Be sure to optimize each post with hashtags to ensure it reaches more of your target audience.
You can also leverage influencer marketing on social media for organic lead generation. With this strategy, you build relationships with relevant influencers. They promote your products or services to their followers, allowing you to reach even more potential customers. Their recommendations — which statistics show can be more effective than brand-created content — can drive more traffic to your website.
Strategies for Organic Lead Generation
The following strategies can help you reach your target audience more effectively, draw their attention to your brand, and encourage them to engage with you:
Understand Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are profiles of the ideal customers for your brand. They feature a variety of crucial details, including:
- Demographic information
- Household income
- Occupation
- Online behavior
- Buying habits
- Hobbies or interests
- Pain points
Using this information, you can determine who is most likely to be interested in your products or services: your target audience.
Your business, like many others, may target many different types of people. Take the time to consider the groups of people you want to attract to your brand and who can benefit from what you have to offer. When you know who you want to target, you can determine the best ways to achieve your goal and generate more qualified leads.
Content Marketing
When most people think of content marketing strategies, they think of blog posts. Maintaining an informative, regularly updated blog on your website is an effective tool for reaching your target audience organically online and attracting quality leads. Your keyword research and buyer personas will help you create informative content that converts.
Blog posts aren’t the only form of content marketing you can use. You also have:
- Ebooks
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
- Email newsletters
- Video content
- Podcasts
The forms of content marketing you use to generate organic leads will depend on your business and your target customers. No matter which ones you choose, keep in mind that your content should be informative, relevant, and valuable to those who engage with it.
Building Social Media and Online Communities
There’s no ignoring the popularity of social media. At least 82% of internet users in the U.S. use it, and more than half (56%) of internet connected-adults have accounts on multiple platforms. The average user spends nearly 2.5 hours a day on social media.
On top of all of that, social media has become a popular marketing tool for businesses of all sizes, with approximately 93% of organizations using it to promote their brands. Establish a presence where your target audience spends their time. Be active, share newly-published content, and engage with your followers. Build an online community around your brand. The more people get to know and trust your brand, the more likely they will convert.
Grow Partnerships for Guest Posting
Guest posting is a content marketing strategy that involves creating high-quality content for another company’s website. A significant benefit of this tactic is attracting new traffic to your website, which can help you grow your leads and generate more sales. It also benefits the company hosting your content, giving them new and relevant information for their audience.
The first step to guest posting is networking and establishing partnerships with businesses in your industry. Along with your name and business name, don’t forget to include a link back to your website. That direct access makes it easy for them to visit you and learn more about your brand.
Create Webinars
Hosting a webinar is a marketing channel that allows you to showcase your product or service and your expertise in front of a virtual audience, often in real-time. It offers an easy way to generate lots of quality leads quickly, as most people sign up based on the topic and what they hope to take away from your seminar. Attendees from all over come together in an online meeting space to hear the information you have to share. This way, you can engage directly with your audience and answer any questions they might have on the spot.
Mobile-First Optimization
More and more people are using smartphones and mobile devices to access information on the internet. Today, just over half of all web visits are mobile. However, not all websites play nicely with these devices. Content and images load awkwardly — or not at all — ruining the user experience and driving prospects away.
Prioritize mobile-friendliness. Optimize your website for mobile devices. Your pages, including landing pages and lead generation forms, should load quickly and correctly. They should function properly, too. Google’s mobile-friendly test is an easy and free way to check the mobile-friendliness of your site.
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