Why Digital Marketing Is Crucial for Online Lead Generation

The marketing world has undergone a paradigm transformation because of advances in technology and communications. Easy access to the internet, social media and global marketers changes the game. Traditional advertising has given way to digital marketing even for brick-and-mortar neighborhood stores. Instead of reaching broad audiences with a scattershot approach based on heavy-handed marketing, companies now employ a subtle approach to generate leads, personalise marketing and nurture potential clients with appointment setters.

It's essential to use digital marketing techniques to sell products, find and qualify leads and nurture them to convert. According to one survey, the most popular digital marketing methods are social media, website and email promotions. [1]

Digital Marketing Techniques that Generate Leads

One of the strongest techniques for building leads is using on-page marketing strategies to build a database of customers and leads. You can use this list to send bounce-back offers, seasonal updates, news about upcoming promotions, incentive offers and other marketing messages based on the customer data you've collected. Some of the most effective digital techniques that generate sales and leads include:

Branding Your Company

Bringing positive attention to your brand by posting relevant content is a critical aspect of marketing that generates a steady stream of leads. If customers align with your company's core concept and brand, they'll come to you more often without further marketing. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to improve the odds by sending reminders, incentive offers and news about new products and sales events.

Cross-channel Marketing

It's important to engage customers where they are if you hope to attract new people to your website. Cross-channel marketing allows you to engage with prospects and leads in other forums.

Digital Insights About Customers

Your CRM software can collect an impressive number of facts about customers by monitoring their online behavior, comparing customer databases with business intelligence and automating personalized marketing campaigns based on predefined criteria.

Social Media

Social media campaigns are 24/7 lead-generating machines. You can buy display ads and monitor the response to gain incredible marketing insights. Content campaigns can generate steady leads and encourage social sharing. Branding your products effectively in social posts can attract influencers who might review or promote your product to thousands of followers.

Better Targeting

Digital marketing enables you to target your customers more accurately based on criteria such as demographics, online browsing habits, buying history and social media platforms that allow you to narrow your audience. Your leads and prospects for immediate sales are prequalified even before you gather further information from website visits.

PPC Advertising

Paid advertising includes pay-per-click, or PPC, ads. Everyone's business goal is to optimize the company website to generate organic traffic, but you can often save money with a thoughtful PPC campaign. PPC campaigns generate immediate website traffic of motivated buyers. You can use PPC to test keywords, refine your organic SEO strategy and even find customer leads in PPC customers who don't buy but might be interested in other products.

Personalisation

Digital marketing offers many ways to personalise your interactions with customers such as email campaigns based on buyer behavior, seasonal products, customer portals, GPS mobile marketing campaigns and social media promotions. The process of separating customers into buying groups is called segmentation, and it makes it possible to send personalized marketing messages, customer-specific landing pages, relevant product recommendations and other personal touches such as birthday greetings. MailChimp reports that customers are 14 percent more likely to read segmented messages than generic marketing. [2}

Analytical Insights

Unless you use a coupon or special offer, it's difficult to know how well a newspaper or TV ad performs. Digital analytics provides this information in many ways to qualify your leads. You can determine how much time visitors spend reading product descriptions, whether they share the information, how long they stay onsite and what type of buyer seems more interested than others. You can monitor other actions customers take such as migrating to another website or searching for lower priced alternatives.

Digital marketing techniques can level the playing field for small businesses. Consider the digital behemoths Amazon and eBay. Savvy business owners can leverage these businesses to find effective keywords and marketing strategies and even use them as additional marketing platforms to sell their goods. Small businesses can often rank higher for certain keywords than Amazon using local SEO techniques, niche marketing practices and GPS-based marketing.

Lead Generation Using Digital Marketing

Unlike traditional advertising, digital marketing requires a subtle touch, personalisation and customer engagement. You’ve got to build your own marketing infrastructure to reach customers such as cross-channel marketing, SEO, paid campaigns, influencer targeting and customer-specific content to build a pipeline of leads. Thoughtful marketing accomplishes more than just sales; it generates leads, referrals and long-term business.