Every successful business is built upon a strong foundation of lead magnets and the profits and customers they generate. Without these lead magnets, companies can easily get lost in the mix of disengaged businesses hoping to gain success simply through existing alone.
With this being said, you may be wondering how these lead magnets are created and why organic lead magnets are the key to company profitability without fail. This is why we at The Driller in conjunction with Engage chose to create this organic lead generation guide in hopes of helping companies devise lead-generating strategies that are sure to succeed.
In order to gain substantial and promising leads, let’s break down organic lead creation and its efficacy by reviewing the basics of lead generation, tactics you can begin to implement immediately, and why inorganic leads are never quite as effective or trustworthy to utilize below.
The Basics of Lead Generation
When generating leads, the goal is to create a sales funnel and constantly determine where your leads are in this funnel so you can market to them accordingly. Down the sales funnel, there are four stages of leads: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), Product Qualified Leads (PQL), and Service Qualified Leads.
For starters, MQLs are leads that connect with your business through lead magnets like eBooks or holiday sales but aren’t particularly interested in receiving a full sales pitch just yet. These are what can be considered lukewarm leads and are the perfect start to a promising customer relationship.
Once your marketing team has connected with these leads, they then move on to the SQLs category. SQLs are contacts that have now shown interest in your products or services expressly through engagement with your marketing strategies or by contacting you about your business. At this point, your marketing team should connect with this prospect and help lead them to the next point in the lead funnel.
PQLs are clients that may have worked with your team on projects at a discount in the past but have not continued to use your company once the additional perks are gone. These clients simply require a nudge in order to move to the final step in the leads process and become repeat customers.
This final step in the sales funnel is called service qualified leads. These leads are customers that have indicated that they want to upgrade their services, buy products once again, or set up larger drilling projects in the future. This is where the concept of customer retention comes into play for organic lead generation.
Now that the basics of lead generation are broken down, let’s take a closer look at five of the most effective lead magnets to use for increased profits below.
5 Lead Generation Tactics You Can Implement Today
There are countless ways that companies generate valuable leads. However, the most effective lead generation tactics are based on strong marketing strategies and an understanding of your company’s target audience. With this being said, below are five marketing strategies sure to increase sales as proven by our full team of marketing specialists year after year.
1. Developing High-Quality eBooks
While many companies tend to undervalue this marketing method, the truth is that eBooks are not only effective for nearly every industry but are also perfect for increasing audiences and retaining customers as well. The power of this marketing strategy is that it relies on providing potential leads with value in exchange for a connection and an ability to market to these prospects regularly. This is how marketers are capable of leading these new potential customers through a curated sales funnel and earning exponential profits in doing so.
For drilling companies, these eBooks can be utilized to share invaluable information, education, product highlights, or industry news that showcases the authority of your company in a way which is far more organic than an ad or a flyer.
According to Statista, 25% of consumers read eBooks regularly, and this number continues to increase as more and more companies turn to eBooks for marketing purposes. With this being said, the ability to create quality eBooks is vital to modern success in any industry.
A great way to determine what topic to cover is to find the top questions your target audience is searching for online and create eBooks that answer these questions effectively. This is the bait with which your leads will be hooked and, from there, the main goal is selling your brand’s products or services within the eBooks so that these clients will be sure to contact you once the book is finished.
For instance, let’s just say you are a New York drilling supplies brand. If you discovered that the search ‘geothermal drilling in New York’ is one that has a lot of traffic online, creating a guide such as ‘Geothermal Drilling Best Practices in New york’ could be exactly the kind of lead generation content that gets people in the door and helps increase your engagement on social media and your site as well.
2. Creating a Content Marketing Funnel
The second effective lead magnet every company should utilize is implementing a content marketing funnel. Content marketing funnels are made up of wide funnel, mid-funnel, bottom-funnel, and evergreen content. The goal of these funnels is to write blog posts that slowly lead potential clients to your contact or product pages.
The first category of a content marketing funnel is the wide funnel, which accounts for all content that is broad and meant to attract the target audience without selling them anything. Next, the mid-funnel content is meant to cover industry topics specifically. Lastly, bottom-funnel content is content that specifically discusses the business or its services and products. This funnel, with the incorporation of evergreen content (content that is broad and cannot be archived by Google), is the perfect answer to engaging any audience and retaining clients for years to come.
To build a content marketing funnel, try utilizing this content calendar template from Engage as it can help you keep track of the content you develop and map out ideas for new content each month.
3. Setting up Bimonthly Newsletters
Another highly effective lead generation tactic is creating a bimonthly newsletter. These newsletters can be used to share business news, blog posts, backlink articles, and ongoing sales or promotions. Because of this alone, these newsletters serve as a highly useful marketing strategy and help companies retain customers far more often.
According to AllBusiness, “The most valuable customer is the one you already have. In order to retain those customers, stay in touch with them and offer incentives for their continued patronage of your company.” This is where a consistent email newsletter comes in handy. By creating informative and valuable newsletters, you can connect with your past and future clients and increase your profits as well.
The best way to create an effective newsletter campaign strategy is by signing up for a newsletter scheduling and design platform and using it to create automated and scheduled newsletters accordingly. The one thing to consider when doing this is that you will likely need a developer to help you design some of the content. If you don’t have someone capable of doing this, you can always work with a qualified marketing agency to complete your newsletter campaign successfully and swiftly as well.
4. Using Basic Link Building to Your Benefit
Although link building was once a four-letter word to business owners and site owners alike, the truth is that link building is now one of the best ways to organically boost a company’s SEO and increase site traffic that converts to profits with ease.
There are three forms of effective link building. A mix of all three is the most common strategy for businesses looking to dedicate themselves entirely to this lead-generation tactic. The first method is reaching out to big companies and simply asking to have your business owner or company featured as a guest blogger on their site. You can see examples of this method on countless major sites, and they are typically called a ‘spotlight series’ or ‘guest blog.’
The second link building option is contacting sites with articles that include keywords related to articles on your own site and asking them to add links to these articles where these keywords are found. For instance, if The Driller wrote an article about water well drilling in Idaho and you happen to be a water well drilling brand in Northern Idaho company, you might look at this article and find any parts that are related to your services and message our team to add a link to your services in our article. This is a great way to get instant links, but it must be done in a tactful and transparent manner, as you want the site to know you’re not trying to fool them or have them post something inappropriate by accident.
Lastly, the final link building option—which is also considered the best option by marketing specialists such as myself—is writing articles with links to your site in them and outreaching blogs and sites to have them feature these articles and link to your site in doing so. The reason this is often considered the best option is that it allows sites to gain much higher DA backlinks and also gives a sense of value back to the other party in the process.
When explaining this system to others, I tend to explain it as such: Imagine you’re the nerdy kid in high school and you don’t have any clout on campus. Then, one day, the star athlete and Prom King at your school suddenly begins telling everyone you are the coolest person and should be treated as such. Suddenly, people start treating you with respect and you somehow become popular as well just by association.
This is what a big site is essentially doing for your smaller site by linking to you. Google then knows, as does anyone who reads the article and clicks on your link, that your brand is considered legitimate by this big brand and its team. See how this can be highly beneficial? That’s what makes this method so enticing to marketers and small business owners alike.
5. Hiring a Highly Experienced Marketing Team
Finally, the last lead generation tactic we strongly recommend is hiring an experienced marketing agency to implement all of these strategies and more for boosting profits and SEO alike.
When working with an agency, the content creators, social media experts, designers, developers, and SEO specialists come together as one to provide each and every client with a hand-tailored and expertly-crafted marketing strategy sure to generate leads.
This is where the power of marketing agencies comes into play. Instead of putting these tasks on the mountains of tasks you as business owners have to accomplish, marketing agencies can split up the work amongst a series of professionals and experts in the field to get the best results every single time.
And, while it may be a bigger investment right off the bat, is it really something worth putting on the backburner when it could quite literally double your leads as a small business organically?
Why use Organic Lead Generators Over Inorganic Ones?
Now that the five best lead magnet tactics have been broken down in full detail above, you may still be wondering why these strategies are preferred over the simplicity and swiftness of inorganic lead generators.
The simple answer is that organic lead generation lasts while inorganic methods are sure to be recognized over time and lead to a major disaster for businesses relying on them. Building your business’ foundation on fake leads and followers will surely lead to a crumbling company in time.
Meanwhile, working harder from the start to generate organic lead methods will benefit the company more over time, making it a far better solution in the long run. Think about your marketing in the same way you think about your work ethic and image. If you build your image up on insincerity in an industry as honest and hardworking as the drilling industry, you are bound to gain more enemies than followers and tarnish your company’s name as well as your own in the process. Instead, put in the hard work now and reap the innumerable benefits in no time!
All in all, passion and patience are the name of the game, and to the companies willing to give it their all, the best results are sure to come.
