Many business owners make a costly mistake: only focusing on lead generation when they desperately need new customers. By then, though, it’s usually too late!
Instead, to run and grow your business sustainably, lead generation should be a constant in your strategy. Everything becomes easier when you have a regular flow of well-suited leads.
Here’s a blog post explaining why and, most importantly, how you can do that successfully at different stages of your business.
Reasons why you should always focus on lead generation
By lead generation, we mean attracting and identifying your potential customers so that you can nurture them until they buy from you. So, when you think about it, it’s only logical to keep focusing on lead generation.
After all, you could have the best product, a fabulous team and the most sophisticated systems. But if you can’t generate plenty of leads, you’ll struggle to sell enough to run your business sustainably (let alone grow it!).
Instead, as our founder Daniel Priestley always says, EVERYTHING is downstream from lead generation:
- Going from unpredictable referrals and occasional sales to becoming oversubscribed (for example, with the right quiz, waitlist and email sequence, you can set yourself up for successful launches and always sell out)
- Confidently increasing your prices and revenue as a result
- Building authority and getting a competitive advantage over everyone else in your niche
- Expanding your market by tapping into new audiences
- Reducing your marketing and sales costs
- Skyrocketing your conversion rates
- Selling your products or services consistently
That’s why the right time to focus on lead generation is ALWAYS.
But to maximise your efforts, you should prioritise different tactics at each stage of your business growth. Let’s go through them!
Lead generation for start-up businesses
During your early stages, your main lead generation goal is to help people find out about your new business while keeping costs down.
So, you’ll want to focus on:
- Really understanding your audience – Who are your ideal customers? And what are their pain points, needs and goals? When you use a ScoreApp quiz for market research, you can find all this out by asking them strategic questions (for example, “What have you already done to try and solve this problem?”)
- Demand generation – Most of your target customers have never heard about your new business (yet!). So, you must reach them, create brand awareness and generate interest in your products or services. A ScoreApp quiz lead magnet is perfect for this because it’s compelling and shareable (for example, “What’s your entrepreneur profile?” or “Ultimate SEO Scorecard”). So, more people will want to take it and spread the word
Lead generation strategies for start-up businesses
- Content marketing – Create valuable content that helps your ideal clients understand their problems, speaks to their needs or goals and compels them to engage with your brand. For example, this could include blog posts on your business website, insightful whitepapers, short-form videos and valuable social media content. A ScoreApp quiz will complement ALL your content marketing tactics: by using it as a call to action, you’ll turn those eyeballs into actual leads
- Networking – Meet your ideal customers by attending relevant industry events, trade shows or networking groups. Instead of pitching everyone, stand out and grab their attention by offering them your valuable ScoreApp quiz
- Digital advertising – To get more leads fast, harness pay-per-click advertising and social media ads. When you direct people to your ScoreApp quiz, you can learn more about them and nurture them in a personalised way, closing more sales
- Email marketing – Build trust and create a stronger connection by showing up in your audience’s inboxes with relevant content. To get more people on your list, start with a dynamic and personalised quiz lead magnet! While traditional PDFs only convert at 3-10%, quizzes have a whopping 30-50% conversion rate
- Waitlists to sell out – You can use them at every stage of your business growth, but they’re even more useful for your first product or service launch. Why? By attaching a ScoreApp quiz to its waitlist, you can validate your idea with your target customers (instead of wasting months and thousands of pounds building something they aren’t interested in). Then, optimise it accordingly if needed
Challenges of starting up
- Limited budget and resources
- Building credibility and trust in your market when you’re still relatively unknown
- Identifying the most effective channels for your lead generation so that you can use your resources wisely and show up in front of your target audience
A ScoreApp quiz is ideal to overcome these challenges and master your lead generation, even as a new start-up!
- It’s low-cost (you can create a full quiz for free!) and easy to manage in-house
- It makes you stand out from your competitors
- It complements all your other tactics and allows you to test different things to find what works best
Nail your start-up lead generation for FREE with ScoreApp
Lead generation for scaling businesses
Once you’ve built your initial customer base, your main lead generation goal is to accelerate your growth. So, focus on:
- Tapping into new markets – For example, you could reach more people by offering different quiz lead magnets and diversifying your lead generation sources
- Optimising what you have – Get more specific and strategic. For example, a ScoreApp quiz will segment your leads based on their answers. That way, you can send them personalised messages and more relevant content, offers and follow-ups
Lead generation strategies for scaling businesses
- Inbound marketing – Help more customers come to you by doubling down on your content marketing (like blogging) and your social media engagement. You can also invest in long-term strategies like SEO. And of course, a ScoreApp quiz will complement all these tactics and bring you more inbound leads on repeat
- Outbound marketing – Leverage sales development representatives to reach out to potential leads (for example, with tactics like cold calling or emailing) and move them down your funnel. They could start with a strategic ScoreApp quiz to learn more about each prospect’s situation, pre-qualify them automatically and sell in a more personalised way
- Partnerships and alliances – One of the fastest ways to expand your audience? Tapping into someone else’s! So, collaborate with businesses that specialise in complementary services (for example, through cross-promotions or joint webinars). When you offer something valuable like a quiz lead magnet, you’ll entice this new audience to engage with your brand, too
- Marketing automation – You can’t scale your business if you keep doing everything manually. So, use automation tools (like CRMs and email sequences) to increase your lead generation, streamline your nurturing process and follow up faster while removing human error. With ScoreApp, you can set up a full quiz marketing funnel that’ll keep generating leads and selling for you
Challenges of scaling
- Managing a larger volume of leads while maintaining the same communication standards
- Attracting high-quality leads (not just “more”) so that you’re using your time and resources wisely
- Integrating and optimising new lead generation channels while ensuring that everything works in synergy
ScoreApp facilitates your lead generation when you’re scaling your business, too! Your quiz will:
- Segment your leads and nurture them with more personalised sequences
- Pre-qualify them so that you only speak to the warmest ones
- Complement your other tactics, with everything working as part of the same funnel
Scale your lead generation for FREE with ScoreApp
Lead generation for established businesses
Once your business is more known and successful, it’s tempting to get comfortable and take your foot off the lead generation pedal. Don’t!
It’s VITAL to keep the momentum going. So, focus on:
- Optimising your systems – Improve your lead generation process based on your audience’s preferences (for example, with ScoreApp, you can A/B test your quiz)
- Maintaining your market leadership – As well as acquiring new leads, strengthen your relationship with your existing customers. With ScoreApp, you can use a separate quiz to get their input
Lead generation strategies for established businesses
- Advanced analytics – Rely on data, not guesswork! Analyse your audience’s behaviour through your CRM and the reporting features of your lead generation tools. Then, optimise your process accordingly. For example, with ScoreApp, you can run some A/B testing and look at your analytics to understand what resonates the most with your participants
- Account-based marketing (ABM) – Get more premium customers (like Enterprise clients for SaaS businesses) by targeting specific high-value prospects with personalised campaigns. How about impressing them with a custom ScoreApp quiz that’s all about them?
- Content personalisation – When you try to speak to everyone, you end up appealing to NO ONE. Instead, show different content to each segment so that you can boost your engagement and conversion rates. With ScoreApp, you can do this automatically by setting up separate email sequences based on someone’s answers
- Customer referrals and advocacy – Turn your most loyal customers into ambassadors: encourage them to share their experience, and offer them an affiliate or referral programme. But how can you identify your happiest customers? Easy: with a short but targeted ScoreApp quiz (for example, “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?”)
Challenges of reaching new people while maintaining your reputation
- Staying innovative and being flexible to adapt to market changes
- Keeping your marketing and sales teams aligned to make sure your prospects are always receiving relevant communications
- Managing more complex lead generation and nurturing processes that cover different strategies and higher volumes of prospects
Once again, ScoreApp simplifies this for established businesses, too:
- By collecting feedback, you’ll get to adapt to match your audience’s preferences
- When all your teams have access to the same quiz (which feeds into your CRM), they’ll always know what’s happening with each lead
- Its segmentation and automation features will streamline these processes for you
Keep mastering your lead generation for FREE with Scoreapp
Choose ScoreApp to focus on your lead generation consistently and automatically
From launching a new business to scaling it and maintaining your reputation: the actual tactics will change, but if you want to be successful, you must keep focusing on your lead generation.
With ScoreApp, this couldn’t be easier. Not only will it complement all your other tactics but your quiz funnel will also grow and evolve with your business.
Everything is downstream from lead generation. So, start taking control of yours for FREE with ScoreApp, and only upgrade to a paid plan when you actually need more features.
