15 tips on how to generate leads for b2b and b2c
In this article, you will discover 14 tips on how to generate leads for b2b and b2c to find more customers to start your own business or further develop your clientele if you are already working on your own.
Here are briefly my tips:
1 – Identify your added value and define your customer profile
2 – Target people who need you
3 – Create a lead magnet
4 – Create a trusting relationship with your potential customers
5 – Create a product or service that meets the needs of your potential customers
6 – Market and sell your product or service
7 – Increase customers’ loyalty
8 – Become more productive
9 – Broaden your understanding of your market
10 – Use the power of testimonials
11 – Improve the ranking of your website
12 – Create a YouTube channel
13 – Develop partnerships
14 – Become an ethical marketer
15 – Ask your former clients to promote your products and services
Now, I suggest you go through these tips one by one. Let’s move on to the first tip on how to find your ideal potential customers.
1 – Identify your added value and define your customer profile
Whether you are a new entrepreneur or an old one, it is always important to go back to the basics of entrepreneurship.
Before looking for potential clients and customers, it is essential to be aware of what you are able to provide to your audience.
You need to identify your:
- qualities in terms of personality
- skills and knowledge
- strengths and weaknesses
- motivations for being an entrepreneur
- values as an individual and as an entrepreneur
Next, you need to identify at least one need of your target audience and see if you can meet that need.
If the answer is no, keep thinking about other needs that you can try to meet.
If the answer is yes, then you will need to study your competitors’ strategies in depth to understand the kind of value you can add by taking into account the items on the list above.
2 – Target the people who need you
Now that you know the value you can add to your ideal audience, you need to understand whether your potential customers really need you.
But in order to do this and to effectively target these people, you need above all to develop a deeper understanding of their needs and desires.
To achieve this goal you can:
- study the business strategy of your competitors
- research on the Internet and in specialized publications
- continue testing your marketing hypotheses
Once you have gathered enough relevant data, your job will be to define a marketing communication strategy aimed at showcasing your expertise and attracting the potential customers you are interested in.
In the following tip, you will understand how to attract the clients that interest you.
3 – Create a lead magnet
One particularly effective way to attract qualified prospects is to create a lead magnet.
This is something free that you will offer these people in exchange for their contact information, and especially their e-mail address.
For the lead magnet to be effective, it is essential to offer an ebook, video, or any other document that is related to a need or desire of your prospects.
If the perceived value of your lead magnet is good, you will be able to generate an e-mail list that will be useful in keeping communicating with these people.
From a practical standpoint, you have several solutions for collecting your prospects’ e-mails, but after trying several options, the one I recommend in terms of value for money is GetResponse. You can try GetResponse for free for 30 days.
After creating your lead magnet, you will need to distribute it to the people you are interested in.
You can do this either with paid advertising or for free by taking advantage of social networks such as Facebook or professional ones such as Linkedin.
Search on Facebook and on LinkedIn for groups where the customers you are targeting are located and offer them your lead magnet on a regular basis.
Seek them out on Facebook and LinkedIn, and if you have followed these tips you will receive e-mail addresses within a few days and your list will grow constantly.
Now that you have started this reciprocal relationship with your potential customers, you must also maintain it by constantly giving value every time you interact with them.
4 – Create a trusting relationship with your prospects
Any effective relationship is based on some form of reciprocity, and the same goes for your future clients.
If you want them to become customers, you must strengthen this relationship.
To achieve this, you must constantly provide them with useful information that will enable them to make some progress toward achieving their goals or to better understand topics that are important to them.
Above all, your goal is to be helpful by providing them with quality content. In this way, you can integrate yourself into their lives as a partner in their success.
From time to time, you can take advantage of these exchanges to highlight products or services you might want to offer.
But do this without neglecting the added value you bring them week after week.
These interactions with your prospects are also an opportunity for ongoing dialogue to better understand their goals, problems, fears, and desires.
Doing so will help you integrate these elements into your communication strategy with your potential and current customers.
5 – Create a product or service that meets the needs of your potential customers
If you already have a product or service to offer your potential customers, you can move on to the next tip.
But if you don’t have one, it is essential to create one or propose a product or service from another company you work with, such as a sales representative or affiliate.
If you want to create your own product or service, you can easily do so by starting with analyzing your competitors.
Then you will gather all the information you have accumulated so far to create a new product or service or an improved or different version of an existing one.
This is the time when you need to differentiate yourself from your competitors by meeting a need of these potential customers that your competitors are not meeting yet.
To do this you need to develop a deep understanding of these people’s needs.
The more you are able to strengthen the relationship of trust with these potential customers, the more you will be able to establish a dialogue with them that will allow you to understand what they are really thinking and feeling.
When in doubt, you can use your existing database to ask your prospects to answer some questions to clarify your doubts.
Ideally, meet with them in person or talk to them online, in groups, or preferably, individually to better understand their challenges.
6 – Market and sell your product or service
Now that you have all the elements in place to create a product or service that meets the needs of your customers and at the same time gives you a competitive advantage, it is time to market this product or service to your audience and sell it to the people who need it the most.
At this stage, your list of potential customers will be particularly useful, especially if the lead magnet you used previously addressed a topic related to the product or service you want to promote and sell.
If not, you will need to create another lead magnet that addresses one or more issues consistent with the concerns of your potential customers.
To begin with, I recommend you do not spend money on paid advertising, especially if you have a small budget.
Instead, do whatever you can to develop a free list of qualified prospects.
Then you can use this list to continue exposing these people to your content.
Alternatively, you can use these same e-mail addresses to advertise on Facebook.
In terms of content to spread the word about your products and services for free, I recommend 3 methods:
- writing articles with keywords directly related to your product or service
- creating videos consistent with your products or services
- developing your email list using one or more lead magnets
7 – Increase customers’ loyalty
All entrepreneurs can sell once, but only a small proportion of them are able to sell to their customers many times.
Customer loyalty is the key to developing a business that can thrive in the long run.
The secret to achieving this goal is to take advantage of all the opportunities at your disposal to deepen the dialogue with your customers.
This way, you will always be one step ahead of your competitors.
Most competitors limit themselves to a purely commercial relationship.
If you remain curious and genuinely interested in your customers’ challenges and problems, you will always be at the forefront of your industry and can even challenge the leaders in your market.
A very effective way to retain customers is to actively listen to them.
If you want to improve your active listening skills, I recommend you discover our course on active listening.
8 – Become more productive
To begin with, it is important to understand how to become more productive as an entrepreneur. If this topic interests you, I recommend my article on becoming a productive entrepreneur.
The simplest advice I can give you is to focus your work time on tasks that will:
- increase your visibility
- sell more products or services
- strengthen your skills and knowledge
9 – Broaden your understanding of your market
It is important to constantly study the strategies implemented by your competitors and see which ones you can easily and quickly implement to gain new market share.
Then, expand your research to understand what is happening internationally in other countries.
This is one way to identify new trends and anticipate how your market is evolving before your competitors do.
Next, study industries other than your own and try to test new ideas that you think are relevant for creating new growth opportunities for your business.
Finally, keep up to date with market developments by reading business publications and relevant sites in your industry.
10 – Use the power of testimonials
Even if your product or service is perfect and your sales strategy is perfect, you may meet potential customers who have difficulty deciding.
In such cases, you can convince these people by utilizing the testimonials of your former customers and especially those who have something in common with them and with which they can relate.
For this reason, it is in your best interest to show testimonials from a wide variety of clients on your website.
To strengthen the credibility of these testimonials, also ask for a photo, keeping the original size.
Each testimonial is an opportunity to strengthen your credibility and make it easier for your prospects to choose you.
11 – Improve your website ranking
If you want to achieve medium- and long-term results without spending a lot of money on advertising, you need to learn at least the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). If this is not possible, you can hire an expert SEO consultant.
In this article I share with you some basic tips that will give you results if you apply them consistently:
- use keywords that will allow you to increase your revenue or exposure
- develop a single topic for each article
- alternate high value-added articles that highlight your expertise with articles that are purely strategic in terms of keywords used by your potential customers
- create a video for your most strategic articles in order to improve the ranking of these pages on your website
- regularly create new content
- continue developing the content for the most strategic pages of your website
It is essential to have a quality web host to have a website that loads quickly.
This is true especially nowadays as most people use smartphones to surf the internet. If your site loads too slowly, you lose customers.
After several tests, we recommend infomaniak because it is a very high level host.
12 – Create a YouTube channel
Video creation is important not only for improving your site’s search engine rankings.
Video also allows you to communicate your personality by showing your strengths and weaknesses.
This makes you more approachable to your audience and therefore more vulnerable and human.
In this way, your prospects and current customers will feel they know you and will be more willing to listen to you and trust you.
You will not be able to please everyone, but you will have a greater chance of earning the trust of people who will recognize part of themselves in you.
If you want to grow your YouTube channel more efficiently and quickly, I recommend using the free TubeBuddy extension.
13 – Build partnerships
Developing partnerships with other professionals is important not only to attract current and new clients but also to improve the quality of your life and health.
As a business owner you are more susceptible to isolation, and making connections with others is essential for your well-being.
In order to fully enjoy the benefits of partnership, I recommend you define what is essential to you before entering into business agreements.
Here are some important tips to follow.
Choose professionals with:
- ethics and values consistent with yours
- skills that are complementary to yours
- a genuine interest in working with you
- enough flexibility to devote some of their time and energy to your joint projects
- a tendency to avoid being pessimistic or overly perfectionistic
14 – Become an ethical marketer entrepreneur
Some entrepreneurs do not know how to attract prospects and new customers because they have a negative image of selling.
If you think of a salesperson as someone who forces you to buy something you don’t need, or even worse, as someone who tries to harm you, you will never be a good salesperson.
To sell effectively, it is necessary to transform this belief into an image of the ethical salesperson-that is a person who has solutions that improve the quality of life of their customers.
An ethical salesperson listens to the needs of their customers and prefers not to sell to people who do not understand the value of their offer.
The goal is not to increase sales at all costs, but rather to come up with a solution that will make their customers happier and more satisfied.
This marketer is sincere and assertive because they are ready to say what they really think. At the same time, they know how to show empathy when their potential or current customer expresses their motivations, struggles, and desires.
15 – Ask your former clients to promote your products and services
In my psychology studies, I had learned that we tend to believe more in what others say about a person rather than what we hear directly from that person.
This principle can be applied to your marketing strategy by asking your past clients to not only write you a testimonial.
But also by asking them to actively promote your products and services.
Specifically, you will ask your former clients to highlight only the benefits of the products or services they actually received.
This has several benefits for you.
Firstly, your clients will be able to promote your offer more effectively than you, especially to their close circle of contacts.
This is because they will be able to highlight the aspects of your offer that are most relevant to them.
Secondly, your previous customers will focus on aspects of your offer that you have not thought about because you cannot be completely objective about what you provide.
Some of these aspects that you will discover, will allow you to improve the effectiveness of your communication and consequently your revenue.
Conclusion on how to attract prospects and new customers
In this article, I have shared with you my experience as an entrepreneur to give you several ways to grow your clientele.
Each of these suggestions addresses very broad topics that would require writing several articles, or even several books or training courses.
This article was intended to give you an overview of what you can start implementing easily in your future or current business.
If you want to take advantage of customized coaching with a business coach, write to us now using our contact form, or call us by phone or WhatsApp at +33 6 69 46 03 79.
Read this article in other languages
Français : Comment attirer des prospects et de nouveaux clients : le guide complet !
Italiano: Come attirare potenziali clienti e nuovi clienti: la guida completa!