Lead generation for small businesses: Top tips

Identifying prospects and generating new leads is vital to any business, but especially so to smaller firms and new start-ups, as they are often more vulnerable; having fewer long-term or high-spending existing customers.

Here we explore some tips to help lead generation:

Who do you share your news with?

Some organisations focus solely on communication with their existing customers and current prospects. This practice is absolutely vital, and should never be neglected at the expense of lead generation. However, it cannot be the sole focus of your marketing and communications strategy if you are looking to grow your business. To see growth you will also need to generate new leads by sharing your news, product updates, special offers and more with new prospects.

What method to use to contact your prospect list

Once you have selected the optimal prospect list, you need to arrange to send your campaign to begin the lead generation process. You may be planning an email, postal mailer, sales calling or an integrated multichannel marketing campaign.

The best way(s) to contact your clients may depend on your campaign plan, but can also be informed by the Customer Profiling exercise, as this can show the channel to which your existing clients respond best, and therefore inform some of your decision-making when proposing to contact a similar group of prospects.

Where to invest your marketing budget

There are some key elements that you should always invest in to drive effective marketing communications:

• Creative – investment in the design of your email or postal mailer will be vital to its success. It will need to make an impact on your target audience and thereby encourage them to read the content/offer within.
• Campaign Management and Automation – the time, day and regularity with which you send the elements of your campaign will affect your level of lead generation and campaign success. So this is an important area of investment, to ensure that you optimise these aspects for the best results.
• Distribution and Print – using a professional and reliable print or email distributor will ensure a successful deployment of your campaign. In the case of emails, it will also allow in-depth reporting to help you identify the level of ROI achieved.
• Cleansing – you can undertake a Free Data Quality Audit which will highlight what enhancements and updates are possible. For example, where you may currently have out-of-date information in your existing list. This information can then be used to cleanse and upgrade your data, to make it ready for your campaign activity.
• Marketing List of defined prospects – last but by no means least, as it will be vital to new lead generation, is a mailing list of prospects that have been selected based on criteria you know are a good fit to your target audience.

Further reading: Data HQ's complete guide to marketing lists and Data HQ's complete guide to email marketing