It’s hard to overstate the importance of leads in the business world. They act as a sort of fuel that enables companies to keep growing. That’s why maintaining a high-quality leads pipeline is considered essential by most businesses. For example, consider that 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. But the average number of total leads generated by midsize and large companies is around 1,900 per month. With stats like these, it stands to reason that if your company could create a strategy around how to acquire free leads, it might develop a serious competitive advantage. Doing so could open up your marketing budget for other initiatives by significantly reducing your cost per lead.
If you’re not sure where to get started, don’t worry. We’ve put together everything you need to know when it comes to how to get free leads and convert them into paying customers.
For other strategy tips, read up on our additional tactics that can be easily rolled into your free lead plan.
What Is Cost Per Lead? What Should Yours Be?
Cost per lead is one of the most effective ways to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. It’s a pretty simple calculation that can provide your company with some truly powerful insights.
To calculate your cost per lead, you only need two pieces of data:
- The total amount your company spends on marketing
- The total number of new leads that you’ve generated within a set time frame
Once you have both of these data points, just divide your marketing costs by the number of new leads. For example, if you spend $100,000 on marketing and generate 1,000 new leads, your cost per lead would be $100.00.
Now that you know what cost per lead is and how to calculate it, you might be wondering whether yours is any good. The average cost per lead varies pretty significantly from industry to industry. But the overall average for all industries is about $198.
So if your cost per lead is lower than that, you’re probably on the right track. If it’s not, you may want to consider focusing more on free leads to help you get your cost per lead down.
Start Generating Free Leads With These Strategies
Leverage your ChatBot
According to Acquire, there are 1.4 billion people across the globe who are willing to talk with chatbots – so if your company isn’t already using a chatbot on its website, now could be the perfect time to set one up.
Chatbots are commonly used to resolve consumer complaints and provide quick answers to customers’ questions. But they can also be used as a powerful free lead generation tool.
Chatbots are available to automatically respond to customers 24/7. That means with a little tweaking, you can turn yours into a full-time lead generation tool. The process is easy enough. Just alter the information that the chatbot requests from those who use it. Doing so is an easy way to start learning more about the people visiting your website.
Create a value-packed newsletter
Newsletters are a fantastic way to spread brand awareness. They’re also an effective means of pulling a prospect further down your sales funnel. You can use them to share promotions, updates, upcoming events, and anything else that you think your prospects might find valuable.
Your goal with a newsletter should be to infuse it with enough value to get a prospect to give you their information in order to access it.
Host an event
Events are another excellent way to start generating more leads without a significant investment (especially as we emerge into the post-pandemic landscape). Try to imagine something that your company is an expert on that you also know your target audience cares deeply about.
Then, have one of your employees put together a workshop, conference, seminar, or meetup that will focus on that topic. You’ll get to interact with prospects in real-time while also gathering the information that you need to reach back out to them at a later date.
Give podcasts a chance
Podcasts might not be one of your first ideas for prospect outreach. But it’s a medium that you shouldn’t ignore. More than 144 million Americans listen to podcasts. That’s a huge market that you could start tapping into with content that’s free to produce.
There are several ways to go about doing this. You could start your own podcast slated to those who align with your buyer personas. You don’t even necessarily have to invest that much time or energy into this free lead generation method – just the right recording equipment and a willing audience.
Another option is to sign up to be a guest on podcasts that you know people in your target audience listen to. For example, if there’s a podcast that’s popular in your industry, pitch the hosts on being a guest for one episode. You can use the opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader while also boosting brand awareness.
Create and distribute valuable content
The best way to generate free leads is to get new prospects to come to you. And in order to do that, you need to provide them with something they value. For example, you might create detailed how-to guides on relevant industry topics, ebooks that summarize important issues, and even webinars that offer new prospects the chance to interact with someone from your company in a live setting.
You can offer all of these to readers for free, but use a signup for access method to ensure you collect emails and other contact information, like their name, the company they work for, and their email address.
Your results with this strategy will be as good as the content that you create. The more valuable the content you produce, the more quality leads your company will be able to generate.
How To Get Free Leads And Convert Them With A Strong Qualification Process
Now that you know how to find free leads, you need to figure out how to convert them. A portion of your conversion rate will be determined by the effectiveness of your sales staff. But having a strong lead qualification process will help your company convert more free leads regardless of your sales team’s impact.
Lead qualification is the process of separating the leads that are lukewarm on your company from quality leads that are most likely to purchase your products or services. There are several different strategies for this, and you may want to play around with a few methods before settling on one. But our recommendation is for your company to start using a lead scoring system.
Lead scoring is precisely what it sounds like. It’s the process of using an objective system to rate the quality of your leads. For example, your company will assign a point value for each of several key actions that a new prospect might make. Examples of this include:
- Visiting your pricing page
- Downloading your ebook
- Opening up an email that you sent
- Watching your webinar
- Conducting a search on your website
The goal is to add together all of the points a prospect has to provide them with an objective lead score. With that score, you can easily figure out where your sales team’s time is going to be best spent. And, most importantly, you can begin increasing the number of free leads you convert.
Start Getting More Out Of Your Organic Web Traffic
Your company’s website is a rich source of data. When you collect and analyze this data, you can learn things like who’s visiting your website, which pages they’re looking at, and even how they got to your website. This makes your website another excellent resource when you’re learning how to get free leads.
But in order to get the most out of your web data, you’ll need a powerful tool that can help you collect and analyze it. Cue LeadLander.
Our platform was carefully designed to enhance the impact of both your inbound and outbound marketing and sales efforts. It will provide your company with specific details about its anonymous web visitors. So you can use LeadLander to identify new prospects that your sales staff might not have discovered.
We also make it easy to track the behavior patterns of repeat visitors so you can see which of your leads are the most interested in what you have to offer. All of this is packaged together in an easy-to-use platform that’s accessible to everyone in your organization.
Collectively, these factors mean that LeadLander can be a tremendous resource as you work to generate free leads and convert them into paying customers. Try it yourself by taking advantage of our free 14-day trial. You can sign up today without having to give us your credit card, and it’s free to cancel at any time.