November 19, 2021
Maintaining a steady flow of marketing leads is crucial to the success of your company. But at the same time, you can’t overspend on leads, or you risk cutting into your profit margin.
That’s why free marketing leads are sought after. Keep reading to learn where to find free marketing leads and how to leverage them to achieve your goals.
Understanding The Value Of Free Marketing Leads
The average cost per lead varies by industry. Check out this list for more information on how much leads cost on average in your sector:
- Finance – $160
- Non-profits – $31
- Marketing – $99
- Retail – $34
- Media – $108
- Healthcare – $162
- Manufacturing – $132
You also need to remember that not every lead will ultimately become a paying client. So the actual amount that you pay per new customer acquisition is likely much higher than these figures.
That makes securing free marketing leads a top priority. If you can replace a sizeable chunk of your paid leads with free ones, you could save money and improve your bottom line.
Where To Find Free Marketing Leads
Blogs
Blog posts are an excellent way to attract new leads to your website. You can produce them for free, and once a visitor visits your site, you can begin tracking their behavior to display targeted ads.
The key to this strategy is creating blog posts that people want to read. Doing that will require you to understand what your target audience cares about and then creating a resource that provides real value in that area.
It’s also smart to add SEO keywords throughout your blog posts. Doing so will help your post show up higher on Google searches.
Emails
Email marketing feels a bit old school in this era of social media, but it’s still one of the most effective ways to find new leads. The average ROI for an email marketing campaign is an impressive 4400%, and you can run one for free.
The most effective marketing emails are short and sweet. They offer value to the consumer and utilize personalization as much as possible.
The tone of the emails should fit with your brand voice. If you’re a serious analytics firm, highlight the data revealing how your company can help them grow. But if you sell fun products, don’t be afraid to send a more easy-going, conversational email.
Social Media
Social media is another fantastic way to earn free marketing leads. The first step is getting a solid number of followers to your profile – and engaging with them.
You can do that by sharing content people in your target industry find valuable. You can also run contests to drive up your engagement numbers without paying for ads.
Then your focus should shift to getting people to move from your social profile to your website by sharing posts, company news, and updates.
Podcasts
Podcasts are an under-utilized way to get free leads. 60% of U.S. consumers over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast, and 80 million Americans listen to podcasts every week. That’s a huge audience your company can tap into to find more free marketing leads.
You have a few options here. One is to launch a podcast that covers relevant industry topics. You can find guests to take advantage of their audiences as well.
Another is to go on a podcast tour and have someone from your business guest star on existing podcasts. This way you can appeal to already dedicated audiences – and perhaps attract some new audience segments in the process.
Referrals and Reviews
Focusing on these two marketing channels is another crucial way to earn more leads.
Both referrals and reviews provide external validation that your company is as good as you say it is. Begin by giving your customers a reason to provide them for you. That could mean incentivizing them with a one-time discount or simply encouraging them to leave a review after you’ve delivered a positive experience – take advantage of customer satisfaction surveys.
Your Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a piece of content you produce to attract new prospects. The goal is to create something that your target audience will find valuable enough to exchange their information for.
You could create a free online course accessible only through an informational wall. This can include their name, company association, email address, and anything else you find useful (as long as it’s not too invasive).
Other examples of lead magnets include ebooks, access to guides, expert advice, and anything that you can think of that might be valuable enough to entice your audience.
You can create some effective lead magnets if you’re willing to invest some capital into doing so – but you can also make these offerings completely free. You have total flexibility to spend what you’re comfortable with.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are another excellent source of free marketing leads. So how do you make compelling landing pages? Here are some tips:
- Clearly state the value you provide
- Don’t complicate things
- A/B test different headlines and copy
- Incentivize people to give you their information with trials, discounts, and other offers
Networking Events
Everything nowadays is so digitally focused that it’s sometimes easy to forget there are also non-digital ways to engage with leads. For example, networking events in your city can be a great way to meet new marketing leads.
These can be especially effective because they let you form a personal connection with the person you’re trying to sell your product to. Having that connection already established should significantly increase the chances they end up buying your product.
It’s why you should consider adding networking events to your list of free-lead tactics.
Leveraging Free Leads To Reach Your Sales Goals
Free marketing leads are the first step toward reaching your sales goals. You also need to be able to convert those free leads into paying customers at a high rate. Here are some tips:
Understand your audience
If you’re not converting a good percentage of your leads, it could be because you don’t understand your audience as well as you think you do. Experienced salespeople will often assume they know what a lead wants just because they’ve dealt with so many similar situations in the past.
If you think you could understand your audience better, start by re-examining their pain points. Then consider how your product addresses those pain points.
It’s also a good idea to ask each lead in your sales funnel these types of questions. The responses they provide will help you refine your sales strategy so it’s personalized to address their unique concerns.
Don’t give up too soon
It’s also important you don’t give up on a marketing lead too soon. A study by Propeller found that 44% of salespeople give up after a single follow-up. That’s even though the average sale requires five follow-ups after the initial contact.
That means you may be moving on from leads before they’ve gotten to the point where they’re ready to make a buying decision. And if you’re doing that, then your sales numbers could be much lower than they should be.
So why not embrace the practice of doing at least five follow-ups with each lead? Spread these out over at least a few weeks and see if that improves your sales figures.
Optimize your website
Most customers do the majority of their shopping for large purchases online – and your website is the place consumers will go to evaluate what you have to offer. If it’s not exceptional, you risk losing out to competitors who have decided to optimize their websites.
Content is really important. But you also need to display it in intuitive ways and places that are easy to find. Aim to remove as much friction as possible between your leads and the content they look at before making a buying decision.
A platform like LeadLander can help you achieve this by showing how your website visitors interact with your site as a whole, as well as each landing page.
Offer incentivizes
Offering incentives can also help you close more deals. The best part is, these don’t even have to be costly. It’s often enough to provide a lead with a small discount on their first purchase.
Know when it’s time to move on
A lot of salespeople indeed tend to give up too early. But there’s a balance to hit here. If you try hanging on to a lead for too long, you risk wasting time that could be spent pursuing prospects that you have a better chance of converting.
So, how do you know when it’s time to move on?
We recommend setting a hard cut-off date after a certain amount of time with no communication from a lead. For example, if you haven’t heard from a lead in 30 days, that may be a sign that it’s time to focus your time elsewhere.
LeadLander Makes The Most Of Your Marketing Leads From Your Website
Your website is one of the most valuable resources you have for generating free marketing leads. And LeadLander helps you get more out of it. Our website visitor tracking software helps companies:
- Discover new leads
- Track the behavior of existing leads
- Understand how prospects are interacting with different parts of your website
- And much more
You can use LeadLander to support your efforts to start finding more free marketing leads and converting them at a higher rate.
But don’t just take our word for it. Try a free 14-day trial of LeadLander to experience the difference we provide for yourself.
