One of the biggest dilemmas for business owners in Singapore is deciding whether to buy leads or generate leads.
If you want to run a successful marketing campaign for your company, you probably know that having leads is vital. A lead is a person who shows interest in the products or services offered by your business.
Once you have a lead, the next step convincing them to make a purchase. Although it is not a simple task, it is much easier to persuade an interested party than it is to get the lead the first place.
As a marketer in Singapore, you have two options – to buy leads or generate leads. Here are the differences between these two approaches, including their respective pros and cons.
Generating Leads
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into people who show interest in your business’s products and services. Popular methods of lead generation include blog posts, coupons, online content, live events, and so forth.
The concept of generating leads online focuses on providing internet users with content that appeals to them so that they eventually get interested in your company’s offerings. Once a stranger shows interest in your service, it is simple to convert them into a customer.
How to Generate Leads
The easiest and most effective way of generating leads for your business in Singapore is to have a website that shows your products and services. Once you get people to your website, you can quickly convert them into clients.
If you want to generate leads online, consider using the following channels.
Publish Amazing Content
Your website should aim to provide visitors with accurate, relevant and informative content. If a user finds the information on your site to be useful, they are likely to read until the end. Remember to include compelling call-to-action statements that redirect visitors to a landing page.
If your content is exciting, it increases the chances of the user clicking your CTA and moving to your landing page.
Email Marketing
When a person visits your website, you can request them to subscribe to your mailing lists. Emails are a powerful tool for engaging with people who are already aware of what your business offers. This makes it easier to ask them to take a particular action, as they have already indicated an interest by subscribing to your emails.
When designing CTAs for email, keep in mind that email messages often appear cluttered. It is vital to use a startling design, accompanied by a captivating copy to grab the attention of the reader.
Blog
Blogging is a smart way of conversing with your target audience. You can design an entire blog post to promote a specific product or service. For instance, if you offer digital marketing service, you can create a post titled ‘a definitive guide to digital marketing.’ This way, you tell your visitors about the importance of what you sell, and they are likely to get interested in your business after reading the entire post.
Use Social Media
The majority of internet users in Singapore spend a lot of their time online browsing social media platforms. Social networks have various tools that make it easier for businesses to ask users to take action. For instance, you can easily integrate a link to your landing page on a social media post. Similarly, you can post a short video describing your products or services.
Offer Product Trials
If you are finding it difficult to generate sales, you can get people interested in your products by offering free trials. Once prospective clients start using your products, you can encourage them to purchase by giving additional offers.
Ensure that you include your branding on the free versions of your products. This is an excellent way of capturing the attention of anyone who comes across your products, even if they do not get the chance to use them.
Get Referrals from Existing Clients
Your existing clients can help in generating more leads by recommending your offerings to their friends and family. Naturally, people are more likely to buy products if they are approved by a person they trust.
The secret to having a successful referral campaign is maintaining a close relationship with your clientele, such as giving occasional free offers and incentivizing referrals. Also, people are likely to recommend your services if they are exceptional.
The Advantages of Generating Leads
Increased Awareness
Brand awareness is a measure of how well your company is known to its target audience. The more the people are aware of your businesses, the stronger your reputation. This, in turn, translates into a higher value for your brand and significantly improves your potential profits.
Increased Sales
Another significant benefit of lead generation is increasing sales. Businesses that use lead generation record increased sales after converting the leads into customers. You can also boost your profit margin, as well as maintain a competitive edge by generating more leads.
Contributes to a Positive ROI
Lead generation is a method of marketing your business in Singapore. If you generate your leads organically, you get a positive ROI since it costs almost nothing.
Targets Desired Clients
One of the core principles of lead generation is targeting the desired clients. By targeting people who are likely to show interest in your products, you boost the chances of making more sales.
Collects Vital Information about Prospective Clients
When you start generating leads, you learn more about your prospective clients. This enables you to tailor your products and services to suit their needs and preferences.
The Disadvantages of Lead Generation
Risk of Termination
If you employ the wrong strategies, your lead generation campaign can be disastrous. Instead of getting people to like your brand, you can disengage them entirely.
Low or no ROI
In lead generation, you can generate little or no ROI if your products and services do not appeal to your target audience.
Non-convicting Factors
In some cases, your company might emphasize lead generation so much that it forgets its primary objective, which is to serve clients. This might turn away both existing and prospective customers.
Buying Leads
If you are struggling to generate leads for your business in Singapore, you can always buy leads online. Buying leads requires less time and effort and is much quicker than generating leads organically.
The Advantages of Buying Leads
High-quality Leads
Companies that sell leads usually have a broad database that caters for businesses in various niches. They can filter the data to suit the preferences of your business. For example, if you are targeting the youth in Singapore, that is what they will sell to you. For B2B leads, The Grid could be helpful.
Consumes Less Time
Buying leads saves time that would otherwise be used trying to convince people to show interest in your brand.
High Conversion Ratio
If you manage to get high-quality leads, it becomes easier to convert them into customers. Pitching your ideas to bought leads is likely to be successful than trying to persuade strangers.
Economy
Although you spend money to purchase leads, the high ROI it promises makes it a worthwhile investment. With organic lead generation, you are essentially shooting in the dark and hoping to convince strangers to show interest in your brand.
Buying leads, on the hand, gives you a head start by connecting you to people who are already interested in your offerings.
The Disadvantages of Buying Leads
No Guarantees
There are no assurances that the leads you purchase will convert into regular clients. Also, it is worth noting that you cannot buy authority.
Obsolete Information
When you purchase a lead, there is a chance that it is outdated. The information might have been entered on the database years ago, making it irrelevant for current use.
No Personal Connection
People prefer interacting with brands that are already familiar to them. This means that it takes time to build trust, even with high-quality leads.
Shared Leads
A common practice among companies that sell leads is selling such leads to several other businesses in your niche. If your leads are not exclusive to your business, it significantly reduces the chances of converting them into customers.
By way of instance, if you promote social networking scheduling program for smaller companies, you can host an internet workshop for entrepreneurs showing them the way to construct involvement on social networking. You’re building trust fast by sharing your own knowledge on a topic within an arrangement like video.
Ways To Get Leads Without Paying For It
Attempt to associate with as many potential clients as possible
The more links you have, the broader your reach will be. You do not need to be buddies with those that you connect to. Connections that are tangential could be one of the most appropriate for prospects.
Get three recommendations from present clients displaying high quality work which may attest to your worth, professionalism, and efficacy. It will cost more if you can expand your brand via Facebook for Business, Twitter, and Snapchat but in many cases its a good investment.
Actively participate with leads at events
In the busy world of today, you’ve got work friends, biking friends, neighbours, club fellow members, association clansmen, etc. The key is easy — build your acquaintances to the stage where you could talk business, or not.
Obviously, mixing the professional and personal like this should be respectful and effective — but it’s a method of improving your reach.
Engage with current customers
It might be within the sales process of your own product/service, referral marketing, or optimisation — but no matter what you do, begin writing, to start the ball rolling.
It is about being human and having fun. Do not take matters too seriously! Explaining your”continually be helping” doctrine face-to-face is typically a fairly major differentiator. Bring business cards all events, whether its business or social. Some of the largest deals were forged during a chance encounter like a shared flight to a foreign city.
Optimize your networking profiles
When was the last time you updated Twitter account or your LinkedIn? Maintaining your networking profiles that are social to date is a fantastic way to bring in leads.
To get the maximum impact from your Twitter profile, make sure you’ve got a profile photograph, label your business’s accounts, include a URL and attempt to include hashtags which are connected to your customers.
LinkedIn is one of the very useful social networking platforms for your salespeople. Create your profile in view of standing out (and possibly appear in search questions) by creating a leading LinkedIn headline and descriptive outline which tell individuals who come to your profile precisely what you do and what services you provide.
Salespeople are on LinkedIn, but might not be utilising it for creating activity that is top-of-the-funnel. It’s a salesperson’s aspiration to have the ability to attach to find prospects that are interested, and networking is an excellent means to achieve that.
Working your network is just another alternative that is easy to begin with since you’ve got confidence that is built-in. There are people that you’ll meet in a context which you wouldn’t believe about a lead generation system but could be valuable.
Twitter is just another networking platform that create interest and prospects may use to associate with prospects.
Use a chat box to engage
One more means to get leads would be via a chatbot builder that is easy-to-use. You will find a lot in the marketplace nowadays, but HubSpot Conversations provides you the context and tools you have to have boundless, personalised talks at scale.
Customise your widget so it pops up in the display of your prospect and fits the look and feel of your own brand using a message that fits their aim and’s actionable. Take advantage of your chatbot to accommodate response FAQs, book meetings, schedule responses, download resources and much more.
Embed a meeting scheduler.
Embed a scheduled appointment scheduler onto your signature and your site.
Additionally, if there is no sales rep, then you may decide on a round-robin meeting connection, so prospects can schedule meetings with all the rep is available next.
Make it simple for prospects to get in contact with you personally and schedule time to discover more.
Since they’re more valuable and qualified than leads, invest in such prospects well. Enrol them in advertising email drips that are proper, send them applicable blog articles, and maintain communicating personalised.
Contribute posts that are informative to blogs and other sites.
Are you currently writing blogs? You ought to be. Begin with writing about everything you are a specialist at.
Blogging may be construed as as a structured means of writing a school essay — and composing is up there with people speaking that people fear and despise.
While sharing posts and blog articles are excellent ways to talk about your knowledge, nothing beats getting the chance to really instruct. Hosting a training or internet workshop sharing your experience on a subject is an excellent way.
But blogging is truly only a conversation, and a blog subject is often as straightforward as answering the conventional questions regarding your product which you do daily, like”The Beginner’s Guide to [Common Business Challenge]” and”X Items You want to Know About [Industry].”
Ask your clients.
Say that you appreciate your relationship and you are always interested in making it more beneficial to your customer. Ask whether there are some other contacts or businesses she could think of that will be considering precisely the exact same degree of support.
Get the title, contact number, and email of the contact, and also your customer thinks it’s a great fit. Request if they could tee up you with a fast introduction email. Small touches go a very long way.
Revisit closed/lost opportunities
Check with your account manager to ensure that the client is happy (and when they are not, establish a call anyhow to determine how it is possible to make things better). Ping the customer using a telephone and an email and request a 10-minute dialog.
Each six months, Get in touch with these prospects. Ask what their challenges are, and how their priorities have shifted, if their business enterprise and staff goals have changed.
Lead a webinar or an internet workshop.
It is essential that you are an expert in your area. Not only can it display your own experience, but you are going to educate your prospects. Want some help? Reach out to website editor or your marketer to get a lesson.
When you can, attending those events (in person and online) must be a part of your regular since they are a terrific way to cultivate your reach and possibly drum up business.
Create an email pipeline
Message 1: State pain points
Message 2: Describe a value message
Message 3: Name drop some large customer brands
Message 4: Qualify your message
Message 5: Contain a call-to-action message
Message 6: Reach out one final time
By the 6th email send, if the prospect is not biting, it will be a waste of time to continue.
Conclusion – Should you Buy Leads or Generate Leads?
Of these two options, buying leads seems like the more convenient approach of getting leads for your business in Singapore. Proponents of buying leads often justify the method by comparing it to paying for adverts.
However, it is much better to generate leads organically. Firstly, purchased leads do not know about your business. This means that if you send marketing messages to them, you are intrusive and annoying.
If you continue sending such messages to several people, the next consequence is getting flagged as a spammer. It only gets worse from here, as you can get blacklisted by email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it is impossible to get off it. Even worse, it will affect your IP reputation and email deliverability.
Although it takes time and a considerable amount of resources, always try to generate leads organically. This way, you build authority and trust with your clients.
Get in touch for pro digital marketing services in Singapore. We will also help you get more leads and improve your online reputation.
