Start generating leads for your business

All businesses need a source of leads.  Start up businesses especially since if they don’t quickly start getting clients they may not be able to keep their doors open. Unfortunately many new business owners know a lot about their business, but not a lot about how to generate the leads their business needs.

Below are a few tips that will help you generate leads for your start up business.

Word of Mouth

Request your present customers to pass on word about your business to those they understand. Your present loyal customers are the greatest lead generation strength you’ve got. Their word of mouth can actually mean a lot to creating new customers. Simply them sharing your business info in social media can be astonishingly strong.

Tip: offer them some sort of discount or extra service if they share your business information on their social networks.

Open House Networking Events

Open your company up to the world.  If you have an office space that is large enough to host a large crowd.  Think about hosting networking events there.  Not only can you have presentation running in the background so people can learn about your business if they wish.  But you can also partner with other local companies so that they too can get some exposure.

tip:   In partnerships like this they should be non-competitive businesses.   If you are hosting you should have these other companies either pay a fee to help with the cost of the event or have them bring food, drinks or entertainment.  From personal experience I would say figure out how much it will cost to throw the event and split up the cost evenly.  We once had an event planned where one of the “sponsors” brought 2 bottles of wine and about 8 2-liter cokes.   They knew we were expecting 150 people over 3 hours.

Keep your lead forms simple

Simple forms get filled out.  Long forms turn people off.  Save the laundry list of question till after you have made contact and built a rapport. Keep in mind with each data field your possible lead must fill out, their interest will start to wane.  Collect only what is necessary to pre-qualify them.

Look for opportunities to sponsor events

Take a look at events locally and see if there is a way you’ll be able to use them to create leads. By way of example, if there’s a cycling race, purchase a sponsorship package. Then you certainly can get yourself on TV talking about it, or in the newspaper, or simply speak to individuals who are there to observe.

Revamp your SEO

Many start up companies go after very competitive keywords when they start their online marketing campaigns.  While its good to start trying to obtain these keywords, it may be a long time before you will be able to rank.  Consider making a list of what are called “long tailed keywords” .  These are keywords that are extremely specific to your niche and may have few companies trying to rank for them.  They will be easier to obtain and you will start to see organic traffic to your site a lot faster.