Tag: Free Lead Generator Tool

Most Important Integrations That Every MCA CRM Must Have For Business Growth

If you are an owner of a Merchant Cash Advance business, chances are that you have sat in on a few meetings with your employees to help your teams understand the best approaches to manage their leads, contacts, customers, and opportunities. Now, what begun with a Rolodex machine, a date book, and a telephone has now evolved in MCA businesses to the use of sophisticated online lead management software applications- better known as MCA CRM platforms, like ConvergeHub, which is customized for Cash Advance businesses. If you are not aware of what is CRM, you might wonder what is exactly the purpose of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, how it can help your business to attract and retain more customers, or how you can integrate your easy to use CRM with your MCA website for rapid and consistent business growth.

If you are an owner of a Merchant Cash Advance business, chances are that you have sat in on a few meetings with your employees to help your teams understand the best approaches to manage their leads, contacts, customers, and opportunities.
Now, what begun with a Rolodex machine, a date book, and a telephone has now evolved in MCA businesses to the use of sophisticated online lead management software applications- better known as MCA CRM platforms, like ConvergeHub, which is customized for Cash Advance businesses.

Integrating QuickBooks and CRM helps your business deliver a better customer experience. Click To Tweet

If you are not aware of what is CRM , you might wonder what is exactly the purpose of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software , how it can help your business to attract and retain more customers, or how you can integrate your easy to use CRM with your MCA website for rapid and consistent business growth.

So, here are the answers to your question.

What is Customer Relationship Management software?

The main task of any CRM software be it customized for Cash Advance or any other business, is that it is an application that helps your sales, marketing, support, and even accounts manage your leads, prospects, customers, leading to business growth and more sales.
It is a software that helps to keep track of your leads and customers, their relationship with your organization, keep a record of whom they work for, what they are doing, what they are thinking about buying, or keep a tab on how often they contact you, among an incredible number of other options that CRM also aids in business.

The major benefit of using Merchant Cash Advance software in your MCA business is to find the ability to streamline your sales process, increase interactions with your Cash Advance customers and prospects and finally nurture those relationships in a way you see it fit for your business growth.

Therefore, regardless of whatever easy to use CRM software that you use, for Cash Advance, Retail, Reality, Legal, or any other business, majority of CRM software platforms, gathers the same type of information and have identical types of goals, such as:

  • Perk up customer communication and customer retention plans
  • Enhance company profitability by ushering business growth
  • Increase focus in your business
  • Increase prospect and customer tracking abilities

What are CRM integrations?

The best and the most popular easy to use CRM software especially Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions are the ones with the highest user adoption rates. This is because, the more your sales, marketing, support, and accounts are willing to input data, the better will be the CRM platform’s ability to enable your employees to engage more customers and perform better over time. Hence inputting more data in the MCA CRM leads to increased business growth.

As with most easy to use CRM software platforms there is no one-size-fits-all solution, as vendors of CRM software as a whole strive to meld different functions to accommodate the needs of individual employees, to personalize their workflow, and create a uniform system that better tracks performance, ensure consistency in customer engagement, and improve productivity for business growth.

Now, CRM platforms can achieve this above-stated feat, with official and third-party integrations.
While official integrations are native collaborations between the MCA CRM and external software solutions, third-party integrations need the use of APIs or web services such as Zapier.

Here are some of the most used integrations that your MCA CRM platforms must have for increasing your alternative lending business’s growth.

  1. QuickBooks (Online)

For organizations, especially the ones that cater to financial services, QuickBooks accounting software is one of the most popular third-party software used along with their CRM platforms.
MCA CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub, offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, and is widely accepted as one of the best QuickBooks CRM software for any alternative lending business who are looking forward to using the data from their QuickBooks accounting software to build a closer relationship with their customers and generate more sales.

Once you integrate QuickBooks and your MCA CRM together, there can be a free exchange of information and data between these two software applications, whereby you can continue to use QuickBooks for accounting purposes, and at the same time see all the customer’s details, products and services for sale, along with invoice and payment information directly in your CRM.
You can then use this data from QuickBooks CRM for reminders, follow-ups, customer service, and business process automation.

  1. DocuSign

A plethora of signing on documents is most essentially required in alternative lending businesses. Therefore, most Merchant Cash Advance software users prefer integrating their MCA CRM with DocuSign that can help them to manage every aspect of each contact from preparing and sending documents for signing to managing them in their CRM platforms.

Using DocuSign with CRM for your business growth helps in remaining rest assured that everything stays legal, secure, and visible with a complete audit trail, apart from saving money and time and enhance your customer’s experience with your organization, delighting your customers along the way.

  1. Ring Central

MCA CRM is a storehouse of information about communications between your teams and your leads, prospects, and customers. Therefore, most companies in alternative lending business integrate Ring Central, which is an external software that help users to dial and log calls through RingCentral inside the CRM in a smarter way to enhance productivity and enrich customer interactions. This integration between the MCA CRM and RingCentral is perfect for small businesses who want to have a reliable voice service inside their CRM and efficiently manage customer phone calls.

  1. Google Drive

Google Drive integration for Merchant Cash Advance CRM software allows the users of the MCA CRM to share, sync, manage and access files associated with records through Google Drive right from within the easy to use CRM account. All attachments from your respective CRM records gets stored and synced into your associated Google Drive account with the help of this most important integration, used by many in alternative lending businesses.

  1. Google Calendar

Integrating Google Calendar with your MCA CRM software helps to bring all of your events, tasks, and meetings from your Google Calendar to your Merchant Cash Advance software, allowing you to stay updated by referring to what you have planned so that you never miss out any opportunities.

Once you use this integration for your alternative lending business and edit the calendar of your choice in real time, you can make a decision if you want those alterations to be reflected in either the Google Calendar, or MCA CRM software’s calendar, or both.

  1. Lead Generator Tool

If you are using ConvergeHub, the best MCA CRM for small businesses, you can also download and integrate its Free Lead Generator Tool.

Using this integration allows you to visit any lead’s social media page and capture all information instantly with no manual typing and hereafter save qualified leads from social media, other websites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse for even more sales power and business growth.

This integration (which is most often liked by all ConvergeHub MCA CRM users) helps to capture qualified leads into the sales funnel in a flash and use the power of CRM to convert them into paying customers – all for FREE.

Conclusion

Hence, the only limit to the ways you can use ConvergeHub MCA CRM is your imagination. ConvergeHub CRM seamlessly integrates with more than 30 third-party integrations, helping you to integrate your billing, call management, e-signature solution, and others, for a complete customer data, smarter selling, leading to rapid business growth .

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How Lead Scoring Benefits Businesses Using Merchant Cash Advance Software

If you are using MCA business and is using Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative funding business, what should you do next after attracting a high volume of leads? Remember, not all leads are the same, and therefore, separating the good leads from those that are not can be really challenging. This is exactly where if you are using an easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM solution like ConvergeHub, solid lead scoring comes into play. According to a report published by APSIS, only 44 percent of companies are presently using lead scoring systems to grow their business.

If you are using MCA business and is using Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative funding business, what should you do next after attracting a high volume of leads? Remember, not all leads are the same, and therefore, separating the good leads from those that are not can be really challenging.

This is exactly where if you are using an easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM solution like ConvergeHub, solid lead scoring comes into play.

According to a report published by APSIS, only 44 percent of companies are presently using lead scoring systems to grow their business.

Just 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to Sales- MarketingSherpa Click To Tweet

Therefore, before it gets too late you as a user of MCA CRM software should maximize this methodology and leverage your alternative lending business from your competitors by unveiling meaningful insights to improve your sales processes and your funnel.

In fact, lead scoring is a time-honored process, which most often exceeds expected benefits such as sales productivity and effectiveness, increased conversion ratio, and measurable ROI.

However, even before we delve into how we can build an awesome lead scoring model for your MCA business, let us talk primarily about whether you should have it and if so why.

Candidly, lead scoring is truly a tedious process, therefore, it is most essential to determine if lead scoring is suitable for your MCA business, to ensure that you do not waste time, money, and effort dedicated towards it.

Why Implement Lead Scoring in MCA business?

The most intriguing factor about lead scoring techniques is it does not come as a “one-size-fits-all” methodology. In fact, not every business needs an advance lead scoring model for their business. Nevertheless, lead scoring provides your business with a scientific and automated means to rank your leads, in a quantifiable manner, to calculate their perceived value in your organization.

Let us look at an example:

Suppose Jack, an owner of a large departmental store, visits your website. Since you do not know about him yet, he starts from the score of 0. However, as he interacts with your website more his scores increases subsequently. Per say, information about his title (+10 Points), he requests a cash advance demo (+10 points), he is from a large retail outlet (+5 Points). Now, once your lead reaches a certain point (based completely on your individually created criteria), where Jack is deemed sales-ready, it is time to send your sales team to reach out and convince Jack to convert him into your customer, by closing the deal.

The lead scoring technique is most often used with Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for improving the sales process, align marketing and sales, prioritize leads and lastly for creating higher quality conversions.

Now, to determine if lead scoring is required for your cash advance business, here are some questions you should consider as a user of MCA CRM platform, which aids in implementing the lead scoring methodology.

–Do you have a very high volume of leads flowing in from several channels, than your sales team can follow up within a specific time?

– Do you have enough information in your MCA CRM database for lead scoring?

–Do you have a particular content from a lead nurturing strategy, which needs to be delivered to a lead at a specific time in their buying journey?

–Do you feel that your sales processes can be more effective and efficient than what it is now?

If your answer is affirmative for all or most of these above-mentioned questions, then we would readily recommend that your alternative funding business organization is ready to start with a lead scoring system.

Otherwise, we would suggest you to primarily focus on generating more leads, establish an SLA (Service Level Agreement) between your marketing and sales teams, and collect and track the right information from your forms and website.

If you do not have enough leads to start lead scoring for your business, do you know ConvergeHub offers FREE LEAD GENERATOR Tool, which is a free lead generation software that you can easily download from ConvergeHub website?

Implementing a lead scoring methodology is extremely difficult to do manually (using spreadsheets) as a lead’s activity can change every day. Therefore, you need Merchant Cash Advance software or online lead management software, like ConvergeHub, which has an excellent lead management system to implement the modeling we will discuss below.

Basic Framework of Lead Scoring Setup

According to SiriusDecisions, 90 percent of B2B (Business-to-Business) companies are applying lead scoring. However, on the other hand, only 40 percent of sales reps have said to have found value from it. Although various factors can contribute to the failure of this remaining 28 percent, we are sure if you start on the right foot when implementing this system, the lead scoring methodology is always beneficial, especially as your business grows in years and becomes more complex over time.

Demographic Lead Scoring

Primarily, you need to outline what your MCA business needs by identifying your ideal lead. To begin, you need to select the demography based on your lead’s characteristics. Like, who are more likely to purchase your offerings compared to others? Is it small or large enterprises? In what industry/business and in what level?

Using lead capture forms helps you to collect this data. You can easily capture four basic demographics:

  • Job title or role
  • Number of employees or size of the business
  • Industry or business type
  • Department

Assign points based on your ideal lead. For example, for company type, you may assign higher points for B2B and lesser for B2C leads. This also works for the lead’s industry (like retail, small shop, large departmental store, among others) and seniority (like the owner, the floor in charge, sales rep and others).

Behavioral Lead Scoring

The second type of data that you need is how your lead interacts with your website. This process of lead scoring is based on the actions that the lead performs to indicate their interest. While in this behaviors such as opening an email, attending a webinar, or request a demo gets a higher score, similarly unsubscribing from your email list or webinar or canceling a demo request gets negative points and consequentially that lead goes further down the sales pipeline.

Here are some examples of the type of interests you can observe from your leads:

  • Web pages they viewed
  • Emails they opened
  • Content they downloaded
  • Webinars they signed up for

Apart from this, it is also important to consider your leads activity levels before you consider and mark your leads with the help of lead scoring as sales-ready.

Here are some examples:

  • Number of web pages viewed
  • Number of forms completed
  • The typical sales cycle for your company

How to Build a Killer Lead Scoring Model

Now once you have completed your basic framework, you can combine the information found in both these data, to paint a complete picture of your lead.

Note: It is always best to keep a separate and a combine sore of the two data. Because although the demographic data normally remains stable, the behavioral data can always change over a certain period of time. 

As we mentioned earlier that lead scoring is a tedious process, therefore getting your demographic and behavioral data is just the start of the lead scoring process, after which you need to proceed with the following:

  1. Identify your criteria

Now, that using your lead scoring framework you have created a foundation of your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), whereby your MQL are more likely to convert into a customer, compared to other leads based on their demographic and behavioral data. To set up a lead scoring process, you will have to assign points or scores as a basis for your lead scoring methodology.

For this, it crucial that your MCA organization to extract insights, use lead intelligence and analytics of your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, to find the unique attributes including customer base, sales cycles and key differentiators that focuses on your efforts on finding high-quality leads, which results in more conversions.

  1. Assign values

It has often been said by many that figuring what the score should be may be one of the hardest parts of the lead scoring process.

In most of the cases, the threshold for the lead scoring scale ranges in-between 0 to 100 (but you can also set any value as you like).

In ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, you can easily segregate the leads into three main categories: Hot, Warm, and Cold.

Leads that have a score of over 80 can be considered ‘Hot’, while leads that get a score between 30-80 can be denoted as ‘Warm’, while ‘Cold’ leads should have a score below 30. Although, you can always customize the range based on your company’s individual preferences and needs.

  1. Determine sales-ready score

The main point of implementing a lead scoring process is to identify the leads that are ready to accept your alternative funding services. Therefore, by identifying leads, which are sales ready (with a score in-between 80-100) your sales reps can prioritize whom to follow up with to maximize their time.

According to MarketingSherpa:

When 73% of leads are not yet sales-ready, this is where this process becomes more crucial, as you have to make sure your sales team will only reach out to the lead once the opportunity is right. Since the lead score can change every day, a tool such as an easy to use CRM solution featuring lead scoring updates the score instantaneously based on your criteria.

  1. Test your model

These three steps mentioned above are the most crucial factor to cover while implementing a lead scoring methodology in any business. However as lead scoring models are never sacrosanct or set in stone, it is only by testing in real-world scenarios; you can get a hands-on and more reliable results. So monitor your MCA lead scoring model for a few months and then if needed revise the scoring criteria and the lead scores against each of these criteria by analyzing past leads before finalizing your lead scoring process.

  1. Aim for continuous growth and improvement

A lead scoring model that is based on data collected with the help of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for the growth of your alternative lending business is a real game-killer.

Always be open for improving, testing, and tweaking your lead scoring model, since although developing a lead scoring system takes time, but its effects can always be improved.

Therefore, involve your sales department and check in monthly or every fortnight to make sure everything is working fine, since behavioral lead scoring needs to be reset over time, to identify scores that need to be redefined according to the behavioral data of the leads, which can change over a certain period of time.

8 Ways CRM Platform Can Decrease the Costs for Your Business

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil? Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders? Well, if it is so, then CRM platform can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses have no structure for archiving their client communications.

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil?
Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders?
Well, if it is so, then CRM platform can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both money and time.

According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses have no structure for archiving their client communications.

58% office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses have no structure for archiving their client communications. - Superoffice Click To Tweet

So how can create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers? A digital record management gives you:

  • Improved business process through speedier retrieval and access of information
  • Make better-informed decisions through faster access to all right information
  • Better service delivery as the right information can be located quickly
  • Reduced staff time looking for information
  • Lesser compliance cost and increased ability to provide timely, accurate and transparent responses
  • Cost savings from less storage, creation, handling, and retrieval of paper records

Every business initiative starts with a singular person and so here are 8 workable tips on how you can organize your day and be on the way to digitally manage your growing organization.

 

  1. Plan your tasks and activities ahead

When you have several ideas and a multitude of agendas on your mind, it is impossible to do ‘everything’ at once. Therefore, sit in front of your diary and plan the different tasks over a period of time. However, make sure that your hard priorities do not get disturbed and so keep some open room for unexpected and important tasks that may come up in-between.

  1. Log everything

As with your database, your dairy is only good if you keep it updated every day. Write down in your dairy everything right from your colleague’s birthday to ordering flowers and management meetings. Not only does this help you but it also provides your colleagues and not to forget the front desk, an overview of your day or week. However, remember to make all your private bookings only visible to you.

  1. Avoid the Print button

Although it may depend on the job that you have as to what is really necessary to print. Nevertheless, in truth, most of us do not need much paper in this today’s digital world. Hence, if you use a CRM platform you can easily save all your documents, emails, and activities as Projects in your CRM platform.

  1. Share electronically

Use a CRM system to share your documents and emails, since using a CRM platform you can have all your information stored in one place where they are traceable. Additionally, you also save time by not having to send an email to for example your sales group, and the possibility that your “crucial” messages do not get lost inside hundreds of other emails. You can also use applications like WeTransfer or FTP for sharing bigger files.

  1. Use electronic templates

There are several organizations that waste a lot of their time building templates for advertising, sales offers, invitation and others. However, if you digital library available for your organization you will not only save money but also a lot of time by not inventing new templates and instead focus on your original work. Moreover, doing this will ensure a uniform profile and verbiage in all your outbound communications, which will be in accordance with the policy upheld by your company.

  1. Reporting

Are you getting tired of endless hours putting together Excel spreadsheet with the latest sales figures in your sales pipeline? Today we all have to put in our optimal performances and show results to the management, and to do that we need to take out data from several sources, for example, sales by week, months or quarters or by the open rates on the e-marketing mailers. However, if we have a CRM platform, we can easily find all the sales data in one system and therefore take out standard reports or even if needed add an Analytics module to get the data reproduced in chart formations on the CRM’s dashboard.

  1. Contact information

Have you ever used Google or Yahoo to find company information or looked into a corporate website to find out information about a contact person? It is true that when a company does not have a contact database or a business directory, it becomes time-consuming for the employees of that organization to quickly find the relevant information. Therefore, having all the personal and company data in one place benefits the organization in several ways. Hence if your organization have a CRM platform you can search for everything, for example, if you just have an email address you can search for all the related information tagged with the email which is there in your CRM’s database.

  1. Mailing lists

Are you buying your prospect lists from external agencies, if you do, we recommend to not to do it anymore? Start building your own prospect list, since this proves to be better leads and cheaper in the long run. Adding a call to action buttons to your website, getting subscribers through your social media channels and blogs or you can do it even by collecting emails at business conferences and do not forget to add these contacts to your CRM so that you can send them direct mailers using your CRM’s database.

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Takeaway

There is also another way for collecting free leads from social media websites like LinkedIn, Yelp, and Facebook by using CONVERGEHUB FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL that help generate leads of your choice directly from the Chrome browser. This amazing handy add-on has also been highlighted in an article on Small Biz Trend website as the “20 Best Chrome Extensions for Small Businesses”.

You may also visit our landing page and click on the download link to get this absolutely free prospect listing tool.

This Is How We Show Our Love This Valentine’s Day

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers. With this tool, which presently according to SmallBizTech ranks as one of the top 20 Google Chrome extension will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms.

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. Hence, every year on February 14, brands use this day as a catalyst for email campaigns aimed to woo their customers. Nevertheless, whether your brand’s strategy in 2018 is as simple as resending previous year’s e-card or sending wine and rose, this time of the year is a good time to remind your customers that you love their unflinching support and presence and care for their engagement with your brand throughout the year.

Below are a few unique ways to cultivate meaningful customer relationship, and show your prospects and customers some gratitude on this year’s Valentine’s Day:

Listen

It may sound extremely simple- that actually it is. Your CRM platform can track your customer’s social media presence, and therefore by tuning into your customer’s daily activities, you can easily recognize which channels they prioritize, which customers are acquainted with another, or which are planning to attend certain business-related events. This intelligent flow of information through your CRM can aid your sales, marketing, and support teams to tailor their customer outreach strategy, send messages that reach the users on their preferred channels or set up in-person meetings for fostering a more better than before relationships.

Diagnose and find the trends in your customer service

When a marketing initiative or a sales process is not paying off, either you can scrap it as a tough luck or use the available data in your CRM system to better understand the behaviors of your customers.  By using keywords to sort out through your customer support requests, you can find recognizable patterns, identify common customer complaints, and deal with them proactively, rather than holding back and wait for the customers to bring the problems to your attention.

Automate your ‘To-Do’ list

In every business verticals and in all departments and positions there are always certain tasks which are more repetitive than others. Regrettably, these monotonous tasks many times lead to errors, which in turn send unfortunate messages to your prospects and customers that you do not seem to appreciate their businesses. Nevertheless, there is help at hand.  Automating a workflow in your CRM platform can trigger of a set of actions whenever you add a new customer to your CRM system, like a welcome email, or special offers for new users, or dictate automated reminders to aid your team to customize the user experience for weeks and months to come.

Present a gift

Think out of the box on this Valentine’s Day. No more stale chocolates, offer your customers a time-sensitive deal, a gift card, or bonus points that enhance your customer loyalty program.

Valentine’s Day- Takeaway

On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers.

With this tool, which according to SmallBizTrends ranks as one of the 20 Best Chrome extensions for Small Businesses, will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Yelp, and others. You can even use this tool to grab email addresses from Gmail and store them straight into your ConvergeHub CRM platform seamlessly.

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5 Approaches To Get Your Hands On New Sales-Ready Leads

What is the most effective and best way to generate fresh sales-ready leads? Well, we have spoken to some people over the years that swear by social media, while there are also others that prefer a more traditional approach. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain that like many other sales tactics, the just cannot be one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to lead generation strategy. However, if we are to consider all the answers and reactions that we got from people on what works the best, these would be the most popular top 5 approaches (in no particular order).

What is the most effective and best way to generate fresh sales-ready leads?

Well, we have spoken to some people over the years that swear by social media, while there are also others that prefer a more traditional approach.

Nevertheless, one thing is for certain that like many other sales tactics, the just cannot be one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to lead generation strategy.

ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation tool ranks within 20 Google Chrome extensions in Small Biz Trends website. Click To Tweet

However, if we are to consider all the answers and reactions that we got from people on what works the best, these would be the most popular top 5 approaches (in no particular order).

# 1. Search Marketing

Search engines, more specifically Google, are most often the primary place people go when they seek information. Depending as to where a person is in the sales cycle, they can search for information about any product or service, or they can also look for user feedback and reviews.

Does your brand show up when people search for you? Search marketing is one of the most valuable digital tactics, which can provide you with a plethora of inbound leads.

Search marketing includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEM is commonly described as Paid Search or Pay-per-Click (PPC).

For those you are new to search marketing tactics, SEO is more of a long-term strategy, for it takes a long time to establish your brand’s online presence as an SEO-friendly website.  Hence, do not expect your website to show up on the first page of the organic search results by just changing or adding few keywords to your website.

This is where SEM comes into play- as it is a great add-on to leverage your brand’s name in the search results as you continue working on your website’s SEO.

PPC and SEM allow the users to bid on long-tail phrases and keywords that are relevant to your business. Therefore, if someone looks for a keyword that you want to bid on, your brand’s advertisements may show up (depending on a couple of factors) on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) that increases the likelihood of receiving more leads as your target audience finds your products and services online.

#2. Word of Mouth

This remains to be another most effective lead generation strategy for customer acquisition. Do you want to know why? It is simply because people trust their peers and friends more than they can trust an online advertisement or any other marketing collateral developed by the company itself. Moreover, now with the advent of social media, it has become easier than ever to spread the news as to how awesome your product and service is, compared to other brands in the market.

Here are 4 golden points by which you can increase your customer referrals:

  • Offer great support.
  • Treat your customers well and get engaged with them on the social channels like Twitter and Facebook.
  • Always provide your customers with the information they want, not what you like.
  • Create a formal referral program for your brand.

#3. Content Marketing

By content marketing, we do not mean developing junk load sales-y contents that push the online audience to purchase your products and services. Rather by contentment marketing strategy, we mean developing contents that are authentic and helpful for your prospects.

You can always think, “I am not doing business to circulate valuable information for free”. Maybe you are right. However, in today’s world earning the trust and respect of your consumers is an utterly powerful thing that pays its dividends in the end.

According to IDG and Google, B2B consumers go through anywhere between 10 to 14 pieces of content (on an average), before making any purchase. Therefore, developing the right kind of content that can help guide your consumers towards educating them for making a perfect purchase decision can be the crucial difference between getting a sale, or losing the opportunity to your competitors.

Some of the most useful content types that help inform buyers to make their purchase decisions are:

  • Blogs
  • Whitepapers
  • How-to videos
  • eBooks
  • Webinars
  • Product demos
  • Case studies

#4. Event Networking

Attending, conferences, industry events, and trade-shows are all excellent ways to generate leads. Even better than just visiting these networking events, actually speaking in such events brings in results that are more positive. There are many events where you have “calls-for-speakers” and there you can propose someone, as well as yourself, to speak on a topic of your liking to the conference attendees. Hence, this can be an excellent way to build thought leadership and therefore gain visibility for your brand.

#5. Social Media

Before you land on social media platforms for generating leads, remember not every social media channel are right for all businesses. For example, if you are an owner of a local restaurant and is looking for right patrons, you may find more success leveraging social media channel like Facebook rather than LinkedIn. But, if you are into B2B marketing, LinkedIn may prove to be a more valuable channel to get your brand in front of the relevant audience.

Here are some tips that can help you to extend your reach on LinkedIn and other social media websites:

  • Publish content:

LinkedIn nowadays allows users to publish their contents, such as blogs and articles on the LinkedIn website. Hence, when your posts find traction among your networks, you may even be lucky enough to earn more visibility on the social media website, which can eventually help you in generating new leads.

ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation tool ranks within 20 Google Chrome extensions by SmallBizTrends website.

Actually, this absolutely free “social lead generator” captures contacts from the popular social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus and more.

Hence, this free lead generator tool helps you to add captured contacts to your CRM database with just one click for easy prospecting.

Here is how it works:

-Primarily navigate to Chrome Extensions in your browser. (You can also access this by clicking on the Chrome menu on the top right side of the Omnibox, hovering over ‘More Tools’ and selecting ‘Get more Extensions’.)

-In the Chrome Web Store, type ConvergeHub Lead Generator in the Search bar.

-Once you find the ConvergeHub Lead Generator, click on Add to Chrome and complete the installation.

– After successful installation of the extension, which appears on the side of the address bar, open any of the social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus) and view the desired profile that you want to target for your lead.

-Once the profile is open, clicking on the lead generator will extract all the necessary information of that profile and save it in the browser.

-You can even edit the saved data on the lead generator window by typing additional information regarding the lead.

-If you are a user of ConvergeHub CRM, you can save the information automatically into the CRM database for email campaigning and nurture of the lead.

-If not, you can copy the information from the lead capture form and manually enter the data into your CRM’s database.

Conclusion:

Of course, this is not the end or an all-inclusive list of lead generation processes. Here are some other tactics, which you can also use for harvesting your leads:

  • Reseller programs
  • Affiliate marketing
  • PR/media relations
  • Guest blogging

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!