An Economic Developer's Guide to Multi-Channel Lead Generation

Multi-Channel Lead Generation

Your website isn’t a silo operating on its own. Economic developers must utilize multiple channels to maximize their prospecting. In this sense, a channel might be a website, a social media platform, an email, or a text message. The objective is to make it easy for visitors to research and evaluate your community by reaching them through their preferred communication tool. It’s all about having the right marketing mix.

Here, we will briefly cover a few channels that help economic developers generate the most amount of leads.

Blogging Brings in the Leads

Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog (DemandMetric). Marketers who prioritized blogging received 13 times more ROI than those who didn’t (HubSpot). This proves that blogging is a highly effective channel for lead generation.

When creating blog posts, be sure to include hyperlinks to landing pages within the copy of that post, as well as a prominent call to action. In addition, blogs should be relevant, and informative or entertaining to your target audience. Do some research to see what information they are actively consuming and searching for.

Email Marketing

Many communities may think that email marketing is only best used when communicating with existing businesses and community members. False! Email can be a great channel for new lead generation. Here are some ways you can use email to generate more new prospects:

Focus On an Opt-In Strategy

If you’re buying email lists and spamming your prospects, no one will want to share your email with others. They will only want to unsubscribe or mark you as spam (which can really hurt you in the long run). The first step to email lead generation is to make sure you have happy subscribers that enjoy receiving emails from you.

Send Valuable Offers

If you send really interesting or valued offers - whether it’s downloads, whitepapers, job listings, etc. - people will more likely share your emails with their friends and colleagues.

Tools to Share

Give people the tools to share. Don’t forget to add a “Forward to a Friend” link or social media sharing buttons with each email so people are encouraged to pass it on.

Social Media

Social media isn’t just for liking funny pictures or tweeting what you ate for breakfast. Social media is an emerging channel that many businesses are taking advantage of. Here are some great tips for generating leads on social networks:

Loyal Followers

Building a relationship with followers is a critical first step. Social media connections are really about people-to-people, not always company-to-individual. Get to know your audience online, communicate, and share information. In order to generate leads, you need to have human interaction with others.

Social Media is a Dialogue

Companies that only use social media to blast out messages about themselves aren’t using social media effectively. The goal is to interact with others and be helpful. When you share content on social media, don’t always post something that relates to your company. Share links to other interesting things you’ve found online. People will be thankful you’re noticing their work too!

Content Sharing

Influence connections for content sharing. Publishing and sharing content that directs traffic to targeted landing pages is the single biggest lever to increase lead generation through social media. Share your new content offers by posting links to landing pages, and, in addition, share blog posts, discounts, and other great resources.

Organic Search

While promoting your community in many channels is crucial for lead generation, it’s also equally important to make it easy for people to find your landing pages through search engines. To do this, you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.

Golden Shovel Agency helps clients with SEO strategies. But here are some best practices you can apply to your landing pages right now:

1. Pick a primary keyword for each landing page and focus on optimizing the page for that word. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about.
2. Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
3. Include keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant to the rest of your content. Also, use synonyms of your keywords to provide variety and to avoid “keyword stuffing.”
4. Include keywords in the file name of images (ex: mykeyword.jpg) and use them in the ALT tag.
5. Include the keywords in the page URL.

Use Links and CTAs Within Offers

Your offers themselves are great channels for lead generation. For example, in our articles, and even in our eBooks, we include links to other content offers you can download. As people share the articles and resources, viewers may discover other resources that we offer by the links within the content.

A/B Testing

While this isn’t necessarily a “channel,” A/B testing is a great way to increase leads across all channels and tactics because it allows you to gather information on user behavior and respond accordingly. A/B testing can be used in CTAs, landing pages, email marketing, advertising, and more. According to HubSpot data, “The insights stemming from split tests can drastically improve the conversion rates of your landing pages and click-through rates of your website calls-to-action and email campaigns. In fact, A/B testing of landing pages can generate up to 30-40% more leads for B2B sites and 20-25% more leads for eCommerce sites.” When done correctly, A/B testing can provide a huge competitive advantage for your company.

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