It’s inarguable that the internet has changed every aspect of our lives from how we source information for various services and products to how we shop for them. According to research done by Statisca, approximately 169.1 million Americans are expected to engage in the buying of goods and services online this year. What’s more? This number is expected to increase to 185.5 million by the year 2018. If this statistic is anything to go by, it’s about time you stopped sitting on the fence and tapped into the ever resourceful and rewarding world of the internet for your business.

Your success as a business depends on how you can use your website to tap into the lead generation potential of the internet and use it as a competitive edge over your business rivals. Failure to do this is effectively shooting yourself in the leg as it will not matter how good your product or service is if you can’t hijack the opportunity and take advantage of the limitless advantages that come with internet lead generation. As a small business owner, there are a number of online marketing strategies for your leads generation.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is. If you cannot optimize your website and appear higher in the search engines, your goose is as good as cooked. Proper website optimization leads to high organic traffic and by extension higher number of leads. To get higher leads, you need to get it right in so far as search engine optimization is concerned. You don’t have to be an expert or understand all the technical aspects of SEO. You can hire an expert to work on the technical aspect of your website, fix meta description, fixing site errors, adding appropriate h1 and h2 tags among others.

Social Media Marketing

Don’t listen to the pundits who have been fallaciously preaching that social media as a lead generation strategy is dead. They are naysayers as the power of social media as an effective lead generation cannot be underestimated. So long as you know where to look and make use of effective social media marketing strategy, you can never be wrong. Knowing where to look means you must know where your target market is. For instance, its foolhardy and an exercise in futility to target the young generation using Facebook. You are more likely to score big if you went the Instagram way with them as that is where they are mainly concentrated. Consequently, if you are targeting top CEOs, LinkedIn will be the perfect platform as opposed to Pinterest.

Make your site mobile friendly

There is no denying that searching for information using mobile devices has hit an all time high. In fact, Google has since made mobile friendly sites a ranking factor. As such, if your site is not mobile optimized, you can as well forget about generation of leads. Make your site mobile friendly and increase the number of people visiting it irrespective of the device they are using.

Engage in email marketing campaigns

The assumption in many quarters has been that email marketing is dead. This is not the case and is merely hot air. For email marketing to work, you need to build up a legitimate list of people who are genuinely interested in your product or service and willfully sign up. With the right target market, you can rest assured that the clicks will go up and leads increased.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising

We all know that SEO is an effective strategy in the long term. It does not provide immediate results in so far as lead generation is concerned. The same cannot be said of PPC ads as the results are immediate and you can optimize your leads against certain keywords. With a small budget, you can start getting leads and ultimately, conversions.