The Ultimate Guide to Build Web Developer Leads

So you've laid the foundation for your business. You have your fresh new LLC, found accountants and all of the other required tasks to start a business. But one question looms in your head. "Where the heck do I find leads for web development?". Believe it or not, this is a common question amongst freelancers of every kind. This article will help you find more leads for your business

According to a study conducted by Jessie Hagen of U.S. Bank, 82% of businesses fail due to cash flow problems. Thus, businesses aim to maximize their profitability by cutting down costs and increasing sales. However, in the competitive business world today, increasing sales isn’t easy. Businesses have to do all that they can to generate more leads and convert them into customers.

There is so much that business owners can focus on to improve their lead generation and sales. Out of all that can be improved, here are five tips that can help retailers achieve this task:

Call To Action

Use only one call to action (CTA) instead of multiple. According to the Vice President of Marketing at Toast, “Emails that had a single CTA increased sales by 1617% and the click-through rate by 371%.” Add CTA’s to relevant website pages such as blogs and landing pages. In fact, Hubspot reported that adding anchor text CTA’s increased the view-to-lead conversion rate by 121%.

Hyperlink the CTA’s to take visitors to the relevant pages. Also be sure to use a font color that contrasts with the color scheme of your website, so the CTA stands out. According to SAP, “An orange colored CTA boosted the conversion rate by over 32.5%, while a red CTA boosted the conversion rate by 21%.”

Landing Page

Be direct about what your business is offering and emphasize the benefits of your products while keeping the form simple. Be careful about where you position the information. Adding images and graphics can also catch the visitor’s attention. Eyeview reported that adding videos to landing pages can increase conversions by 86 percent. Keep the content of your landing page short and sweet so it’s readable and can easily be scanned. The landing page’s headline should also match the CTA.

Optimizing The Website

Having a responsive website is crucial. Green Geek said “Websites that are optimized for mobile usage are trusted by 51 percent of customers. Reducing the load time of the website can also help with this so the visitor doesn’t have to wait long. Millennials and Gen Z are known to have shorter attention spans and will abandon a page if it takes too long to load.

Make sure to use strong headlines, visible CTA’s and high quality images. Give the design extra attention and detail as well as the development process, user flow and navigation to make the user experience smooth and effortless. The first impression always counts.

Why should you use interactive content?

It all comes down to those conversion rates—and interactive content will drastically improve conversion rates across your website. According to the same CMI survey mentioned above, 66 percent of marketers use interactive marketing for engagement, 63 percent for educating the audience, 58 percent for creating brand awareness, 57 percent for lead generation, 50 percent for conversion, and 33 percent for sales / sales enablement.

What are the benefits of using interactive content?

Interactive content is more appealing than static content in that has the ability to attract and educate folks who might become future buyers. In addition, interactive content encourages people to engage with and share content with friends on social media, (which brings with it the mighty power of word-of-mouth), it increases website traffic and page views, it cuts through the “noise” of the vast amounts of stagnant content marketing already out there (thus offering a huge competitive advantage), and it provides valuable data to optimize your buyer persona as well as your sales funnel.

The three main advantages of interactive content are:

By engaging with customers and starting conversations, interactive content helps to pinpoint the exact challenges and objectives of customers, thus assisting organizations with how to best present the products and solutions to meet a buyer’s needs.
It provides better data metrics, allowing organizations to quickly and easily identify which leads are ready for conversion and which require more nurturing.
Interactive content provides immediate value with personalized experiences and clients more willing to divulge even more information, thus completely removing the friction associated with lead forms.

Why interactive content works

Interactive content works for many of the same reasons social media is so popular. People love to share their opinion, have fun, compare, compete, and test themselves. Did you know that 96 percent of people that start a Buzzfeed-sponsored quiz finish it? Why? Because folks love getting personalized answers.

As the landscape of traditional content marketing becomes increasingly crowded, and the preferences of buyers have changed as technology has evolved—no longer is it OK to simply inform buyers. It’s imperative to connect with them on an emotional level by providing content that engages rather than serves out information on a one-way street. And that is exactly why interactive marketing is so effective. Just look at some of these statistics:

The top four most effective types of interactive content

According to CIM, the top four most effective types of interactive content are assessments, calculators, contests, and quizzes.

1. Assessments

Assessments are great evaluation tools that usually include questions about a particular topic, behavior, or a simple test of knowledge on a particular subject. Orion HR has a “Test Your Emotional Intelligence” assessment that they claim provides users with an accurate assessment of emotional intelligence, as well as recommendations on how to manage emotions and connect with others while under pressure. Assessments are a fantastic way to acquire new leads and increase your email database list.

2. Calculators

You’d be hard pressed to find someone not interested in money—which may be why online calculators are so popular. From mortgages to taxes to insurance to student loan debt payoff and everything in between, calculators are an extremely helpful and succinct way to show your prospects what they’ll gain by using your product or service. Check out Hubspot’s ROI calculator for an example of what folks can expect to receive based on their initial investment.

3. Contests

Contests have been around even before the dawn of the internet and have continued over the years to be a “go-to” tactic of many marketers for many reasons. Prize-driven contests incentivize many folks to participate, and they’re a great way to increase brand awareness and social engagement and grow the size of your email lists exponentially. The various types of contests include giveaways, video, refer-a-friend, vote-to-win, and quiz contests, amongst others.

4. Quizzes

If you’ve ever had a terribly long commute or a particularly dull day, you may have run across an online quiz or two that helped you pass the time. Interactive quizzes are a great way to collect an immense amount of information and convert prospects into leads. Much more entertaining than a web form, quizzes offer interactive, personalized, and relevant content that build strong relationships with prospects and give them something of value before you ever ask for anything in return.

One type of quiz is the “product recommender” that asks a bunch of questions and, based on the user’s replies, makes a product recommendation that will fulfill that user’s needs. Warby Parker, for example, cleverly exchanges the word “questionnaire” for “quiz” to encourage customers to take part in its “Home Try-On” program, which involves having five pairs of glasses sent to your home for five days to try on for free. Topshop uses a “Style Quiz” to recommend different items of clothing. Airbnb’s “Trip Matcher” quiz tells you what kind of traveler you are and then recommends the perfect destination, including accommodations, activities, and places to visit.

Is interactive content worth it?

If you aren’t currently utilizing interactive content, you most definitely are engaging in traditional content marketing and probably have a team member adept at developing blogs and other forms of one-way content. So, you may be asking yourself, is it worth it? While creating interactive content does require a bit more work and additional resources, we’d encourage you to go back to the statistics we listed earlier: 88 percent of marketers felt interactive marketing helped differentiate their brand from their competitors, 66 percent claimed higher engagement, and 81 percent stated it was an effective tool at grabbing a prospect’s attention.

If cutting through the noise of all the content that is already out there, jumping ahead of your competition, and engaging on a personal level with your prospects are listed anywhere on your marketing goals for 2020, then we’d say: yes, it’s absolutely worth the investment.

Marketing Strategy

Opt for multichannel marketing for a wider reach. Demand Metric Research Corporation reported that content marketing (67%), event marketing (73%), and email marketing (78%) are the most common strategies employed by B2B firms to generate leads. This can be done by creating quality content to engage your audience and effectively communicate your message.

Email marketing is an effective strategy to keep your potential, current and past customers in the loop with the latest promotions, products and services for higher chances of conversion. Marketing on social media can help generate leads since so many users utilize those platforms as a way to shop and find new products. Collaborating with industry influencers can help your engagement, following and conversions.

Keeping the design short and clean can greatly help with user readability, since attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Typical readers can a webpage in a ‘Z’ or ‘F’ pattern, so ensure that important content is optimized accordingly. Leaving the right amount of white space on your webpage is also crucial.

In a world that has become quite small with technology and the internet, it is now easier than ever to not only start a business, but also grow it. The resources and tools at your disposal in this day and age are unmatched, and this is why you hear about new startups and businesses coming to life almost every day. Still, it all comes down to one thing; generating leads to get more sales and in turn, make money. It might sound simple, but it is not easy and it will take a lot of hard work.

In the rest of this article, we’ll take a look at some lead generation techniques to boost your sales.

Knowing your audience

You can’t possibly hope to generate leads if you’re randomly targeting people. The first step to getting more customers is knowing who it is you want in the first place. That way, you can create strategies and targeted approaches to cater to certain demographics––those that you know would be interested, and wouldn’t dismiss your product or service. You need to know where your target audience lives, what they do for a living, what they search for online, their lifestyle choices, and their preferences. Fortunately, courtesy of data analytics and the huge amount of information you can get online from Google, Facebook, and other platforms, you can now have access to such data and tailor your approach based on that.

Encouraging referrals

True, we live in the age of the internet and people basically look for everything online, but word of mouth never gets old, and it will always remain a powerful lead generation technique. You need to encourage your customers to refer your products/services to their friends and family. The best approach to ensuring that happens is to maintain a certain level of quality; you want these people to refer you to their acquaintances, and the only way that will ever happen is if you provide them with excellent products or services. You can give people some extra incentive, though. Some businesses offer their customers some discounts on their next purchase if they refer someone, and others include a family/friend coupon with discounts as well if they make a purchase.

Social media marketing

Like it or not, you are going to have to capitalize on the power of social media, like every other business in the world right now. Billions of people have social media accounts and spend a lot of time on each platform every day, and this is why you have to try and reach them there. Create Facebook campaigns, that will help you reach bigger and better audiences, by offering people’ quality content so they’d feel like sharing. You have different ways to reach people on such a platform, like Facebook ads that help you reach exactly the kind of people you want. More importantly, you get to show people the true colors of your brand on social media outlets. So, create engaging content for them to interact with, from videos and images to articles and any other means you can utilize. The best thing about using these outlets is the fact that they give audiences a rare opportunity to interact with the brand they like by liking, commenting, and even asking questions, so take advantage of that.

Digital marketing

When was the last time you saw an actual business that didn’t have a website of its own? Chances are it has been a while, because every company out there now understands the importance of having a powerful digital marketing strategy, which starts with creating your website. Social media is important and everything, but studies show that over 75 percent of people look for the things they want through search engines. In other words, if a person wants to buy a product or find a service, they will open Google and search for it. This is why you have to make sure your website is optimized in terms of content quality, loading speed, ease of navigation, keyword placement, and a host of other factors.

Digital marketing is how businesses ensure they rank higher on search engines, which guarantees lead generation and in turn, boosts your sales. Almost 90 percent of people don’t go beyond the first page of a Google search, which means you really need to be on that first page if you want to start generating leads. This is why a lot of businesses out there are allocating chunks out of their budgets to hire the best digital marketers out there; the payoff will be much bigger than the cost.

Email marketing

While email marketing is one of the digital marketing techniques, it is one often neglected by many businesses, despite its immense influence. It allows you to specifically target the people you want, giving them particular services and products that you know they’ll be looking for. It’s one of the best lead generation techniques out there, because, above all, it’s personal. A person wants to open an email with a list of products they usually look for online, and if you carefully choose your emails, you can win them over as a customer. There’s a very thin line between email marketing and spam, though; be very careful not to cross that line so that you wouldn’t lose leads.

Using different approaches

Digital and social media marketing are very well-known approaches to generating leads, and they are very efficient. Yet there are other, lesser-known approaches that can also get you some leads, and they don’t cost any expenses on your end. For example, free webinars are something that a lot of people are interested in, and it gives them the chance to interact with your brand in a lively manner. The same can be said of Twitter chats or Google Hangouts, which are successfully implementing methods by a lot of the bigger companies out there.

There are dozens of different techniques to generate leads and boost your sales. The key is in diversity. Yes, some means are more efficient than others, but that doesn’t mean you should stick to only a few. Always remember to mix things up, and in the end, you’ll get even better results.

Use YouTube to find new customers and build your business

The entrepreneur Sunny Lenarduzzi shares tips on how to use YouTube to build a business on her channel, which has 320,000 subscribers.
Lenarduzzi helps clients figure out how they can use YouTube to sell products and programs, explaining how to take viewers and make them customers.
Lenarduzzi outlined for Business Insider how someone could build and scale a business using YouTube, from figuring out what to sell to creating content that will get views.

Sunny Lenarduzzi wants to inspire her followers to ditch traditional careers and be their own bosses online by using YouTube to scale their businesses.

Lenarduzzi shares tips on how to build a business using YouTube with her 320,000 subscribers. The Vancouver, British Columbia, resident walks business owners through how they can build an audience, from marketing to sales tools, and turn that audience into paying clients.

Programs like Lenarduzzi's are popular on YouTube, and creators like Kevin David, Benji Travis, and Amy Landino are among those who have built similar external programs off YouTube fame.

In an interview with Business Insider, Lenarduzzi shared tips on how to build an audience on YouTube and direct that audience to whatever you are trying to sell online.

Sunny Lenarduzzi's YouTube channel has 322,000 subscribers. Screenshot of SunnyLenarduzzi/YouTube

Ad revenue and brand sponsorships aren't the only way.

"I noticed that most people who were doing YouTube were talking about it from the perspective of being a creator and getting views and subscribers," Lenarduzzi said. "I've never approached it that way."

Lenarduzzi approaches YouTube by thinking about how she can take her viewers and make them customers off the platform. She doesn't care about AdSense or sponsorships, she said, and prefers to create a consistent business from YouTube without relying on either method.

She's worked with a sponsor in the past and said the experience was "painful" because of how drawn-out the approval and payment process was, and that she still "had a boss" who was in control.

Figuring out what to sell

The hardest part is narrowing down what you want to sell, she said, and knowing that it's actually profitable.

Lenarduzzi sells an online course, which she built using the website Thinkific, she said. There are a ton of great "plug-and-play" platforms online to help you build a course like this, she said.

Start with YouTube and the traffic that comes with having a channel.

Once you understand your product, you should build out a machine that consists of pieces and parts that will ultimately turn a viewer into a customer, she said.

Start with YouTube and the traffic that comes with having a YouTube channel. Then use that to drive viewers to an email list, and then offer a free training over email. Lastly, pitch them your programs or other full product.

Create an offer and don't worry if it's not perfect.

There's an issue around perfectionism when it comes to building offers, she said. You don't need to focus on making everything look perfect. Her webcam videos are her most successful videos because she cares more about reaching the viewer than how it looks, she said.

Formulate an offer for your client based on what you know and can give. This should be a prototype that you continue to improve as you go along, she said, year over year.

Find your clients in multiple ways

She said there are two main ways she finds new clients online: evergreen and on-demand.

On-demand client attraction is about finding people who are interested in your topic by searching through keywords and hashtags on social media, she said. Once you have found them, you can build a relationship with these people (direct messaging or email, for example), and they will begin noticing your content and eventually start buying from you, she said.

Evergreen client attraction involves using YouTube and its power as a search platform. If you can rank your video as the No. 1 result for your keyword, that is impactful, she said.

For example, you want to be looking at 100 to 1,000 "search per month, search volume" she said, which means how many videos exist within that search. Aim for fewer than 100,000, she said. There's less competition.

"Look up a keyword," she said. "See who the top-five ranking videos are and see if there's videos older than one to two years. If there is, you have an opportunity to pop to the top with brand-new content on that topic."

But make sure people are searching for the topic. If a video has been near the top for five years, and has only 40 views, then there isn't much demand for that topic. If it's been there for a year and has half a million views, then there is a huge demand, she said.

The ultimate goal is to turn these viewers into clients, she said. But YouTube search can be a way to get them in the door.

8 Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads Today

LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B targeting in the PPC space, bar none.

In recent years, LinkedIn has become a more popular destination for users to consume content. Rather than seeing what your great aunt ate for lunch on Facebook or hearing someone yell about politics on Twitter, you can check LinkedIn to see what your contacts are up to and what topics are trending in your industry. For advertisers, the targeting options allow you to zone in on just about any part of your audience’s profile, and since the platform also has many benefits for their users, it’s in their best interest to keep their profiles up to date.

That’s why LinkedIn is the place to be if you want to generate higher quality B2B leads. But, if that’s your goal, you need to know that not all strategies are created equal.

Here, I want to talk about LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads and some best practices for you to leverage in your account. Let’s dive in!

1. Have something valuable to offer

This is the biggest issue I see with advertisers on LinkedIn. Every business thinks what they have to offer is amazing—and I’m sure your product or service absolutely is. But that doesn’t mean it’s appealing for someone to start hard selling you on their offerings without generating any type of connection with you.

I’m sorry, but a demo for your software to a cold prospecting audience likely isn’t going to do well with LinkedIn advertising.

If the content or offer you have isn’t important, no one is going to want it no matter what type of campaign you’re using. So you need to make sure you can offer something of value to your prospects.

This could be anything from an industry report to a rundown of common issues your customer base faces and how to solve them, sometimes without your product involved. Do some research and know what your market wants, and then deliver something fantastic to them for the low, low price of one lead gen form fill.

2. Integrate your CRM to follow up with leads right away

Depending on what platform you’re using, LinkedIn might allow you to directly integrate with your CRM for lead gen ads submissions.

Although you can manually export your leads, I highly recommend you integrate your CRM. It will make life so much easier for a couple reasons.

First, it saves you time of logging in and manually exporting leads on a regular basis.

Second, these B2B leads are able to start working their way into your nurture flows immediately. There’s nearly no lag time on when they user fills out the form to when they’re now part of whatever follow-up sequence any other user would be after filling out the form directly on your site.

Here is more information on how you can link your CRM and LinkedIn depending on the platform you use.

3. Give your form a useful, systematic name

I’m a stickler for naming convention, as it always makes Future You’s life much easier.

Imagine troubleshooting a form issue or wanting to set up a test with new form settings and logging in and seeing a list of the following form names staring back at you:

Lead gen form #1
Form 2
New form 2
Test form

What in the world does any of that mean? Literally nothing.

Now you’re stuck clicking into each one of them and trying to figure out what’s happening and forgetting what you just read between “Form 2” and “New form 2″ if there even was a difference.

Give your forms a meaningful name so you can figure out what is going on from the outset to help with future ad testing.

For one of my own accounts, I know exactly what each of these forms has going on because we have a proper naming convention that might seem silly to an outsider but makes sense to me—way more sense than a “Form 2.”

4. Treat the LinkedIn lead gen form text fields like a landing page

Since the user doesn’t usually end up going to your website until the confirmation page (if at all), it’s important to treat the form text itself as if it’s the landing page.

In the same way you craft your landing pages, put some time and effort into your form content.

The user is deciding if they’re willing to give their information in exchange for what you’re offering and if you undersell it, they’re not going to, costing you the expensive LinkedIn CPC while not netting any benefit.

If you’ve followed Tip #1, this should be pretty easy.

Just like you would on any landing page, use the “Offer Headline” and “Offer Details” sections of the lead gen form to tell the user what benefit they’ll get from filling out the form. There are text limits, so be concise but appealing. Easy, right?

5. Balance volume and quantity

Just like any other form, you have to strike a balance between the questions you ask and the number of responses you want to get.

In most instances, this chart is going to hold true: The more questions you ask, the fewer form fills you’re going to get.

And that’s OK! Too many people are focused on getting as many form fills as possible without thinking of the lead quality.

If you’re out for a volume play, use the minimum number of questions you can get away with to still call that person a “lead.” In my experience, that could be as little as just an email address and a first name.

But if you’re like most of the companies I work with and you want to have better quality leads rather than just anyone, it’s now time to start curating your form questions to weed out the lower quality users.

If you’re trying to get higher quality leads, here are my main suggestions:

Ask more questions.
Leverage the custom questions .
Force the user to type something in, don’t use all “autofill” questions.

6. Leverage hidden fields

Just because you have your lead forms integrated with your CRM doesn’t necessarily mean that all tracking is going to work perfectly. Depending on how you’re tracking performance and have leads mapping in your CRM, it might make sense for you to leverage the hidden fields in the form.

Essentially, these allow you to pass additional information into your CRM that isn’t directly found within the form. These are GREAT for tracking sources, targeting, creative, and more in your CRM like we do for landing page visits.

In the “Field name” portion, choose what portion for your CRM you want this form to map to. Is this a source, medium, campaign, etc.?

The second portion is where you enter the actual value, like “linkedin,” “cpc,” or “lead-gen-ads.”

We’re able to add up to 20 hidden fields—this will likely be plenty, but use them wisely as that’s all you get!

7. Tag your landing page URL with properly UTM tags

As mentioned above, with LinkedIn lead gen ads, users can fill out your form without ever visiting your landing page, but there are some ways they can and if they do, you should be ready to tag them just as you would if you were running regular sponsored content campaigns.

In the “Confirmation” section of the form builder, LinkedIn has you add a landing page to send users to your website. This could either be to get the information they just filled out the form for or it could be just to give them more information about your business.

Either way, treat this just as a normal landing page and add all applicable UTM tags so you can create retargeting audiences and track performance.

8. Give users two ways to get their information

Depending on what you’re offering through your ads, it’s important to remember that not all users are the same and they could have different intentions for when they’re going to engage with your content.

Specifically, for those offering a brochure, industry report, whitepaper—something the user could want to read right that minute or something they could be wanting to come back to later—I encourage you to give them multiple ways to engage with your offer.

The first is to give the website link (if applicable) and the landing page URL in the Confirmation we discussed above. This way, if they want the content right away they can click through the URL and get it.

Second, and regardless if they engage with the content immediately, have your CRM email them another route for getting back in. Even if it’s a short note to say “Here’s the industry report you requested,” it can go a long way for the person to continue to refer back to the information and continue to see your brand as an educational source and create stronger ties for the future.

Use these tips for better LinkedIn lead generation today.

About the Author

DreamBIG Team

Content creator at DreamBIG Technology

The Ultimate Guide to Build Web Developer Leads

Call To Action

Landing Page

Optimizing The Website

More Than Just Content

Why should you use interactive content?

What are the benefits of using interactive content?

Why interactive content works

The top four most effective types of interactive content

1. Assessments

2. Calculators

3. Contests

4. Quizzes

Is interactive content worth it?

Marketing Strategy

Knowing your audience

Encouraging referrals

Social media marketing

Digital marketing

Email marketing

Using different approaches

Use YouTube to find new customers and build your business

Figuring out what to sell

Find your clients in multiple ways

8 Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads Today

1. Have something valuable to offer

2. Integrate your CRM to follow up with leads right away

3. Give your form a useful, systematic name

4. Treat the LinkedIn lead gen form text fields like a landing page

5. Balance volume and quantity

6. Leverage hidden fields

7. Tag your landing page URL with properly UTM tags

8. Give users two ways to get their information

About the Author

DreamBIG Team

Join the Discussion

Call To Action

Landing Page

Optimizing The Website

More Than Just Content

Why should you use interactive content?

What are the benefits of using interactive content?

Why interactive content works

The top four most effective types of interactive content

1. Assessments

2. Calculators

3. Contests

4. Quizzes

Is interactive content worth it?

Marketing Strategy

Knowing your audience

Encouraging referrals

Social media marketing

Digital marketing

Email marketing

Using different approaches

Use YouTube to find new customers and build your business

Figuring out what to sell

Find your clients in multiple ways

8 Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads Today

1. Have something valuable to offer

2. Integrate your CRM to follow up with leads right away

3. Give your form a useful, systematic name

4. Treat the LinkedIn lead gen form text fields like a landing page

5. Balance volume and quantity

6. Leverage hidden fields

7. Tag your landing page URL with properly UTM tags

8. Give users two ways to get their information

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About the Author

DreamBIG Team

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