5 Unconventional Strategies to Generate Organic Leads [Backed by Data]

Whether you realize it or not, organic lead generation is vital to the success of your business. Without implementing a consistent daily lead flow, it’ll be difficult to maintain the growth rate required for your brand to succeed. If you’ve been experimenting with regular organic lead generation practices and your monetary goals are still falling short, it may be time to try some unconventional methods.

However, if you are struggling to get started and don’t know where to begin with SEO, Cardinal Digital Marketing can steer you in the right direction.

If you want to boost your organic lead generation, take a look at these 5 unconventional strategies to help turn prospects into customers:

1. Engage in Partnerships

This may sound weird at first, but this is a clever strategy that you can use to generate leads.

Complementary products or services are related products or services that customers must use together. For example, let’s consider the inkjet printer. Ink and printer paper are essential products that you must purchase if you want your printer to function.

Virtually every product or service has a complement. Once identified, you can use them to get more leads. If you examine your target market, you may be able to identify other products or services that complement your own. Once you discover one, you can then partner with that company and develop a strategy to drive more leads to your business.

Partnerships can open many doors. You may be able to advertise on their website and be introduced to their audience. In turn, you would do the same and promote them on your website. Or you can develop joint content together, like eBooks or research studies. Another idea is to host events together, like a webinar or a product demonstration at a trade show. Once the relationship is established, this is an easy way to access a new audience and potential leads.

However, when meeting with the complementary company, make it clear to them that your partnership won’t pose any form of threat to their brand. Sell them on your brand’s stellar reputation and let them know what’s in it for them. What will they get out of the partnership?

If you’re unable to partner with your premier complementary company, you can still gain value from them. Take a look at their advertising locations and customer lists, then develop a paid search campaign to promote your product or service to their customers. Targeting a complementary brand’s customers will catch the attention of some of them since they’ll need your product or service, too.

Before you start this process though, be very certain that everyone agrees that your product complements the other product perfectly and vice versa. Also, make sure that they have a good reputation as partnering with an unfavorable brand will bring your company down.

2. Introduce Live Chat (in Certain Situations)

Including live chat into your website may seem odd at first, but if you’ve seen the data points and trends on how live chat adds value to businesses—you will understand. For instance, recent studies have shown that 73% of customers tagged live chat as the most satisfying way to interact with a brand.

That’s not all… 42% of customers picked live chat as the preferred way to give their contact information, which is a much larger conversion rate than conversions generated from any other method.

What’s more, live chat has a customer satisfaction score of 92%, which is far greater than the number of leads generated from social media support, phone, or email.

Now, you may be wondering, how does this enhance organic traffic and turn into leads? Well, according to Google’s Rankbrain, simply having a hoard of visitors come to your site but leaving unsatisfied is not moving the needle favorably for your brand. It’s imperative that you ensure visitors leave your site satisfied and got what they wanted, which is Google’s goal, too.

So, imagine a web user navigates through search and finds your brand’s website. But then they get confused about a product he/she wants to order. He/she notices the live chat and starts a conversation, and in a few minutes, the problem is solved. The customer leaves your site satisfied with an excellent experience and you’ve boosted your website’s reputation.

When this type of interaction keeps happening, Google notices and rewards your website with higher search engine rankings. Live chat alone can shoot you up the ranks because they want to offer other web users the same satisfaction.

However, we recommend that you avoid using chat-bots with pre-programmed replies. A study by Kayako shows that consumers want to be recognized as individuals. They need to be assured that your brand sees them as a person and not a random ticket number. Another great tool you can try is Mobile Monkey; it utilizes Facebook messenger chat and allows you to create new contacts.

After implementing live chat, you can then share the news via blog posts, email newsletters, and social media updates to your contacts. And as you may already know, off-site SEO is one of the driving forces to see your site rise through the ranks.

One last tip: be sure to check your website’s loading speed after introducing a live chat plugin.

3. eBooks and Whitepapers

A very straightforward but unconventional way to generate organic leads is through publishing eBooks.

What’s amazing about eBooks is their broad applicability. According to a Statista survey, eBook sales alone in the United States outrank that of mobile apps, pulling in $8 billion in sales. eBooks are powerful because it allows you to bundle up long-form content in an easily digestible format. They can cover a variety of topics and capture the interest of your target audience.

In inbound marketing, eBooks are usually offered in exchange for contact information. They give you their email address and you grant them access to the eBook. This provides you with an avenue to continually market to them.

It’s easy to self-publish your eBook as a simple PDF offered on your website or through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Publishing eBooks on trusted platforms like this will increase your authority and will enable your book to reach new audiences.

However, it is important to note that writing an eBook just for the sake of generating leads may not be beneficial to your audience; you must consider the quality of your book and the value it will add to the life of the reader and their goals. If you publish a high-quality eBook, it will keep them interested in your brand and they’ll be happy that they gave up their email address or contact information to receive it. But if it doesn’t offer any value, then you may lose your audience.

A whitepaper is a bit like an eBook in the sense that it covers just one topic in a long-form format, but it’s generally shorter. Unlike eBooks, whitepapers often cover complex topics and take on a more serious tone. The aim of whitepapers is to persuade and convey authority in a subject while also providing solutions to problems in the industry.

If done properly, eBooks and whitepapers are very convincing lead magnets that can entice prospects into giving up information like their email or phone number in order to get information. You can also use whitepapers and eBooks to nurture prospective customers through the sales funnel.

4. Video Marketing (Share videos on YouTube)

Most people are not aware that YouTube is the second largest search engine, processing more than 3 billion searches per day.

Whatever you post on YouTube stays there for a long time, unlike some social networking platforms. This is one of the reasons to take advantage of this wonderful platform and use it to generate organic leads.

It’s easy to create your own YouTube channel and share tutorial videos or informative videos regarding issues that are relevant to your audience. It proves that you are an expert in your industry and gives people the opportunity to see the face behind the brand.

A recent study showed that 87% of businesses are using at least one form of video marketing or another to advertise their brand and generate leads.

80% of these businesses have found using YouTube for video marketing has contributed the most to their success.

Generating leads through YouTube is very effective and easy to do. The key is to create entertaining, relevant, and highly valuable content for your audience. Videos should address each stage of the sales funnel. Try to be personal and authentic in your videos, this will help you build a connection with your audience and capture their attention. Once you start delivering a regular supply of high-quality videos, you will start to build an audience and have a steady stream of consistent organic leads.

One thing most people are unaware of is that marketing videos on platforms like YouTube can reach more people than even the most popular television networks will reach. Therefore, knowing that a video can be freely promoted to many people will expose your brand to a wider, more qualified audience.

Just remember to make sure that the videos you upload check all the boxes and are beneficial to your audience. And note that to be able to hit the nail on the head and give your audience exactly what they want, you must have a good understanding of your audience and what interests them.

5. Embrace Personalization

There are many rewards associated with taking some extra time to personalize messages and connect with your customers.

If you were making a purchase from a business, would you be happy if it treated you as a mere transaction or one that gives you the VIP treatment? I’m sure you’d go for the second option because everyone loves to be given the red-carpet treatment, including web users. Furthermore, many studies have backed the positive effect of personalization as it relates to generating sales.

A survey carried out by B2C revealed that 75% of consumers would most likely make a purchase from a brand that identifies them by name, is aware of what they’ve bought previously, and that makes product recommendations based on previous buys.

Despite the availability of powerful data, many companies struggle with personalization. A Pure 360 research study suggested that the regular forms of personalization used by most brands fail to engage consumers in any meaningful way.

Personalization must be done in a way that shows a deep level of understanding and not just superficial information. For example, one data point showed that only 8% of people would want to engage with a business that simply addressed them by their name.

Also, just 7% stated that they may engage with a birthday email. These stats show that superficial personalization isn’t that successful. If you want to use personalization to boost your organic lead generation, you need to dig deeper. Go beyond using names in emails and sending them messages on their birthday.

The company Drift is a great example of how to use personalization the right way. Due to their utilization of various technology and consumer data platforms, they are able to align their live chat to every unique visitor. In the screenshot below, they were able to identify where the customer works and tailor their messages to it. It’s amazingly targeted and smart.

The whole purpose of personalization is to improve the user experience. If people love using your service or product, they’re more likely to recommend it. And more recommendations mean more organic visits and opportunities for conversions.

Gone are the days when you could just whip up some random website, stuff in some keywords, and start getting visits. Now, you have to offer value and a quality experience to web users to be rewarded with a high ranking on the result pages.

Conclusion

It can be frustrating to try the standard methods of lead generation over and over without positive results. However, don’t let that be a deterrent. It simply means you need to think outside the box. We just shared a few ideas, but there are methods that you can use to generate organic leads.

All you need to keep at the back of your mind when trying to implement these methods is how it will impact user experience and satisfaction. People won’t willingly go to your website or tell others about it if they left unsatisfied or had a terrible experience.

This is important because regardless of what methods you use to pull in organic leads, if they aren’t staying due to unsatisfactory experiences, your site will suffer in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To avoid this, try out some of the tips listed above and enjoy the flood of high-quality organic leads.

Be sure to visit Cardinal’s blog for more ideas on how to generate leads.