When it comes to generating more leads online, there is no shortage of strategies available to try.

You can run Paid ads, email marketing, video content, audio content, written content, optimize your website for SEO, organic social media, and so on...

The list is pretty much endless, but what makes matters worse and even more confusing is that for every strategy available, there are at least a dozen people on one side saying one way is the absolute best way to go, and on the other side you have people saying why its a total waste of time...

We want to share with you what most "gurus" don't really like to talk about.

And it's not the strategies that don't work, and it's not necessarily your fault either that things didn't work out.

So, if the problem isn't the strategy and it's not you, then what is it?

Well, 9 times out of 10 it's a mismatch between you and the strategy that you're using.

Most of the time it's the mismatch combination and the fact that the strategies aren't being built on a solid foundation.

So, let's fix that now.

Here is my 5-step strategy and the best way to generate leads online.

Identify the Ideal Target Market

You need to as accurately as humanly possible identify your perfect customer (ideal customer).

That's the kind of customer that loves you, loves what you do, want's to tell everyone about you, and is willing (and able) to pay you for the value that you provide.

What's important here is to identify their demographic details like age, gender, income, occupation, etc. Their geographic details like where they live including city, state, province, or country, as well as their psychographic details like what are their attitudes, interests, beliefs, and opinions.

The better and the more clearly you're able to identify your ideal customer, the better your online lead generation will be.

Miracles and miseries

This step is where you want to identify their miracles like their wants, needs, desires, and dreams, as well as their miseries like their fears, frustrations, pains, and their problems.

It's in this step that you'll clearly identify what they want and what they don't want, and then start to communicate how your business is uniquely positioned to solve those problems for them.

So, you see one of the best ways of showing someone that you can help them is by actually helping them.

When you focus on really letting them know that you understand their miracles and their miseries, and present to them with a solution (ideally a solution that your business is uniquely positioned to provide) is when you both win.

Give them what they want (Education-Based Marketing)

You're going to want to create content that directly addresses their miracles and their miseries, and delivers it to them in the form that matches your content creation style and their content consumption style.

So, you really want to identify what kind of content your target market likes to consume.

Is it video content, audio, text, or a combination of all three? Also, you have to take into consideration what kind of content you don't like creating.

If you hate being in front of a camera, then video is not the answer. If you don't like talking, then audio is not the answer. And, if you don't like writing then clearly you are not going to want to do text-based content.

But if you manage to match your preferred content creating style with their favorite content consumption style, you get something called content concurrence, and that's when your content really resonates and hits the mark.

Once you've got your content created, you can deliver it in an exchange for a name, email, or a phone number, or whatever kind of lead gen you're after, or you could give it away for free, but just make sure that if you do, you include some kind of relevant call to action (CTA) at the end that lets them know what step to take next.

Go where they are

This is where most marketing tactics tend to fail.

Most tactics advise picking a channel first.

Normally, whatever is hot that day and then diving in and staking your claim there. But sadly, this is the entirely wrong way to do things and it resulted in countless businesses going out there and starting content marketing strategies on channels that their target market isn't even active or present on.

The alternative then and the best way to do things is to take a look at all the steps we just covered and really identify where your ideal target is spending their time online, and then go there.

Once you've figured this out it makes deciding where to focus your online lead generation efforts a complete no-brainer and way more effective.

Accelerate with online ads

Again, where most people go wrong is they start with paid advertising before really fleshing out all the details and all the steps that we've just covered prior.

This means they go into paid ads completely blind, not knowing what's going to work, what content is going to resonate, and not even knowing if they're on the right channel.

As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of losses and a lot of disappointment with paid ads.

This is why we always do paid advertising at the last step because by now we know about our ideal customers, we know their miracles and miseries, we know what kind of content we need to create, and on what channel to go and advertise.

We covered a lot in the post, but if you go through all of these steps and apply them in your strategy, you'll be miles and miles ahead of the competition, most of who are still using outdated lead generation strategies which we're barely even effective five years ago.

Also, always remember "Strategy first, Tactics second".

With all that said, if you're still not sure what the best place to generate leads online for your business is then we don't want to leave you hanging.

Our top 2 suggestions:

Facebook

While the giant is under pretty heavy fire in these last couple of years, it's still one of the best and most effective places to generate leads online. This is largely due to its massive user base, but also to the sophistication and level of detail present in its advertising platform.

Because Facebook's algorithm has gotten so sophisticated, it allows you to really laser in on exactly who you're trying to reach, including their demographic, geographic, and even psychopathic details.

For most businesses using Facebook's advertising is an easy choice.

Youtube

This is due to a number of reasons, but the big one is that while Facebook is a discovery platform (meaning that people can just kind of stumble upon it and discover your content), well Youtube is largely a search-based platform, meaning that people can go on the platform, type in something that they are actively looking to solve.

Use Facebook or Youtube alone and you'll get good results, but combine the two and your lead generation will never be the same (In a good way 😃).