How to Generate Leads Online & Sell Products as a Marketing Agency

Generate Leads Online

Are you wondering how to generate leads online? If you have an agency for online or digital marketing, you are certainly familiar with lead generation. But how does it look in practice?

Is it possible to create products and services for marketing businesses or agencies? And further, can you sell these without even owning them? Finally, can you sell them in China?

Yes, it is all possible! It can be tough, especially in the beginning. But if you do your research right and implement your strategy thoroughly, your efforts will pay off. In this week’s China Gravy blog article, we would like to tell you our story. Plus, we share what we have learned and where we hope to go in the future.

A Brief History of China Gravy

China Gravy was successfully established in 2018 by Christian Schuster, a German entrepreneur, and digital nomad, as a digital marketing agency in Cyprus. The focus is on digitalization. In particular, hospitality and real estate digital marketing, and Chinese marketing.

Generate Leads Online and Sell Products as a Marketing Agency

As a Cyprus Ltd. and with its office in Livadia, China Gravy also explored the business opportunities on our beautiful Mediterranean island. We quickly found that there is a high number of so-called HNWI globally who would like to gain more freedom through getting second citizenship or residency. One of the biggest emigration markets is China.

Since Cyprus is a member of the EU and Eurozone, these investors often seek to buy real estate in Cyprus. They often do so, in order to obtain a Cyprus permanent residency.

Exploring New Business Opportunities

However, there was no centralized platform for this group of internationals. They had to go to multiple places online to find Cyprus real estate in various languages together with a variety of useful information and services about living in Cyprus.

Besides, every real estate developer and agency has its own website, often with minimal or even no digital marketing (SEO, social media, PR). That’s because the marketing for these platforms is often done by the implementing partners through personal networks and contacts.

Therefore, China Gravy identified the opportunity. In October 2020, Immigration Explorer (IE) was born. This platform helps international expats immigrating to Cyprus as well as 7 other exciting immigration destinations for maximum freedom, security, and asset protection.

Now, you may ask yourself, how Immigration Explorer is profitable by generating leads, and how your business can benefit? So, without further ado, here is a 6 step guideline on how to generate leads online for your service business or agency. We spice it up with our personal experience during the set-up of Immigration Explorer. Let’s get started!

How to Generate Leads Online

You may wonder, why generating leads is so important in the first place? Lead generation refers to the process of identifying and engaging with potential customers and converting their interest in buying a business’s products or services.

So, even with an average product, more leads means more revenue. And more revenue usually means more profit.

Generate Leads Online and Sell Products as a Marketing Agency

For your business, your goal is to guide potential customers through your Marketing & Sales Funnel, so they ultimately buy your product or service. Today, lead generation refers to the stages from awareness to interest, consideration, intent, and evaluation. Only the purchase itself is referred to as the final sales stage.

1. Decide Your Strategy for Online Lead Generation

Generally speaking, running a business to generate qualified leads is a lucrative venture. Depending on your business model, you can work with strategic partnerships to sell the products and carry out the services for which you generate leads. Or you can do this by yourself. However, this requires more effort including cash flow and human resources.

Some companies also outsource their lead generation processes to save time. However, without active lead generation efforts, it is difficult to grow and scale up your business.

Immigration Explorer: In our case, owning products and carrying out services by ourselves, was too big an investment for a small start-up business. And also, there was no need for it as there are many businesses in Cyprus and abroad, offering exactly the services and products we had in mind.

Therefore, we identified Immigration Explorer’s added value and key strength in bringing the two groups together – international investors and local service providers. We decided to work with trusted strategic partners and use our platform as a highly efficient marketing machine for them. For offering and maintaining the platform, launching campaigns, maintaining a good personal relationship, and making sure our partners are 100% trustful we will get a small commission for a successful referral. The price doesn’t change though for our leads.

2. Keep your audience in mind to generate leads online

Knowing who will benefit and gain value from your products or services, is the key to understanding where to find and how to engage with your potential customers.

Immigration Explorer: We figured that being a bridge for international investors to immigration in Cyprus and other favorable countries and getting around on the island, could be a helpful service. Especially for entrepreneurs and business owners, expats, and retirees. In particular, we focus on HNWI from China, connecting with them through dedicated Chinese immigration agency and platform partners. Keep in mind that a WeChat account is a must to communicate with Chinese partners).

Tip: Check your current customer base and your competition. Try to walk in the shoes of your potential target audience. What kind of problems do they have? What would add value to their business or personal life?

3. Optimize Your Web Page to Generate Leads Online

Now that you have your strategy in place and know your target group, it’s time to start generating leads. Besides social media, your own website is a must to drive traffic and build a customer base. Therefore, your website needs to be optimized to capture a prospect’s contact details (name, email address), interests, and any other information that will help you in the selling process.

Immigration Explorer: At Immigration Explorer, we use a sleek and straightforward design, based on the easy-to-use WordPress CMS, to welcome our visitors. We make sure that our web pages load fast, and provide many points of contact, where potential customers can get in touch with us. We are also in the process of setting up video interviews to provide added value and information in exchange for contact details.

Tips: Using video on your landing pages can increase conversion by up to 86%. Include a call-to-action (CTA) at the top of each page and throughout your whole website. Make sure that your business appears at the top of the most relevant search engine, Google. Local SEO, both on-page and off-page, and PPC via Keywords or Display Ads are crucial elements for this.

4. Directly Engage with Leads

Did you know that only 4% of website visitors are ready to buy? Therefore, engaging directly with potential customers should be a top priority. For example, through live chat, forums, and help centers. Since the majority of website visitors need more incentive to make that final click on the buy-now button, further points of engagement are a must.

Immigration Explorer: On our website, we currently engage with our audience via email. As a next step, we plan to implement a live chat and we are curious about testing chatbots as well.

Tip: Did you know that marketers who follow up with online leads within 5 minutes are up to 9 times more likely to convert them? Live chats and pop-up windows, for example for a quiz or newsletter sign-up, are a widely-used way to engage with your audience.

5. Digital Marketing for Online Lead Generation

From social media and influencer marketing to question-and-answer platforms like Quora, email marketing, and other blogs – the world of social media marketing is colorful and diverse. Identifying the right social media page and online platforms for your niche and target audience will help you to get more value for your expenses.

With an abundance of information available at everyone’s fingertips, providing added value to your audience is a must. You can share videos on YouTube, offer free downloads like ebooks, cheat sheets, and other printables, host a webinar, create infographics, write an informative blog post, and much more. This is called content marketing. Unique and high-quality content is a long-term asset for you as it attracts traffic to your website beyond its publishing date.

Immigration Explorer: We are active on Facebook to generate online leads. Additionally, we are getting our leads through SEO and PPC from the website https://immigrationexplorer.com.

Tip: Comment on other people’s blogs and offer to write guest blog posts to establish yourself as an industry thought leader and collect valuable backlinks.

Tip: Automate your business processes wherever you can, for example, marketing automation for email marketing.

6. How to Convert from Leads to Sales

Finally, it is time to convert the interested prospect into a paying customer. The client has all the information he or she needs, has done his or her research and is now ready to purchase. Congratulations!

Immigration Explorer: Since we just started operations, our clients currently benefit from a very personalized service throughout all lead and sales stages. It is our goal to keep up this individual approach as we grow.

Tip: Make sure to guide your client through the sales process, offering assistance, and helping with any last-minute concerns. Follow up after the purchase to make sure the customer is happy with his product or service and to potentially engage further, like asking for a review and offering complementary products or services.

This is your practical 6 step guide on how to generate leads online, including China Gravy’s experience in the process of setting up our own lead generation platform. For most industries, the median conversion rate is around 3-5%. Following the 6 steps above will help you to increase this ratio.

Immigration Explorer

Today, Immigration Explorer is a hero project of China Gravy, offering 6 main services related to investment immigration. By offering our services in English, Chinese, and German, we add additional value to our audience.

  1. Connecting international investors with immigration and real estate agencies in 8 selected countries
  2. Education – selection and enrollment in universities and schools
  3. Medical tourism packages –  including specialized surgeries like limb lengthening surgery
  4. Company set up
  5. Retirement Planning
  6. Insurances – from health to home and travel

If you are planning to maximize your freedom through investment immigration, need help with any of the above-mentioned services or if you want to learn more about our story, Immigration Explorer is happy to answer your questions.

How to Generate Leads Online – The Takeaway

Congratulations! You now learned all about lead generation in digital marketing, why you need to get more leads, how to generate leads online, and many practical tips and lead generation strategies.

China Gravy is your trusted digital marketing agency and China marketing agency. We focus on website optimization services and real estate SEO. Take a look at our FAQ page to learn out more.

Contact us if you want to generate more leads for your business, for example, via Facebook real estate leads.

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