If you want to generate leads, it’s important that you bring in a lot of traffic to your site. To make the most of your website, you need to identify the top traffic sources that provide your business with the leads it needs.

In this blog post, we’ll break down the most important lead sources: SEO, social media, paid ads, organic traffic, and referral. We’ll touch on what each means and what you have to do to ensure you’re getting enough traffic from those sources.

Why Do You Need to Know Your Lead Sources?

Tracking your lead sources helps you identify how effective your marketing is and what you can do to improve. When you have information about where your leads are coming from, you can:

• Identify where your qualified leads are coming from and brainstorm ways to improve results.
• Identify potential problems with your marketing efforts, online presence, and website.
• Track the performance of your marketing campaigns and adjust your budget so you’re putting more money toward the best-performing channels.
• Gain insights into your target audience’s behavior and the marketing messages they respond to.
• Improve conversions using strategies and content targeted and optimized for your audience.

The Top Lead Sources

There are several channels through which leads can get to your website or simply learn about your brand. Some of the most high-volume lead sources include:

Social Media

As the world becomes increasingly digital, businesses leverage social media to reach a larger audience. In fact, social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with customers and promote your product or service—85% of marketing professionals agree with us on this.

Due to its widespread use by consumers and businesses alike, it is one of the top channels for driving traffic to your website and generating leads. To take advantage of the traffic possibilities of social media, it’s important that you understand how each platform works and the types of content that perform best on each.

For example, Twitter is a great platform for news and updates, while LinkedIn is ideal for thought-leadership pieces.

Paid Advertising

With paid advertising, you can put your business directly in front of your target audience and drive the leads you’re looking for right to your website. When you pay for ads, you can target audience demographics that align with your core audience, share with them your business promotion or offer, and direct them to your website for more information.

With 40% of the first page clicks going to the top three ads, not using paid advertising as a lead generation channel denies you the potential leads that matter to your business and its revenue.

Common paid advertising methods include:

• PPC (pay-per-click) ads: You pay a fee for each person who clicks on your ad.
• Display ads: You pay to have your ad displayed on other websites.
• Social Media ads: You use a social media platform to target potential customers based on their interests and demographics.

Email Marketing

When you create and build an email subscriber list and regularly send your subscribers targeted emails, you are putting your brand at the top of your subscribers’ minds. You’re able to encourage visits back to certain blog posts or promotions on your site, therefore increasing the chances of converting these subscribers to paying customers, which is an effective way to generate revenue for your business.

While email may seem like the oldest kid on the block with the advent of social media and other channels, it is still one of the top sources of traffic and leads for businesses that do it right. 

Email marketing is still a solid way to keep in touch with your subscribers on a regular basis, build relationships by sharing engaging and valuable content, and turn leads into customers.

SEO

SEO is a long-term lead generation channel that requires constant modification and optimization—with the opportunity to drive 300% more traffic to your website. As you rank higher on search engine results pages with your SEO strategy, the number of your website visitors increases. This allows you to convert a higher number of leads.

To get leads successfully from your SEO efforts, you need to understand that SEO isn’t just one thing but many actions that work together. Keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and content marketing all work in tandem to earn you higher rankings in SERPs, which leads to more website visitors.

Referrals

72% of happy customers will refer your business to six or more people. When you provide your customers with positive experiences, they’ll share them with their friends and family. Also, when people see that others are talking positively about your business, they are more likely to be convinced to make the leap.

Referral traffic is similar in that it refers to any link back to your site from an outside website. Examples include:

• When you place an article on another website and generate traffic back to your site from it.
• Review websites that list your product or service and link to your website.
• Any blog posts or articles on other websites or publications that include links to your content.

To encourage referral traffic, make sure you have a backlink strategy in place. Also, become a guest contributor by writing articles for other websites that generate traffic from audience members that align with your target audience. 

How To Improve Lead Generation

While there are several ways to improve lead generation, below are tips we believe will get you more results.

1. Create High-Quality and Engaging Content

Creating high-quality content catches the attention of your target audience because it’s aligned with their needs. If you want to generate leads from content, you must create content that answers questions, demystify confusing topics within your industry, and offers tactical solutions. Content you should be creating includes blog posts, infographics, eBooks, guest articles, and whitepapers. 

2. Leverage Social Media

Social media offers you the opportunity to interact directly with your target audience, so take advantage of that. The key to getting leads from social media is to create engaging social content and to be consistently active. Reply to comments, follow accounts that make sense for your brand, and create social content like:

• Videos
• Tutorials
• Demos of your product
• Behind-the-scenes footage of your business
• Employee profiles

3. Use  Lead Capture Forms

You can generate great traffic on your website and still not get the leads you need. Place lead capture forms on your website with enticing offers such as a discount on goods or services or a free report or white paper. These lead forms should ask for the name and email addresses of visitors, so you can add them to your email marketing campaigns and start tracking their engagement. 

4. Utilize Effective CTAs

Encourage visitors to take action and move on to the next step in the lead generation process with clear CTAs placed strategically on your website. CTAs are most commonly used on landing pages that promote certain gated content, webinars, or other offers that typically require a sign-up or a download. 

5. Ensure a Positive User Experience

Optimize your website to provide visitors with positive experiences. Make your website easy to navigate and visually appealing—and be sure to fill it with appropriately targeted content. Make sure your pages load appropriately, your images are high-quality, and that the site journey a visitor takes makes sense and is intuitive. 

Knowing where your website traffic and leads come from gives you valuable insights into your lead generation and marketing activities. With this knowledge, you can make objective decisions on your marketing to engage with and convert more leads into paying customers.