How a digital lead helps your business grow—without breaking the budget

Bringing in new high-spending customers is one of the biggest challenges for small and medium-sized businesses. Many spend a lot of time and money on cold calls or networking meetings—yet still don't bring in enough new deals. Meanwhile, the customer journey has changed for most industries. Today, most buying journeys start with a Google search. 97% of customers ignore sales calls, and over 70% find new suppliers through digital channels. In this article, we want to give you tips on what to consider to improve both visibility and relevance.

Typical Challenges for SME Companies

Many smaller companies recognize themselves in one or more of these points:

• Limited marketing budget – it's difficult to compete with larger players and understand where efforts are most effective.

• Hard to reach the right people at the right time – the message is not relevant or doesn't get through at all.

• Unclear digital touchpoints – the website, social media, and ads are not optimized to generate leads, and messages are scattered.

• Long sales cycles – customers need several interactions before they are ready to buy, and often multiple stakeholders are involved from the customer's side.

How Digital Lead Solves Many of Your Challenges

Digital lead is about using digital channels to:

1. Attract the right visitors to your digital touchpoints.

2. Capture their interest with relevant content, forms, or offers.

3. Process and qualify them until they are ready to buy.

A structured approach makes it possible to tackle many of these challenges.
If you have a limited budget, targeted advertising and search engine optimization can give a higher return than broad campaigns. Advertise narrowly and spend time on optimizing your target audiences.

Finding it hard to reach the right audience? With segmentation and marketing automation, your message can land at exactly the right time. Timing and relevance are crucial to breaking through.
If your digital touchpoints aren’t converting, optimizing with clear calls-to-action can make a big difference. And with long sales cycles, lead nurturing through email, social media, and retargeting keeps the conversation warm until the customer is ready to buy.

Source: HubSpot, Litmus, Oracle & EmailToolTester

Proven Impact – By the Numbers

• Marketing automation can yield up to 80% more leads and 77% higher conversion rates (Oracle).

• Content marketing is used by 85% of B2B marketers to generate leads, costing an average of 294SEK per lead compared to 7,710SEK for physical events (HubSpot).

• LinkedIn is used by 89% of B2B marketers for lead generation, and 40% consider it the most effective channel for high-quality leads (HubSpot).

What Should Be Included in Your Digital Leads Strategy?

• Optimize your website for conversion – start from the customer and how they navigate during their buying journey.

• Use marketing automation to follow up on leads with relevant dispatches – again starting from the customer's perspective and addressing their questions or challenges with examples of responses or proactive service.

• Combine SEO and targeted advertising to reach the right audience – and tailor the message so it resonates with the customer, using the language your buyers use.

• Measure and analyze the results weekly to quickly adjust efforts.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

A common mistake is trying to be visible everywhere at once. Many companies spread their resources thin by engaging broadly across all channels, instead of focusing on those that actually deliver the best results. Another issue is that the marketing often lacks clear goals and metrics, making it difficult to understand what is working and what needs adjustment. Additionally, it happens that digital touchpoints—like the website and social media—don't match the company’s actual offerings, creating confusion and reducing the chance to convert interest into business.

Is It Time for You to Focus on Digital Lead?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you know where your best customers actually find you?

• Are you aware of which channels generate the most high-quality leads?

• Do you follow up on leads until they are ready to buy?

• Do you collect data from all interaction points to optimize your strategy?

If you answer “no” to any of them, it’s high time to take control of your digital customer journey.

Want to know how digital lead can help your business grow?

Contact us for a free meeting where we discuss how you can get more customers—without increasing your marketing budget.