In today’s world of online marketing, it’s hard to grow a business – or even for a business to survive – without target lead generation. By learning to identify your potential customers or audience, you can better serve them. And you can make it easier than ever for your business to grow organically.

Step 1 – Target leads on your website

You do have a website, right? One that has a focused and targeted SEO strategy? One that is well organized to explain your products, services, and business organization? One that clearly demonstrates your branding through images and professional copy?

If not. Then that’s your first assignment. Get yourself the best website you can.

Targeting leads on your website becomes easy, once anyone who lands at your website can see who you are.

Organize your website according to the types of customers you’d like to start doing business with. Think ahead about the services you’d like to offer them and how they group together to support the best customer experience you can provide.

Step 2 – Target leads on your social media

Did you ever hear that your “vibe attracts your tribe”? Social media is the perfect place to find your tribe.

You don’t have to be on every social media platform – in fact, you shouldn’t. It’s hard enough to manage a proper social media strategy and generate valuable leads when you are connecting with an audience well. Don’t burden yourself by trying to connect with multiple social media audiences at once.

Choose one or two social media platforms to focus on, and boost your profiles to the best level you can get them to. Make sure you have links to your websites, professional photos, proofread words, and a clean and pleasant appearance.

Step 3 – Target leads in blogging circles

Whatever business you’re in, there are other businesses that support your same industry. How can you network with people who are could be valuable potential customers?

Join a few blog networks, forums, or self-publishing platforms (like Medium) and start searching out others who are writing topics in your industry. Save the articles that are most intriguing to you for future use – like sharing them on your social media. You could always reach out to the writers and ask them to review your website, try your product, or discuss their business with you over a (real or digital) cup of coffee.

Step 4 – Target leads with genuine content

As you begin to build an online archive of content – whether you’re publishing your own blogs and articles, producing a video series or podcast, or just commenting on other people’s content – you can begin to connect genuinely with your audience. The more authentic your content, the less you’ll sound like you’re talking to a “lead” and the more you’ll sound like you’re talking to a person. And people like to be seen as people, not statistics.

If your site is designed with a solid SEO strategy, your social media and content strategy can easily support that. And since your business is genuine, your content will be genuine. All you need to do is produce it, and it will easily reach the business leads that you want to connect with.

Step 5 – Target leads with paid ads

I mean, you can. Paid ads are a great way to gain exposure in just the right place – especially if you’re in a highly-competitive industry in a highly-competitive market. An SEO or online lead generation specialist can help you with this, but it’s worth doing some basic research before speaking with anyone.

Consider, at least, where you would like to post paid advertising – would a search engine make the most sense? Do most of your current leads come from organic search results? Or if a major source of your traffic is one social media platform, should you advertise on that platform to boost its traffic? Or, should you advertise on a different platform to try to capture new traffic?

Paid advertising can bring in more targeted leads than organic advertising, but it can also result in lower interaction with your site and a higher bounce rate. Additionally, a boost in revenue that you see because of advertising may quickly taper off if the advertising is stopped. Ads often don’t sustain long-term, overall growth, unless supported by other online marketing strategies to target leads.