List Building An Important Program

List building is an important program. It should be your short and long-term goal. And in this post, we’ll explain why it’s essential to build your newsletter subscriber’s list.

List Building versus Lead Generation?

In the world of B2B, developing a newsletter was always a top-line marketing initiative. To generate quality subscribers, we developed a communications program strategy to encourage, engage and entice our prospective clients to subscribe. Sales lead generation was and will always be a top priority.

List Building, demand generation, lead generation are all synonyms and created equally to reach the same goal – to get your target audience to subscribe. The goal for Lead Generation is more specific, it’s to develop warm sales leads, but for this post, I’ll put them all together.

And, the reason we want leads subscribed to our newsletter is that the more they know about you, the easier it is to sell your products and services to them. The sales process should be shorter. It is a captured, targeted audience that wants to hear from you. Except for corporate events and trade shows, List Building is mainly produced via online marketing tactics.

Why Implement a List Building Program?

It’s becoming obvious, right? Content marketing is unsustainable. How many of us can actually post 16 times a month, create a variety of free reports and info-graphics as well as run our business. Do you find yourself asking where is time better spent, cold calling or writing a blog post?

I’m sure you’ve noticed that content marketing is time-consuming and at times it feels that we are giving away the shop for free! And, as soon as you write something really great, there are 25 others who took your idea.

Plus, the time and effort in developing quality content is now getting drowned out by lots of weak content, designed for SEO and commentators who comment just to link with popular blogs….

Even searching on Google is now skewed to websites with large amount of content designed for SEO.

Who needs it?

List Building Tactics

Here are a few tactics:

1. Free Content: Create an open course or a readily available case study where they can download or subscribe. Once subscribed, engage by setting up marketing automation series.
2. Webinars: Try to get another expert to be a part of your webinar. You both promote the webinar to your target market while building your brand image.
3. Social Media Advertising: Yup. At this time, Facebook is affordable and worth a try if your target audience is on this platform. If not, then consider LinkedIn, Pinterest or Twitter.
4. Social Media Marketing: Social media has proven to be a quality source for lead generation and increase newsletter subscribers. The only thing is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to be aggressive. Meaning post often! Don’t forget quality content first.
5. Google My Business: Are you a local business? Then Google My Business is for you. While Google states that their search engine doesn’t favour social media platforms, SEO experts tend to disagree. So, don’t omit to build this social media platform.
6. Contests: Who doesn’t love free stuff? Try one of the many new software platforms that incorporate social media fan building with contest example, for every share that’s one entry.
7. Networking: Local events and conferences are great platforms to connect with your industry and share future resources with complementary services.
8. Blog: All you need is quality content. Quality content means insightful and helpful information where your clients, prospective clients and industry will take the time to read.
9. Opt-In Forms: Have an influential blog that provides different types of content, add the Opt-In Form throughout your website, email and social media platforms. Also, don’t forget to add that all-important “Call-To-Action” everywhere!
10. SEO Best Practices: Do take the time to optimize your website; it’s probably your best investment. Search on our blog to get started.

Implementation

Remember that you probably won’t get the subscriber numbers you’re looking for if you hold a contest with a small social media following. Not unless they are a very loyal community and will help promote your content.

To build your list, first update your website with best practices; SEO, Opt-In Forms, properly organized and so on. Second, develop your online community, expand your social media followers and improve your network. And, while you are doing this, start to develop your free content and/or webinar and then, finally promote and advertise your content. You can start to tease your community about the content or webinar as you build your community, too.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter!