The path to scaling a business essentially has two activities involved, gaining new customers and retaining existing ones. But more than often, you are to run into problems with both.

Lead generation and customer engagement are two of the most significant hiccups that any business faces during its lifecycle.

After all, if you are attracting the wrong sets of people to your business, not only are you missing sales opportunities but are wasting valuable resources simultaneously. But that is not all.

Even if you are attracting the right kind of traffic, you can't afford to have a leaky sales pipeline. Customer acquisition costing 6 times more than retention, clearly engaging the existing customer base is a prerequisite.

So the question of the hour is how to alleviate this problem?

Enter growth hacking techniques. Unconventional marketing strategies with the potency of creating a viral effect for your product. With these strategies, you not only acquire a customer but earn a loyal fan.

This post brings you the top 10 growth hacking techniques through which you can create a robust customer base in 2021.

10 unconventional ways to engage your customers and generate leads like crazy

A high-performance marketing campaign, irrespective of goals, whether lead generation or customer engagement, has fundamentally one core motive. Satisfy your target audience's needs.

The path to growth hacking goes through looking beyond the surface and drawing rich, actionable insights to improve the lives of your target audience. The problem is, it is easier said than done, but not impossible.

All you need to do is be strategic.

Start with deep audience research. By research, we do not mean only demographics. Tapping into the psychographics and finding the why behind their interests and care will help you create more accurate forecasts about the success of a marketing campaign. Once you understand your audience inside out, devising strategies to generate high-quality leads should not look like walking in the dark.

But to simplify your growth goals, we bring you the best techniques that can generate high-quality leads and keep your customers tied in the loyalty loop.

Build strong relationships

The core of marketing communications is all about building strong, sustainable relationships. This means every opportunity your brand gets to interact with your target audience is an opportunity to establish a sustainable relationship. This can be done via creating an omnichannel networking strategy.

No matter where you have the 0th point of interaction, you need to continue the conversation.

If you held an offline networking event for your target audience, do not forget to collect their contact information like emails and phone numbers. If you met your customer on digital media, take them offline or keep in touch with them via email. This will help you to stay in touch with your audience with the maximum level of personalization. The best part? You will stay on the minds of your audience.

After all, it takes almost 7 interactions for a person to remember a brand leave alone conversions. But just shooting a daily mail will not make the mark. You would need to go deeper. Create an email conversation strategy that takes the conversation forward towards an offering that your brand provides.

In this Covid-19 situation, if holding an offline event looks impossible, create a virtual event. Take the help of powerful video conferencing tools like Zoom to keep the conversation going.

PRO TIP: Reiterate your networking strategy based on what works for your unique business.

Live broadcasting

If you ever did a webinar, then chances are you know what is live broadcasting? It is a real-time interaction, one to many but one-end interaction.

But that is not what makes live broadcasting such a uniquely capable lead generation and engagement strategy is that its authentic connection to the audience. The best part? It doesn't always have to be expensive. Hosting live streaming is mostly unprepared and raw. This positions your brand as an authentic entity in front of your target consumers.

Embrace omnichannel marketing

In the world of social media, when every other day something or the other is trending, it is almost impossible to get hold of the attention of the maximum of your audience without creating more opportunities for interaction.

This means if you were leaning on one channel for your customer engagement and lead generation activities, you aren't only wasting valuable resources and losing on sales opportunities.

Having an omnichannel marketing approach ensures you are always in front of your customers and indulge them in your brand at every opportunity you have.

PRO TIP: You can select one platform as your core communications channel but spread your word through others to optimize opportunity costs.

Integrate user-generated content (UGC)

One of the critical elements of brand building is trust. If your audience does not trust you as a brand, chances are there will be shallow engagement, leave alone lead generation, most of the time.

User-generated content is one of the most valuable assets in trust-building regarding engagement and lead generation. It not only creates authenticity but boosts brand awareness amongst your target users.

Integrate contests

One of the best ways to engage your customers is by hosting contests. But to ensure success, you need to come up with some desirable rewards. This will nudge your target audience to participate.

You can use a contest alert for various reasons. Lead generation, engagement, and awareness happen to be the primary goals. The best part? Executed well, you do not even have to pay for your campaign.

Create paid surveys

Did you think that expensive audience research is just to unlock your market and product strength? Then think again.

Utilizing surveys and polls can be your sure shot way to engage your audience simultaneously and generate high-quality leads. But even after being such a powerful source of lead generation, this method is still under-optimized. This makes it the perfect strategy to integrate into your system.

PRO TIP: You need to offer something valuable in return to take your quiz to your audience. Give them a reason to care.

Integrate interactive marketing

Are you still stuck on using static content? Well, if you are, then you are just using the same average strategies as your competitors.

In a time of attention economy, when your audience's attention span is less than a goldfish, you can't afford to bore them. As they say, the first impression is the last. However, here's what you can do.

Create dynamic, interactive content. Let them take charge of what they want to see on your website. This way, you aren't only increasing engagement but improving their dwell time. This places your brand uniquely in front of them.

Cold emails

Cold emails might look like the last strategy to generate high-quality leads. But then look again. Done right, it can convert almost every email you shoot to your sendee.

Having no first-hand relationship with the audience to whom you are shooting the email might look like the most salesy mail. But the success lies in how well you can research their core needs. The more contextual and personalized your message, the higher the chances of turning it into a prospective client. But do not expect to get a response right away. Always have a follow-up sequence planned. That is what email service providers like Mailchimp are for.

PRO TIP:  Never leave a cold mail without a CTA (call to action) button. The idea behind cold mailing is to make your sendee take action in real-time.

Gateway content

You may have often heard the phrase, content is king and rightly. But if you are creating average content just like your competitors, your content ceases to have value in your business. This means the actual time when content becomes king is when it is unique. The best part? You can put that valuable content to use for high-quality lead generation. Gateway content is an excellent strategy to do so.

You can ask your traffic to share their email and other contact information in exchange for valuable content.

Integrate popups

No matter how much you hate pop-ups, they work.

Integrating pop-up messages in your site can create immense value in terms of lead generation. However, ensure that they do not create friction in the user experience of your traffic. One of the best pop-up formats is event-triggered, like the exit pop-up.

Conclusion

Lead generation and customer engagement will always be two primary goals for your business, no matter what. Whether you are a startup looking to gain product-market fit or a large enterprise trying to achieve market domination, creating a sustainable business requires both. But here's a reality check.

Both customer engagement and lead generation require hard work, resources, and, more importantly, consistency. This means no matter how robust your marketing strategies are, there is no shortcut to success.

Sure, the above tips and hacks will create the launchpad for your marketing success, but it can't give you maximum results until you develop an optimization mindset. To achieve the desired outcome; you would have to embrace continuous data-centric experimentation along with the above tactics.

Each of your efforts counts and takes you one step towards your goals. The question is, are you ready for the challenge?