Why is it so challenging to generate qualified leads to your business? There are a couple of good reasons.

First, your business could provide a service that many other people offer, which can cause a lot competition. Something like personal training or accounting. And since many may provide the same services, you find yourself competing for the attention of every customer out there.

Second, it has become harder (and more expensive) to market on social media. Customers are tired of seeing the same cookie-cutter websites and want real personalized solutions. If you provide a service and your website doesn’t do a good job of telling visitors exactly how you can help them AND provide a method to capture their information, you have lost them forever and literally wasted any money spent on advertising.

The result is as inevitable as death. Your business becomes a commodity service. For the customers, it’s difficult to differentiate between who’s better, and price wars becomes intense to lower cost which decreases your margins.

Not all leads are equal…

There are ways to free your firm from this dilemma. Here are some of my favorite strategies for tipping the scale in your favor:

1. Become a specialist

There’s no need to be everything to everyone. There are a number of powerful advantages to specialization, including being able to command higher billing rates, generating more leads, and being able to close sales more easily.

You can focus on understanding a problem so well that you know all the non-generic challenges they are facing. Then you can have meaningful conversations about how your services help that problem — which is problem that other competitors in your field will completely miss or not be as well-equipped to handle. This is a big advantage and will bring you better leads because you offer more solutions.

Other types of specialization that can help differentiate your business include:

• Service type specialization
• Geographical specialization
• Specialization in certain types of problems

2. Publish Value Content

Forget the usual newsletter babble. Find a topic that will be very useful to your target group and explain it in very simple terms. There’s no doubt that rich, highly-readable content backed up by solid SEO is one of the most important elements of any digital marketing approach taken by market leaders such as AdInfusion, and focusing on this kind of quality content will help to boost your efforts no end. In our research, we found that one of the top ways that buyers are convinced of expertise is when someone is able to explain a complicated subject in an understandable way. The content that you post on your website is not just going to affect the local customers to your business, either. If you publish content that is rich and readable, you’re going to reach an audience that goes far beyond your local area. Your website will be a global hit, and you will be able to reach audiences in other areas of the world. This could lead to a new customer base opening up elsewhere, and you could then find yourself heading abroad to network and meet potential new clients. The new clients that you meet may require you to head abroad, and that means that you need to send money to afford your meetings and business abroad. Eventually, the content that sparked a whole new audience could see you opening a new business location. Valuable content has a place, and it could improve your business more than you think.

3. Create A Sales Funnel To Attract Clients

A sales funnel is an automated marketing setup which contains a series of webpages that include different stages. Cold prospects go through each step, watch your value content and learn more about your business, until they are at the last step and stoked to schedule an appointment or buy.

Using sales funnels for your business definitely has its advantage.

Here are just a few ways which sales funnel can help your small business.

• Instill passion or a desire to buy through education or information
• Pique interest in whatever you are offering
• Create awareness of your product, services, and brands
• Take leads through the sales funnel until a final purchase is done

The biggest benefit of sales funnels are that they do all this for you online 24/7, so it’s like having hired your own personal marketing team! (but without the extra salary). The downside is that you have to get “techy” and learn how to setup a sales funnel, which is a time investment many small business owners just don’t have available to make.