Top 8 Lead Generation Strategies

Lead generation is one of the foundational disciplines of marketing. Gaining leads helps you grow your customer base while at the same time raising brand awareness and getting potential audiences interested in your services and products. When properly executed, an effective lead generation plan can find not just more customers but the right kind of customers who will form long-term relationships with your business. So, leads are all very well, but how do we go about generating them? We’ll show you how to put together a fantastic strategy for lead generation that can optimize your marketing processes and generate greater conversions.

What is a Lead Generation Strategy?

Every good marketing move starts with a plan. Your lead generation strategy will create a roadmap for you to appeal to the right demographic and convert their interest into leads by bringing them on a brand journey through your marketing funnel. Whether your work is B2C or B2B, every lead generation strategy has four main stages:

• Lead capture. That’s the way you extract data from a lead. This may include their name and personal contact details as well as pertinent facts like their job role, income level, and profession.
• Lead magnets. The treat or hook you use to encourage the prospect to engage.
• Lead qualification. The processes you have in place to help evaluate the likelihood of a lead becoming a conversion.
• Lead segmentation: The method you have for categorizing different segments of leads based on factors like their age, income bracket, and gender.

Take advantage of these effective lead generation strategies to help put you on the path to success.

1. Exploit Chatbot Opportunities
   We think of chatbots primarily as customer service tools, but why not leverage them to help give your marketing a boost? Chatbots can open a line of communication with potential customers around the clock, and with a little programming, their conversation style can help with your brand alignment. They can provide intermittent calls to action along the way and help bring the lead onboard with your organization.
2. Use Dedicated Search Tools
   Direct marketing is still an effective method of generating leads. In the past, it might have constituted physical mailing campaigns. However, today, the consumer landscape is altogether a different proposition. Contacting leads by email or SMS is much more relevant to the way modern audiences engage with service providers. Before you are able to get in touch with leads, you’ll need to know their contact details. A service like SignalHire can be of tremendous value in garnering these. The SignalHire API can be accessed through a browser extension, and the service lets you search for contacts by name, phone number, address, and even location. You can also use it to find out about potential customers’ job titles, helping you target demographics with better accuracy for a more efficient marketing process. If you’re unsure whether the service will be worth the cost, SignalHire offers pricing plans and free trials to let you experience the service for yourself and choose a tariff that suits your needs.
3. Offer Gated Content
   Gated content is content you’ve posted online that can only be accessed by users who have completed a call to action (CTA). This might be anything from registering with your mailing list, creating an account, or answering a questionnaire. This tactic is effective because it doesn’t expect the user to submit their information for nothing in return. It creates a value proposition that many audiences will find intriguing and also creates an air of value about the content available on your site. Some forms of gated content might include:

   # Videos
   # Exclusive articles
   # Special offers
   # Elite blog posts

4. Offer Discounts
   Everyone loves a discount. Pricing discounts create a sense of scarcity and value around your brand by giving customers the feeling of having access to a time-limited opportunity and the chance to make savings. You can use discounts to help prospects convert who can be logged as being interested in making a purchase. This is a good quality of customer and one with whom it may be possible to create a long-term relationship.
5. Offer Freemium Opportunities
   Gain more leads from curious prospects by inviting them to partake in a free trial of your product or offer them a freemium version. A freemium version is a version of your product or service with pared-down features, creating a conversion funnel by paying to upgrade to the premium version. This model engages potential conversions who aren’t quite ready to buy yet and gets them interested in your product. You can leverage this relationship by enticing them with paid features and sending them email campaigns focusing on the extra benefits they’re missing out on.
6. Promote Your Business on Social Media
   Paid ads on social media are proving increasingly effective as more people spend their time browsing through the platforms. Both Instagram and Facebook have very effective targeting algorithms that allow you to target the demographics most likely to be interested in your product. You can pursue leads on macro levels by pursuing leads according to traditional systems of gender and age. The other option is to use micro-targeting that relies on behavioral patterns and psychological drivers.
7. Change Your Website to Put Your Lead Magnet Front and Center
   Your lead magnet should be at the core of your value proposition to audiences, and you need to make sure that your website is designed to reflect that. Creating sales funnels on your web page can help align your web design with audience values and nudge them towards whichever magnet will be most relevant to their profile. Try some of the following to optimize your web design for marketing purposes:
   # Place it in the center of your homepage as a strong CTA.
   # Embed it at the bottom or relevant content pages and blogs.
   # Design a pop-up around it with a CTA.
   # Insert it into your gated content.
   # Promote it in the sidebar.
8. Create a Newsletter That Offers Value
   Content is still king as far as marketing goes, and creating a juicy newsletter can help you maintain your relationship with prospects and engage them in your latest activities. It can also provide you with a forum to build up your brand value to consumers and help nudge them along deeper into your marketing funnel. Such content you might add to the newsletter includes your latest blog posts, special offers, new releases, updates to your services and products, and contributions from your partners.

Final Thoughts

There are many different approaches to take with lead generation tactics. Some may be more appropriate than others depending on the nature of your business. What all effective lead generation strategies have in common is that they’re powered by your willingness to be proactive in trying new methods to build connections with audiences.

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