14 Lead Generation Techniques

Often defined as potential sales contacts, leads are an asset to your company that directly helps you increase profit. Essentially, leads are contacts you’re most likely to turn into customers, due to a particular action they did or simply due to their interest in what you have to offer. This is the reason why lead generation is an activity you should prioritize in online marketing. Lead generation is defined as the process of attracting new people or converting the existing audience into leads, i.e. people who indicate some kind of interest in your company or product. For example, if a person submits an email address to claim a coupon for your product, that person could be considered a lead because they have shown interest by claiming a coupon. Even though it’s important in all stages of online marketing and doing business online in general, lead generation can be quite challenging when starting out your business online. Learning about techniques for lead generation should be a part of your business strategy and planning at any moment because they can help you improve your business.

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1. Outstanding blog

Publishing content regularly helps with creating a readership, a base of followers interested in the topic you write about. The content of high quality generates a lot of attention and interaction among followers. This interaction is what’s going to make lead generation possible for you. It allows an opportunity to communicate with your readers, to see the influence of your work and to get feedback about what you’re doing. Content Marketing is that trigger which is going to spark interest and eventually turn those interested readers into leads. Content enables you to create this link between you as a publisher and readers, providing an incredibly practical outlet for an indirect promotion of your brand. Through the blog, you get to connect with your readers, to provide information, to educate, and to help. Using different content formats can additionally boost the performance of your blog, as well as the additional promotion of this content using online marketing. Having a call-to-action button or a lead magnet alongside this content is the best way to generate leads through the blog.

2. Popular podcast

The approach with this lead generation technique is similar like with blogging. You should share high-quality content to gain the attention and influence among the online users. The main difference is the content format. According to many studies, video and audio content are increasingly popular online, which is one of the main reasons why you should test this strategy when gathering new leads. This type of format is on-the-go content, which can occupy people when commuting, walking, running, etc. It’s becoming more convenient for people to consume content is such a way, so try podcasting as one the techniques for lead generation. From gear needed to get started to strategies for recording and promoting your podcast, here’s a guide that’s got you covered if this topic is new for you: Podcasting for Beginners: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Podcasts.

3. Recognized authority

Even though this is a long-term strategy, it’s a very effective approach in online marketing in general. Being active online, including sharing content on your website and being present on social media, can do wonders for your reputation. It helps you create a recognizable authority in your niche, and it increases the influence of your brand, or your influence if you’re building authority for a particular person. As a result, this increases trust, which helps you get and retain those loyal to your brand.

4. Irresistible offer

Another amazing strategy for gathering leads is presenting an offer. These offers are also called lead magnets because their primary purpose is to attract leads. The idea is to create something that your followers will appreciate and find worthy for them to claim, usually by providing their email address or sometimes by filling out a form. It could be an ebook, a template, a checklist, study findings, etc. It could be any type of resource they’d appreciate. Want to create an offer, but you’re all out of ideas? Take a look at this comprehensive resource with 69 lead magnet ideas with examples.

5. Special promotions

Special promotions are always a great strategy to kick off a campaign or boost sales. The best way to make sure this strategy is a success is to create a memorable promotion that will be a real treat for your customers. It should also be educational and informative because providing information about your products through this promotion can help you highlight the benefits and the results customers can achieve by using your product. Ultimately, promotions are an incredible way to show your followers that they are special.

6. Carefully designed website

The website is the most common technique used in the generation of leads, and it’s rightly so. This is where everything starts. The website is the place where the online users find out more about your brand, what you offer, how they can benefit from this, etc. It’s also the place where you publish original, high-quality content that enables you to increase influence in the online world. Finally, it’s the place where you get to convert visitors into buyers. Regarding lead generation, a prominent call-to-action button, placed strategically, is going to help a lot with generating leads. Responsive design and great care when designing forms also increase the rate at which you’ll be gathering leads. In addition, both about us page and testimonials can help, because they’ll provide more information for indecisive visitors.

7. Effective landing page

Since landing pages are often part of the lead generation process, you should be extra careful when designing them. The aim when creating a landing page is to present the offer in such a way that it attracts the visitors and eventually convert them, so you need to analyze each element of a landing page and see how those can be optimized to contribute to a better overall performance. To learn more about the presentation of landing page content and optimization, check out this article: How to Create an Effective Landing Page.

8. Social media visibility

In the year when 2.46 billion people use at least one social media, there is no reason to doubt that social networks are a useful asset in presenting and promoting your business online. By increasing your social media visibility, you increase interest in your brand and the engagement among the existing followers. As a result, you get to generate leads through social media. Your entire social media presence strategy should be designed so that you increase the influence of your social accounts and gain trust, to make sure you maximize the number of leads generated this way. You also need to think about social media strategies that will help achieve this goal to generate leads.

9. Clever advertising

Paid advertising offers a lot of opportunities for reaching more people in a short amount of time. Unlike building the reputation, which is quite effective, but it requires a lot of time and dedication, advertising is a quick way to expand your reach. This strategy can be used for achieving a lot of marketing goals, but in terms of lead generation, this technique is particularly effective for gaining new leads when you’re unable to reach them with your content and social media presentation. The real art of this technique is to create clever ads. Those that will attract precisely the right kind of visitors. Don’t go for quantity. Reaching thousands of people might not do you any good if those are unlikely to become your leads. Instead, go for quality. Try to closely define your potential customers and use these characteristics as criteria for targeting ads. You’ll soon realize that this strategy will prove to be much more effective and profitable than aiming to reach a large group of people without any specific targeting options.

10. Thought-out link building

Even though it’s a strategy typically used in off-site optimization, link building can help with lead generation as well. With lead generation, you will have to consider audience as one of the main factors that will affect your decision whether or not to have a link placed on another website or blog. Since you want to collect potential sales contacts, your target group and the profile of your ideal customer needs to match the profile of the online users expected to be visiting the page where the link will be placed. When you take care of this first aspect, when you’re sure that the audiences do match, and you’re going to target the right people, you need to think about the second aspect to actually leverage the power of link building – presentation. You want to generate leads and you have to be efficient at attracting them to your website. This can be done with great content, an exclusive offer, a special promotion, etc. A presentation is everything. The audience you’re trying to reach has likely never heard of you. So, when placing a link on a third-party website, make sure you present your company in the best possible way.

11. Leveraging the list

A mailing list is the ultimate asset in email marketing and promoting the business through this channel. However, there is are big differences among contacts on your mailing list, which leads us to list segmentation. When segmenting your list, you make distinctions between regular subscribers and leads. If you use email marketing software, you’ll be able to track numerous activities, and even rank leads using lead scoring. To make sure you increase the number of leads, your goal is to focus on regular subscribers. You’ll use different email marketing methods, including sharing special promotions and offers to engage those subscribers and turn them into leads. Since these are the contacts you already have in your possession, this is a smart way to leverage the assets you already have to increase the number of leads.

12. Getting recommendations

Building and maintaining the reputation in the online world should be one of the top priorities for companies. Reviews, recommendations, and opinion of others have never been so close to the potential customers, which means that your online reputation will speak volumes. This is why recommendations are an excellent way to generate leads. People may share these recommendations in a blog post, on a forum, in a newsletter or on social media. Anyone using the internet may share them, including previous customers, ordinary people, but they may come from celebrities, influencers, respectable experts, etc. In all of these cases, the recommendation will have some degree of influence on the online users and your ability to convert them into leads.

13. Affiliate marketing

Unlike the previous method, where you deserve recommendations purely by your extraordinary quality, this method focuses on getting recommendations in exchange for compensation. Still, it can be a valid method of obtaining leads, especially having in mind that you won’t be doing the promotion yourself, but the leads will be generated for you by the participants in your affiliate program. This method enables reaching more people and leveraging the power of different content formats, writing styles and channels for promotion.

14. Offline marketing

It’s true that the best way to promote your brand online is to use online marketing and resources it provides. However, for lead generation, offline marketing techniques can also be quite useful. Offline marketing provides direct and indirect contact with your audience. The direct method is more efficient at gaining leads. It gives an opportunity to interact with the potential customers and directly promote your product. These include:

• Special events
• Brochures
• Lectures
• Exhibits
• Fairs
• Seminars  

Conclusion

Lead generation is an ongoing activity, which means it starts as soon as you set up your business online and it should be a part of your regular business running. The techniques highlighted here are the most common ones you’ll use to generate those leads. To make sure you always get the most out of your approach, try alternating between the various methods, and then combine a selected few. The chances are that some of these techniques would turn out to be quite prolific. Others might just not be worth the effort due to poor performance. You’re the one who knows the strengths and the potential of your business best, so you’ll know which lead generation technique(s) to focus on.