Today, if a business wants to reach a sustainable level of growth, having an effective lead generation strategy is a must. The greater your success, the larger your milestones become, requiring a constant and steady flow of new customers. In simpler times, qualified leads could easily find their way to your website independently or after a mild nudge from traditional marketing efforts. However, 61% of companies today state that forming an effective lead generation plan is now their number one challenge.

Because modern consumers have become hyper-aware of traditional lead generation techniques, customers are quick to tune out an advertisement that they feel is irrelevant or doesn’t meet their needs.

In this blog, we’ve prepared a series of seven effective lead generation strategies you can use today to nurture a lead’s interest in your brand.

What is Lead Generation?

Understanding how every piece comes together for effective lead generation is critical when building your marketing strategy. In online marketing, leads are potential customers who’ve found their way to your website, with or without prior contact from your sales representatives. Lead generation is when you capture a lead’s attention, gather a lead’s contact data, nurture their consumer interest in your brand, and finally convert them into qualified customers using a sales funnel.

Lead Generation Marketing Strategy

Lead Capturing

Lead capturing is one of the final steps of any effective lead generation strategy. This process collects the most common form of lead contact data after they’ve visited your website. Typically, a name or email. However, a lead visiting your website often won’t return, so you must provide something of value in exchange for that contact data. These offerings can be any of the various forms of lead magnets. Once you have that personal data from a lead, you can contact them through personalized ads and slowly convert them into a sale.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are lead generation methods that offer a long-form resource to trade for contact information from website visitors. Usually, lead magnets take the form of eBooks, whitepapers, downloadable content, demos, or discounts. Any informative content that drives customer engagement by enticing leads with your products or services.

The best lead magnets have three elements in common: they are relevant, reflect a perceived value, and serve your business needs.

Lead Nurturing

In digital marketing, lead nurturing is cultivating a relationship with buyers using engagement tactics like emails. According to Marketo, 50% of new leads are not ready to buy anything. Successful lead nurturing can solve this issue by using demographic data (job title, role, and industry) to learn the needs of each prospective lead and develop solutions for them. You want to provide leads with answers relevant to their current position in the sales funnel. When done correctly, marketers generate trust and brand loyalty long before a sale is finalized.

Landing Pages

A landing page is a stand-alone webpage that collects a visitor’s contact information for effective lead generation. Data is exchanged for resources whenever prospects “land” on your website after clicking a link. Unlike typical webpages, landing pages only have one goal: prompt visitors to perform an action with an attention grabbing call-to-action (CTA). This makes landing pages the ideal place for lead magnets to attract people to your page and convert them into sales over time.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the final phase of effective lead generation when marketers qualify whether a prospect is likely to convert into a customer. This process works by sales or marketing assigning a value to each lead based on their behavior and recorded interest in their products or services. These interactions are then used to label leads as either “hot,” “warm,” or “cold.”

7 Lead Generation Strategies that Work

Utilize Lead Nurturing and Personalization

Utilize Lead Nurturing and Personalization

Personalized email campaigns are a highly effective way to connect with your audience. Two easy ways to personalize emails are to include the lead’s name in your email’s greeting and to design the message with as much targeted content as possible. Many marketers even segment their subscriber lists to automatically send follow-up emails when triggered by high engagement rates.

Social Media Ads and Retargeting

Social Media Ads and Retargeting

Social media, specifically Facebook, is easily one of the most direct methods to drive leads. That is provided you’re willing to pay for the precise targeting tools the platform grants you, including age, location, hobbies, and more. Using retargeting to run a successful social media ad campaign will hinge on keeping all content relevant to what leads have already engaged with online.

Offer Discounts and Coupons

Offer Discounts and Coupons

One of the best ways to draw in a crowd of qualified leads is to leverage a chance to save money with discounts and coupons. After calculating those deals, use every social media channel you have and your email lists to distribute them. Take initiative and combine your intro email with those savings by including a limited-time coupon code.

Educate Your Buyer with Reports and Whitepapers

Educate Your Buyer with Reports and Whitepapers

An effective lead generation strategy for increasing leads is to offer educational material such as whitepapers or ebooks. Something that has a perceived value for the lead while making them an expert on your products or services.

Deliver High-Value Content

Deliver High-Value Content

These lead generation techniques involve demonstrating your industry knowledge through high-quality, high-value content. Your first step is to identify issues your target audience cares about, then create content your leads will find relevant to their needs. This content can take the form of blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers. The final step requires the leads to exchange their contact information for viewing your gated content, allowing them to be re-targeted later for sales conversion.

Develop Referral Partnerships

Develop Referral Partnerships

A quick way small business can generate leads while expanding their customer reach is to form referral partnerships. Think of your business as the middle link of a chain, and each partner you collaborate with adds another link. Each link refers a customer to a different link in the chain and then passes back a percentage of the total revenue from that sale.

Create Short Form Videos

Create Short Form Videos

Short form videos are videos designed to grab a lead’s attention and hold it for long enough to garner interest in your brand. Marketers generally agree that the perfect size for these videos is around 31-60 seconds long. 73% of consumers prefer short form videos when learning about a product. Leveraging this lead generation strategy with YouTube or TikTok will allow you unfettered access to a vast digital audience.

Conclusion

The best marketers are the ones who understand how to leverage new tools and popular trends online to stay relevant with consumers. Today, effective lead generation is how you pull those customers to your products and make your brand a part of their lives. These strategies will help you learn how to leverage the issues your audience cares about, present your business as the solution, and convert leads into customers while staying on budget.