40 lead generation tips and tricks

Lead generation is critically important to the life and future of any business. To grow, you need new customers—there’s simply no way around it. After all, 85% of B2B marketers consider lead generation to be their most important content marketing goal. 

Just as a dog follows a scent, sniffing out its target, you must follow your leads, understand where they might be, and follow the scent until you can find, engage, and convert them into customers.

Whether you’re looking for lead generation tips for small businesses, B2B lead generation tips, or just general lead generation ideas, the best practices below will provide you with useful takeaways to elevate your lead generation efforts to the next level.

1.      Create buyer personas and revisit them often. It’s crucial to maintain insight into who your typical customer is and what they need. Revisit your buyer personas every quarter at a minimum, and ideally every month, to ensure your message stays fresh and relevant to your audience.

2.      Establish authority in your space. Outbound content is a great way to do this; create content that doesn’t even mention your product, but rather is educational and includes your logo. Establishing your brand as one the market looks to for expertise and insights produces superior brand recognition. 

3.      Targeted content is always best. You can’t be all things to all people. These days, your message and content must be highly relevant for leads to take notice. Aim to target specific market segments with different content initiatives, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

4.      Focus on quality rather than quantity. You can have hundreds of blog posts, but if none of them are interesting or engaging, they are irrelevant. One valuable piece is worth ten irrelevant ones, so keep your focus on highly relevant content that engages your audience—it’s perhaps the most important lead generation tips there is.

5.      If your content is awesome, your readers will share it. This is one reason why quality is so important. Look for ways to create content that stands out from the crowd. If it makes the reader say “wow,” they are more likely to share it, extending the reach of your content and bringing you new leads.

6.      Focus on engaging leads, not simply adding names to your database. This is among the most important lead generation marketing strategies. Higher engagement levels equal more leads generated. Unengaged leads don’t convert, so focus on engaging them first and foremost, and the rest will take care of itself.

7.      Be strategic with your email marketing—don’t inundate them. Email marketing is still one of the most important and useful lead generation techniques. But, with the volume of emails being sent today, leads are on guard, and if you overload them, they will unsubscribe, plain and simple. Shoot for no more than one email every week—one every two weeks is preferable.

8.      Map out the buyer journey. It’s important to understand the stages that a buyer goes through on the journey from realizing they have a need, through to selecting your product or service to fulfill that need. Identify each stage they pass through on the journey—you’ll need this for effective content creation.

9.  Map content to the buyer journey. Once you understand each stage of the buyer journey and what a lead needs to know or understand before moving to the next, you can create content that specifically provides the necessary information to progress leads on to the next stage.

10.  Embrace multichannel marketing. Leads are like snowflakes—no two are identical. And this applies to how they obtain their information as well. Some like social media, while others prefer reading emails or watching videos. Make sure you cover the entire spectrum by presenting content in a variety of formats.

11.  Have an email opt-in mechanism. The fastest way to lose a lead to unsubscribing is to begin your relationship with them by sending unsolicited spam. Allowing them to opt in ensures that you are marketing to leads who are genuinely interested to hear what you have to say.

12.  Include forward to a friend links in emails. Assuming you’ve already created awesome content and are now ready to start sharing it, give your audience a way to share it with their colleagues and friends. Hey, that’s essentially free marketing for you!

13.  A/B test… and do it often. Never assume you’ve reached perfection and don’t need to continue evolving. Trends shift and so do the needs of the market. A/B test your email subjects, email bodies and landing pages frequently to confirm that you’re on the right track, or to alert you to the need to course correct.

14.  Use social media, every day. It’s where people look these days for information, and it’s great for online lead generation. Once you establish authority in your space (see above), you should see your social media following grow steadily. Try to post every day if possible—on every platform you use—and if you can’t, aim for at least three posts per week.

15.  Respond to comments on social media. Social media interaction is a two-way dialogue, so it’s important to respond to comments posted directly to your site or under your posts. It will cement your reputation for being a brand that genuinely invests in its customers.

16.  Mix up your message and tone on different social media platforms. Push for diversity in your social media marketing. This is much more effective than duplicating the same message and tone across them all. The conversation on Facebook should be inherently different than LinkedIn, so take the time to mix it up.

17.  Engage with industry influencers. Identify and interact with industry influencers on social media. Contact them directly and ask about co-authoring content with them that they will post to their sites. Then enjoy the ability to reach their followers with content that you know they will want to consume. 

18.  Beware of keyword stuffing. SEO is critically important, but don’t overdo it with keywords. Be sure to include your primary keyword at least four times in the body of your web content, and try to keep it at that. Search engines will notice when you saturate your content with keywords. 

19.  Format your web page title tags properly. You should try to follow this format: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand. And remember not to go over 60 characters.

20.  Limit your web pages’ description tag to 160 characters. If you go over 160 characters, some of your description will get truncated in the results displayed by the search engine.

21.  Place your primary keyword in your web page’s URL. Search engines look for this, so be sure to include your keyword in the web address to generate higher SEO rankings for each page.

22.  Use pay-per-click advertising. This is particularly important if you’re a young business looking to grow, as it ensures your web pages appear at the top of web searches for the keywords you specify.

23.  Share customer testimonials. You can create a web page template that lets you include testimonials at the bottom of various pages. This is more effective than having a dedicated testimonials page, as readers will see them more often and don’t have intentionally look for them to become aware of the reputation your company has among its customer base.

24.  Place calls-to-action (CTAs) above the fold. It’s important to make your CTAs obvious and easy to find. Don’t bury the lead and make them hard to find by hiding them at the bottom of landing pages or emails.

25.  Offer one clear CTA and avoid multiple CTAs. Don’t confuse your audience by offering them the option to click on two or three different CTAs on the same page or email. Instead, direct them to one clear CTA that closely aligns with the content presented alongside it.

26.  Make your CTA stand out. When possible, use buttons or clickable images for your CTAs instead of hyperlinked text in a paragraph. Do anything you can to make it jump out, such as using a button with a contrasting color to more easily catch the eye.

27.  Use specific—not general—CTAs. Be sure your CTAs take the reader to an offer for content about a specific topic—which they are already reading about on your landing page or email—as opposed to having your CTA link back to your homepage. This way you engage them with something relevant to their needs and interests in that moment.

28.  Strategically place a CTA in your email signature. Have an important event coming up, or a valuable eBook or white paper that was recently published? Add a link to it in your email signature, and every lead you write to will see it.

29.  Use social share buttons to extend the reach of your content. Insert them beside valuable content. Or place them on the confirmation or thank you page of a form they completed. Social is king these days, so make it easy for leads to share your great content with their friends.

30.  Limit the length of your forms. Asking unknown leads for too much sensitive, personal information can scare them off. The initial capture of new leads should involve web forms with five fields or less.

31.  Capture different information on different forms. You can incrementally build contact profiles by asking for certain information on early stage forms, then digging deeper and asking for additional information on forms in front of late-stage content.

32.  If you gate it, be sure the content is worth it. Ask yourself if you would be comfortable divulging your personal information for the content offered behind your form. Longer, more valuable pieces like eBooks or white papers are good pieces to gate with a form. Infographics or short videos, on the other hand, may not warrant a form.

33.  Give away plenty of free content. Engaging your leads is important, so don’t prevent them from consuming your content by placing forms in front of it all. Every piece of content they read pushes them closer to qualification, so be generous.

34.  Avoid messy landing pages with too much text. The easier it is for a lead to skim your landing page and understand how the content will benefit them, the more likely they are to take action. Make the text brief and concise. Use bullets to call out important benefits. Supplement your text with images.

35.  Mirror your company’s branding on landing pages. You want it to be clear to leads that the landing page they arrived at is yours. Pull your company’s branding onto the page and make it clear that the page is yours, so that leads don’t get confused and think they are on another company’s site.

36.  Score leads for important actions that illustrate a propensity to buy. Give them a few points for visiting high-value web pages or opening emails. Award more points for actions that indicate greater interest, such as taking the time to attend a webinar. Once they meet your scoring threshold for lead qualification, pass them to sales to ensure your reps are only speaking to leads that are ready to have a conversation.

37.  Include a fast track scoring mechanism. Certain actions, taken by a lead, indicate that they are already qualified for sales outreach. For example, if someone requests a demo of your product, award them enough points to instantly surpass the qualification threshold.

38.  Work with sales to continually assess your scoring process. Your sales team will know if you’re passing them leads too soon, or too late, and will probably love to share their insight. Sit down with them (quarterly or monthly) to assess the quality of qualified leads coming their way and revise your scoring rubric as needed based on their feedback.

39.  Don’t stop with lead generation. Generating new leads is important, but it’s what you do after you capture them that determines whether they become customers. Nurture them with periodic content that continues to engage them, bit by bit, until they become qualified and sales-ready.

40.  Track, measure, and track some more. Find ways to attribute qualified leads back to marketing, and aim to understand what content is pushing more leads toward qualification. This can be done with accurate lead scoring. If you can claim responsibility for a large percentage of leads that become customers, you can more easily lobby for that increased marketing budget you need.

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This article was originally published on the Agile CRM blog.