I bet no business is completely satisfied with revenues at any point of their company development. It’s never enough to stop boosting leads and generating more sales.
68% of businesses report struggling with lead generation and yes, it can really be a problem. But if done properly, lead generation techniques can establish solid pipelines of qualified clients who make long-term investments in your company.
In this post, we’ll share with you a list of extremely powerful, but pretty simple to implement, lead generation techniques.
In addition, we’ll talk about:
- What is lead generation and why is it so important?
- How can you generate leads? 4 simple steps.
- What useful lead generation tools can you add to your arsenal?
So, here we go.
What Is Lead Generation and Why Is It So Important?
Before starting talking about practical strategies, let’s make sure you are very familiar with basic lead generation definitions.
Term 1 – Lead. A lead is a person who has somehow shown interest in your business or a desire to connect. The actions of visiting your website or viewing an ad don’t count. Basically, only a user who provides you with their contact information can be considered as a lead.
The following activities can be examples to help you spot a lead:
- Submitting your web forms (qualified lead)
- Calling on the company’s phone number (qualified lead)
- Requesting a callback or a free consultation (qualified lead)
- Registering on a webinar (warm lead)
- Downloading an eBook (warm lead)
- Subscribing to your newsletter (warm lead)
Since this individual has given their permission to contact them (through email, over the telephone or by other channels), now they are in your sales funnel at the stage of interest. However, it’s important to understand that not all incoming leads become your clients.
Lead ≠ Client
Lead = Potential Client
In the sales funnel, the purchase is the next step after interest. Your task is to carefully organize the customer journey and guide the leads to the stage of purchase using different marketing strategies and trends.
But that’s another story. Today, we talk about the lead generation phase.
Term 2 – Lead generation. Accordingly, lead generation is a process of attracting potential clients to your company by obtaining their contacts via different channels. The final objective of lead generation is to develop a constant pipeline of qualified prospects.
So, why is lead generation essential, and what benefits can a company gain from quality guidelines? Well, the aim of lead production is to develop and increase the lead base constantly. Lead generation helps you to focus on your buyer personas and collect essential information on their needs, requirements, and preferences.
Business growth is impossible without lead generation. Nurtured leads create a 20% boost in revenue and help companies to achieve 50% more sales at a 33 percent lower cost than non-nurtured prospects.
Term 3 – Lead generation techniques. Everything that allows you to find and get contacts of the target audience is a lead generating technique. This includes various website marketing strategies, content marketing tricks, email tactics, advertising efforts, and so on. Now, let’s go over some practical knowledge to use for your next lead generation campaign.
How to Generate Leads? 4 Simple Steps
Finding and generating potential clients may sound frightening, especially when you don’t know where to start or your current activities don’t bring desired results. However, getting leads is simple and guaranteed when you follow a clear plan. Here is one:
Step 1. Search for the leads
The initial step toward the generation of qualified leads is to find them. Where do your target users hang out on the web? Clearly define characteristics of your key buyer personas, particularly their interests and favorite web platforms, and try to find them there. Choose the most attractive marketing channels that can bring leads to you—be it the website, social media pages, forums, product catalogs, or other resources, and build your presence there.
Also, bear in mind the location. You should clearly define which global markets you are entering or are already in so that you can ensure you target leads in your desired geographical locations. It could help to use a platform like Dealfront, which is the go-to-market platform for any European market. Using the platform is straightforward too.
Step 2. Create an appealing proposal
Once the user finds your offer interesting, they want to learn more about it. So make sure that the process of getting in touch with you is simple and clear. Take care of your call-to-actions (CTAs) and provide workable submission forms.
Step 3. Immediate lead qualification & prospecting
When a lead shares her contact data, your no. 1 priority is to process the request as soon as possible. Speed and quality of lead handling are what matters now. Just imagine, 78% of potential clients choose the business that responds to their inquiry first. Thus, assign a good support team to your project. Your support/account/sales managers should not only immediately react to incoming requests but also competently qualify the lead status. Is it a cold, warm, or a qualified lead? The sales funnel will vary for all of them.
Step 4. Closing leads
Ideally, after the lead’s interaction with your business, he chooses you, and the sale is completed. That’s when a lead converts to a client.
Not that tricky, agree?
Lead Generation Techniques for Your Next Campaign
Once you’ve understood the basics, it’s time to start applying actionable lead generation tactics to bring visitors to your core landing page and conquer their interest. You can achieve this in numerous ways. Here are my favorites:
Make the user experience as simple and quick as possible
Compared to other website lead generation strategies, you can implement this trick in a tick with no effort. Just get rid of extra elements in your user experience. Various eCommerce platforms and websites like Shopify give you the opportunity to build and maintain your website UX perfectly.
For example, a designer Jared Spool describes how eliminating a login requirement earned $15 million on a $300 million-dollar button tweak. So, how did his firm get such a big outcome from a single change? Friction. According to Jared, eliminating the extra login requirement decreased friction. This significantly simplified the purchasing process for visitors.
Another excellent example of a seamless user experience is Oysho’s online store. You’re offered to complete a purchase without registration.
Thus, the bumps, obstacles, and jarring encounters that users face on your site are referred to as friction. It can also be a faulty search button, a clumsy menu, or a picture that’s much too small to view. Even minor UX improvements are capable of making a big and beneficial impact on your lead generation results.
For generating B2B leads, give LinkedIn a try
Although many companies don’t take using social media to generate business seriously, in fact, lead generation on LinkedIn is one of the most efficient B2B marketing strategies.
More than half of small and medium firms (51%) and big businesses (58%) have a social media presence. 85% of large enterprises are presented on the most popular social networks, too. Why? In addition to pursuing a goal of building strong corporate branding, nearly half of all B2B marketers today use LinkedIn to generate sales leads.
LinkedIn is the dominant professional network where companies’ decision-makers are open to discussing various business questions and proposals. It’s the best place to get new business connections and find client opportunities. All you need is to craft an appealing offer and send it to your target audience within the platform.
Good news: You can cover a great batch of accounts with your letter in one tick. The mailing process can be legally automated with dedicated tools from LinkedIn – Sales Navigator. However, keep in mind that to get a really high positive response rate, you should follow a well-planned personalized approach to communication with potential clients.
Don’t send a sales letter right off the bat. Build your relations smoothly. Use an exciting connection request template and proposal templates, and then have a little friendly talk thereafter.
For example, in our lead generation strategy on LinkedIn, we use a straightforward, unobtrusive welcome letter with some impressive numbers to arouse a person’s interest.
Only once the individual sees your genuine interest in her personality, they will gladly consider your business proposal.
Hosting a webinar is more effective than you may think
Moving on to the next point, needless to say, today, webinars are among the top lead generation techniques. And it’s not surprising. The online education industry is on fire, forecasted to grow by $247.46 billion in 2020-2024.
To prove the effectiveness of online conferences, let’s take a look at Impactbnd’s example. The agency co-hosted a webinar with Wipster (a tool they use regularly) and received 900 leads and 225 participants.
Isn’t it impressive for a single campaign? By holding only one webinar, you can get tons of leads—-especially when you decide on partnering with another company and organizing a joint event.
What’s more, the webinars help not only attract and pre-qualify leads but also act as a tool for upselling and interacting with potential clients, ultimately making on-demand sales. To ensure success and maximize the benefits of hosting a webinar, it is important to conduct a good webinar.
Create eye-catching subject lines
If you can’t persuade leads to open your email, your prospects of closing them on a sale are little to none. The power of headlines is greater than you might assume.
And you don’t need to be a genius to come up with powerful subject lines. We’ve already gathered them for you: 24 Cold Email Subject Lines That Grab Attention And Get Responses [Pro Tips, Examples, Infographics].
Here are eight PRO techniques we recommend you implement in your email headlines:
#1. Make your cold email subject line not so cold with a mutual connection/recommendation
#2. Grab attention with a relevant offer
#3. Create a sense of urgency and missed opportunity
#4. Keep intrigue
#5. Ask a pain point question
#6. Use the mysterious word that can’t be ignored
#7. Follow-up letters matter more than you think
#8. Make sure you are not using stop words
Now things look much simpler, right? And surely don’t forget to verify email addresses before sending an email blast out.
Offer your product or service … for free
Giving your business for free may seem completely irrational and foolish but don’t reject this idea right off the bat. There’s a little lead generation trick you should know about.
The Zero Price Effect refers to the emotional response that the word “free” elicits. Essentially, when buyers pay for something, they carefully evaluate the risks in order to avoid any dissatisfaction with the goods. When it comes to free things, in most cases, users have no expectations. Since the probability of disappointment and lack of value for money is avoided, free items are considered to have a higher worth.
And here is one of the awesome giveaway lead generation examples: HubSpot, one of the most well-known companies in digital marketing, gained early popularity by giving away its tool absolutely free of charge. In turn, customers were ready to provide their contact information and eagerly promoted software on their social media pages.
After that, HubSpot offered clients a very feature-rich trial, which was a great opportunity for a startup to build a strong sales pipeline. Impressing novice users with cutting-edge service, HubSpot easily nurtured these marketing leads until they converted into paying long-term customers.
So, don’t be afraid of being generous! Ultimately, you’ll get compensated many times more.
Useful Lead Generation Tools to Add to Your Arsenal
Using automated software is a perfect way to leverage the power of your lead generation strategy. Let’s discover the most helpful B2C and B2B lead generating tools that will make your job easier:
Tomba.io
Tomba.io is the ultimate email finding tool that will move your cold outreach to the next level. Offering a comprehensive domain search with 430+ million email addresses indexed, Tomba.io will help you extract the contact information of people working in a specific company in a click. With its advanced search filters and email verification functionality, you’ll be able to get emails behind any website and ensure excellent deliverability rates.
LiveWebinar is a cutting-edge SaaS tool that creates real-time communication software solutions for a diverse range of clients, including startups, SMBs, and established enterprises. Founded in 2016 by two developers with extensive experience in IT, R&D, and audio-video engineering projects, the company has successfully developed breakthrough technologies such as ArchieBot to solve common video conference software issues.
The platform offers a range of key features, including live event streaming, collaboration tools, live chat, HD quality, cloud solutions, customizable interfaces, and integrations. With LiveWebinar, users can efficiently promote their products or services, enhance sales, welcome new team members, and facilitate team collaborations all in one place.
LiveWebinar provides a unique, fully customizable platform that is 100% browser-based with multiple layers of protection.
VoilaNorbert
VoilaNorbert helps you look up any email address, manage your leads and gain a lot of time spent on creating an email list. It allows you to find leads, email addresses, and contact information on any website simply by clicking on a button. All your leads can then be exported, added to custom-made lists, and/or contacted directly by Norbert with advanced tracking tools to know if they opened or even clicked on your emails.
VoilaNorbert lets you find any corporate email address but also has a feature of verifying addresses in bulk and an email enrichment feature.
D&B Hoovers
D&B Hoovers is a sales acceleration platform that enables companies to use customer data and website analytics to build custom user lists and interact with prospects more quickly. Informed discussions, automated workflow software, real-time notifications, and tailored buyer intent data are just a few of Hoovers’ killer features.
ContactOut
ContactOut is a powerful B2B sales and email finder tool that enables users to swiftly locate and verify email addresses, phone numbers, and social profiles of potential clients and job candidates. It presents the information in an easy-to-use interface, streamlining recruitment and sales processes and increasing productivity.
The platform offers various plans, including a free version with limited features and paid options that provide more functionalities and a greater number of searches. The cost of the paid plans ranges from $29 to $129 per user per month, depending on the credits, features, and customer support level.
Hunter
Hunter is a professional B2B lead generating software that allows organizations to rapidly obtain the email addresses of their leads. You may also collect all emails from a certain firm. The free version allows you to do up to 25 email searches and 50 email verifications each month. Paid subscriptions allowing 500 searches and 1000 verifications start at $49 per month.
Findymail
Findymail is another email finder tool specialized in B2B emails. It only provides valid emails without you needing an extra email verification step and only charges you for that. It works both as a standalone email finder/verifier and also provides a Chrome extension that lets you export your Sales Navigator searches automatically.
You can try it out with 10 free credits, then paid plans start at $49 per month for 1,000 verified emails.
Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the most widely used and effective lead generation tools available on the market. With its help, SaaS firms and B2B agencies can easily handle all sorts of sales and marketing issues, including lead generation campaigns.
Reply.io
The new Reply.io Chrome extension is very useful for efficient lead generation. It makes it so quick and easy to locate prospect emails on LinkedIn, keeping your pipeline full. You may either seek the needed contacts one by one or use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to collect bulk-source emails. Reply.io plugin also allows you to add new contacts to multichannel sequences, access and manage your tasks, and make direct calls.
Leadpages
With solutions like Leadpages, capturing leads on your website is as easy as putting two and two together. You may use this service to create customized highly converting landing pages for certain audiences with no coding skills. By connecting the program to your other applications, it will automatically add all incoming leads into your CRM.
Conclusion
Lead generation is an integral part of a successful and stable sales process. Yes, it’s difficult to generate leads, but it’s not impossible. Especially when you apply proven lead generation techniques (like the ones we detailed in this post). Nowadays, there are lead generation services offered by a variety of companies. If you avail of their services, make sure to ask for a detailed breakdown.
Start small, plan big, and grow exponentially. Do you want to accelerate your speed of attracting potential clients? Trust this important mission to us. ReVerb’s marketing strategists will create a custom lead generation strategy for your business, selecting the most appropriate actionable techniques for filling your sales pipeline with qualified leads on a regular basis. Request a free consultation right now!
