Lead Generation

17 Best Lead Generation Strategies that Drive Sales

A sales lead is an individual or a business interested in your products or services.

Leads qualify as ‘prospects’ when you identify their fit and level of interest in your brand as a customer.

Generating quality sales leads is one of the main challenges of any business. As per HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2024 Report, 50% of marketers think ‘Lead Generation’ is their top priority in marketing strategy.

Through gated content, landing pages, targeted ads, emails, social media, referrals, offers, discounts, cold calls, promotions, pop-ups, events, etc. businesses must find innovative ways to attract new buyers. Because, if your business has high volumes of leads, but you do not score, nurture, and qualify them efficiently, they may not drive revenue as you expect.

The focus here should be to fill your sales pipeline with the right type of leads.

To help you with this, we have enlisted the 17 Best Lead Generation Strategies in this article. Read on.

17 Best Lead Generation Strategies to Generate Sales Leads in 2024

A lead generation strategy is a well-thought-out plan to push your potential customers to share their contact information and talk to the marketing or sales team.

17 Best Lead Generation Strategies that Drive Sales

Here are some of the best lead-generation strategies in 2024:

  1. Short Lead Generation Forms

Remember the thumb rule- the earlier a lead is in their sales journey, the simpler the lead gen form should be.

First, keep your sign-up forms simple and short by gathering only critical information like Full Name, Job Role, and Email Address. Long sign-up forms tend to discourage users and they end up leaving your website, especially those using mobile devices.

However, for leads who are highly interested or invested in your products or services, you can create long, complex forms to filter out low-quality leads. This will allow you to personalize your marketing efforts as well, increasing the chances of conversion.

  1. Leverage Sales Intent Data 

There are many sales intelligence or intent data tools available in the market such as ZoomInfo Sales, Qualified, Drift, Apollo.io, etc. that help you track customers’ digital activities across numerous websites to identify their fit and level of interest in your products/services.

With these valuable insights, you can better understand your prospects’ needs and target them before your competitors can. Such rich intent data is further backed by prospects’ contact numbers and emails for targeted marketing and lead generation.

Some of these tools even offer CRM integration to aid lead nurturing.

  1. Engaging Content

Engaging Content

Source: spiralytics

Create engaging, high-quality content that resonates with your business’s niche and expertise. Such content is likely to attract the attention of prospects interested in your products and gain their trust. This could include videos, podcasts, informative articles, blogs, etc. Prospects who love your content may sign up for your company’s newsletter, increasing the likeliness of sales.

Likewise, businesses can even create gated content (whitepapers, stat reports, eBooks, templates, etc.) exclusively available to those who share their information in exchange.

  1. Leverage SEO and Market Analysis

SEO helps you generate leads organically and drive ROI with the lowest customer acquisition cost. With the right SEO, brands can drive traffic to lead-generation landing pages whenever users search for targeted keyword phrases in search engines.

Leverage SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Google Search Console, Check My Links, PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog, and more to reap the benefits of SEO tactics and keyword research.

  1. Remarketing campaigns

One of the key remarketing/retargeting strategies is ‘Paid Advertising’ to attract leads who visited your website but didn’t convert. Here visitors are already familiar with your brand, they may just need that little push to share their details.

To maximize conversions, make sure your retargeting campaigns are based on buyer personas and are more personalized than other campaigns. Gather results and key metrics from the remarketing campaigns to make further fine-tuning.

You can use this strategy to find similar leads, like your existing clients. Many tools such as Google’s Audience Expansion, Facebook’s Lookalike Audience, LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences, etc. will help you expand your reach and attract quality leads.

SMS and email marketing are also effective strategies to remarket your products or services.

  1. Leverage Automation with AI and ML

Leverage Automation with AI and ML
AI is rapidly paving its way into marketing strategies, seeing how 85% of marketers tell us generative AI has improved the quality of their content,  64% of marketers are already using it, and the rest of the 38% are planning to use it in 2024.

Leveraging ML (machine learning) helps businesses create predictive customer value models, identify patterns in customer research and data, improve ad buying, build AI-powered marketing campaigns, and help in overall digital development.

Businesses could use AI to reap the following benefits:

  • Integrate Virtual Assistants and Chatbots to engage and nurture leads on your website.
  • Live Chat not only captures lead data but also invites them to talk to an expert or book a demo.
  • Brainstorm new ideas
  • Write basic outlines or articles
  • Create basic videos/images
  • Re-use content for a different channel, format, or audience segment
  • Connect leads with the right agent who will best cater to their needs based on their interaction history.
  • Integrate ML algorithms into Google Analytics, Slack, or Email Automation Software to identify where your leads come from and their attributes.

Live Chat software like Drift or Intercom allows you to interact with your visitors, gather their details, and aid further lead nurturing.

  1. Video Marketing

Video-first apps like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are at the forefront of content marketing and driving ROI followed by LinkedIn and Twitter.

Short-form video is an extremely popular content marketing strategy today, driving the highest ROI. Combine video marketing with SEO and other marketing strategies to drive quality leads in the long run.

  1. Personalized Cold Emails

Use merge tags to send personalized cold emails where you can add different first names or business names to every email. Such a personalized approach is likely to get a response.

  1. PPC Ads

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is an online marketing model where businesses pay every time a lead clicks on their ad. This is one of the effective ways to drive traffic to your landing pages and generate leads through lead gen forms.

Lead generation through PPC Ads

Run PPC ads on social media, websites, search engines, and other advertising platforms. Some platforms even have built-in lead-generation tools to quickly open lead-generation forms instead of redirecting to a landing page. For example, Facebook’s Lead Ads, Instagram’s Lead Ads, and ‘lead form assets’ in Google Ads where you can add CTAs.

Businesses can use PPC tools like Semrush, SpyFu, iSpionage, Google Keyword Planner, etc. for competitor analysis and SEO keyword research.

  1. Free Trials

Free Trials are also one of the effective lead-generation strategies, especially for SaaS products. Because it will attract people to try out your SaaS solution for free and provide them real value of paid products.

  1. Sales Demo

One of the effective ways to take a personalized approach to lead generation is to offer live demos to your leads. During the live session, you can directly ask your prospects the reasons they are interested in your products/services, and what can you do to make it better, and get feedback on your content as well.

  1. Partner with Industry Experts

Partnering with industry experts and salespeople to endorse your brand will not only expand your business network but also help you close sales faster and increase brand credibility. Such brand promotions must often be unscripted and explain in detail how your product/service is beneficial to that target audience.

  1. A/B Testing

Split Testing or A/B Testing is a data-driven model where you test two variations of the same content to check which one performs better for users based on KPIs.

You can run A/B testing for your website pages (CTAs, images, colors, designs, etc), email marketing (images, CTAs, subject lines, etc.), content, mobile apps, SMS, and other marketing assets to see which variation is yielding the best user engagement and conversions.

  1. Positive Reviews

Positive reviews from other customers will aid your lead generation efforts as they will incite user engagement and instil trust in the minds of potential leads. Hence, brands must try to reach out to their satisfied customers and encourage them to share reviews on Google Reviews, your website, or socials.

  1. Online Webinars/Events

Online Webinars

Hosting webinars or online events through pre-registration allows you to gather valuable data about your leads. It also creates a greater sense of commitment, participation, and engagement. Leads that pre-register are likely to have a high purchase intent. By gathering their details, you can further nurture them and push them to complete the sales.

  1. Publish Use Cases

Use cases or success stories are an effective way to help your prospects understand how your business is meeting your existing customers’ needs and expectations. Add CTAs at the end of the use cases to encourage readers to try your product/service or sign up for free.

  1. Referral Programs

Referral Program is a good lead generation model where you reward existing customers for referring your business to their peers. You may even reward the person who’s receiving the referral, creating a strong incentive for lead generation. Once you set up referral programs, there’s very little you need to do whilst the chances of success are high.

On a side note, referral programs will not work if your customer service and support is poor. Because unsatisfied customers are less likely to participate in referrals.

Conclusion

Apart from social, search engines, and websites, you can also capitalize on offline lead generation strategies such as sponsored local events, industry events, print ads, etc.

The key to success in your lead generation plan is to continuously monitor marketing campaigns, track key metrics, and identify which campaigns drive the most leads and which drive the highest conversions.

If you want to take your lead generation strategies to the next level, we will help you with our marketing expertise, smart CTAs, and SEO insights. To learn more, talk to us now!