Top 5 Lead Generation Strategies for 2022
No matter what stage you’re at in your business, you need a consistent flow of leads to keep it running and increase your revenue.
But the truth is, B2B lead generation is not a cakewalk.
You have to identify and research your ideal customers, market your business, reach out to prospects, qualify and nurture them—all of this before you actually convert them and make the sale.
Enter lead generation strategies. These are tactics that capture the attention of leads, bring them to the sales funnel, and convert them into clients. The process helps enhance your brand’s awareness and build interest in your product or service. As per Marketo, companies with an effective lead generation strategy earn 133% more revenue than those without one.
These strategies can help you keep your lead pipeline full and make some excellent conversions if implemented correctly.
Let’s explore five such strategies that can help you acquire leads on a routine basis without having to worry about it constantly.
1. Optimize Your Landing Page
Creating a stellar landing page isn’t difficult—you can even make a free landing page using templates on a website builder. It’s the optimization part where most businesses struggle, and that causes their lead pipelines to “leak.”
One of the most crucial yet straightforward strategies to boost your lead generation process and get conversions is to improve your landing page. Here are some tips for this:
Tweak your headline, so it instantly grabs people’s attention, like Crazy Egg does here.
Optimize your landing page for search engines by using keywords in the headline, copy, and alt text—like Bench does here.
Use your customer’s language. Veeam is an excellent example of this. They generated 161.6 percent more clicks on their landing page by replacing “quote” with “pricing”—a term their customers were more familiar with.
Add social proof to build credibility, and show potential customers that you can be trusted, just like Semrush here.
Make your CTA benefit-driven. For instance, instead of saying “Download Now,” say “Download our free marketing eBook”—this highlights the benefits prospects will get after completing the action, thus inviting customer engagement.
These critical elements can take your landing page from good to high-converting in no time, thus helping you capture more leads. The key is to keep experimenting with and testing these conversion optimization practices till you start seeing results.
2. Invest in Data-Driven Content Marketing
B2B purchase decisions are far from spontaneous—they involve multiple decision makers, all of whom do extensive research before buying.
In this context, creating content around your business and marketing becomes extremely important. It helps you simplify your product for your audience, assist them in the buying process, build authority, rank in search engines—all of which help you get more leads and conversions.
Now, some content formats you can create are:
Blogs, videos—to inform your top-of-the-funnel leads.
Whitepapers, eBooks—to educate and further nudge your middle-of-the-funnel leads.
Case studies, webinars, in-depth guides, and blogs—to convince bottom-of-the-funnel leads.
HubSpot is an excellent example of this—they generate 10k leads per month through their blog alone.
But remember, while this strategy is powerful and can boost your online presence and revenue, it can take time to start showing results.
3. Offer Free Trials or Freemiums
Offering a free tool, trial, or freemium service is one of the best lead generation strategies. They allow you to capture a potential customer with a free trial of a product or service to offer them a paid version later when they’re satisfied with the usage and results. There are several examples to support this strategy’s success.
Take WordStream, for instance. Their free software trial wasn’t bringing massive results, so they offered a free AdWords Grader instead, and they claim their conversions went through the roof.
Meanwhile, Grammarly offers a freemium service and then puts across a premium and paid version to the acquired leads.
This strategy is very popular among SaaS companies, and for a good reason. It helps interested prospects who are not yet ready to buy test products and understand the value and benefits they bring, thus pushing them down the sales funnel.
Moreover, once they sign up, you can upsell your product by teasing premium features—and get a percentage of those leads to convert.
4. Leverage Social Media
As a business, social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are excellent channels to market your product or service, build brand awareness, and engage in social selling.
Here are some ways you can use social media to your advantage:
Add links to your best-performing landing pages on your posts like Hootsuite does here.
Share customer reviews to build social proof and interest in your brand.
Monitor conversations around your brand and step in to solve concerns.
Share tips, tricks, and links to your blog to boost authority.
Use paid advertising methods to target your audience.
There are various ways you can use social media for marketing your business and generating leads—the key is to show up in front of your audience consistently and build solid brand awareness and recall value.
5. Use Good Ol’ Email Marketing
Although it’s more than 20 years old, email marketing is still an effective strategy to generate leads and nurture them.
There are many ways you can go about this. You can generate leads by sending cold emails. Outfunnel recently did this and saw 33 to 51 percent open rates and 3 to 6 percent engagement rates for their email campaigns.
You can even add personalized images, gifs, and videos to make your campaign further stand out.
Another way is to start a business newsletter where you share industry-related tips, experiences, knowledge, exclusive offers, and more. Hear it from Meghan Blair, owner of Fogged in Bookkeeping:
A newsletter can lead to a win-win situation for both you and your prospects. The promise of getting value-packed information delivered right to their inbox will persuade them to sign up. And over time, you can bag high-quality leads and customers by providing rich insights and showcasing your expertise.
When it comes to lead generation strategies, the problem isn’t the number of options available but choosing the right ones for your business.
These five strategies are time-tested and some of the most effective ones. But remember, there’s no one size fits all formula here. What works for another business may not always work for you, so choose a strategy keeping your business goals and resources in mind.
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has six-plus years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Raoult loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.