Can you imagine a business running smoothly without a proper lead generation strategy? Sure, luck may work for a while, but definitely not forever.
Succeeding in business requires a steady supply of qualified leads, and according to research, 69 percent of companies consider converting leads to customers a top priority.
Image Source: State of Inbound
However, the same research also found that lead generation is one of the top challenges brands are facing.
Image Source: State of Inbound
Why is that?
Today’s customer is enlightened and has access to numerous channels. They do not follow the traditional funnel anymore. So why would your business stick to it?
Lead generation helps you get potential customers to your site, collect their information, and then nurture them to become loyal customers and fans.
Doing this the right way leads to an increased bottom line as nurtured leads give brands an average 20 percent increase in sales.
What Is Lead Generation?
A lead is a person who shows interest in your brand in any form, shape, or way. They hear from you after they open lines of communication through submitting their information. They could provide their information for a subscription, a download, or offer. It’s a non-intrusive way of communicating with potential customers.
Traditionally, companies cold-called customers without knowledge of whether the customer cares about their products or services. Today, we have ways to avoid annoying those who will never buy from us and to avoid wasting time on people that will never become leads.
Whenever someone downloads your white paper or subscribes to your newsletter, they become a lead. You know that they have some interest in your products or services if they trade their personal information for your content or offers.
Lead generation is, therefore, the process of attracting potential customers to your database with the hope of converting them into loyal customers. It’s about finding unique ways to generate traffic to your organization by providing potential customers with relevant information, products, or services so that they eventually want to hear and buy from you.
Lead generation requires tact.
Only 17 percent of shoppers visiting a brand’s website for the first time are there to purchase. The other 83 percent are either researching, finding reassurance that they are making a good decision, or comparing before they can make a final purchase.
Image Source: Episerver
This shows that brands need a lead generation and nurturing strategy that helps them understand their customer buying behavior and their preferences. They must provide relevant informational content and exceptional experiences that build relationships with customers.
The best lead generation strategy will require the business to:
For your lead generation strategy to work, you will require some key elements:
Informative and relevant content
Use content to create brand awareness and build credibility. You can use social media and your blog to educate your audience.
Lead magnets
Lead magnets are content offers that provide value to your audience. They allow you to collect potential customer information. They include:
Image Source: Demand Gen Report
For a customer to access these lead magnets, they have to fill out a form which gives you access to their contact information.
Calls to action
Call-to-action is a phrase or word that invites a potential customer to act in a way that helps your business grow. Phrased and placed right, it guides the lead through the process of providing information. The customer then knows what to expect once they perform the desired action.
Landing pages
A landing page is another popular tactic that you can use to increase conversion chances with your prospective customers. Design unique landing pages for each offer to personalize experiences for your customers. Why is this important? Well, having a landing page for each offer also increases your lead generation chances.
Thank you pages
The thank-you page shows appreciation to the customer for taking an interest and informs them that the transaction is complete. It’s also a good way for your business to track conversion data.
An effective lead generation strategy requires time, effort, and resources. It’s the reason why leveraging lead generation tools is important for the success of your business.
What Are Lead Generation Tools and Why Use Them?
Lead generation tools are software businesses use to automate processes. They perform processes like attracting leads, engaging them, gathering and storing their information, and nurturing them automatically. These lead generation tools also help streamline your lead generation and nurturing strategy.
There are many lead generation tools in the market today that provide numerous benefits and operate in various ways. They can help you:
Top 11 Lead Generation Tools
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is a great lead generation software that allows you to track customer behavior while overseeing other platforms. This includes social media, email, calls to action, and landing pages. It allows you to generate leads and automate lead nurturing.
The all-in-one HubSpot software also helps you with marketing automation, live chat, calendar scheduling, landing page creation, pop-ups, website forms, email follow-up, content marketing lead collection, and opt-ins.
It’s a great tool that allows you to use one tool to run your lead generation and nurturing from one point.
As an automated lead generation software, you can use it to collect contact information from different channels on your website, including pop-ups, live chats, website forms, calendar scheduling, and banners.
With the HubSpot CRM, you can see how your leads are behaving, activities they take on your site, and how they interact with other product touchpoints. It also allows you to set up alerts during critical activities or actions by the leads.
It also offers automation benefits that, according to marketers, help with message targeting, improved customer experience, more quality leads, and higher conversions.
Image Source: Email Monday
HubSpot allows you to get prospects, consistently engage with them, follow up, and track them on the sales funnel.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk is great at helping you effectively leverage customer support conversations and use them to generate meaningful leads.
With the help of Zendesk, your support team will know and understand what the customer wants, since they are constantly on the phone, messaging, emailing, or handling live chats. Their conversations can help nudge leads to purchases.
Zendesk Sell allows your support team to notify the sales team when a lead opportunity arises as they handle customer support. The sales team receives qualified leads derived from fruitful conversations with the support team.
The sales team can also easily access support tickets to get a background on the conversations support has had on a qualified lead.
3. Mailchimp
Mailchimp provides you with the ability to build email campaigns with the right content and look. This tool will help you create landing pages that generate leads with adopt-in boxes.
Their lead generation forms contain fields for names, email address, and can be customized to collect any other data. The add-ons and integrations help connect Mailchimp to engaging blog posts where you can collect leads and email addresses.
You can create targeted ad campaigns and emails. It also has several marketing tools that help your store attract leads with discount offers, coupons, mobile sign up forms, tests, toolkits, custom sign-up forms, assessments, resource lists, and more.
Once you have potential leads, Mailchimp will help you nurture them until they convert. It also helps you build lasting relationships with leads.
Constant Contact is another popular lead generation tool that will help your business grow a proper email list.
Using this tool, you can integrate sign up forms on your website or have leads join your list through Facebook. Leads can sign up from their phones or tablets.
Once you have collected your list, Constant Contact processes them and helps you segment them and send automated emails to them.
5. Drip
As an automation tool, Drip will help you segment your lists depending on what products or offers they signed up. You can then send highly-relevant and customized content based on this segmentation.
You can also integrate Drip with different tools to assist with lead generation. A Drip NetSuite Integration, for example, gives you insights into what your potential customers need or want.
You get valuable insights into their demographics, buying patterns, browsing behavior, and more. Through the integration, you get the data you need to send personalized emails, and quality content on your website and social media pages.
6. Nimble
Nimble is a social relationship management tool that helps with relationship building and social interaction. The CRM software provides relevant lead generation support.
You can identify potential leads using social data. You get alerts for your contacts’ job changes, birthdays, and future activities. This way, you can reach out to existing and new contacts using personal messages.
It gives you actionable insights so that you know who you need to get in touch with, when to reach out, and why they are important. Their algorithm allows you to reach out to prospective customers when they are warm and have contextual conversations with them.
Integrating Nimble with other tools allows you to collect emails and contact information using website forms which then pushes data to Nimble. You can automate the flow of leads from the different teams so that the sales team is always updated.
7. Keap (formely Infusionsoft)
Infusionsoft, which has since rebranded to Keap, is a marketing automation platform that features lead generation tools. This is yet another great tool to use as it will help you capture leads and email subscribers – a task most businesses still seem to be struggling with.
It’s also super easy to integrate into your site.
Once integrated, Keap will help you to create detailed lead generation campaigns that include user interactions, emails, and content offers. You primarily generate leads using content downloads and email subscriptions.
Keap also offers you the tools to nurture the leads and convert them. Information is accessible from one location and lets you track the responsiveness and interactions with your campaigns.
You can score leads, create automated email campaigns, manage contacts, track website visitors, create landing pages, and more.
8. Pipeliner
Pipeliner CRM allows you to manage leads and track prospective leads as they move through the funnel. It’s a great lead generation tool since it provides your team with visibility, allowing them to follow up with opportunities and leads quickly.
The Pipeline View allows your team to see leads quickly, assign, and qualify them. Once a lead becomes an opportunity, they are ranked and scored according to quality.
The lead is then made available through reports to the sales team until they become a lost or a won deal. It becomes easy to assign leads to reps, qualify them, nurture, and convert.
The lead data is collected and archived so that if they visit your site again, the team can reactivate them with a single click.
9. Delivra
This marketing automation platform will help your business grow an email list with the help of pop-ups and forms. Delivra also features text-to-subscribe tools that make it easy for leads to sign up. You can also use it to create sophisticated campaigns that convert leads.
Delivra allows your team to segment subscribers using behavior or custom fields. They can then use the information to understand the potential customer interests, send targeted campaigns, or use visitor activity to create triggered responses.
Set engagement score parameters using Delivra and reward subscribers with unique content or relevant promotions. You can also track your campaign progress and identify top-performing content.
Use it to create messages, reach more audiences, and automate content. Your different teams will have access to the leads and constantly receive lead alerts that let them take advantage of opportunities.
10. Act-On
Act-On allows you to convert unknown visitors into leads. It provides the right tools for your team to engage with prospects throughout the sales journey. Act-On does this by providing form capture and landing pages, website personalization, SEO audits, and social media management.
Your team is able to collect valuable information from prospective customers using landing pages and capture forms. With their social media module, you optimize brand visibility and grow relationships with prospects interested in what you offer.
Act-On will help you capture your audience’s attention by personalizing depending on the visitor’s needs, interests, and behavior on your website. Every user experiences a unique adventure since the tool has customized each experience to suit each visitor.
With Act-On, you can implement best search engine optimization (SEO) practices to help you attract prospects to your site. The SEO Audit tools ensure your site is optimized to appear on the first page of search results.
Their lead scoring, lead nurturing and qualification features empower the marketing and sales team to close more deals. The sales team has access to aspects of every customer’s journey to tailor content and conversations to each prospect at the right time.
You also get alerts when prospects visit your website and also from their browsing history. It also gives you insights into anonymous visitors whereby you can learn more about them and the actions they took while browsing your site.
Armed with this information, you can easily reach out to prospective buyers since they are already familiar with your products.
11. Paperform
Paperform is a great lead generation tool that allows you to attract and nurture relationships with customers continually. In the old days, this meant staffing a booth at shows. With Paperform, you can create interactive content like true-or-false quizzes, surveys with scales, matrixes and ratings, event bookings, and even coupons. As simple as writing a word doc, you can customize the tool to manage any project.
While most form builders are either pretty or designed for powerful conditional logic, Paperform combines both. Import branded multimedia, tweak backgrounds and change the typography. But not only that, but add complex calculations, tailor success pages, and use the built-in analytics dashboard to gain insights. It’s got both brains and beauty.
How to Leverage Lead Generation Tools: Best Practices
Having your lead generation tools in place does not mean you can now relax. Using the same tactics as before will only give you the same results as before. You will not be fully leveraging your lead generation tools.
These best practices will help you boost your lead generation tactics and help you achieve the growth your business deserves.
Use high-quality data
According to research, 95 percent of organizations have suffered from wasted resources, additional costs, ineffective business initiatives, delayed data migration projects, poor customer experiences, and so much more — all because of poor data. Poor data also results in lack of trust, which later affects the business bottom line.
Good quality data, when used to fuel your lead generation, significantly improve your campaigns and customer experiences. It allows you to deliver personalized customer experiences leading to increased conversion rates, increased lead generation, and improved customer experience.
Image Source: Evergage
To ensure you get quality data, sort it out well, segment it depending on the target audience, and ensure you have no missing or wrong data. It’s a tough task, but it ensures that the data you use to target prospective customers or generate leads is accurate and up to date.
Quality over quantity
The many tools you are using for lead generation will provide you with lots of data. However, generating more leads will only be beneficial if they are quality leads. You won’t be able to sell to poor-quality leads, so why spend money generating them?
Focus on getting quality data that gives your sales team sales-ready leads. You can do this by having a lead qualification system that puts leads through a check to ensure they are fit.
You can define what qualifies as a lead. Is it when they download your webinar or click on a link? How did they respond? Your sales and marketing team should agree on several criteria to make it easy to only chase quality leads.
Generate leads then nurture them
The lead finder tools will help you gain leads through a call-to-action, but you must nurture them by telling them what you are offering and how it will help them.
Use content that is informative and engaging and contact the leads at the right time through the right channels. Think about what messages your prospective lead will respond to and ensure you are providing value.
Analyze
Analyzing and getting insights allows you to prepare for future strategies. The reports help you know what is working, what can be changed or improved, and what you need to do away with completely. Most of these lead generation tools offer metrics that you can use to gauge your efforts.
Conclusion
Armed with these lead generation tools, you can find prospective leads, nurture them and increase conversions. To choose one that suits your business, go over your budget, goals, and team size. Most of these tools will allow you to test them for free for a limited time.
Start by testing out and gather feedback from your team. Review each tool before full implementation and ensure that it’s helping your company achieve its goals and improve processes.
Equipping your team with the right lead generation tool helps your company sustainably achieve its goals. It will help them concentrate on their conversion efforts and boost sales instead of wasting their time finding customers.
