Create an Interactive Tool
There’s a reason brands like HubSpot and Unbounce create so many tools. Tools can power interactive ideas that result in leads.
There’s the free keyword tool on WordStream which people can use to generate free keywords. When Neil Patel bought UberSuggest and rebranded it as Neilpatel.com he kept most features free for marketers and included rank tracking, keyword research, and competitor analysis plus lot more.
Developing such a tool is work because it needs coding but then it also generates them a huge number of leads.
The
The tool works this way. Either enter a keyword or site url that you want to analyze. To further filter these results, choose the industry and country you’re interested in.
Hit search and you can see related keywords. The rest of the results are blurred and you can see the rest if you enter your email address. That’s how they generate leads.
The tool took 3 months and has generated million signups.
2. Put those lead generation forms in videos
You have great content and you can either give it away for free to get organic traffic. Or gate the content and use it as a lead magnet.
The hybrid approach led to embedding led generation forms inside video so as you watched the video the lead generation forms would show up.
A video series can be top of the funnel content designed to engage with a target audience and get them to sign up.
The form generates attention and aren’t distracting. IT goes away of ou move the mouse off the screen and pops back when you put the mouse back. It drives results.
3. Interview a Third-Party Expert
For brands, consistent blogging is often the answerto getting leads. Whenever you publish an article, it’s an avenue for someone to visit your site and discover your brand. THere’s no issues with looking elsewhere for content generation. This means you need to move out of your comfort zone and use a fresh perspective to bring a new audience on board.
To generate leads with an interview article use many lead gen call to action ctas and content upgrades around the interview’s topic.
4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail
Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so direct mail continues to be old school. But it’s an interesting thing to see how the abandoned marketing tactic can force others to take notice.
Each mail can use a video screen that shows the clips of presenters who are going to participate in the event to sell more tickets to the show.
If you play the video to the end there’s a free ticket offer as well.
5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches
Video testimonials can be try. There are talking heads and customers simply parrot the reasons why they chose a particular product. But there are other kinds of video testimonials that tell the full story.
These are harder to product and they serve another type of customer and lead generation.
The customer tsestimonail shot in real-time is emotional and tells a compelling story.
The references are subtle and then become the main focus of the video. Andrew calls this implied CTA to the next step.
A great testimonial video doesn’t require a call to action. It should o0nly create a moment that inspires people for the next search. It doesn’t require a button.
6. Connect via Communities
For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly For plenty of freelancers consultants and marketing agencies this approach to lead generation uses ladin g pages and ties down to success.
SFor some people the lead generation source is online and offline marketing communities.
Websites like Growthhackers help them become part of the team and build relationships and showcase expertise and people willthink of you for more opportunities.
7. Promote a Personalized Template
The correct template on the right page is a good tool to generate leads. This is because visitors can give away their personal information to get something they can use.
Most templates are pdf downloads adn you can use a downloadable template to get mor existing results.
The free privacy generator tool i one such option from Shopify.
Privacy ppolies are needed by ecommerce businesses and the may not always have the time to do so. Instead use the personalized template
8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities
Cross promotion isn’t new. You can strategically promote something for lead generation.
The hard thing is finding the correct partner brand to partner with. If the companies are too similar you risk gaining nothing with the exposure. If not, then you risk promoting someone who doesn’;t buy your product.
This is where outside thinking can help.
Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the Hydrate bar ussed a different strategy. They thought about places where the customers may take an IV bar. And struck partenreships based on this.
The team thought of tlash extensions because of audience matching and thought of this as efficient use of time.
9. Create an Interesting Side Project
At times the leads you generate come from something that has little to do with your main business. If you go write about related topics it can be something good. Ryan Robinson launched a challenge on his blog to validate a business idea.
The project despite being a side project took up a lot of time as he though it’s going to be a good thing to let people validate business ideas. But this gave him plenty of ideas. The blog took on 3000 new subscribers. And he built a course that was around this idea of validation.
After the challenge wrapped up, he launched a new course validating ideas for the new audience. This new group of subscribers tuned in and he kept a close eye on the challenge and generated over 15000 in revenue in the first week of open enrollment.
High quality written blog content
The content you publish on your blog is going to be your number 1 lead generation strategy. It’s going to fill your sales pipeline as well.
A simple embed of a video can lead to leads generated. You can regularly publish 5000-word guides and close sales, publish case study breakdowns and write about selling strategies in top B2B startups. Plus talk about detailed takeaways from early stage startups as well.
Investing thousands of hours into creating this content will be effective for generating leads. Content works for generating leads for specific reasons. If you’re going to get leads with content marketing you need to put in an equal amount of time promoting the said piece of content as well.
If your prospects do not see this content then it won’t help your business either.
What’s the primary goal of your content?
The very basis of content marketing is to build real relationships with teh right people. These are people who are most likely to convert to leads and then to customers for your business.
Before you start with the first blog post, determine your motivations for investing in content and how you’re going to see it to execution.
- The problems you can solve for the target customers
- Out perform the competition and differentiate yourselves on the said topic
- Where to target customers spend time online. Are they reading blogs. Going through Quora or LinkedIn groups, searching on Google etc.
- Who do we want? 100 readers, 1000 readers or handful of customers.
- Which medium do target customers prefer to consume content in
- The core skills to produce quality content.
Transactional content that asks readers to purchase with the first sentence is often enough.
You need to be able to teach your students by investing in their future.
How does content get discovered?
Going back to things before, learn how to promote content is important just as creating the content. Your target customers need to be able to discover the content. This drives results for your business.
Organic search can deliver the biggest share of traffic if you target informational keywords first.
Create evergreen content that ranks well in organic search results. Most customers are searching for advice on Google. Say business or marketing advice.
Getting atop search rankings isn’t easy. It takes time, you need backlinks from high authority sites, You need to invest in guest posting, in strategic partnerships and social shares on media networks.
Be it software, merchandise or consulting or real estate services, organic search traffic can be a significant drawing point for new leads.
It increases search rankings for content over days, weeks and months. You can find potential leads in many ways.
Engage in online communities where target customers are spending time, recording videos for YouTube and leveraging connections to increase social sharing.
2. Educational or instructional videos
You can also post instructional videos that tap out at 20 minutes
As you record your first video, it works great for the team to transcribe it and put away the takeaways into a useful post that can be published with the video.
Record the first video and then streamline your content creation and submission process. Experience the benefits of recording and uploading each video to channels like YouTube.
The results to the video creation and posting efforts can come without doing any direct promotions. No paid ads were used to drive traffic to get 1000 views and these views keep climbing to the tune of thousands. YouTube ranking algorithm rewards this content for plenty of reasons.
As with any strategy, being consistent is the key to getting traction with the video content. Show up every day, put in the hard work, work on delivering a strong message and you’re going to see what’s gaining momentum.
Combine video with written content and you’re doing two things at once, adding new channels for the audience to get your content and offering readers an option to read the content than video than just text.
3. Audio content (podcasts and audiobooks)
Do you love podcasts? If you start releasing episodes of show that are around building an audience and helping a community solve business challenges you can get an engaged audience that way. If you already have a sizeable audience, give readers an opportunity to engage with you on yet another platform.
Even if you already have a sizable audience, giving your readers the chance to engage with you on an even deeper level—through the speakers on their daily commute, during lunch or at the gym—will help you create more meaningful relationships that transcend just the lessons learned from reading your blog content.
Studies show that 112 million americans listen to podcasts. Chances are good they subscribe to 6 or more shows.
In each episode most podcasts tackle a major topic for a segment of the audience say startup founders and discuss challenges around building mobile apps, finding a business partner, growing a remote company, churn, scaling sales teams and more.
At 3 years of running the podcast with over 286 episodes they are getting 20000 downloads. That means they got total of 700,000 downloads since they launched the show.
There are plenty tuning in to hear Steli and Hiten’s advice every week and that means more relationships, more leads and people who are startup founders or employees.
Not every listener today is a true lead but the long term view is that who are listening about growing a startup are going to keep a CRM or tool for startups at the top of their mind when they’re finally ready.
They don’t invest time into indepth content production. The intro is short to the point and they dive straight into the conversation of the topic at hand.
To start off the episodes.
To create these episodes you can first create a Google sheets file full of relevant keywords that you can always add more to. This is something you can share with everyone on the team. Add couple of case study examples to begin with.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
Podcast recordings are a great way for you to repurpose them into blog posts for your blog. When some episodes do well on the blog you can keep the conversation going on at another spot with the blog. Or you can explore new fresh angles you never thought of before.
If you’re already selling physical or digital eBooks and using them as a lead generation idea then take few hours to record an audiobook version of the existing content and make it a high impact way to reach people who are not in the sphere of influence.
To make most of podcasts there are three things to do. Take your highest-performing blog posts and turn them into podcasts.
As one more lead generation tactic you can offer readers bundle downloads of blog’s best content. These audio versions are the good stuff that they can get.
4. Books and eBooks
The books and ebooks you write can be a great strategy for generating leads over years. It can result in thousands of new leads for you over months.
From supplying readers with fresh new content, that grows sales to getting lead generation with launch of books and startup-focused titles they are going to be lead generators for you.
For instance one book is Your Growht Hacks aren’t working with 760 upvites that raised 3300 new leads for them so far.
In addition to launching books on external communities where your audience spends most time on, you can use them for lead generation on the entire blog.
Include calls to action and ask readers to download the books through the high traffic blog posts and on different topics that you can borrow from the book and expand on later.
Whether you’re producing a new book we are going to decide on a topic that hasn’t been covered yet. Yet there should be clear demand for something like this.
Then there’s the catalog of blog articles on a broader topic like how to nail your follow up strategy. These posts are organized into a Google doc following a single theme.
Once everything is covered edit the book, add the table of contents, get a cover from the team at TopTal and then it’s go time.
Once you launch the book to online communities for new lead generation, it’s promoted to the existing audience to keep delivering value to the community and share with others who can benefit.
5. Downloadable guides
For lead generation the guides are a class apart than books.
Books often cover a broad topic in good length. Short form guides with higher frequency lets you cover something more relevant like b2b qualifying questions to ask your prospects.
The single largest benefit is the 10 to 20 page long guide in the form of downloadable pdfs that serve as a lead generation idea.
You can create guides from reusing already existing content on the blog. Here’s what the process may look like:
- Pull together a few blog posts around the same subject from different angles.
- Organize these ideas inside a Google doc
- Put them in logical order, edit them and format and fill gaps.
- Use the design template for a simple cover and save the document as a combined pdf of all files
- Use over existing landing page, alter the copy and add it to the new pdf stored in the CMS>
With this you have a new downloadable guide that’s ready to rock.
Once you have a few of these, group them together in topically relevant clusters. This is a compilation of best guides, books and courses picked for free.
As a mini lead generation tactic for collecting leads from downloadable materials on the blog use the exit-intent popups that detect as a visitor is about to bonce.
6. Copy & paste templates
In B2B everyone loves using templates to start skilling up, experimenting tactics and looking for inspiration for lead generation.
Cold email templates can be a significant lead generation magnet as it’s easy to download them.
The templates can generate 25000 leads for close as these are ones that can be used to send customers better cold emails.
They’re relevant because they solve a problem prospects face.
If you offered templates for something say content marketing calendar you may be going for leads that aren’t working in sales and they’re unlikely to be the decision makers or stakeholders selling within the organization.
Determining the right copy paste templates should be part of the lead generation strategy.
Talk (and actually listen) to your customers and prospects.
- Dig inside organizational challenges and struggles.
- Uncover influential steps your prospects take to get to goals
- Ask where they’re getting hung up on.
Using things they know about how salespersons work with ideal customers, they constructed templates that help prospects that they can become better at selling and have high performing lead generation ideas as well.
Starting with objection management template, to call review checklist to sales interview matrix, each copy paste template and script can help create new sales relationships.
7. Joint webinars
Webinars hosted together with brands who belong to a similar niche but aren’t direct competitoprs are a good way to generate leads. It’s something that will pay rich dividends to you in the future,.
You can host 1 or two joint webinars each month and see if the new channel of marketing is working for you.
On using data to grow sales with tools they concentrated on sites like Drift and Datanyze which have a large database of salespeople. The other similar tool is Mailshake and Vidyard.
The webinars they created had 2000 people register and 1000 of attendees comingfrom partners they co hosted with.
With these two webinars they generated 2000 more leads. This came with low effort and zero cost. This is by promoting the events to audiences on social media and email newsletter/s
As a bonus, the partners who are with you also get a list of targeted new leads for the business as the offer is to do a 1-1 list share from the attendees for webinar partners that promote the webinar to their audience.
This is a pretty useful lead generation idea you can begin to use and see results from as a result of the hard work.
Keep the conversations casual by enacting a speaker panel format where the experts are questions on things deemed important.
8. Online courses
Online courses are a unique way to generate leads because of the number of content delivery formats you can use to connect with the audience and deliver value.
A course can be a combo of video lectures, text, templates and workbooks that you can ask people to action on. It can have links to blog posts, to podcast episodes, to YouTube videos and more.
With online course hosting platforms like Teachable you don’t need to spend time creating a custom page for the course kmaterial, you can create forms for the course and workflows for the content.
It’s super easy and plain affordable to start with a template with Teachable, add content and connect the course to the marketing tool you’re using and have the lead generation tool up and running.
.
Coming up with the right online course idea.
If youhave an idea around course topics that you want your prospects to learn more about, then something is not right with your strategy.
A course is only a matter of knowing your audience well.
The cRM helps founders and salespeople effective at selling and the online course on negotatiion covers key challenges to growing sales for a startup.
Like empowering the prospect, making them close over the ophone or the video and theyn working with you.
If you’re running a agency creating a course can be a great lead generation idea and one of the challenges for existing customers as they work woih you.
- Create a course about best Facebook ad campaigns.
- Promote the content
- <May be create a course on how to become a contributor to sites like Forbest. This will help you build relationships and pitch editor.s
end of the day, you need to create a course that seizes upon this opportunity to help your target customers solve those most pressing problems themselves.
The course may not convert as well as other resources you create. When you follow up with readers they may say the free ebooks are valuable but the courses not so much. THe courses may not be a great lead generation idea.
11. Optimize (and scale) outbound connection requests on LinkedIn
Linkedin if you used right is a golden opportunity for you to generate leads. If used wisely you can avoid sending spammy and irrelevant messages.
Simply contacting prospects out of the blue and asking for their time is a bad way to use LinkedIn. To do things effectively, use LinkedIn the right away.
It’s a good place for b2b sellers.
To bring industry expert you can use done for you lead generation and prospecting service.
Linkedin is a place for you to start qualified conversations with target buyers. It’s a form of outreach superior to cold outreach.
With LinkedIn it’s easy to find people ready to reply and interact with outreach differently. With LinkedIn people use the chat feature like they would facebook messenger on the phone sending push notifications directly to the mobiel device.
This turns LinkedIn outreach great for B2B sales teams to explore./
If you want to scale lead generation with LinkedIn, it’s simple.
Optimize the linkedin profile so that most profile views convert.
Then start by sending 100 connection requests to a narrow list of targets and then drip send custom messages into them. These messages should be conversation starters that turned into booked meetings for you and customers afterwards.
Use Dux Soup to visit these profiles of other LinkedIn members in the target market and create interest in your optimized offer at the top of your profile.
For a scale approach to generating leads use tools Like ReachHub.
12. Answer questions on Quora (and other communities)
One common approach with sites like Quora is they are destinations for target market and are looking for solutions to prlbmes that want to be solved.
A few years ago sites like Quora were really popular where you could share answers to questions and get feedback from the community. Most answers bring in 1000s of views and 25 upvotes in a year. You can get 500 to 1000 views with a 1000 word answers. Demand for the topic, creativity in answering can help you replicate Quora answers by using the general format.
Aside from the beenftis you can link your site from where Quorans are willing to learn more. If you spend 30 minutes a day writing helpful answers, in a year’s time you’re going to amplify you reach to several times and the follower count will keep growing as a result of all that activity.
Share long form updates on Linked
Long form updates on LinkedIn are quickly becoming the rage. They’re a pretty good lead generation strategy. They’re a good lead generation idea for the amount of time it takes to craft one of these posts.
If you go through your feed you will find several high quality examples of such posts and they all receive dozens of likes and comments.
They are crafted to drive high engagement and high number of likes and within a dew hours.
Most of these updates have a hook like I was devastated, One mistake cost me 10k and my life changed forever, My 1000 mistake and the lessons it taught.
The character limit of 1300 is fully utilized breaking each sentence within the paragraph. The update takes plenty of real estate and increase readiabliy.
Mist will either link out to an article or to a landing page where readers canr ead more.
To get more engagement, don’t include a link in the update. Use the link in the comments section.
Such posts lead to 10000 or more views and can receive comments and likes.
14. Social listening and groups on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn
If you’re aware of the key terms target customers are using social listening can be a powerful If you know the key terms and phrases associated with your target customers, social listening can be a very powerful lead generation idea for your business.
From searching hashtags to reading about topics on Twitter to drive discussion you can get more with your social listening by following and engaging with people who identify as affiliating themselves with terms your business is built around on.
The tactic of keyword researching relevant tweets is easy with their inside sales and bios.
This can be automated and put on autopilot as well with tools like Narrow.
What’s more, is that this tactic can be automated and put on autopilot to a degree, but using auto-engagement tools like Narrow.
On Facebook groups are the best places to discover prospects you can create meaningful discussions with.
Join groups where you find members to be clearly active around a subject matter and weigh in with your expertise related to your product.
:ike with everything else on social media, don’t be self promotion and share too many links to your own site or brands.
Allow appreciation and curiosity to be the driving factors that yield to one on one conversations with group members and lead to authentic relationships.
Groups on LinkedIn let you generate leads as well. However the engagement on them has gone downhill over the year.s
If there’s an opportunity in smaller communities that’s better because menaninful relationships are the best thing you can do.
Instagram also gives you opportunities to build close relationships with influencers in your space and forge partnerships that will grow your instagram.
15. Leverage niche online communities
Every niche will have online communities that you can actively manage for building relationships and for generating leads.
Product hunt, hacker news and Indie hackers are great places for prospects who have been interested in similar products or services like the one you offer. They upvote like and share.
Another sales crm
Lead generation is hardly scalable at this level. You can outsource the work and get a va to visit profiles of people who upvoted competoring produc.t
16. Speak at industry events and conferences
Another way to build your personal brand and present thought leadership is by speaking at local events leading up to international conference.s
This helps you get in front of thousands of new people in your target market. As you impart expertise you’re going to get some signups and many more leads.
Attend 10 or more conferences each year where you speak and that which are attended by sales leaders and founders.
It’s difficult to put a number on the returns with this kind of investment. It’s clear there’s always growth in traffic and increase in trial signups.
In person opportunities can attract signups and product trials with clear call to action.
Share your email address in the final slide of the presentation and shoot an email right at the moment to get a free book this can be one of the pitches.
You can also create a QR code and initiate e it to get responses immediately.
17. Get featured in major publications
Who doesn’t want their name seen on Forbes or Fast company?
It can be tough to track regularly. But you can strategically position yourselves as a source of authority of advice on startups plus sales through blog posts, videos and others.
The content makes you a go to expert and gets you both bylines and quotes on major b business and tech publications.
If you can forge a relationship with an editor at these channels and feature yourselves as a regular contributor then that’s a channel for advice sharing, talking about tactics and techniques to an audience where they spend time online.
19. Be interviewed on relevant podcasts and radio shows
Chances are you are regularly finding people off podcast. You might have heard some person on the interview they did before.
Other podcast host are going to hear these interviews and you will be able to see a different angel for the audience of thousands of weekly listeners.
This makes your show a lead generation platform for your product or service.