lead generation marketing

Lead Generation Marketing | Popular Strategies Reviewed

Table of contents

Lead generation marketing definition

Lead generation or lead gen marketing is a process of targeting the right people and turning them into leads.

Leads are the people who are interested in buying or using a business’ products or services. Leads are what every business is striving for.

Leads need to be generated constantly to feed the business’ sales funnel and depending on many factors including how good or bad the sales funnel is, leads can become clients or slip away.

Lead generation marketing & prospect generation

Lead generation marketing can be a short or long-term task depending on your main purpose. For example, if you expect leads to become clients, lead gen marketing is usually a long battle.

However, leads aren’t always viewed as potential customers, they can be your business partners or services that you’re looking to use.

The success of a lead generation marketing campaign relies heavily on how you target your audience (a.k.a prospects). If you’re targeting the wrong people, you’ll certainly be missing out on a lot of lead gen potential, or in other words, your investment will be going to waste.

Therefore, a lead gen marketing campaign usually includes a proper prospect generation strategy, if you’re targeting the right people, you’ve already done more than half of the lead gen job.

Lead generation marketing strategies reviewed

There are several popular lead generation strategies that you should know about. These are the ones that have been around for a very long time and proven to be effective.

1. Cold emailing for lead gen

Cold emailing is the most popular lead gen strategy nowadays since it has many advantages such as low cost and good conversion rate.

Before running cold emailing for lead generation, you will first need to generate excellent prospects. Excellent prospects are the ones that present the highest probability of becoming your clients.

Depending on your products or services, you might need to find prospects based on where they live, their job titles, their companies, social profiles, etc.

To generate excellent prospects, there are a few methods that you should know about.

Generating excellent prospects using a reliable contact database

Using a reliable contact database is probably the fastest and most affordable way to generate excellent prospects.

A great contact database will provide its users with tools and features to find the most suitable prospects fast and effectively.

There are many data providers on the Internet, however, finding a good one can be a challenge. Most businesses end up losing a certain amount of money before finally getting the right contact database.

Since every data provider claims to be having the best data quality and service, the only way to find out the truth is actually using them. Look for the following to find a good prospect database:

  • Free trials
  • No credit is required
  • Excellent support
  • Refund policies
  • Generous discounts for first-time customers.

At Limeleads, a leading B2B prospects and leads database, we provide all the above-mentioned and more. We offer a $79 detailed cold emailing course free of charge to help you get the most out of every prospect.

Simply complete a few-click sign-up and get your free trials with us. No credit card is required.

We also make sure to provide expert advice for your lead gen campaigns. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at team@limeleads.liqteq.us or via our live chat support.

Generating prospects using a combination of digital marketing tools

Tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs and Hunter can help you generate prospects quite effectively. However, there are certain types of data you are not able to get since they are not specifically designed for prospect generation.

The advantage of using these tools is their reasonable cost and high-accuracy data. However, it’s not as cheap as the 1st method above since you will have to use them together to generate the data you need. This means you will have to pay multiple monthly fees.

Also, to use the tools for prospect generation, you will need to spend some time learning how to use them, it can be quite challenging for beginners.

Generating prospects using a scraper

A scraper is a software that helps you collect data by crawling web pages. A scraper will give you control over what types of data you want to collect.

However, you will need to hire a qualified developer or service to build it for you, and the cost can be from expensive to very expensive depending on who you hire and how often you want to adjust the software to get the data you need.

Also, the scraped list of data will need to be cleaned later to make it suitable for cold emailing, otherwise, your cold emails will upset a certain number of prospects.

Cold emailing

Cold emailing is a process of sending emails to people that haven’t known about you to try to convince them to take action.

Cold emailing can be automated thanks to the rapid development of technology in email marketing software.

Nowadays, a series of emails can be automatically sent at a certain time or/and based on activities or actions that your website or app visitors have taken.

Cold emailing’s main advantages are its ability to reach many prospects in a short time. Moreover, it’s affordable and provides performance stats that will be very helpful to understand and optimize your campaigns.

However, cold emailing is quite complicated and challenging for beginners. If you subscribe to one of our plans (with 60% off discounts), you’ll be given a $79 detailed cold email course with video tutorials and downloadable guides and worksheets free of charge.

 

customer prospect database

 

2. Use paid ads to generate leads

There’s no doubt that ads can help generate leads fast. But, the cost is the main concern for most businesses because depending on your market, the cost per lead acquisition can be very expensive.

Also, if you rely on ads and when you stop running them, you will stop getting leads & sales. This is different than organic traffic because organic can help generate leads in the long term, even when you’ve stopped investing in it.

However, ads do have their advantages. Thanks to machine learning, ads nowadays make it easy for advertisers to achieve good performance. Also, ads are becoming easier to set up and optimize for better results. They do really know how to take your money!

When it comes to maximum lead generation performance, there’s a need to use a combination of strategies and methods because some strategies seem to be able to assist the performance of others.

3. SEO and lead magnets

SEO is what drives organic traffic to your website or app. It’s the most sustainable way to generate leads and sales if working.

The problem is that it has become so much more challenging for businesses to take on over the past several years. For example, if you’ve just started in niches such as lead generation or email marketing, you’re probably not going to see any significant results for the next several years even when you work really hard.

Therefore, you’re strongly advised to do rigorous research on your market and competition, otherwise, your investment will go to waste.

But when SEO works for you, you’re going to enjoy it very much since it helps generate leads and sales consistently for years to come. When paired with lead magnets, SEO will help increase your lead gen’s conversion rate significantly.

A lead magnet can be as simple as a useful checklist or an eBook. Visitors become leads when they download the lead magnets for free in exchange for their contact information such as email addresses or phone numbers.

Lead magnets are a must-have nowadays for SEO-based lead generation efforts. If you’re not utilizing them, you’re missing out on a lot of potentials to generate leads.

4. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has emerged as a powerful lead generation strategy in the digital marketing landscape. Here’s a review of its effectiveness:

  • Audience Reach: Influencers can extend your brand’s reach to potential customers that might be hard to engage through conventional marketing channels. Their followers often trust their recommendations, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
  • Trust and Relatability: Influencer marketing can lend credibility to your brand. Influencers are often viewed as more trustworthy and relatable than traditional ads. When an influencer genuinely endorses a product or service, it can have a strong impact on their audience.
  • Niche Marketing: Influencers usually specialize in a specific niche, allowing businesses to focus their marketing efforts. This can lead to high-quality leads that are more likely to become customers.
  • Affordability: Influencer marketing can be more affordable compared to traditional advertising methods. Micro-influencers, despite having smaller audiences, can often provide a high return on investment due to their highly engaged followers.
  • SEO Advantages: Influencer marketing can enhance your SEO. When an influencer links back to your website, it can boost your site’s search engine ranking.

However, it’s worth noting that influencer marketing comes with its own set of challenges, such as identifying the right influencer, verifying the authenticity of their followers, and assessing the success of a campaign.

Despite these challenges, influencer marketing, when executed correctly, can be a potent lead generation strategy.

5. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing has become a popular lead generation strategy in the digital marketing world. Here’s a review of its effectiveness:

  • Economical: Since affiliate marketing is performance-based, you only pay when a specific action (like a sale or lead) is achieved. This makes it a budget-friendly strategy for many businesses.
  • Extensive Reach: Affiliates exist in every market and product category today. This allows your brand to reach a wider audience without additional marketing efforts.
  • Increased Brand Awareness: Even if leads don’t convert right away, affiliate marketing can enhance your brand’s visibility and trustworthiness. Potential customers are more likely to trust a familiar brand.
  • Targeted Audience: Affiliates cater to their audience based on their content and niche. This means the traffic from affiliate sites is highly targeted, leading to higher conversion rates.
  • SEO Advantages: If affiliates use SEO techniques to drive traffic to their site and your link, it can improve your own SEO rankings.

Conclusion

Lead generation marketing done right is essential to any business. It can have a deciding impact on how a business is doing.

Lead generation among competitors in any market is a fierce battle, therefore, a business will need to constantly improve its lead generation campaigns while trying to figure out new and creative ways of generating leads.

Lead generation is a lifetime task for businesses, that requires constant learning and improvement to stay relevant and ahead of the competition.

If you need any advice to start or optimize your lead generation campaigns, you’re welcome to contact us at team@limeleads.liqteq.us or via our live chat support.