The Top 11 Techniques for Lead Generation

Marketing teams are under pressure to generate leads at every turn.  

Just take a look at these stats. Per eMarketer's report in 2022, the top priority for marketers globally is to...  

• Generate high-quality leads (79%)
• Attract more website traffic (75%)
• Improve brand reputation (57%)
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty (47%)

That’s over 2/3 of marketers across the globe whose main focus is lead generation.

Since sky-high revenues largely rely on an efficient sales pipeline, it’s crucial to keep the lead-gen mill — the first touchpoint of that pipeline — spinning, even during the off seasons, too.  

For many marketers, the challenge is, the world of digital advertising is constantly evolving. And with major brands vying for the attention of online audiences, generating leads on a consistent basis just got more tasking.

Think of this: If 80% (averagely successful) marketers believe their lead gen strategy to be only slightly or somewhat effective, you’d bet they’re learning new skills and leaning into best practices to improve outcomes.  

Thankfully, you don’t have to be among the aforementioned 80%.  

In this blog, we’ve done a breakdown of the mechanics of high-performing lead gen campaigns, arming you with the best inbound and outbound tactics to acquire more leads.

Ready to learn the top lead generation techniques? Let’s get started.

Learn how efficy helps you generate more leads.

What are the best lead generation techniques?

As our “Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation” blog shows, lead gen is the driving force behind new customer acquisition and revenue. But real success depends on how you acquire leads.

In an age of ‘information overload’, the average buyer is constantly exposed to ads, sometimes intrusively, which makes outbound techniques a less acceptable source of generating leads.  

As such, any efficient and creative lead gen strategy should harness both inbound and outbound techniques to organically attract, engage, and convert new leads:  

Content marketing

Every day, thousands of consumers come online to search for all kinds of tips and advice to solve whatever problems they may have regarding the niche of products or services that your company offers.

When you publish resourceful content on the internet (blogs, ebooks, case studies, white papers, video marketing, etc.) tailored to a particular audience, you leverage their search intent, pulling in a pipeline of leads that can be engaged and then converted to customers.  

One Aberdeen study finds that marketers who target their leads based on their position in the sales funnel have a 73% higher conversion rate.  

Leads can be at different stages of the funnel, and they require different types of content to cater to their present needs and nudge them toward conversion in your sales funnel. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Top of the funnel: If a lead has just discovered your business, they would require top-of-the-funnel content that educates, such as “how to” blog posts, social media tips, and engaging videos.

Middle of the funnel: In this stage, you’ll want to establish trust and provide value-packed content like ebooks or guides, presentations/templates, industry research & reports, webinars, email newsletters, and even on-demand videos.  

Bottom of the funnel: On the other hand, leads at the bottom of the funnel need content that inspires confidence to make a purchasing decision with your organisation. Content formats of this kind are logic-centred, data-driven, and facts-based documents like case studies, demos, infographics, or pitch decks that position your brand as superior to your competitors.  

However, you should test different offers with your audience to determine what works best for you — you might find that some content formats fare better than others for you, so always track your content’s performance.  

Social media

Forget its usual deployment at the top of the funnel—with 3.78 billion active users, social media content plays a crucial role in your lead generation.  

Social media ads also work a treat. Include links to your high-performing landing pages in your social media posts on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Let visitors know they'll be taken to a landing page by including a CTA (call to action) in your posts.  

And this is where your CRM shines through, arming you with web forms to help capture their data and the background info to shape your interaction. Efficy’s Reporting tool can also give insights into how impactful your interaction with them is.

While marketing on social media, remember to choose your advertising (social media) platform based on the product you sell.  

When promoting an educational program, social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are more suited to a specific audience sharing similar educational backgrounds, interests, and professions.  

On the flip side, email marketing can be a more effective medium to reach potential attendees when promoting a physical event.

Search engine optimisation

SEO entails all activities aimed towards increasing your online visibility by improving your ranking in search engines (e.g., Bing, Google, or Yahoo).  

Per Marketing Charts in 2021, 49% of B2C marketers and 59% of B2B marketers rely on the SEO lead generation method to boost their online presence and SEO rankings.  

Besides offering more visibility and differentiation from your competitors, SEO also gives you access to pre-qualified website traffic (a good indicator that leads gotten from your website are likely to convert). SEO can be done in two ways:

Directly — through satisfying user search intent by posting relevant content and targeting certain (transactional keywords) OR

Indirectly — through business listings, guest postings, backlinks, and posting relevant content on third-party platforms like Quora or Reddit.  

You generate leads when you appeal to your target audience at the right time and place online. A kid’s store, for example, can target its most qualified audience — daycare houses, new moms etc., by using target keywords in their copy, building authority online, and more.

The more potential customers can find and interact with your business, the more often you appear on the search results' first page. This is why SEO and lead generation work well together.

Lead magnets  

A surefire marketing hack to capture leads is to create and publish lead magnets.  

Lead magnets are free resources that act as valuable incentives to get visitors to provide their contact information.  

Create freebies such as ebooks, whitepapers, templates, checklists, or other exclusive content to put your business ahead of the pack for leads. Promote these relevant resources across your website, blogs, and social media, and you’ll be on the right track to generate more quality leads.  

Your lead magnet copy should be value-focused and entice your website visitors and social media followers with FOMO so they feel they just can’t miss what’s inside your gated content.  

Be sure to use a strong call to action (CTA) and create an optimised lead capture form with the information you need to qualify the lead (i.e., make sure they’re right for your business and product!).

Once the visitor fills out your form with their contact info and clicks the button to download your resource, you’ll have snagged a new lead, and your marketing team can take it from there to bring them from warm to toasty — getting them ready to convert into a paying customer.  

Email marketing

When you get €42 for every €1 spent, you know your lead gen strategy could benefit from doubling down on email marketing.

Reportlinker in 2021 agrees, with the global revenue generated by email marketing projected to reach €9.87 billion by 2023 and increase to €16.22 billion by 2027.

After identifying channels your prospects are likely to be active on and collecting emails, you want to stay engaged with them and encourage website visits.  

One effective way to keep your leads interested and get them closer to conversion is by sending relevant weekly or biweekly newsletters and email blasts. Ensure to include interactive and fun features such as videos and polls to capture their attention and encourage them to act on your call-to-actions (CTAs).

By measuring the level of engagement with your videos and polls, you can gain further insights into which leads are more receptive and interested in your offerings. This valuable data can then be used to optimise your targeted campaigns and focus on high-intent leads.

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Marketing automation

When used hand in hand with your email marketing, marketing automation (MA) further streamlines and enhances your lead generation processes, enabling highly personalised and timely interactions with potential customers.  

Really, the two go together like bread and butter — they’re the dream team. With a powerful digital marketing tool (like efficy’s), you can get much more out of your lead generation efforts with marketing automation, generating more marketing leads and quickly turning them into sales leads — and ultimately lasting customers.

With MA, you’ll also save time by automating repetitive tasks such as ongoing email lead nurturing campaigns and follow-ups.  

Use your marketing automation tool to segment your audience, deliver targeted content, and track engagement — this approach ensures that leads receive relevant information that speaks to them at the right time and nurtures them through the sales funnel.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Perhaps the oldest trick in the lead gen playbook, PPC advertising remains one of the easiest and most efficient lead generation techniques.  

Across paid channels like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Display, you can pay to list your ads on web pages optimised for keywords relevant to your business. These ads then direct leads to your website.  

Since keywords are central to PPC ads, they only get shown to users who are (at the very least, marginally) interested in your products/services since they have actively searched keywords that hint at a potential interest in your product. Thus, you can easily convert them to active leads.

It’s also an immense value for ad spend. As the name implies, you only need to “pay per click,” which means you’re charged for each user that successfully clicks through to your website, rather than pay bogus flat rates or pay for other forms of engagement that hardly translate into real interest.  

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to tap into the existing audience of other influential websites in your industry to attract more relevant leads to your business.  

Identify authoritative blogs that align with your target audience, niche, or industry — or a potential market you’ve identified that you want to dip your toes in — and contribute high-quality guest posts.  

Choose your topic carefully and be sure to optimise it for search engines to get noticed — and, of course, don’t forget to include a CTA in the post and your bio or author profile, linking to your website or landing pages.

Building this partnership with other businesses can be a valuable way to increase your authority, create social trust, and drive more traffic to your own site, thereby improving your lead generation.

Webinars and online events

Hot tip: the majority of B2B buyers (51%) are willing to share their contact info with you to get access to a webinar.  

As you can see, webinars and online events are a highly effective lead generation method; they offer an interactive way to engage potential leads and get them excited about your solution.  

Choose relevant topics that you know your target personas are interested in, invite industry experts, and deliver value-packed presentations.  

Want to make this process more efficient?  

Repurpose a current guide or long-form blog you own into a comprehensive webinar with your expert speaker — or vice-versa. This way, you get two pieces of stellar content out of one — doubling your output.

In your webinar registration forms, you’ll capture attendee information (leads) and should be sure to always follow up with post-event communications that nurtures them through your sales funnel.

Referral programs and social proof

Did you know that 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a product if their friends or family recommend it? That’s a statistic you can’t look away from — and referral programs are a great way to leverage this.  

Referral programs are built to incentivise existing customers to refer new leads to your business by offering rewards and other exclusive benefits when they successfully bring in referrals.  

Take advantage of social proof by displaying customer testimonials and showcasing the benefits of your referral program. This kind of word-of-mouth marketing is a fantastic way to boost your lead generation efforts by instilling confidence and trust in potential customers.  

Don’t just stop there, it’s also a great idea to use social proof in your website, landing pages, emails, and retargeting ads to validate your offerings and persuade visitors to take action.

Retargeting ads

Just as you should create organic content for leads at each stage of the funnel, your ads should speak to your leads where they are in their journey too.

Retargeting ads are a key way to reach out to leads who have already shown interest in your products or services and re-engage their interest.

With the help of multi-channel lead management data in a CRM, you can track your leads’ activity with your business and create tailored retargeting ads for individuals who engaged with specific pages or previous ads.

This top technique keeps your brand in front of potential customers, uses copy that goes deeper into how your product solves their pain points and addresses any potential objections they might have, persuading them to return and convert into a paying customer.

Use CRM software to supercharge your lead generation

You probably already use CRM to manage communications and overall customer relationships.  

But did you know you can also make CRM a crucial cog in your lead generation wheel? Here’s how:

More insight into your audience

With the ability to constantly gather data on customer behaviour from their interaction with your emails, social media posts, and other marketing channels, CRM gives you direct feedback from your customer base — in real-time.  

By using CRM lead generation software to capture the data of anonymous web visitors, you can gain more data about these fresh contacts and their behaviour.  

Afterwards, you can segment your audience along with different shared preferences. You can ditch the scattergun approach of mass advertising to target the specific segment of your audience that is likely to respond positively.  

Even if a lead doesn't convert into an opportunity, you can still leverage that valuable contact information in the future; contact data is automatically stored, and every previous interaction is logged in the contact record, enabling you to pick up where you left off easily.  

Track customer behaviour & relationships

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) arms you with valuable insights into the behaviour and preferences of your leads, allowing you to tailor your marketing content and optimise your strategies accordingly.

For instance, if you notice that a particular landing page is not performing well, you can use the data from your CRM to identify the pain points of your audience and make necessary improvements.  

Using segmentation in efficy, you can also easily segment your audience based on user-specific variables like demographics, interests, purchasing patterns, and behaviour to help you personalise your communications and target them with more relevant content.  

By collecting hundreds of data points — frequency of website visits, email open & click-through rates (on embedded links) — CRM can draw up models of customer behaviour to help you identify purchasing patterns and tweak your lead gen campaigns accordingly for better outcomes.  

Embrace automation for “lead gen on auto-pilot”

Closer to home, this APSIS’ study found that 77% of marketers use automation software to convert more leads than others. And when you recall that customers very rarely decide to purchase a product or service at the first point of contact, it adds up.  

Purchasing decisions are typically made between later encounters. Thusly, follow-up interaction, where marketers track and interact with potential leads at every point in the sales funnel, is where the purchasing decision is influenced.

Your interaction includes everything from emails to scheduled phone calls and progress tracking, and it can be overwhelming to keep track of. This is where CRM automation can easily set up workflows to ease follow-up operations.

This Gartner report points to widespread acceptance in the market in the not-too-distant future. The transformative power of automation doesn’t stop at follow-ups, as the automation capabilities of CRM flows into other areas — for instance, helping you avoid the manual entry of data when capturing data.  

For instance, efficy’s campaign automation tool frees you from the tedium of manual and repetitive tasks, reallocating your (valuable) time to cultivate stronger connections with leads and nudge them closer to the ultimate finish line of conversion.

Wrap up

Effective lead generation is a never-ending process — it requires constant iteration, re-evaluation and refining of your strategy.

To truly gain an edge in lead generation, efficy CRM can help you identify web visitors and gather a wealth of insight on them while streamlining your lead generation process to improve sales performance and take your business to the next level.

Here, at efficy, we pride ourselves on being one of the most preferred CRM providers across Europe.  

Efficy will help your established business capture and convert more high-quality leads and boost ongoing sales with a solution that scales with you. Book a demo now to try it out!

Learn more about:

Lead Generation: Your Ultimate Guide for Growth [2024]

What Is Event Management and Why Is It Important?

How Content Marketers Can Use ChatGPT to Drive Efficiency 

How CRM Improves Lead Generation: Streamline Your Lead-to-Deal Flow