At the heart of every effective go-to-market strategy lies lead generation. If you’ve been struggling to attract high-quality leads, it may be time to consider revamping your lead gen strategy. In this article, we explore lead generation best practices that can enhance your strategy and drive better results. We’ll cover balancing inbound and outbound marketing, diversifying channels, and of course, leveraging data every step of the way.

Optimize Your Website for Lead Capture

A well-optimized website that prioritizes the user experience forms the foundation for your lead generation efforts. Though 96% of your website visitors won’t be ready to make a purchase, you may be able to capture leads before they leave if you leave a good impression. Your website should:
  • Have a clean design that encourages exploration and interaction
  • Work seamlessly on any device
  • Incorporate concise, easy-to-fill inquiry forms
  • Have a thoughtful structure that parallels the buying journey
If you’re already confident in your website’s overall look and structure, A/B testing your calls-to-action and gated content is a solid next step to optimizing your lead capture efforts. Since user preferences and needs evolve over time, ongoing testing and tweaking can ensure your site is currently serving your audience well.

Balance Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Balancing inbound and outbound marketing strategies will ensure your sales team is working with a healthy, diverse pipeline. Inbound marketing focuses on attracting potential customers through offering valuable content and building long-term relationships that foster trust and loyalty. On the other hand, outbound marketing relies on direct outreach to generate leads quickly, making it an indispensable tool for immediate results.
Finding the right balance between these two approaches can significantly improve lead generation outcomes. Combining inbound and outbound marketing allows you to educate prospects through content marketing before engaging them directly, increasing your chances of striking at the right time. When you have well-rounded marketing efforts, you’ll be properly equipped to attract desirable leads from various channels.

Diversify Your Lead Acquisition Channels

A diverse lead generation strategy should enhance brand visibility, drawing in a broad audience you can then sift through to prioritize the warmest leads. Utilizing multiple channels such as pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, third-party lead generation services, and even social media platforms like LinkedIn can significantly improve your lead generation efforts. Each channel offers unique advantages and can target different segments of your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) effectively.

Implement Data-Driven Lead Generation Strategies

The cornerstone of any successful lead generation strategy is quality data. It is fundamental to achieving desired outcomes. Poor data can lead to ineffective targeting and wasted marketing resources. Intent data, which shows which leads are actively researching your products or services, can be particularly beneficial for quality lead gen, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most promising prospects. Leveraging these data-driven strategies ensures your lead generation efforts are targeted, efficient, and capable of generating high-quality leads likely to convert.

Ensure Your Sales and Marketing Teams Are Aligned

The shared objective of growing the company’s revenue requires close collaboration and communication between sales and marketing teams. Sales teams provide valuable insights into ideal buyers, which can improve lead-scoring models and help prioritize high-value prospects. Marketing team members, on the other hand, play a significant role in initially connecting with and capturing leads for sales staff to nurture. When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, you can focus joint efforts on strategies that yield the highest return.
One of the best ways to get everyone on the same page is to implement and reference a lead scoring system. Lead scoring assesses potential customers using points based on various attributes to streamline marketing and sales efforts.
Related Reading: All About Lead Scoring

Create High-Value Content

High-quality content attracts visitors and establishes your brand as a trusted source of information. Valuable content builds relationships, establishes trust, and demonstrates expertise. When you align your content marketing strategy to address each stage of the sales funnel, you can ensure leads have access to compelling information at the right time.
Content is the foundation of any solid inbound marketing strategy, and you may find it helpful to diversify the type of content you produce. Formats like videos, infographics, and e-books can cater to different audience preferences and improve lead engagement. Some types of content, like webinars and downloadables, can even be gated for low-effort lead capture. When you prioritize creating content that your ICPs find genuinely helpful, you can foster connections that aid you in sales conversations further down the road.

Personalize Your Lead Generation Efforts

Understanding your audience and personalizing lead generation tactics based on each target persona is crucial to any successful lead gen tactic. Personalization allows organizations like yours to create tailored experiences that resonate with individual prospects, fostering deeper connections and increasing the likelihood of conversion. By leveraging customer insights, you can segment your audience based on demographics, behavior patterns, and preferences, paving the way for highly targeted content and offers that address specific needs and pain points. This approach enhances engagement and improves conversion rates by making your marketing efforts more relevant and compelling to each unique prospect.

Use Email Marketing to Nurture Leads

Email marketing is a tried-and-true tactic that effectively nurtures leads through personalized engagement, and with good reason. When done right, carefully crafted email campaigns can help you stay in front of leads, funneling them helpful information based on where they’re at in the sales cycle. By segmenting leads into distinct lists for each target audience, you can personalize the type of content each prospect receives, showing them all the benefits of your offering based on their priorities. A carefully crafted lead nurturing email should be concise, ideally between 50 to 125 words, and guide leads toward specific actions. Remember, you face stiff competition, so making a great impact without requiring much of your leads should always be prioritized before you press send.

Leverage SEO for Organic Lead Generation

SEO is crucial for increasing a business’s visibility and driving organic traffic that can, in turn, generate leads. Typically, an SEO strategy focuses on building brand awareness by boosting site traffic and then warming visitors through tactics like retargeting or inbound content marketing. By focusing on getting the right users on your site through keyword targeting, you can present your brand as an authority on relevant subjects. When visitors view you as a trusted source of information, they’re more likely to provide their lead information on an inquiry form or otherwise find ways to connect with your team.

Utilize Paid Advertising for Lead Generation

Paid advertising is a powerful tool for lead generation, enabling businesses to target specific customer segments with precision. Options for paid lead gen are diverse, and sifting through all the different choices to figure out what’s right for your business may feel overwhelming. Here’s a high-level overview of some of the most popular types of paid advertising tactics for lead gen:
  • Traditional Search PPC: This involves bidding on keywords to display ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their ad, making it a direct way to reach potential customers actively searching for related products or services.
  • Social Campaigns: Paid social advertising targets users on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. These ads can be tailored based on user demographics, interests, and behaviors, allowing for a more personalized approach to lead generation.
  • Display Advertising: This tactic involves placing banner ads on various websites within a display network. These ads can create brand awareness and capture interest from users who may not be actively searching for a product but are browsing related content.
  • Gated Content Ads: These ads promote valuable content that requires users to provide their contact information (like an email address) to access it. This method effectively captures leads while offering something of value in return.
  • Retargeting: Retargeting ads are shown to users who have previously interacted with your website or content. This tactic helps re-engage potential leads who may have shown interest but did not convert initially, increasing the chances of conversion over time.
Paid advertising is one of the most powerful lead generation tools organizations can consider, and testing a mix of strategies to find what works is often the way to go. Once you find what effectively captures or nurtures leads, you can fine-tune your efforts from there.

Monitor KPIs and Adjust Strategies

Adapting your metrics to align with evolving digital marketing strategies is essential for sustained lead generation success, and that’s where KPIs can be a huge help. Making data-driven decisions based on key performance indicators helps businesses improve lead generation ROI and continuously optimize your marketing efforts.

Stuck on Next Steps? Predictiv Can Help.

Mastering lead gen takes time, and sometimes, having an outside expert opinion can help you spot gaps in your current workflows and processes. Our team at Predictiv provides full-service demand generation consulting plus we’ve built a proprietary intent data platform that allows sales and marketing teams to glean powerful insights into their ideal buyers. Whether you’re looking for end-to-end support to take your lead gen efforts to the next level or you’re just looking for best-in-class intent intelligence, our team would love to meet with you.
Contact Us Today!