No matter what industry you’re in, you have a target audience. And that audience is somewhere in the deep nether of the web looking for you.
They’re on the hunt for the product or service you provide. When they find you, you should have opportunities available for them to express an interest in what you have to offer.
This is where a lead generation strategy comes in.
A lead generation strategy focuses on using specific tactics that attract interested prospects with the goal of converting them into qualified leads. A lead is someone who has taken some action on your website or through another touchpoint.
This means you have captured their contact details.
Lead generation strategies include these four components:
Before you can get started with implementing your lead generation strategies, you must learn what elements make up a good lead generation strategy.
The aim of your lead generation strategy should be to capture interest and contact information from your target audience.
via GIPHYThis requires several key elements, including:
This one’s pretty obvious, but it’s crucial that you educate and support your audience through content.
Content is how you expand brand awareness and establish credibility online. It comes in many forms, but the most popular choices are blogs and social media posts.
Also known as content offers, these are free content assets that you offer to your audience with the intent of offering true value. These should be gated in order for you to collect information from the lead.
For example, if they want to download an ebook from you or take your email course, they simply need to fill out a form and provide their contact info.
Some of the best lead magnet ideas include:
Calls to action (CTAs) are words or phrases that invite your audience to take action in a way that will grow your business. In regards to lead generation, they serve the purpose of guiding the person through the process of providing their contact information.
CTAs are usually placed after a short description of a content offer. They should be phrased clearly so that the person knows exactly what to expect when they perform the desired action.
It’s a straightforward process of call and response that’s extremely valuable to your lead generation strategy.
Landing pages aren’t necessarily mandatory for a successful lead generation campaign, but they will definitely increase your chances of converting a prospect into a lead.
Essentially, they’re a page for your prospects to obtain their offer and submit their information.
Designing unique landing pages for different offers will help personalize the experience for your audience depending on what they’re looking for and how they got to the page.
You don’t have to over complicate a landing page. You can keep it simple as long as the content on the page matches the content linked to it. Consistency is key.
These pages are meant to inform your potential customer that the transaction is complete. Pretty self-explanatory, it’s meant to thank them for taking an interest in your business.
They are a pretty important step in your lead generation strategy since they can be used to track conversion data.
Looking at all of the elements involved, executing an effective strategy requires a lot of time and resources.
This is why lead generation tools are so helpful.
Lead generation tools come in the form of software that can automate several processes for you. Many steps can be handled automatically, such as attracting and engaging your site visitors, gathering and storing their information, and nurturing those leads.
Lead nurturing is an important aspect of the strategy. It’s how you deliver relevant, helpful information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. It moves them through the journey and, ideally, pushes leads to the sales team, who can close deals.
Basically, your lead generation software is essential in streamlining your whole strategy.
There’s so many different variations of lead generation software available.
And each tool delivers plenty of benefits because of how much they can do for you, operating in a variety of ways.
A valuable generation tool will be able to attract more visitors to your website.
They use tactics like paid search advertising and SEO best practices to get your content in front of the right audiences.
There are a lot of elements that can slow down work processes, like a lead’s contact info changing.
The right lead generation software handles keeping your lead information updated and accurate, allowing your team to spend less time editing data and more time selling.
A common challenge for business across the world, lead generation software can take the pains out of attracting high-quality leads by enabling you to target your ideal customers.
Qualified prospects mean leads that are further into their buyer’s journey and closer to a sale.
Certain softwares alert you when you get new leads, automate emails, and send you reminders when it’s time to contact a lead in person.
All of these tasks are important in helping you follow up with a lead, but the timing has to be right. Lead generation software helps you keep track of each lead’s timeline, reducing opportunities for oversights and mistakes.
In the world of marketing and business, time is money. Automating all of the different steps required for winning a lead with lead generation software can accelerate the sales process.
Lead generation touches on a lot of different points throughout the marketing and sales process. Most lead generation tools address several aspects of your marketing and sales efforts, but some tools may only help you with one specific area.
Here are some categories that lead generation tools can help you with:
This form of lead generation focuses on boosting the percentage of site visitors who convert into valuable leads.
This form of lead generation helps you to capture leads on your website.
These lead generation tools help to bring more prospects and leads to your website and other marketing channels.
These tools help you to identify leads so you can send messages to them using outbound techniques and channels, like cold emails or cold calls.
Email marketing tools are great for helping you to nurture and generate leads when they are on their customer journey.
Survey tools allow you to refine your brand messaging and offerings to help you position them in a way that truly appeals to your target audience so you can gain more leads.
Referral tools help you to gain more leads via social proof or word of mouth.
Marketing automation software is an end-to-end approach to marketing that helps you to capture and convert leads on multiple channels.
These lead generation tools help you to get organized and reduce repetitive tasks so you have more time to focus on what is important, building a relationship with your prospects and leads.
Live chat tools give your team the opportunity to attend to your site visitors using a chat icon that is visible on whichever pages you choose.
Your potential customers can get in touch with you easily to have their questions answered quickly.
Contest tools help you to easily host contests for your marketing campaigns on your website, via social media, and on other channels.
Contests can help to increase your brand awareness, engagement, and generate new leads while delighting your customers.
The range of lead generation software types is pretty large.
Some have tools that center on simplifying your email and streamlining prospecting. Others help with your CRM strategy and can nurture leads toward closing. Many do all of the above comprehensively.
No matter what you’re looking to improve, there are plenty of options for you to consider using.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Starts at $99/mo
A customer experience analytics platform, Hotjar offers several helpful tools, like on-site polls, session replays, heat maps, and form analytics.
For example, their polls are useful in doubling conversion points by collecting an email address while also collecting feedback. Marketers, product managers, and UX designers alike benefit from what their software has to offer, providing value throughout the customer’s entire journey.
Pricing: $179/mo
Leadformly is a helpful tool that allows you to build forms that are proven to convert more leads. This software focuses on form details so you don't have to.
You can choose from a a library of form templates that are already optimized for conversions. You can customize the templates according to your needs and then use the embed code to add them to your website.
Leadformly also allows you to see how the forms are performing with their insights and analytics they include in your software.
Rating: 4.1 Stars
Pricing: Starts at $10/mo
Pingdom is a software that helps make your website more reliable and easy to use, while increasing site speed and uptime. This tool offers full stack monitoring of your website, root cause analysis, immediate alerts, real user monitoring, and website reporting.
Using this interface enables you to ensure your website is always at its peak performance for generating and converting leads.
Rating: 4.1 stars
Pricing: Starts at $199/mo
VWO is a great tool that allows you to conduct split testing on your new ideas. It helps you to find exactly what is limiting your conversion rate.
With this tool, you can test out search algorithms, product feature changes, subscription workflows, and any other idea that contributes to your goals.
Rating: 4.2 stars
Pricing: Free to start, and $24/mo thereafter
Mixpanel is a simple tool that allows you to see how users interact with your internet-connected product. You can see details like their location, where they purchased from (app or website), the date and time, and other user interactions or demographics.
It is designed to help you understand and increase your engagement to boost conversions.
Rating: 4 stars
Pricing: Starts at $25/mo
Leadpages makes it easy to set up and test fully optimized landing pages for offers at any level of maturity.
It’s so quick and easy that many enterprises use it to test market concepts before product development goes into full swing. With an immense variety of design elements, features, and built-in analytics, Leadpages calls itself the #1 landing page builder for good reason.
Rating: 4.4 stars
Pricing: Starts at $80/mo
Unbounce allows you to make customized landing pages for your website without needing designers and developers. It gives you the power and agility you need to customize campaigns to increase conversions.
Some central features of this great software are CRM integration, A/B testing, drag-and-drop functionality, lead generation, and a library of mobile responsive templates.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Starts at $39/mo
A great means to aid marketing, sales, and support all at once, Intercom presents itself as an on-site chat feature.
You can interact with your site visitors, collecting their information that can be analyzed. Additionally, you're able to create message triggers for onboarding, support, or retention so that you never miss an opportunity with a lead.
Current customers also have access to an integrated help desk and knowledge base.
Rating: 3.9 stars
Pricing: Starts at $384/year
Qualaroo collects user feedback on products or marketing experiences, providing valuable data and conversion metrics for your business.
Through analyzing responses, you can gather customer information and follow up on their experience, finding new leads along the way. As we’ve already figured out, surveys and forms are valuable means to generate happy customers.
Rating: 3 stars
Pricing: Starts at $29/mo, or a free plan for up to 5,000 searches/month
To start building a relationship with your leads, they need to stand up and be counted. Many potentially lucrative leads have “opt-in blindness,” easily ignoring complex opt-in forms.
To cut through the clutter in a simple, inviting way, try Hello Bar. It functions as an elegant opt-in bar that can remain highly visible at the top of your website without frustrating your visitors.
Pricing: Free
It might seem odd to find a social media site on the list of great lead generation tools – after all, social networks are often looked at as their own separate animal.
Look closer at Quora and you’ll realize it is custom built for two powerful lead generation activities: Spreading thought leadership by answering professional questions and connecting with genuine influencers.
Rating: 4.2 stars
Pricing: Starts at $64.99/mo paid annually
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the cream of the crop for lead gen. Their software allows you to "target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach."
If you're in B2B sales, you already understand the importance of LinkedIn, and their Sales Navigator is a great tool to help you capture leads. You are able to begin your prospecting efforts and save your leads into your CRM directly from their platform.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Free
SlideShare is a document and presentation sharing platform that allows you to share infographics, slideshow presentations, and a variety of other documents with a large audience online.
This platform allows you to share your expertise in your field and can connect you to other professionals that are interested in what you do. When your slideshows are done well, you have the chance to be featured on SlideShare's homepage that can get you thousands of views.
Some of these views can be targeted leads that are interested in a product or service you offer.
Rating: 4.1 stars
Pricing: Starts at $29/mo
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that can bring together all of your social networks so you and your team can collaborate and execute brilliant social media strategies that drive results.
With Hootsuite, you can engage with customers, apply social listening techniques, and manage all of your comments, and respond to direct messages. They also have analytics that provide actionable insights through the social data they capture for your business.
Rating: 3.8 stars
Pricing: Starts at $499/year
EverWebinar is a cool tool that allows you to create automated webinars that look and feel live, but are actually pre-recorded.
You can use these webinars to increase customer engagement and attendance by making your webinar appear to be on demand with a countdown to the webinar and a CTA that directs users to save their seat.
Rating: 4.2 stars
Pricing: Contact company for a quote
Datanyze is a sales tool that is specializes in "technographics." Basically their software helps software and tech companies understand what technologies their prospects are using on their websites.
But it doesn't just end there.
Their free Chrome plugin (up to 50 domains analyzed a month) also allows you to analyze company details such as the year they were founded, revenue and employees estimations, people within the organization and their emails, and much more.
It is a terrific tool to help your sales team save time prospecting.
Datanyze's Chrome extension is free, but to get domains analyzed on a monthly basis, you'll need to reach out to them for a quote.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Starts at $49/mo, free plan up to 50 requests/mo
Hunter.io provides you with an easy way to locate prospect email addresses based on their profile or website.
Since it comes in the form of a Chrome browser extension, it’s easy to use while you are on the prowl for the decision makers you need to contact.
Rating: 3.8 stars
Pricing: Free or pro plan for $138 lifetime use license
Sendblaster is a bulk email software that helps you to manage mailing lists with ease while setting up your email marketing campaigns. They include free email templates and build your permission-based email list with ease.
You can also track the performance of your email campaigns by using Sendblaster's free email stats service.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Pricing: Starts at $250/mo
BuzzBuilder is an outbound email marketing platform that helps you to get more of your emails opened and read.
The ultimate goal of using BuzzBuilder is to maximize the amount of respondents that take action on your emails. They do this by making sure they have a solid reputation with ISPs so your emails reach the people you intended to target.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Pricing: Contact for a quote
Growbots is one of the first full outbound sales platforms. It features automatic lead generation and CRM integration for managing email marketing campaigns.
This platform makes it easy to find prospects that will make good leads with over 100 million contacts. It also allows you to find the contact information of the lead decision makers you need to get in touch with.
With Growbots, you can ensure your email gets to the right place with a bounce rate that is less than 10 percent.
Rating: 4.8 stars
Pricing: Starts at $49/mo
Buying email lists is never a good idea, but Voila Norbert offers you a much more honest means of finding emails.
With a CSV file, you can search in bulk for prospects and verify email addresses. It’s easy to integrate into most CRM software options, making it that much easier to keep track of your lead generation efforts.
Voila Norbert has many different pricing options depending on what you’re looking for help with. For prospecting purposes, they start at $49/mo.
Rating: 4.1 stars
Pricing: Starts at $79/mo
If you’re looking for a software that can multitask, Prospect.io is a great choice.
It takes care of prospecting and outreach jointly, searching for emails and verifying them for you. From there, you can use a variety of templates to reach out to prospects. All the data received from these interactions are tracked too.
Rating: 4.6 stars
Pricing: Starting at $9/mo paid annually
ActiveCampaign gives you the power to track each and every interaction a lead has with your website. You can then use the information you learn as triggers for your email campaigns.
This allows you to notify your sales team right when a lead visits a specific part of your website. You can also automatically follow up with cold leads or run email campaigns to nurture them until they become warm leads again.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Starts at $9/month, includes a free plan
Mailchimp is a popular all-in-one marketing automation platform that is known best for its email marketing capabilities. This platform allows you to manage all of your prospects, talk to your customers, and engage with other people who are essential to your business.
Mailchimp helps you to focus on creating beautiful campaign designs and using data analysis effectively to generate more leads.
Rating: 4.6 stars
Pricing: Starts at $25/mo, includes a free plan
SendinBlue is a complete sales and marketing toolbox that mostly focuses on helping you send the right messages to your audience at the right time.
A prime feature of this set of marketing tools is their customizable email marketing capabilities that allow you to grow your business by generating new leads and establishing relationships with potential clients.
Pricing: Free
Email templates are the perfect addition to your email marketing campaigns. You don't want every email to look the same, and making your own templates or email designs can be time consuming.
Really Good Emails provides exceptional email templates so you don't have to sort through a lot of not-so-good templates before you get to the awesome designs.
Rating: 4.2 stars
Pricing: Free up to 500 subscribers, Pro plan starting at $19/mo
AWeber is an email marketing tool built to aid in automated lead generation.
You can easily create and send emails, import content from your blog, and share it with your subscribers – all while keeping track of your analytics.
It has a pretty easy interface with pre-built templates, built-in A/B testing, and more meant to help build your brand.
Rating: 4.7 stars
Pricing: Free basic subscription for up to 20 responses, $39/mo and up for additional features
Surveys and quizzes are a more engaging way to collect lead information from a visitor, as compared to forms, which can be off-putting.
Survey Anyplace allows you to create customer satisfaction surveys, quizzes for lead generation, and beyond. A great tool to integrate into your existing marketing arsenal, it’s easy to transfer leads to your CRM and begin nurturing campaigns.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Pricing: Free for up to 100 responses, paid plans starting at $35/mo
An outstanding survey tool, Typeform is capable of providing conversion data as well as lead generation. It makes customer surveys feel easier and more conversational.
It also successfully pairs with other marketing software, like HubSpot and Mailchimp. You can craft anything from surveys to quizzes to forms, with templates and question examples available for inspiration.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Pricing: Contact for a quote
Extole is an advocacy marketing platform that allows your happy customers to turn into promoters who can generate more leads.
Through your social channels, you can invite customers to refer your business to friends and family. If a referred friend becomes a new customer, then both the friend and the advocate are rewarded somehow.
Extole is able to track and log all of this data, creating a bank of testimonials for your brand.
They provide a demo that walks you through all the unique features. Following the demo, you can get a quote based on your unique needs.
Rating: 3.7 stars
Pricing: Starts at $49/mo
Primarily for ecommerce stores, ReferralCandy is pretty similar to Extole in the sense that it rewards customers for business referrals.
Rewards are automatically paid out to customers, saving you time to send out emails and monitor your ROI. It can be integrated into your marketing stack fairly easily and provide you analytics and insights on your program.
Rating: 4.1 stars
Pricing: Starts at $40/mo
Keap helps you keep all of your customer info in one spot for easy access. This feature allows you to track interactions so that future campaigns can be better informed.
An all-in-one CRM, it works across devices as well so you have access at all times. Between reminders, automated emails and texts, and the ability to create repeatable sales processes, you’ll never fall behind on lead follow up.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Starts at $40/mo.
HubSpot’s expansive tool suite includes both the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, both of which really help you prioritize generating and nurturing new leads.
Between personalized, automated outreach, email templates, and live chats, you can engage with prospects consistently on their platform. Following up becomes more efficient as you’re able to track your entire pipeline.
Rating: 4.2 stars
Pricing: Starts at $79/mo
Ontraport has all the marketing tools you need in one place. With Ontraport, you can find the best growth opportunities for you, define the lead sources that work best for you, create attractive landing pages, and design branded emails.
This all-inclusive marketing software has the solutions you need to generate more leads with automated campaigns and easy-to-use lead scoring and routing tools.
Rating: 4.1 Stars
Pricing: Based on database size
Marketo is an all encompassing marketing software that includes features like lead scoring, email marketing, email automation, lead management, and analytics.
The Marketo system makes it easy to attract, nurture, and deliver qualified leads through inbound and outbound programs. You can adapt quickly and stay relevant by automating the whole customer experience.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Pricing: Free for 100 tasks a month, paid plans starting at $19.99/mo
Boasting the “easiest way to automate your work,” Zapier successfully does just that. “Zaps” connect all of your work apps to keep track of your tasks and remind you of next steps.
Conveniently, it can be paired with a lot of the other lead generation software on this list. The workflows generated can help keep your work day way more organized.
Rating: 4.7 stars
Pricing: Free for one event type, $8/mo for unlimited event types
Calendly is a popular app that is used for scheduling events, appointments, and meetings. This helps remove the confusion of schedules and availability.
You can easily send your Calendly availability link to people you wish to meet with, even if they don't have the app.
This makes it easy for leads to book appointments and phone calls with you right away, instead of waiting for an email or phone call.
Rating: 4.4 stars
Pricing: Starts at $4.49/mo
Doodle is similar to Calendly because they also allow you to schedule meetings faster. With Doodle, you can skip the back-and-forth emails and juggling of timezones.
Use Doodle to schedule 1:1 meetings, open time blocks, and gather groups of three or more people even if they don't use Doodle.
Rating: 4.4 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
Boasted as the world's first and only conversational marketing platform, Drift is a truly powerful tool with a variety of features.
Their live chat function allows your website visitors to click on a chat bubble to get in touch with a member of your team immediately. You also have the option to set up a bot to act as your website's personal assistant.
Their LeadBots qualify your visitors, identify which sales rep they should speak with, and book meetings...all without filling out a form.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
Acquire is a platform that helps you to create awesome customer experiences by encouraging customer engagement with a one-stop shop to customer communication. With Acquire, you can customize the customer experience through multiple channels such as live chat, video calls, VOIP, and SMS.
The platform even allows your customer support team to co-browse and screenshare to give users the support they need on your webpage.
Rating: 4.6 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
tawk.to is a live chat platform that allows you to monitor your site traffic and customer activity in real time, engage with the visitors on your website, and respond to support tickets.
Rating: 4.4 stars
Pricing: Starts at $16 per seat per month
Live Chat is a full customer service platform that makes it easy for you to boost sales and delight your customers. It allows you to compile all of the apps used for messaging in one place so you can respond faster than ever before.
This includes their chat link that you can embed onto your site to answer prospect and customer questions.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Pricing: Free to try, $13/month to implement
Rafflecopter allows you to design contests easily for platforms like Facebook, email, Twitter, and Pinterest.
You don't even need to know how to code to use this tool. Create your giveaway in minutes to help engage your audience and increase your brand awareness.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: $97/mo
Gleam is a system that allows you to create viral contests for platforms such as Facebook, Eventbrite, Twitter, and Pinterest. They have a wide range of widgets and integrations that help you to create any campaign you want.
Rating: 4.7 stars
Pricing: Contact for pricing
VYPER is similar to Gleam because it also allows you to create viral contests.
However, Vyper goes a step further by enabling your participants to take other desired actions, such as filling out a form on your website, referring a friend, or following your social profiles to help them earn extra entries into the contest you are running.
This increases the likelihood of them winning, and it gets your contest shared with more people.
Rating: 4.6 stars
Pricing: Starts at $29/mo
Proof’s software tools are meant to boost your website’s conversion by using social proof messaging to make the customer’s experience feel more humanized.
Leads can get real-time updates on your business and how other customers are doing. The technique boosts your brand’s credibility, saves money on online advertising, and converts visitors into leads.
The addition of features like A/B testing and personalization make it an investment worth pursuing.
Rating: 4.2 stars
Pricing: Starts at $69/mo
Great for real estate professionals, you can connect your Google and Microsoft contacts with Contactually for easy organization and segmentation.
Once synced up, you can control how often your automated messages are sent to clients individually, prioritizing relationships.
It’s a neat tool if you have clients that require different levels of engagement. You can use custom templates to automate personal messages too, making your process that much more streamlined.
Rating: 4.6 stars
Pricing: Free plan, pro plans starting at $99/mo
Video marketing has seen a meteoric rise alongside mobile technology. Turnstile, an app by Wistia, helps you motivate leads to take action when they view your videos.
Instead of putting links in the description and hoping you get clicks, you can empower any video with an opt-in form. The form can come at any point in the video, too, so you have a fully customized experience.
Rating: 4.6 stars
Pricing: Starts at $25/mo
Loomly is a platform that allows your team to collaborate seamlessly. Manage all of your social media accounts and communication from this one tool.
You can even upload your digital assets like pictures and videos to the app so they are all in one "asset library." They also allow you to see a mock up of your post before it goes live, so you can make sure everything looks the way you want it to.
Rating: 4.3 stars
Pricing: Contact company for pricing
Do you wish you had a better way to understand who your leads are? Crystal uses AI to help you with this.
Crystal acts as your coach for every conversation because it can predict your leads' personalities by tracing their online footprint. This allows you to write and speak in the style that appeals most to them.
Take the time to go over your budget, team size, goals, and other factors when researching which software to use. Many of these tools have free trials available, so start testing them out.
Also, make sure you gather feedback from your team. To narrow down your options and make the right decision on which tool to subscribe to, follow these simple steps:
When you equip your team with the right lead generation tools, you're setting them up for success. The software that fits your company right will help you drive big picture results in a sustainable way.