16 Lead generation ideas to boost your ideal customer list

In the online world, marketers do everything to generate new leads to increase sales. The potential audience may or may not have encountered your brand often.    

There are numerous practices through which marketers generate leads by implementing various strategies such as content marketing, social media involvement, email outreach, paid advertising, events, webinars, community outreach, etc.

In this blog post, you’ll find the top 16 creative ideas for lead generation that are easy for you to implement and will give huge ROI.

Companies with tight budgets can take up the following lead generation ideas for their small businesses.

So, let’s get started.

16 Lead generation ideas to implement

Below is a list of interesting ideas for lead generation which you need to check out. You can experiment with different tactics and optimize your lead generation process.

1. Start a niche-focused blog

The strategy of posting blog posts consistently will always bring leads as the audience is fond of reading good content. A niche-focused blog is potent for generating leads to target sales further.

Below are a few ideas on how you can leverage different types of niche-focused blogs to generate more leads for your marketing strategy.

Industry-based: “Guide to SaaS sales.” 

Audience-based: “Is your sales team mature enough?” 

Subject-based: “10 Marketing automation best practices.”

I hope the above Salesmate blog topics examples were helpful for you to discover the right topic for your business.

B2B and B2C businesses regularly post blogs to get more sales leads and guide them through the sales funnel.

Even startups rely on blogs for lead generation. Hence, starting a niche-specific blog can help you enhance your lead generation efforts.

2. Create useful videos

Videos that can be a problem solver for your prospects are a booster for lead generation.

86% of companies utilize video as their marketing tool. 

Ensure to create videos that either educate or entertain, as, on average, a person spent 100 minutes watching videos in 2022.

SaaS industries create step-by-step or how-to-use videos for their prospects. You can share the video recording of your successful webinar that contains answers to all your prospect’s usual queries.

See some of the most exciting stats on video content success.

Videos content is a great lead generator through which you can highlight your brand’s unique selling point and express your brand story.

For instance, a moving company could create a video showcasing a seamless moving experience, featuring satisfied customers sharing their positive testimonials.

You can utilize these valuable videos on your landing pages and blog and send its link during email outreach.

It can help convince your prospects to try your brand and improve the overall lead generation process. 

3. Offer gated lead magnets

Content that is valuable for your target audience will work as a lead magnet for your business.

According to CMI, 83% of B2B marketers utilize content marketing to generate leads. Ensure your content topic surrounds the domain of your product or services.

With the help of the opt-in form, you can quickly generate targeted leads with your content resource. Offer downloadable options because audiences often want the content to read in their free time. 

Try to produce content that is relevant to your audience. The content should be able to drive and entice your target audience, meet your business purpose, and perceive high value.  

Gated content strategy is one of the best lead generation content ideas that drive profitable outcomes of your efforts.

Remember, your ideal prospects will always notice content that can educate right and contain insights.

4. Social proof for lead generation

It takes self-experience or social proof to believe in the authenticity of a brand.

Whenever a visitor lands on your website, they might like your UX/UI copy, but to gain trust and turn them into buyers, you need to provide them with real insights into what your existing customers say about you.

Social proof like testimonials and client case studies presented with snappy headlines will give you valuable leads.

If your prospective client finds these social proofs and facts impressive, you’ll see continuous growth in your ideal customer list.

5. Implement live chat

Taking the help of live chat and chatbot for lead generation is an effective way as your website audience loves to get instant replies to their queries.

Chabot is favored because it saves a lot of time which you can utilize to convert a high-value deal.

According to Juniper’s Research, it is predicted that utilizing chatbots will save 2.5 billion hours of business by 2023. 

A chatbot is a utility lead generation tool for businesses as it serves 24/7 to the company to capture customer details and solve their queries.

Create impactful customer experiences

Get Salesmate's Live Chat and Chat Journeys to engage with your visitors.

Learn about Live Chat

6. Provide access to free templates

Templates seem helpful in your target audience’s eyes, and if you offer them as gated lead generation resources, they can help you in lead generation and build trust that will give you more sales in the future.

Looking for inspiration? Download our template as shown below.

Template creation is an excellent B2B lead generation idea. Salesmate has created sales metric calculator to help their clients measure sales performance.

If you can offer templates that can speed up your customer’s work or solve their problem, you can easily win more leads for your sales pipeline.

7. Ask your delighted customers for referrals

Leveraging the existing happy customer for new leads is one of the most effective lead generation strategies for growing businesses.

More than 50% of customers are ready to refer when offered exciting incentives, free access to good loyalty programs, discount coupons, and social recognition.

According to a Heinz Marketing study, companies receive 40% of leads through their referrals program. So, having a referral program is a profitable lead generation strategy.

The points below will give you a better understanding of the efficiency of the referral strategy.

The referral will drive a more effective lead generation result if your customers are happy with your product or services.

8. Educate through webinars

Limited-time webinars with exciting topics are also helping in lead generation. You can do marketing for your upcoming webinar to entice your target audience to sign up for it quickly. 

Conducting a webinar is a responsibility because if you fail to provide value to your audience, you’ll lose the opportunity for sales.

So, your webinar content should be the most useful for your webinar attendees as it will enhance the getting more paying customers.

You can leverage Facebook and LinkedIn online communities to find the massive ideal audience for your webinars.

We conduct a “Salesmate Weekly Product Webinar” that helps us share knowledge with our customers.

Additionally, if someone misses our webinar, they can check out the webinar video on our YouTube channel.

9. Offer free tools

Not for business promotion, but if you want to develop brand trust and get qualified leads, offering free tools will be an excellent way.

Free tools are lead magnets because they facilitate generating high-quality leads. You must be well aware of your customer’s needs to offer them tools that will be helpful for them.

For example, if your clients are doing extensive email outreach, then you can offer email templates or an email signature tool.

“Salesmate’s email signature generator” is a free tool that helps create perfect signatures in no time.

10. Create skill-enhancing email courses

An email course can help you quickly meet your lead generation goal. An email course comprises a series of chapters provided through emails over a short period.

The course can be extremely helpful for marketers and sales professionals to discover the interest of their target audience.

You can see the benefits of creating an email course for your business below –

You must provide some actionable inks to your audience once they complete your email course, as the final aim is to attract people for sales conversion.

Reaching them with free trials, webinar invites, discount offers, purpose-driven landing pages, and free demos are valuable ideas that help them understand their intent.

11. Answer your target audience via Quora

If you are looking for a reliable channel to drive potential visitors to your website, then Quora is the right one.

Quora is a free website for questions and answers and has more than 300 million distinctive users every month. 

You get to learn about your audience’s pain points. Answering your audience on Quora will develop a sense of brand trust in your target market’s eyes.

There are around 400K topics under discussion among its users.

Hence, Quora can bring phenomenal results if you can engage and provide a solution to the queries of your target audience.

You can learn various news and trends related to your industry that will surely help to improve your lead generation strategy.

12. Create a lead generation quiz

Interactive quizzes are super lead magnets for your website visitors or email recipients.

These quizzes can engage your target prospects and are incredibly insightful for a remarketing campaign.

For example, if you are a CRM software company, a quiz like “Is mobile CRM useful or not?” is a question that will be a great lead generation topic to get audience feedback.

You can try Salesmate’s Mobile CRM to judge its worthiness!

If you are confused about which topic you should create a lead generation quiz for your business, you can take the following ideas for inspiration. 

• Quiz on product/services recommendations, for example, features, usefulness 
• Consultation quiz, for example, preferred time, online or offline 
• Quiz on Product/service personalization needs, for example, specific portal design for the company

A quiz can help you in many ways, such as lead segmentation, lead nurturing, and remarketing.

13. Offer free trials with quick sign-ups

You might have created the best product in the market, but your target audience can only confirm its effectiveness. A free trial is a great way to generate a bang-on lead for your business. 

Your product might be helpful for your prospective clients, and a free trial option will convince them to pay you for it. Lead generation through free trial is more successful for SaaS industries. 

14. Check out the various types of free trials offered by businesses

Suppose your website visitors sign up for a free trial. In that case, the lead generated is ideal for remarketing and nurturing as trials are taken by visitors only who use or want a similar product.

For example, we offer a 15-day trial for our CRM software, which helps our clients to analyze all our robust features and helps us generate qualified leads for our sales pipeline.

15. Partner with publications to get featured

Your marketing efforts seem successful if you get the opportunity to be featured in some significant publications like Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Money.

Though getting featured on such humungous publication brands might take a bit longer, you should always look for authoritative sites for such opportunities.

Don’t be promotional; try to provide valuable content such as your industry insights, excellent advice, strategies, and growth ideas. 

So, when the audience finds your content valuable, it will gradually give you valuable leads for your business.

16. Go for social selling

Social selling is an empowering way for lead generation because of the sheer volume of your target audience’s presence on social media channels.

Social selling is prosperous for both B2B and B2C businesses. 64% of sales teams attain their sales goals when taking support of social selling, and without its help, only 49% of sales teams can achieve.

As per a survey, 31% of B2B business professionals reported that they built more substantial business relationships with the help of social selling.

Social selling isn’t an overnight success formula but supports building prosperous relationships that will give you more sales opportunities.

Apart from the above lead generation ideas, there are various other ways to drive leads for your business, such as-

• Influencer marketing
• Joining affiliate programs
• Creating high-performing landing pages
• Taking the help of email outreach
• Offering giveaways on your social media accounts and many more.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

The notable point is that these lead generation ideas will be successful if your marketing and sales teams have a constructive team communication network.  

The best solution to scale your business is by adapting a lead generation CRM software, Salesmate, to streamline your marketing and sales activities.

Salesmate is profound automation software that offers easy, unique, sustainable experiences to clients and your sales team.