What is lead generation in digital marketing? 6 Proven strategies to generate more leads

Quick overview 👇

Today, digital marketing can drive tremendous results in everything and for every business. Gone is the time when all businesses thrived through radio, tv, or print media advertisement tactics.

Digital marketing is currently the most preferred approach, enabling companies to reach a vast audience in less time and build lasting connections.

In fact, digital lead generation spending in the US is expected to reach 3.155 billion US dollars by the end of 2022.

Marketers can execute successful campaigns to attract their prospects and generate more targeted leads that are more likely to purchase your product or opt for your services. Digital marketing relies upon real-time data and analytics; hence the leads generated are qualified.

Before we discuss all the strategies to generate leads with digital marketing campaigns, let’s understand the term digital marketing lead generation. 

What is lead generation in digital marketing? 

Lead generation in digital marketing involves digital practices that turn the online audience into a paying customer of a business.

It is simply a process of finding, attracting, and capturing the most suitable prospect for selling a product or service. 

Digital marketing lead generation mediums are online channels such as websites, blogs, social media, email, etc.

These digital mediums generate leads via various strategies such as paid ads, email campaigns, gated content, referral coupons, landing pages, etc. 

If you want to learn more in about the overall concept of lead generation, its processes and strategies, read our detailed guide on lead generation.

How is lead generation effective with the help of digital marketing?

Digital marketing offers various technologies to capture leads and nurture them while monitoring their engagement until they transform into your customers. 

Lead generation digital marketing tactics are efficacious as these techniques rely on customers’ interests.

With advanced digital marketing lead generation tools, businesses can track customers’ online journeys and analyze their habits to target them with the right content at the right time. Also, paid social media advertising has broadened customer reach. 

Several key factors make digital marketing in lead generation effective. Let’s quickly go through the insights.

1. It involves content marketing that encourages brand awareness.
2. It helps to understand their buyer persona with content engagement analytics. 
3. Paid ads enable the business to be on top of SERPs results.
4. Get more brand awareness with word-of-mouth promotion on social media.

Businesses procure success due to their loyal customers, and digital marketing lead generation is the top way to grow their loyal customer list.

How do you create a digital marketing strategy for lead generation?

Businesses rely on digital marketing techniques to drive traffic to their website and social media pages or to generate leads.

For creating a solid digital marketing lead generation strategy, you can check out the below image. It explains how you can connect with your leads when they’re in the consideration stage and later convert them into customers.

The ultimate mission of any business is to have a continuous flow of qualified leads, and digital marketing makes this possible with its various channels.  

Let’s find out all the ways through which lead generation is possible by utilizing digital marketing.

Top 6 digital marketing lead generation strategies

There are various ways to generate leads through digital marketing, and below we have shared a comprehensive list of effective lead generation strategies that can be implemented.

There are various ways to generate leads through digital marketing, and below we have shared a comprehensive list of effective lead generation strategies that can be implemented.

1. Content marketing for lead generation

Content marketing is the key element as all organic digital marketing practices require content.

Whether email marketing, SEO, or social media, every medium thrives due to content.

With the help of original, relevant, informative content and customer-targeted content, a business can capture more leads and improve its conversion rate.

With lead generation, content marketing builds trust among your target audience by offering helpful information through different forms of content.

Let’s look at strategies helping lead generation with the support of content marketing.

Strategies for lead generation with content marketing

• Use gated content such as free downable guides, statistic reports, and eBooks. 
• Produce well-researched informative blogs that have a high search volume.
• Write content such as articles, and blogs targeting TOFU (top of the funnel), MOFU (middle of the funnel), and BOFU (bottom of the funnel) audiences. 
• Create engaging and relevant content to be in the eyes of your prospects. 
• You can build a resource library on LMS about your product/services to help the sales team.
• Write FAQs to resolve common queries of your website visitors.

Remember, the highest quality of content drives high numbers of the audience, so make sure your business has an excellent content marketing team.

2. Search engine optimization for lead generation 

SEO or search engine optimization enables businesses to generate leads as it allows them to reach their target audience once they search anything on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engines.

Search engine optimization is an organic digital marketing strategy that helps optimize your website, blogs, and landing pages to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

For example, if anyone searches for “best CRM for B2B businesses.” And if you have written an optimized article on “10 best CRM for B2B businesses,” then it will appear on top of the SERPs if it’s well executed.

To give you more insights, below are some search engine optimization strategies for lead generation.

Strategies for lead generation with SEO 

• Ensure your blog fulfills the intent of the search query
• Work on your blog meta title and meta description
• Add relevant internal links to your article
• Do thorough keyword research
• Build good quality backlinks
• Improve the website speed for a better user experience 

SEO enables the business to get the top spot in SERPs and thus enhances the chances of getting more and more leads.

For online businesses, it is now crucial to stay in the top spots on search engine results as out of all, 75% of clicks get by the top; first three google results.

3. Paid advertising for lead generation 

Businesses with a high budget can go for paid advertising and start generating leads. It is the easiest, fastest, and result-driven digital marketing lead generation tactic that can be used to test your MVP (Minimum Viable Product). 

Paid advertising is a digital marketing technique that uses a bidding strategy to participate and win the real-time auction to be on the top among their competitors on a specific channel like SERPs and social media.

With paid advertising, you can advertise on various channels such as Google SERPs, social media, websites, etc.

The tactic is to get the attention of your target audience towards your business. It offers more value than traditional marketing and is the fastest way to grow.  

Strategies for lead generation with paid advertising 

Execute a search ad with gated content such as free eBooks, programs, guides, etc. 

• You can create ads on social media promoting a sales offer or an event organized by your brand.
• Also, build a remarketing ad highlighting a special limited offer for targeting marketing qualified customer lists.
• You can create hyper-targeted Google ads to target sales-qualified leads.

When it comes to the cost of paid advertisement, companies usually get charged as CPC (cost-per-click) or PPC (pay-per-click), depending upon your ad paying option. 

You can show your ads to the most prospective audience for business when they search relating to your product, services, brand, or business.

4. Social media and advertising for lead generation

Comment, like, and share have become the most common words we hear on social media daily. It is one of the powerful channels for lead generation.

47% of marketers mention that they still struggle to manage their social media channels.

Still, it offers tremendous opportunities to businesses to leverage social platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

When it comes to lead generation, social media is a great source to identify, capture or engage your likely prospects through posts, videos, polls, reels, etc.

You can set targeted social media ads to enrich customer engagements with more followers, likes, comments, or shares.

Strategies for lead generation with social media and advertising 

• Timely post relevant content to enhance brand awareness and boost website traffic.
• Always engage with your audience through comments or messages. 
• Leverage social media platforms to stand out with engaging content. 
• Provide solutions regarding your customers’ pain points.

Social media works best to reach an audience that comes at the top of the funnel for a business. It is a great medium to showcase how you are better than your competitors. Your social media activity will help your customer to identify the brand.

5. Email marketing for lead generation

Did you know that 85% of marketers choose email marketing for lead generation? 

With email marketing, you can easily track your email marketing KPIs like email open rates, click-through rate, campaign performance reports, engagement statistics, etc. 

Not only this, you can target personalized content that captures more attention which is good for business growth or building great customer relationships.

Businesses mainly use email marketing to generate qualified leads, nurture customers, engage, update, or make a target audience about services or products offered by your company. 

Email marketing for lead generation is highly effective due to its high return on investment; according to a report, $1 spending drives a $42 business.

To help you more, we have mentioned a few lead generation strategies through email marketing.

Strategies for lead generation with email marketing

• Build a strong customer relationship with marketing qualified leads by offering valuable content.
• Offer value-driven bottom of the funnel content to sales qualified leads.
• You can send catchy offers, updates, and content to your prospecting audience. 
• Also, convince your existing customers to promote with a bait of referral discounts/coupons.

Moreover, you must create content relevant to your audience, not the brand’s promotional content. If you offer value to your audience, the reciprocity magic will give you promising results. 

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6. Landing page and website optimization for lead generation

Lead generation marketing through a website or landing page is one of the most effective ways to generate high-quality leads.

A responsive business website is not enough to generate ideal leads for your sales pipeline.

Moreover, an optimized website and landing pages help to drive potential prospects and user behaviors.

Optimized landing pages on your website are crucial as these purpose-driven landing pages give most of the leads.

The design and usability of the landing pages should be top-notch as per their subject. 

Strategies to optimize your landing page and website 

• Use testimonials on your website as social proof to build brand trust. 
• Check if your landing pages are easy to navigate. 
• Make your website design captivating with the right color contrast that matches your logo. 
• Loading time should be fast enough to save from a high bounce rate.
• Check your links to navigate correctly to the desired pages. 
• Your web forms and CTA buttons should be in perfect color contrast with your brand.
  If a potential prospect lands on your website, it must be relevant enough to retain them and convert them as the lead. Your website must have enticing lead generation forms or Live Chat pop-ups to capture your ideal leads. 

You can use Salesmate eye catchy Web Forms and Live Chat pop-up systems to make your website more effective in lead capturing.

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Seamlessly connect with your website leads with Salesmate's Live Chat & Chat Journeys.

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Tools for lead generation in digital marketing

Lead generation in digital marketing is incomplete without the support of the right tool. Mainly two robust lead generation tools are needed by your sales and marketing team. 

• Email marketing tools 
• Customer relationship management tools

These tools enhance business by setting up successful lead generation campaigns with the support of web forms & email builders. 

To save more money, it would be best if you found a unified customer management platform that provides extensive support in lead generation, nurturing, segmentation, distribution, and conversions.

Salesmate for lead generation in digital marketing

Salesmate is a unified customer relationship platform helping all sizes of businesses to grow. You can go through the following domains where salesmate is providing great support for your marketing or sales executive.

Once a lead is generated, it is usually passed to the sales team to nurture it and hopefully convert it into a buying customer.  

• Send bulk or mass emails to generate leads through salesmate. 
• Track email campaign performance, like click-through rates and open rates. 
• Perform split testing to draw better results through email campaigns. 
• Use personalized, customizable templates for targeting through emails.  
• Set automated email campaign. 
• You can access social media and your leads’ emails with profile enrichment. 
• Use web forms or live chat features on your website to get leads through gated content start. 
• With mobile CRM, you manage lead generation or any task from anywhere. 
• You can sync calendars to set timely follow-ups and automate them as well.

Salesmate takes care of every business need, and thus, it offers integration with various purposeful apps so that you are not required to go anywhere. You can use Salesmate as a lead generation CRM to resolve all your lead generation hassles.

With Salesmate, you can easily generate leads, track their journey, and convert them. Along with your website, you can leverage various lead sources, such as social media, through contact management and profile enrichment features. 

Salesmate offers true support to marketers or salespeople with its marketing automation and sales pipeline management feature.

Conclusion

Without testing, it would be difficult to identify what works or what does not for any business!

Now that you know all the digital marketing lead generation strategies, you can start experimenting for your business. The practice will provide comprehensive teachings to marketers enabling them to improve lead generation.

With the support of the right tool and an effective digital marketing lead generation strategy, it would be feasible for you to drive more sales.