Three unique ideas for generating leads

Growing your business would be pretty difficult without new clients. As anyone who has searched for B2B leads knows, prospecting takes away time and resources from your sales team, preventing them from turning qualified leads into paying customers.

You’re not alone in this struggle. According to a 2021 Hubspot report, 61% of marketers say lead generation is their biggest challenge. You have to stand out from the crowd, find new ways to connect and remain competitive, all while having an innovative strategy that evolves with new technologies and trends.

Not sure how to start generating leads? Here are three unique strategies for success.

1. Lead magnets

This concept isn’t new. Offering a free piece of advice, exclusive deals, or even physical goods in exchange for customer contact information is a time-honored sales strategy—everyone loves a free sample! The trick is to find a new and unique way to get customers interested.

Effective lead magnets have a few things in common:

They’re high-value

A good lead magnet is something relevant that your potential client can’t find anywhere else easily. It needs to solve a problem they have and give them a quick win.

They’re specific

If you have several product lines, you probably don’t have the same customer base for all of them. The same goes for lead magnets. Don’t use a generic one-size-fits-all products or services—it simply won’t be useful to enough people.

They don’t take up a lot of time

Your potential customers are busy. They can’t stop to read a long report or case study. Give them an engaging, valuable piece of content that they can quickly absorb and put to use.

They offer instant gratification

When your lead opts in, they want their prize right away. Making them wait, or worse, jump through hoops, is a fast way to lose their interest. Using automation to quickly deliver the goods helps avoid this.

The type of lead magnet you use depends on your product and the ideal customer.

2. User-generated content

On your website, social media, or blog, user-generated content connects potential customers to your actual customers. This is an opportunity for your current customers to show what they appreciate about your product. You can publish testimonials and reviews from existing clients and pair them with a call to action.

Also, don’t focus only on the positive: Study those reviews to discover what your customers like and what they don’t, then use that information to solve a problem for them. You can do the same with your competitors’ offering—mine their reviews for the ways your product is different and better. Highlight these selling points in outreach campaigns and email sequences.

3. Target leads that fit the mold

You shouldn’t market to an audience that isn’t right for your product, but you can come at your ideal customer from a different angle. What other products or services do they need that are complementary to yours? What other connections do they share? By positioning yourself in those marketplaces—through social media, advertisements, and networking spaces—you can find business leads you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

Accurate lead generation made easy

Of course, not everyone who offers up their information for a lead magnet will eventually close on a deal. Similarly, when someone gives you their contact details in response to good reviews, how do you know whether they have the budget to purchase your service? And although you’ll meet interesting people by networking in adjacent markets, they may not be senior enough to make purchasing decisions.

What if you could bypass these sales funnel blockers by creating accurate lead lists at the very beginning of the prospecting stage?

American City Business Journals empowers you to do exactly that with BizLeads, its recently launched, cloud-based business prospecting tool. The platform lets you search and download information on over 30 million private companies and 80 million business professionals throughout the United States, which is the most first-party data held by any prospecting tool on the market.

BizLeads subscribers can:

• Use 14+ search filters (e.g., industry, geographic location, number of employees) to build accurate sales prospect lists from the get-go.
• Search by company revenue for leads who can afford what you’re selling.
• Search by job title and seniority to make sure you’re contacting decision-makers (validated emails are provided!).

Don’t waste time on dead-end leads. Schedule a 15-minute BizLeads Demo and start discovering your ideal prospects today.