Finding people interested in what you have to sell – sounds easy right? But if it was as easy as it sounds, there wouldn’t be so many thousands of lead generation companies in existence.

There are countless strategies these companies employ (often changing as per the product/service being marketed), but we’ll dive into the most common, how they work, and what it takes to do them.

Content Farms

Unfortunately, they have yet to be fully stamped out by Google and other engines. Low-quality lead generation services that engage with content farms pump out massive amounts of cheap content and “manipulate” search engines to gain traffic. From there, they obtain user information through “sign up for more” forms. Then they sell that “lead information” to relevant companies.

I know, this model sounds outdated in 2016, but it has persisted through adaption.

Advertising platforms

Admittedly, ad platforms are not ordinarily listed as lead generation tools. However, when an advertisement leads to a page that is intended to gather data on you and your interest in buying, it becomes method for generating leads.

One common scenario is having a searcher click an ad leading to a free trial, but they can only use the free trial after filling up a form requiring some personal data.

Another scenario is a browser clicking a remarketing banner ad offering a free webinar that you can only attend if you fill up yet another quick form.

Seeing the pattern here? If it leads you to giving your information, it’s probably a lead gen strategy.

Lead nurturing and lead building tools (Outbound/Inbound)

Outbound– This is where real manual outreach labor comes into play. Lead generation companies that use outbound lead gen strategies (B2B or B2C) roughly follow these steps.

Build a database containing a list target buyers using a variety of research tools.
Use that database in combination with a lead gen tool like ecquire to move the lead information from an online platform (like LinkedIn) into salesforce.
Either contact these people through LinkedIn or on their own email addresses (see number 4)
Email addresses generally are more valuable; they are obtained through tools like leadgenius or an email verification tool like rapportive.
Make the introduction smoother by finding any mutual contacts to leverage through tools like conspire.

Inbound- As the most popularized type of lead gen, inbound lead gen tools are often present on company blogs, landing pages, and social media. Inbound works like this:

Draw traffic in to your website or social space with online traffic building strategies.
Converting that traffic to a lead with a marketing automation tool like marketo.

Sounds simple right? Sadly, it’s not. The strategies for accomplishing this task border on infinite.

Getting the right traffic to the right place and properly nurturing a lead along the different stages of the buying cycle is a complicated, imperfect formula. Both internal marketing departments and lead generation services are tasked to find the right inbound strategy over time but will inevitably fail before finding success.

After generating leads for over 15 year now, we’ve have had our fair share of experience finding success.

We can put our strategies for lead generation for you, too.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/sailors-all-hands-deck-903033/

Tags:- Advertising platforms conspire Content Farms ecquire