Have you mastered consistency in your lead generation strategies? If you’re reading this, chances are that’s a “no,” or you feel there’s room for improvement.
A quality lead funnel (how you guide prospects through discovery to purchase) is the foundation of your sales strategy. It doesn’t matter if your primary lead source is social media ads or word-of-mouth marketing. Generating leads is an essential first step of this process and can be the key to unlocking scalable business growth.
Is the lead generation strategy that worked in 2020 no longer reliable, or have your target customers or services changed? As we begin 2025, let’s consider how you can adjust your lead generation strategy and tactics, and what tools can help.
Creating your lead generation strategy
Ad hoc lead generation may work for a while, but it’s not sustainable and may not produce the warm, ready-to-buy leads you need. Instead, create your lead generation strategy to ensure your efforts are focused on bringing in the highest quality leads and content flow you need to scale or grow your business.
Your strategy should include:
- Audience profile: Who exactly is your target customer, and what do you know about their pain points, reasons for seeking a solution, how long they compare solutions (lead cycle), and motivations when making a purchasing decision?
- Lead nurturing funnel: Create marketing and lead funnels with content to attract new leads and content to nurture them as they learn more about your solutions and make their buying decision.
- ROI calculations: Review your budget and lead generation results over time to understand the ROI for your channels, content, and lead paths. With this information, you can optimize your content generation and marketing spending, which provides the highest chance of predictable leads and overall ROI.
As with any digital marketing strategy, be open to evolving your strategy over time. Give each tactic or strategy time to work, but if it isn’t performing optimally (based on your goals or expectations), consider tweaking your plan to find that optimized solution.
3 Top-selling Lead-generation Tactics
Online lead generation tactics will vary depending on your needs, marketing capacity, and budget. However, they’ll typically fall into three categories:
1. Content Marketing
Content is king (or queen). The content you produce (including blogs, e-books, whitepapers, and more) will be a key driver in your lead funnel. They can be used to educate prospects about you and your solutions, showcase your expertise in the solution (thought leadership), and provide valuable information for your prospects to make their buying decision.
2. Social Media
Choose which social media platforms your customers frequent and create an active business presence. Use your profile to share your thought leadership and engage more personally with leads and customers. You can also invest in social media ads to expand your visibility and reach to new leads, or nurture existing ones.
3. Email Marketing
Emails continue to be a valuable lead-generation tactic. Thanks to privacy laws in many areas, your prospects must opt-in to receiving communications from you, which in marketing means they are at least somewhat interested in your business or content, making them a lead.
You can harness email marketing by setting up segmented lists to provide subscribers with a more personalized selection of content or campaigns based on what they need now and where they are in your lead funnel. Build your list (and leads) by offering a freebie in exchange for being added to your mailing list.
Helpful marketing tools for lead generation
To create a scalable lead generation strategy, marketing tools can help you track leads and customer information, automate processes, and analyze or report on your results.
1. Customer Relationship Systems (CRM): Scalable lead generation strategies require tracking your leads and the information you learn about them. With the right tools, you can track every time a customer interacts with your brand on social media or your website (assuming that the more they interact, the higher in the lead funnel they may be).
While you can manually use a spreadsheet to track leads, more sustainable options include Hubspot, Salesforce, or Zoho.
2. Marketing Automation Software: Another scalable strategy is to use marketing automation. Tools can help you automate your lead generation and nurturing by publishing content at a specific time, adding or updating contacts in your CRM, generating analytics and reports, and integrating data so it can be shared between multiple apps for deeper insights and personalization.
Marketing automation software our clients like includes Hubspot, Zapier, and email marketing programs like Mailchimp.
3. Analytics and Reporting: Measuring success helps you learn which content, channels, and strategies provide the best leads. Many popular marketing tools and software include analytics and reporting functionality already.
There are many ways to measure the success of your lead generation strategies, including:
- Conversion rates
- Cost per lead
- Cost per acquisition
- Lead quality
- Engagement
- A/B testing
- Customer lifetime value or deal size
We also find Google Analytics helpful for learning more about customer behaviour and lead generation campaigns.
Building your lead generation roadmap for business growth
Your path to business growth in 2025 is to create a scalable, predictable lead generation program. The right combination of strategy, tactics, and tools can help you optimize your lead funnel to generate higher-quality leads while being mindful of your costs.
At picnic social strategies, we can help you develop a strategy using content like social media, blogs, newsletters, and more to help you attract and nurture new leads for your business. Our team of strategists, designers, and content writers will work with you to create content and campaigns to meet your lead generation needs in 2025 and beyond.
Book a complimentary discovery call with Erica today to discuss your lead generation struggles and learn where picnic can fill in the gaps.
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