Digital marketing is slowly becoming a necessity due to the growing competition in online business arena. It involves web design, search engine optimization, content creation, social media marketing, mobile advertising and other digital marketing tactics. But staying in the game could prove to be difficult for many entrepreneurs owing to the complex nature of the game and unless these players work hand-in-hand with lead generation tools in digital marketing, it can turn out to be an uphill task for them.
Lead generation is one of the most important parts of digital marketing and if you run a business then you’ll always need more leads. In this video I’ll go through some the best free and paid lead generation tools that I use for my business and that can help you develop your own!
In digital marketing, lead generation tools are used to generate the valuable contact information (name, email address, phone number, and so on) of the targeted audience. Since digital marketing largely depends on data, these lead generation tools can be considered as effective tools for understanding customer behavior patterns.
In this guide I discuss the best lead generation tools for digital marketers. The big players are Salesforce Pardot, Hubspot, Marketo, Infusionsoft and Eloqua. There are others of course, many other more specialized platforms as well. Let me know what you think!
What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?
In digital marketing, lead generation is the process of identifying, attracting, and transforming online users into prospects for a business. The method utilizes online channels, tactics, and strategies such as email campaigns, paid social media ads, or even offering downloadable content through a landing page.
Quora
Best For: Inbound lead generation, Q&A forum
Quora can be a powerful lead generation platform where you can find people asking questions about your industry topics. And if you can convince them about your expertise in providing the solution, you can generate new leads and drive traffic to your website.
How to Use Quora for New Leads?
- Provide quality answers to questions and attract people to your business.
- Collect upvotes on the answers to feature them on the top to maximize visibility.
- Add links to your answers to drive traffic to your website.
- Post insightful questions that people might search for on the internet and provide the answers/solutions.
- Build brand credibility by genuinely answering the questions posted on Quora.
Pros
- It is free and simple to use.
- Provides a great portal with massive engagement to drive organic traffic to your website.
Cons
- You cannot do much except engage visitors via questions and answers.
Price: Free
ProProfs Discuss
Type: Q&A forum
Suited For: Small to medium businesses
Just like Quora, ProProfs Discuss is another Q&A forum where people post their questions. It provides a tremendous opportunity to show the users that you can efficiently provide the solution they are looking for by answering their questions and attracting them to your business.
How to Use ProProfs Discuss to Generate Leads?
- Find the questions that suit your industry or expertise and answer them to engage users.
- Collect upvotes on the answers to maximize visibility and build credibility.
- Reply to the answers posted by other users to add more information and improve the answer.
- Share your answers on social media to increase your followers and customer base.
- Post your own questions to which people would like to hear a viable answer or solution to build your brand image and attract new customers.
Pros
- Easy to set up account and use for free
- Has millions of active users that can be directed for organic traffic to your website
- Best place to get warm leads for a variety of businesses
Cons
- It needs to cover more Q and A categories
Price: Free
Planable
Best for: nurturing leads and landing more customers
Suitable For: Small to big businesses
Integrations: Yes
Planable is a social media collaboration tool that allows you to plan your social media content so you can nurture leads and land more customers. Planable is an ideal tool for teams who are looking to streamline their publishing processes and deliver lead-generating content on a regular basis.
How can you use Planable to generate and nurture leads?
- An intuitive and easy-to-use social media calendar to create, plan and schedule social content.
- A multi-level approval system that ensures only the best lead-generating social media content sees the light of day.
- Design that mimics the feel, flow
- and look at social media which helps teams optimize content for specific platforms.
- Integrations with major social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google My Business, YouTube, and TikTok.
- Feedback and team collaboration features. Giving feedback is as simple as commenting or replying next to the piece of content in question.
Pros
- The calendar view is pretty awesome to plan your entire posting schedule.
- Collaborate with other team members directly from the calendar to design and optimize the posts.
Cons
- The analytics dashboard is very basic and rudimentary. It can be improved to fetch more data from social sites.
Price: Starts at $9/u”
Google Forms
Pricing: Free
Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars via G2
While it won’t have the level of integration and analytics that come with tools like Survicate or Qualaroo, Google Forms can still help create surveys. The tool is easy to use, and best of all, it’s free.
Extole
Pricing: Contact for a demo
Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 17 Capterra reviews
Extole is an enterprise referral tool designed to turn customers into advocates — making it easier for you to close deals. It helps brands identify and engage with advocates with integrated social sharing, refer-a-friend programs, and a reward engine for offering customized rewards to your best customers.
Survey Monkey
Pricing: Plans start at $25 per month per user
Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 8300 reviews on Capterra
Survey Monkey is a customer survey and feedback collection tool that helps companies better understand their customers. Features of note include easy-to-build surveys, detailed reporting tools, custom logo, colors, and URLs, advanced data exporting, and the ability to accept payments.
Higher plans offer advanced data analytics, targeting, access to industry benchmarks, and data visualization.
Referral Candy
Pricing: $49 per month, 30-day free trial
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars based on 186 reviews on Capterra
ReferralCandy is an e-commerce plugin that helps brands grow their sales by automating referrals and affiliate marketing. Features include the ability to design custom emails, pop-ups, and landing pages, a detailed dashboard to track your referrals, and custom rewards to drive retention and sales.
Leadfeeder
Collecting data about prospects helps with decision-making for lead generation campaigns. With Leadfeeder, you’re getting more than just first-party information from prospective customers. You’re also seeing which companies are visiting your site.
Imagine learning about a potential new market to target after seeing several companies from an industry you’re not focused on. You can take this data and apply it to your ABM campaigns and outreach efforts.
Leedfeeder does this by connecting with your Google Analytics account. After installing it, you’ll have access to insights about industries, employee count, contact details, and behavioral data. This includes which sites a visitor views and the source of all your traffic.
There’s a free version of this tool you can sign up for. But the data is limited to showing only the last three days’ worth of leads. You can upgrade to Premium for $63/mo. It comes with a two-week free trial to determine if it’s right for you before committing.
Hootsuite
Establishing your brand’s presence on social media is critical today. Everyone’s looking for humanized experiences with companies, making social networks the ideal place to connect. But as a B2B marketer, there’s a lot on your plate already. Adding social media posting into the mix may be time-consuming.
So to counter this, you can use a tool like Hootsuite to manage all of your profiles in a single dashboard. This platform connects to your social accounts and allows you to schedule posts in advance. All you need is time to create a month’s worth of posts and then set it and forget it (or at least, until the following month).
Hootsuite also comes with analytics about your social campaigns to see how well they’re performing. Plus, you get to see what your audience thinks by monitoring conversations, brand mentions, and trends.
There’s a 30-day free trial, giving you plenty of time to test all of its features. Afterward, plans start at $49/mo for Professional and $129/mo for Team.
SlideShare
Creating visual content that’s informative is key to building visibility in the B2B community. This is what makes SlideShare a powerful tool for B2B marketers. Surely, you’ve watched more than a few SlideShares yourself.
It’s an excellent platform for displaying your expertise in the industry. Use it to educate your audience about a problem, topic, or solution. You can also use it as accompanying content for a webinar, video, or blog post.
The tool joined LinkedIn back in 2012, making it perfect for sharing content with your B2B audience. And best of all — it’s free to use.
ActiveCampaign
Managing customer relationships is a part of turning leads into long-term customers. When you take the time to build meaningful connections, it increases the odds of them sticking around. In some cases, customers may even turn into brand advocates.
Maintaining good relationships with your clients will help retention rates and generate referrals. ActiveCampaign is a CRM platform, which means you can automate customer relationship management.
All of your lead data is in a single platform, making it easy for marketing and sales to collaborate. It’s also capable of managing your pipeline, following up with leads, creating segmented email campaigns, and keeping deals fresh. The platform has a user-friendly interface, and it’s cost-effective.
Plans start at only $15/mo or $9/mo annually for the Lite plan.
How to Generate Marketing Leads?
Since loyal customers are the lifeblood of any successful business, lead generation is a top priority for marketers and the companies that want to grow. The strategies of lead generations typically involve using content in various forms to increase brand awareness and interest in products or services. Using the sales funnel to nurture the leads interested in your business and nudge them towards taking purchase actions. Seasoned B2B marketers focus on the quality of the lead they attract. They do this by working to understand their buyer persona and ensure that their content resonates deeply with their ideal customer.
Speaking of strategies, keep in mind that content is the medium you’ll use to reach your ideal customers. You need to invest significant resources in creating valuable content that helps your target audience achieve some of their goals related to the product or service you sell. While you’re at it, I’ll share with you three effective lead generation strategies used by highly successful marketers to attract and convert qualified prospects.
If you want your ideal customer to pay special attention to your content when they come across it on any marketing channel, here are the lead generation strategies and tools to keep in mind while planning your digital marketing campaigns.
1. Use advertising platforms
If you have a budget and want to get started as fast as possible, the most simple way to test out your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is to run advertising campaigns on Google or social media platforms like Facebook. How? It’s simple. Based on your product or service type, you can
2. Create gated content pieces and promote them
One way to ensure that you attract quality leads is to create gated content. Gated content is valuable pieces of content that are related to the business goals of your prospect. This content can be anything- white papers, ebooks, case studies; give it a clear and captivating title that tells a prospect precisely what they will gain when they download your content. Since the content is gated, prospects who want access will have to fill the lead capture form. The use of gated content is effective because it makes a good impression on prospects who download and brings your brand legitimacy in front of them. It also provides you with high-quality leads with a genuine interest in your product or service.
3. Host events
An event is a great way to engage with your target audience in real-time and build meaningful relationships with them. Hosting a webinar, workshop, or conference to interact with your ideal customers gives you the chance to capture their contact information when they register for the event. Pay close attention to questions, objections during your discussion in the event. You’ll learn more about your audience and artfully guide them through your sales funnel.
Conclusion
A lead generation tool is a strategy used to make potential buyers aware of your business and what you have to offer. The technology allows companies to communicate with their target market, then track its performance to improve results. It is crucial for digital marketing businesses because it gives them the ability to grow their customer base. Lead generation tools are a great way to generate leads and make more sales.
If you are an individual or an Internet marketer, one of the most important things to do is to generate quality leads. In fact, lead generation has been a long-standing and reliable tool for online businesses and companies around the world. If you want to boost your site’s conversion rate, then listing and promoting high-quality lead generation tools can do exactly that for your business.