5 lead generation tactics for successful digital marketing campaigns

Demand generation and lead generation (or demand capture) are the two most important pillars of digital marketing. Demand generation is the process of creating awareness and interest in your product or service — it’s like finding new friends for your business. Lead generation is how you develop those friendships, with the goal of nurturing your leads through the marketing and sales funnel.

When the two are in sync, demand generation continually introduces new audiences to your brand and, once you’ve got their attention, your lead generation strategy turns those interested audiences into long-term customers. And we all need more customers, right? 

According to the ViB State of B2B Marketing report, 54% of marketers say the biggest challenge they face is improving lead quality and conversion rates while 41% say their biggest challenge is generating more leads.

Marketers, and B2B marketers in particular, are under a lot of pressure to hit their lead gen goals. At the same time, B2B buyer behavior is changing, and lead generation strategies and tactics need to adapt to keep pace with the world we now find ourselves in. So let’s dig in. What is lead generation in digital marketing and what lead generation tactics can help you succeed?

What is lead generation in digital marketing?

Lead generation in digital marketing is the process of attracting ideal prospects, converting them into your funnel, and nurturing them until they become a loyal customer. 

In traditional sales and marketing tactics, in-person events, conferences, and trade shows were the most effective form of lead generation. Though in-person events are still important, most consumers today look first to search engines and digital channels to find solutions to their challenges and problems. This is why lead generation tactics specific to a digital environment have gained so much traction.

HubSpot is famous for their Inbound Marketing Approach to lead generation. Other tactics, like account based marketing (ABM), are also popular among B2B marketers. Whatever direction you take, remember that the simple goal is to turn potential customers into actual customers, and there are a few key lead generation tactics that can make that a reality.

How to generate leads in digital marketing: 5 key lead generation tactics

1. Make your content irresistible

The foundation for any successful lead generation campaign is quality content marketing. After all, the best way to get someone to complete a form and give you their information is by offering something they find inspiring, informative, or entertaining. Generally, this comes in the form of offering more information on a topic that isn’t widely available.

Whether you choose to create a guide, eBook, white paper, checklist, video, or another form of downloadable content, you need to make sure it’s valuable to the person you are asking to fill out a form to download it. Select your topic, do the necessary research, and have an expert copywriter put together the content and optimize it for the format you’ve chosen. Once that is finalized, pass it to your design team to make it branded and beautiful.

Another element of making your content irresistible is thinking about where people will encounter it and tailoring your message to guide them into filling out a form. In a perfectly SEO-optimized world, your ideal potential customer would find your landing page through organic search, enter their information into the form to access the content you’ve just created, and become a customer. SEO, however, is just one element of your lead generation strategy.

Have your copywriters, design team, and marketing strategists work collaboratively to create multi-channel content with compelling CTAs (call-to-action). This refers to Instagram or LinkedIn posts, blog posts, webinars, email marketing content, and digital advertising assets such as Google Ads to promote the information within your content and encourage downloads. Your promotional content should link directly to your landing page, or wherever the downloadable content and form is located.

2. Adopt a video marketing strategy

Many B2B marketers are dipping their toes into video marketing, and with great success. Research by Wyzowl found that 87% of marketers have seen increased traffic through the use of video and 86% of marketers have generated new leads through video marketing.

The opportunities for video marketing are significant, and the good news is you can repurpose existing content to get your video marketing campaign off the ground. Areas of opportunity include creating a YouTube channel geared toward answering the top concerns and questions of your target audience, creating video ads to run as part of your LinkedIn campaigns, or incorporating video into existing content, like blogs and newsletters, to make your lead gen campaigns more captivating and engaging. 

Video is an excellent way to educate, showcase your product or service and its capabilities, and entice people into wanting to learn more about who you are and what you do — AKA become a qualified lead.

In case you need a bit more convincing, Aimtal worked with a cybersecurity company to create a video series that resulted in more than 300,000 YouTube views, more than 6,800 watch hours spread across eight episodes, and a community of more than 2,000 engaged followers across Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube — and that’s just for season one.

3. Double down on email marketing

As much as we bemoan our overstuffed email inboxes and look to messaging apps as our primary form of communication, email newsletters still have a strong role to play in marketing and lead generation. To get the most out of your newsletter content strategy, start by defining your goals, knowing your audience, and picking newsletter topics that will both encourage new people to sign up and motivate your existing audience to stick around.

The thing about your email audience is it’s your captive audience to delight and engage as you choose. At some point, each person saw value in your brand or content enough to want to subscribe (and become a lead). Now the trick is to successfully nurture that audience to take the next step with your product or service.

4. Show your product or service in action

We know that, especially in B2B, people are doing their own research on products and services and prefer not to have to talk to sales reps or participate in live demos just to get a sense of what your company has to offer. Give the people what they want — let them see, interact, and engage in their own way, on their own time, without having to go through a sales call to do so. 

Providing explainer videos, pre-recorded demos, webinars, quizzes, ROI calculators, customer case studies, and free trials are all a great way to answer people’s questions, get them to engage, and, when the time is right, fill out a form to book a meeting, sign up for your email newsletter, or download an ebook to help them in the next stage of their research. 

5. Get your web appearance and forms in tip-top shape

Often overlooked but oh so important is to make sure your forms and landing pages are optimized and designed with the user in mind, visually, in the messaging, and in user-friendliness. When someone gets to your landing page as part of your lead generation campaign, it should be crystal clear what action you want them to take next, what the benefits are, and what they can expect as a result.

In your forms, ask for only the information you critically need. Make your CTA clear and specific. In your copy, explain what the offer is and build some excitement or interest around the offer to encourage a form submit. On the design side, make sure the landing page matches your brand and has a clear and apparent flow. We eat with our eyes, we shop with our eyes, and, in many ways, we convert with our eyes as well.

Measuring the success of your lead generation strategy

Once you’ve decided on what lead generation tactics you want to incorporate into your strategy, the next step is to identify what digital marketing metrics you want to track to measure success and making sure your campaign is optimized to track those metrics. Here are three areas to focus on.

Set up landing pages and tracking

Once your content and promotional plans are ready, you’ll need to create a place for the downloadable content to live—aka the landing page mentioned earlier. This system may vary by whether you host your website through a site like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or utilize landing pages through a platform like HubSpot.

Create your initial landing page with a form, then create a confirmation page (not applicable for HubSpot sites) that potential customers are led to after completing the form. After creating and publishing these pages, you’ll want to generate UTM links to the main landing page for each channel you plan on sharing the link to. This will help you get more accurate results and separate organic versus paid traffic to the page.

If you are launching social media and/or digital ads, you will need to install channel-specific pixel and conversion codes onto the two website pages in order to track the exact number of conversions. Each social media channel has documentation of how to generate and install their codes on your sites.

Launch, monitor, and adjust your campaign

Our golden rule after launching a campaign: never set it and forget it! Be sure to check in on your organic and paid promotions to see how they are performing, evaluate what could potentially help them perform better, and make any necessary adjustments.

Example: You promote your content on LinkedIn, and even back it with a paid ad budget of $500. If a month goes by and your ads are getting low impressions and clicks to the landing page, it may be time to pause the paid ads and evaluate your targeting, or shift your efforts to a different channel that may perform better.

Report and evaluate the effectiveness of your lead generation campaign

The final step in a lead generation campaign is reporting and reflecting on the campaign. There are three key questions you and your team should consider when evaluating your campaigns’ performance:

• Do you understand the results and numbers you are looking at?
• How many leads did you generate?
• Are those leads actually qualified and/or valuable to you?

Simply reading the metrics may not be enough for you to determine success. Many marketers find far more value in who the leads are than the total number of leads generated. Although a high number of downloads may seem exciting at first, if none find your services valuable, you may as well have had zero downloads in the first place.

Launch your lead generation campaign and watch sales soar

Before you launch your next digital marketing campaign, consider this: Do you know what lead generation tactics are most successful for your brand and what content people consume that makes them more likely to convert? 

Focus your efforts on what works and test out some new tactics along the way. Sometimes “the right way” might not be the best way for your brand, and that’s where experimentation, creativity, and a bit of daring can take your lead generation strategy to exciting new places. (And to numbers that will make the C-Suite dance for joy.)

<a href="/resources/b2b-demand-gen-guide" class="resources__link w-inline-block"><div class="_w-resource-item-content"><div class="_w-resource-item-img"><img alt="" loading="lazy" id="w-node-_1957ae03-f2a1-00b4-04c6-eb33c50ef89b-290c290f" src="https://assets-global.website-files.com/62233f4a508be02900c98959/62f451aaf4e3f72177f2de88_62f45193d468ee0373141446_Aimtal_Demand%20Generation_Guide%201.webp" class="resources__image"></div><div id="w-node-_1427d3cf-93d5-3eea-f8cc-7bf9d65233b1-290c290f" class="_w-resource-item-info"><div class="h3 resource-item-heading">B2B Demand Generation Guide: How To Drive Leads And Grow Your Business</div><p class="resource-item-subtitle">Lead Gen Guide</p><div class="resources__linktext">Get the guide</div></div></div></a>