Technology may have made B2B selling more manageable, but that doesn't mean it's made it easier.

SDRs are overworked and striving to achieve more (just 16% of SDRs get above 90% of their sales deals quota), while the B2B sales environment has only gotten more challenging (75% of buyers say they’d prefer a rep-free experience).

In an increasingly competitive B2B market, closing a deal matters more than ever, especially as the average win rate for B2B is just 21%.

Today, sales reps need to respond quickly to prospects and be equipped with the tools to close deals instantly.

How can sellers do that? By integrating chat features directly into a company's website, enabling reps to have real-time conversations with prospects.

So, how does this work? Let's explore with some genuine examples from Warmly’s Live Video Chat.

B2B deal killers in 2024

Buyers want a streamlined purchasing journey just as much as your sales rep wants an efficient sales funnel.

As Gartner reports, the top reason B2B buyers disqualify a solution is because of contradictory price expectations.

However, the second-most popular reason, reported by 36% of buyers, is receiving confusing or contradictory information during the sales process. A low-quality sales presentation can also reduce the likelihood of a prospect signing.

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Sales objections like these typically occur early on in the sales funnel, when a buyer is still scoping out your product versus another company's. When objections do arise, a sales rep who can handle them successfully and minimize the buyer's worry is far more likely to successfully close.

According to one survey, top sales performers are 843% more likely to overcome objections than average sellers. But that's not all—they're also 366% more likely to close an opportunity at the 'Discovery' stage of the funnel.

Sell in real-time, instantly close

Generally, a buyer arrives at a meeting with your sales rep already knowing enough to make a decision. They're aware of your website (in fact, they've probably made multiple visits), your competitors, your product's features, your social presence.

At this point, you need to convince them, not necessarily sell to them. The Gartner survey above shows that a hard sell only makes it more likely that they will choose a competitor (35% of buyers drop a vendor because of aggressive sales tactics).

So, what's a sales rep to do?

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Crucially, B2B buyers are 1.8 times more likely to sign deals when interacting with supplier-provided digital tools alongside sales reps. Buyers don't want sales rep hand-holding all the way through the sales process—they want you to meet them where they are.

And how do you know where they are? By using website de-anonymization tools along with warm signals that tell you which leads are in your ICP and ready to buy.

Once you know a prospect is on your website, real-time chat enables your sellers to interact with them instantly. With a comprehensive overview of your prospect, a good seller can even anticipate their objections.

So, for example, if you know a prospect has spent quite a bit of time on your pricing page across multiple visits, chances are they're mulling over cost concerns.

Maybe they're trying hard to crunch the numbers or persuade the CFO that it's worth the investment.

Next time that prospect is on your pricing page, your sales rep could join a website chatbot instantly and talk through the concerns they have.

Bingo—the lead feels more comfortable about buying, and your seller has closed a hell of a lot quicker than average. Win-win.

How to close deals earlier with Warmly’s Live Video Chat

Recently, Keegan, our Head of Revenue & RevOps, went through a similar scenario.

Context: it was the last day of the month, but there was still just enough time to close one more deal. Really.

He got a real-time Slack notification via Warmly (our signal-based revenue orchestration platform), telling him a CEO was browsing our Cacheflow proposal page.

It was time to put the intelligent Warmly sales strategy in motion. Keegan jumped straight into Warmly's chatbot to ask if the CEO had any questions.

As well as typing messages in the chat box, Keegan appeared in a live video feed, assuring the CEO that it was, in fact, an actual human talking to him.

Over chat, Keegan was able to answer the CEO's questions about Warmly instantly, assuring them of their purchase decision without any icky hard selling.

Within just a few minutes, Keegan had sent over the Warmly contract and witnessed the CEO leaving the Warmly website and opening DocuSign in real-time.

Spoiler alert: he signed with Warmly.

Selling smarter with Warmly's AI Prospector and Live Video Chat

We built Warmly to solve today's biggest challenges for sales reps—prioritizing leads and closing faster.

Sellers want you to meet them where they're at, but how are you meant to predict that?

Warmly de-anonymizes visitors to your website and uses best-in-class intent data to tell you which prospects are showing intent to buy, automating personalized outreach to them.

‎So, you can use Warmly to separate the leads landing on your website into segments, track how long they’re spending on your website, and then engage with the best prospects in real time using our chatbot and live video chat, just like Keegan did.

With cooler leads, free up your sales reps to work on more critical accounts by using Warmly's inbound chat workflows and intelligent, contextually-aware AI Chat.

Here’s how it works from start to finish.

Lead segmentation  

Set up segments in your Warmly account to filter your website visitors based on data points like your ICP, level of buyer intent demonstrated, or engagement activities on your website.

Warmly deanonymizes 15% of contacts and 65% of companies that visit your website, using data from various sources so you can have confidence that we’re identifying the right people.

The segments you set up form the basis for the rest of your sales engagement activities on Warmly. Once they’re up and running, you can run almost everything autonomously if you wish.

Instant visitor notifications

When a high-intent lead lands on your website, Warmly sends your sales reps a Slack notification with the relevant data that will help inform their sales strategy.  

You can manually decide which reps get notifications for which prospects, or you can route alerts to different Slack groups based on demographic and personal information like job title, location, or company size.  

The alert will let you know which page your prospect is currently browsing your site so you can meet them where they’re at. Literally and metaphorically.

Contextually-aware chatbot

This is where the magic happens.

Once your sales rep has received an alert about a lead, they can open up Warmly and track which pages they’re on. Then, your rep can conduct a real-time sales conversation with the prospect via Warmly’s chatbot.

Has your prospect got a question that would be better answered in a call? Instantly switch from chat to live video calling directly within Warmly. 

Your rep will be armed with all the info they need to close the deal, including search intent and previous prospect inquiries, making closing a breeze. 

Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Warmly is designed to help small and medium-sized companies accomplish more by working hand-in-hand with your talented sales reps. Far from a basic sales engagement platform, we call Warmly a signal-based revenue orchestration platform.  

Thanks to our clever lead scoring, we only loop in your sales reps when someone is ready to buy. Then, you can swoop in and use our instant chat features to close the deal instantly. 

Not only can we help you close, but also reduce churn. Research shows that a rep-assisted digital purchasing path ‎cuts B2B buyer regret by half.

And it’s not just Keegan who closes deals with Warmly. Within the first 8 minutes of turning on AI Chat, Kandji was able to book two qualified meetings. Find out more here.

Try Warmly for free right now and start converting high-value leads that land on your website.

‎Gmail might have just changed the entire game for SDRs. And it’s all to do with the innocuous email tracking pixel.

But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

Cold email has always been a sales staple. 

Fire out 100 (...or more) emails to people you think are probably in your ideal audience, and wait for that one person to respond. 

Open rate tracking is a massive part of this process. Marketers and salespeople need to know that their emails are actually being opened, not just thrown in the trash. 

And so, the advent of the email tracking pixel. A tiny pixel image in the body of your email that, when downloaded by your recipient, sends a notification back to you saying your email has been opened. 

It’s foolproof, right? Not anymore. 

The Gmail tracking pixel: what’s changed?

Toward the end of August 2024, we heard anecdotal tales of significant changes happening in Gmail related to their ongoing anti-spam campaign.

Google has been clamping down on spam emails for a while, but blocking open rate tracking hasn’t explicitly been a part of that campaign.

Until now.

GTM and sales experts started talking about a new Gmail update showing a warning banner on emails containing “suspicious images.” Credit to Brendan Kazanjian on LinkedIn and Matt Jesuele on X for these screenshots.

The warning makes it abundantly clear to recipients that the sender is using email open tracking through a tracking pixel. And in one click, your recipients can report the email as spam, likely leading to any further emails going straight to junk. 

The banner doesn’t just show on prospecting emails, though. It appears on every single email you send. 

In one fell swoop, Gmail killed email open rate tracking and left thousands of SDRs wondering: what am I going to do now?

How important is email open tracking?

If you’re using an email service provider (ESP) like Outreach, SalesLoft, HubSpot, or Apollo for your email marketing, chances are that open rate data has been a critical KPI for your sales team. 

A high open rate means you’re doing something right with your marketing copy: piquing your audience’s interest with a snappy subject line. It can also indicate that you’ve targeted the right people with your email campaign. 

In addition to open rates, there are other email marketing KPIs to take note of. As Brendan Kazanjian notes above, reply rates can be equally valuable for your sales team if you’re actively prospecting. 

However, there is a danger in overanalyzing your email campaign KPIs—especially if you’re not connecting these to your overall growth campaign. 

In short, email marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. 

When you fire off an outbound email to a new prospect, that email should be just one part of an overarching sales and marketing campaign—your revenue orchestration efforts.

Sure, losing open rate tracking might seem like a huge deal to an email marketing professional who works almost entirely independently of the rest of your sales growth team.

And, according to research from Litmus, just 30% of marketers say their ESP is “highly integrated” or “very highly integrated” into other marketing channels.

However, if you’re running a tight revenue orchestration ship, losing this one KPI compared to all the other data points you’re tracking won’t seem like the end of the world.

How SDRs can adapt

At Warmly, outbound email is a core part of our sales strategy. Did our sales team panic when they heard that open rate tracking is no more? Nope. 

So, when we heard about the Gmail tracking link changes, we went ahead and turned off open rate tracking on all our outreach[.]io emails. And it didn’t make a difference to our outbound strategy. 

Why? Because email outbound is just one part of a coordinated, integrated sales strategy that drives prospects exactly where we want them: our website. 

Thanks to Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization tools, we can tell exactly who has arrived on our website from email, socials, or search, see what pages they’re looking at, and engage with them directly on the website. 

We call it signal-based revenue orchestration. 

The email tracking solution: Warmly

Warmly unifies all your sales and marketing tools in one intuitive platform, enabling you to deanonymize website visitors, evaluate buyer intent, and conduct personalized outreach (via email and LinkedIn) from one place. 

With Warmly, you don’t need email open rates (or reply rates or click-through rates) to see which prospects are interested. In fact, open rates are hardly as valuable as knowing which prospects are visiting your core brand home, your website. 

Warmly deanonymizes 15% of contacts and 65% of the companies visiting your website and seamlessly syncs this information with your CRM. 

You can see which pages your leads are viewing, how long they spend on your site, and even get instantly notified when they view a high-intent page.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you don't know who is reading your emails when you can see exactly who is on your website at any given moment. With Warmly, email prospecting is just one tool in your belt. 

Integrated email prospecting

After you’ve learned which prospects are visiting your website, you can use Warmly’s AI Prospector tool to send personalized (and 100% automated, if you so wish) outreach to only the most relevant audience segments.

💡 See exactly how this works in our outbound playbooks.

But that's not all—when your SDR gets that Slack notification that tells them that a high-value lead is on your site, you can jump straight into a web chatbot with them. 

Want to make even more of an impression? Use our instant live video chat to jump on a video sales call with the prospect. 

💡 Read how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings in 8 minutes with Warmly’s AI Chat

🤠 Hear directly from our Head of Revenue & Ops, Keegan, about how Warmly solves the Gmail tracking pixel problem

The future of email marketing

Now, we don’t mean to scare SDRs, but this change could be just the beginning. Outbound is changing faster than most people can keep up with. 

Cold calling is already dead. Cold emailing is going the same way now, too. 

The future of outbound is going to be hyper-personalized, data-driven selling. And to do that, you need a platform that combines best-in-class data with the tools that will enable your sales teams to reach out to prospects instantly.

No more studying email open rates. No more endlessly waiting for prospects to reply (and getting mad at your salespeople when prospects don’t.)

See who's visiting your website → get notified when they're online → chat and video call instantly → close deals.

Want to see Warmly in action? Here's how Keegan, our Head of Revenue & Ops, closed a CEO using live video chat in minutes.

Warmly: smarter outbound 

Speed to lead is a problem for almost all sales teams, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses. Cold email outreach can be cheap at scale, but it’s also time-consuming and not to mention demoralizing for your sales team.

So, help your sales team work smarter—not harder—with Warmly.

• Deanonymize website visitors.
• Use buyer intent insights to score leads. 
• Route inbound leads to the right sales rep.
• Engage with prospects directly from your website.
• Personalize email and LinkedIn outreach based on lead segmentation.

You can get started with Warmly for free today. Or, book a demo to see it in action.

So, you are faced with the ultimate choice - account-based marketing vs demand generation.

Yet, you cannot decide which strategy is best for driving business growth in your particular case.

While both marketing approaches yield results, they work differently regarding primary goals, techniques, and target audiences, meaning you have to go for the one that aligns with your needs and objectives.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into the key differences between account-based marketing and demand generation, helping you understand which strategy is more suitable for you.

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

Let’s start with the basics!

Account-based marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on targeting and engaging specific, high-value accounts rather than casting a wide net across a broad audience. 

Unlike traditional marketing strategies, which aim to reach as many potential customers as possible, ABM is highly selective. 

Namely, it concentrates efforts and resources only on nurturing relationships with key accounts - that is, accounts most likely to generate significant revenue.

As such, ABM has two main objectives:

1. Increase engagement with targeted accounts and build meaningful relationships with them.
2. Drive higher conversion rates by nurturing those accounts and guiding them down the marketing funnel.

To achieve these goals, you’ll need to have perfect alignment between your sales and marketing teams to ensure that they’re working on:

• Identifying accounts that best match your ICP.
• Developing strategies fit to attract, delight, and convert them.

Common ABM tactics for attracting and nurturing key accounts often involve a mix of personalized campaigns and direct engagement. 

For example, marketers might create customized content, such as personalized emails, landing pages, or case studies, that speaks directly to the target account's unique challenges to raise brand awareness and build trust and rapport.

On the other hand, they can also launch advertising or cold call campaigns that directly engage high-value accounts, aiming to demonstrate your product’s value and build relationships that might lead to successful conversions.

What is demand generation?

The very name demand generation already implies what this marketing approach is all about.

Demand generation is a holistic marketing strategy that aims to raise awareness and generate interest in your products or services, building a steady pipeline of leads. 

Essentially, its core focus is to let potential customers know that your brand exists and that it’s actually the best solution for their key issues and needs, driving interest and demand for your product.

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To achieve this, you need to engage and educate prospects, which is why demand generation mainly consists of tactics aimed at doing exactly that, such as content marketing, SEO, social media campaigns, etc.

Consequently, it’s fair to say that the key difference between demand generation and ABM lies in their targeting approach.

ABM is highly targeted and concentrates on specific high-value accounts - the accounts most likely to benefit from your product and generate the highest ROI.

Demand generation, on the other hand, is about creating widespread awareness and attracting a large pool of leads, from which the most qualified can later be nurtured through more targeted efforts.

As such, demand generation targets a much broader audience, aiming to raise brand awareness by reaching as many potential customers as possible.

Let’s get a closer look at these differences.

How do targeting approaches between ABM and demand generation differ? 

As mentioned above, ABM is characterized by its highly specific targeting, where marketing efforts are focused on a select group of high-value accounts. 

In ABM, the goal is to identify key accounts most likely to bring significant revenue to the business and create personalized campaigns tailored to their unique needs and pain points.

As such, this approach requires:

1. Deep research to identify high-value accounts and discern their interests and pain points.
2. Close collaboration between marketing and sales teams to ensure that every touchpoint with the target accounts is relevant, tailored, and impactful.

In contrast, demand generation employs a broad targeting strategy to reach a wide audience. 

Rather than focusing on a specific set of accounts, demand generation seeks to engage a broad range of prospects, gradually educating them about the company's offerings and nurturing them through the buyer's journey. 

The emphasis here is on building brand awareness and generating interest across a wide market, with the expectation that at least a part of this audience will eventually convert into qualified leads.

In turn, these differing targeting methods significantly impact lead nurturing and conversion rates. 

In ABM, the highly specific targeting allows for more personalized and direct engagement, leading to stronger relationships with key decision-makers and often resulting in higher conversion rates. 

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Moreover, since ABM efforts concentrate on a smaller number of high-value accounts, the resources invested in each account are typically pretty substantial, leading to deeper connections and a higher likelihood of successful conversion.

On the other hand, demand generation's broad targeting approach often results in a larger volume of leads but with varying levels of interest and qualification. 

While this approach can create a robust pipeline of potential customers, the challenge lies in effectively nurturing these leads and identifying those most likely to convert. 

As a result, demand generation may require more extensive lead scoring and nurturing efforts to filter out less qualified prospects and focus on those with a higher probability of conversion.

Here’s a cheat sheet of the key differences between demand generation and ABM to help you differentiate between the two at a glance. 👇

What are the goals of account-based marketing vs demand generation?

The primary goal of ABM is to nurture and convert key accounts - as simple as that.

ABM is all about quality over quantity, focusing on a select group of high-value prospects with the ultimate aim of guiding these accounts through the sales funnel while increasing the chances of conversion and long-term loyalty.

In contrast, demand generation is about building a strong brand presence and creating a steady flow of new leads that can be nurtured through more targeted marketing efforts. 

Therefore, the goal is to cast a wide net to attract a broad audience and generate as many leads as possible by educating potential customers about your brand and its value.

As a result, each of these strategies contributes differently to the overall sales pipeline. 

ABM drives high-value conversions by focusing intensely on specific accounts most likely to generate significant revenue. This makes ABM particularly effective for businesses targeting large enterprises or key clients with complex sales cycles. 

On the other hand, demand generation fills the top of the funnel with many leads, providing a broader base of potential customers to work with. This is essential for businesses looking to rapidly grow their customer base, increase brand visibility across a wide market, or expand to new markets.

What tactics are used in account-based marketing vs demand generation?

When it comes to ABM, this approach relies on highly personalized and targeted tactics that focus on building relationships with specific high-value accounts, such as:

1. Personalized emails - Email campaigns are a big part of ABM, as tailored emails are a tested and tried strategy for approaching and engaging high-value accounts. To ensure optimal results, don’t rely on basic personalization (personal name, company name, job role, etc.) but go beyond by addressing their individual interests, pain points, needs, etc., in the email copy.
2. Tailored content - Distribute customized case studies and whitepapers to key accounts, ensuring that they are relevant to the accounts’ needs and challenges. For instance, if a key account visits your website and spends most time on a page explaining a particular feature, you can send them a case study breaking down how a similar company achieved excellent results by leveraging that product feature.

3. Direct engagement - This includes activities designed to foster deep connections with key decision-makers through direct contact, such as calls, one-on-one meetings, exclusive webinars or workshops, etc. 

4. Account-specific marketing campaigns - They aim to engage multiple stakeholders within a single account through various touchpoints, including email, social media, direct engagement, and more, to create a holistic and tailored experience that will resonate with these accounts.

In contrast, demand generation uses strategies that aim to attract a large audience and generate a steady stream of leads, including:

1. Content marketing - Blogs, ebooks, how-to videos, webinars, and similar educational and valuable content are the cornerstone of demand generation, as they help raise brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and build trust with a wide range of potential customers.

2. SEO - SEO increases the visibility of your content (and website in general) in search engine results, helping drive organic traffic to your website.

3. Social media campaigns - These help reach a wider audience, create interest in your offering, and engage them enough to give your brand a second thought when they reach the consideration stage.

4. Paid ads - PPC and social media ads designed to capture attention and drive traffic to landing pages are also widely used.

Practical examples are the best way to understand how these strategies might look in real life.

ABM strategy

Salesloft’s partnership with Reachdesk is an example of a highly successful ABM strategy that involved directly engaging high-value accounts through personalized and relevant gifts.

For instance, in the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey, Salesloft would offer prospects a free coffee voucher to book a meeting. 

At later stages, account executives would send free lunch vouchers to prospects during a demo or as a follow-up after a demo meeting. 

As they gained more information about their prospects, Salesloft’s team became even more personal, gifting unique presents like pop culture memorabilia.

Although this approach may sound unconventional, the results speak for themselves—Salesloft got 60x more ROI than before leveraging this personalized strategy.

Demand generation strategy

Pump’s success story is an excellent example of how a good demand-generation strategy can lead to excellent results.

The startup invested heavily in various demand-generation tactics, such as social media campaigns, paid ads, content, etc. As a result, their website started gaining serious traction.

However, the company fell short of capturing the demand it generated, as its team could not identify the potential leads that landed on the website.

That’s when they implemented Warmly, a website traffic identifier that enabled them to capture potential leads successfully and identify those most likely to convert right now.

Ultimately, this holistic approach resulted in closing a $20k deal in the first week of using Warmly.

How do measurement and metrics differ between ABM and demand generation?

Knowing which metrics to track - and how - is crucial for accurately measuring the performance and efficiency of your ABM and demand gen campaigns.

When it comes to ABM, since the focus is on deeply engaging and converting specific high-value accounts, the metrics are centered around the quality and depth of interactions with those accounts.

Therefore, some key ABM metrics include:

1. Account engagement, which tracks how actively the target account is interacting with your content, website, emails, events, and other marketing efforts.
2. Deal progression, which measures how many of these high-value accounts moved through the sales funnel, going from initial engagement to closing the deal. 
3. Pipeline velocity, which is the speed at which accounts move through the pipeline, helps identify bottlenecks and especially efficient strategies.

On the other hand, demand generation is focused on attracting a broad audience and generating a large volume of leads, so its KPIs are more quantitative. 

Some common metrics include:

1. Lead generation rate, which tracks the number of new leads entering the pipeline.
2. Conversion rate, which measures how effectively these leads are being converted into customers. 
3. Brand impressions, which show how often people come across your brand in daily life.

These metrics reflect the fundamental differences in strategy: 

While ABM is about precision and depth with a few key accounts, demand generation is all about scale and reach across a wider market.

Which strategy is better for your business: ABM or demand generation?

There’s no simple answer to this question, as it depends on various factors, including your goals, target audience, business type, etc.

Yet, there are certain cases where one strategy is almost certainly a better choice than the other.

For example, businesses targeting smaller, defined sets of high-value accounts, such as enterprise-level B2B companies, often prefer ABM.

The reasoning is simple here: When your business success primarily relies on deep and lasting relationships with a few key clients, ABM’s personalized and narrowed-down approach is probably a smarter call.

On the other hand, demand generation might be more suitable if your company operates in a market where volume is crucial, such as B2C or SaaS businesses that target a broad audience.

So, go for demand generation if you’re looking to build brand awareness and generate a large volume of leads that can be nurtured over time.

However, sometimes, combining ABM and demand generation can yield the best results. 

For example, a business might use demand generation to build a broad pipeline of leads and then apply ABM tools and tactics to focus on converting the most promising ones. 

This hybrid approach allows companies to benefit from demand generation's wide-cast net while leveraging ABM's personalized engagement for high-value targets, resulting in more conversions and ROI across levels.

In the end, each strategy has its perks and limitations, so it’s important to consider both sides of the coin before deciding.

Can ABM and demand generation work together?

In short, yes.

ABM and demand generation can, in fact, excellently complement each other, filling out the gaps left by each and enabling you to reach your TAM from top to bottom.

Namely, demand generation casts a wide net to attract a broad audience, filling the top of the sales funnel with a large pool of potential leads. 

Once these leads are identified, ABM can be used to focus on the most promising prospects, providing personalized attention and tailored campaigns to nurture and convert them into paying customers.

This way, you’ll both establish and maintain a broad market presence while avoiding wasting resources on low-quality leads. Instead, you’ll ensure that no opportunities are missed, at the same time focusing on converting high-potential leads into loyal clients. 

Caddis Systems is an excellent example of where an integrated approach may take you.

The company used various demand generation tools and techniques, including content marketing, email campaigns, paid ads, and SEO, to increase brand awareness, attract leads, and ultimately drive traffic to its website.

To identify the potential leads who landed there and avoid missing any hot opportunities, Caddis Systems leveraged Warmly, which enabled them to:

1. Identify anonymous website visitors at both company and individual levels.

2. Pinpoint the accounts most likely to convert based on how well they fit into their ICP and buyer intent level.

Once its team knew who its hottest accounts were, they could focus their attention on them.

To engage those accounts further, they used:

1. Warmly’s Orchestrator, which added them to automated email and LinkedIn outreach sequences consisting of personalized emails and/or LinkedIn messages and connection requests.
2. Warmly’s AI Chat, which engaged leads in conversations through contextual messages, offered relevant content, answered questions, booked meetings, and more.

Finally, when the accounts were ripe for a meeting, Caddis Systems’ sales teams used insights Warmly revealed on each account to create tailored pitches that were more likely to resonate with them.

As a result, Caddis Systems experienced 5x the ROI in just a week.

Leverage Warmly and boost your demand gen & ABM efforts 

Now that you’re aware of the key differences between ABM and demand generation, their unique approaches, and the techniques they leverage to reach their objectives, you’ll be able to make the right call much more easily.

Both strategies are powerful - not to mention the hybrid approach that delivers the best of both worlds - meaning that your choice ultimately depends on what you aim to achieve.

Regardless of which approach you go for in the end, Warmly can help you ensure that you’ll:

• Capture leads who land on your website.
• Prioritize the hottest accounts.
• Reach accounts most likely to convert while they’re still hot.

Not sure if it’s the solution you need?

Subscribe to Warmly’s free forever plan and discover what it can do for you with no strings attached.

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Keeping up with marketing trends is crucial for businesses that aim to remain competitive.

However, the fast-paced digital landscape is prone to abrupt shifts and changes, keeping marketers on their toes at all times.

In this article, we’ll highlight some of the key lead generation statistics and trends you should be aware of in 2024, as they can help you:

• Optimize your strategy for success.
• Gain insight into the future of lead generation and marketing.
• Create resilient lead generation approaches.

Ready?

Let’s go!

General lead generation statistics
1. Lead generation is a top priority for 50% of marketers

You can’t do anything without efficient lead generation, as without it, you won’t have any potential customers to convert in the first place.

This is why half of all marketers focus on lead generation before working on other marketing processes.

2. 53% of marketers spend more than 50% of their budget on lead generation

These figures further emphasize the importance of lead generation - and its complexity.

Attracting, nurturing, and converting leads requires lots of resources, and this budget spend clearly illustrates that.

3. The average cost per lead is $198.44

The actual lead acquisition cost varies, as some businesses have to invest more resources in generating leads, but the average expense revolves around $200 per lead.

4. 42% of businesses say that sales and marketing alignment is crucial for accelerating the conversion process

Good communication and collaboration between sales and marketing teams are crucial for lead generation success. They enable you to provide a consistent brand experience throughout the funnel.

Moreover, if both sales and marketing are on the same page regarding their joined efforts, target audience, and objectives, they’re more likely to succeed in less time than it would take them if they worked in silos.

66% of business leaders cite establishing a clear and straightforward lead-qualifying and scoring method as the best way to achieve this.

5. Less than half of marketers are satisfied with the performance of their multi-channel lead gen strategies

Multichannel lead generation is a tricky area for many, as just 41% of marketers cite being completely satisfied with their strategies.

Conversely, 12% state that they are not satisfied at all, meaning they’re still working on finding a successful approach.

6. 84% of businesses claim that converting MQLs to SQLs is one of the most significant lead generation challenges

Capturing leads’ attention and engaging them with your marketing materials is just half the battle.

Pushing them further down the lead generation funnel and getting them ready to contact your sales team is the real pain, as many leads cool down at this stage.

However, investing in proper lead nurturing strategies could help overcome this challenge.

7. In 2024, most marketers face challenges with generating traffic and leads

15% of marketers report that lead generation is the biggest challenge they face in today’s market, alongside keeping up with all the emerging trends.

Source

14%, on the other hand, struggle with understanding leads and their primary needs and pain points.

8. Over 90% of marketers claim that personalization of their lead generation efforts drives business growth 

Personalization is a key contributing factor to lead generation and sales efficiency.

Namely, 96% of marketers say personalization leads to repeat business, and 94% say it increases sales.

Moreover, brands that leveraged personalized experiences were 215% more likely to say that their strategies successfully generated new leads and drove more sales.

9. Most of your leads are using mobile devices to surf the web

Almost 62% of all online users are accessing your website through their mobile devices, in contrast to 36% of desktop users.

Source

This means that your website - and all the content you publish on the web - must be optimized for mobile devices to attract and convert quality leads.

10. Finding quality leads is the number one challenge for 45% of marketers

Nearly half of marketers claim that finding and attracting quality leads is the main hurdle they face in their jobs.

High competition and rising customer standards and expectations make running efficient lead gen campaigns increasingly difficult.

Content marketing lead generation statistics
11. 70% of high-performing brands leverage interactive content

Interactive content is the future of lead generation and content marketing as it enables leads to actively engage with your product in a fun and educational way.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that 70% of the most successful digital brands use interactive tools to showcase their product compared to just 36% of businesses that report lower lead generation rates and overall ROI.

12. Brands that leverage blogging have 13 times more leads and ROI than those that don’t

Blogs are one of the most efficient tactics for generating leads. They can raise brand awareness and help establish your brand as an industry leader, building trust and loyalty.

Thus, it’s no surprise that businesses that focus on producing quality content experience higher lead generation rates and, in turn, ROI.

13. Posting 15 blogs per month can result in an average of 1,200 new leads per month

Brands that regularly publish blogs - at least 15 per month - can significantly increase lead generation rates.

Of course, the actual number of leads will depend on the quality of the content you deliver, so remember to prioritize quality over quantity.

14. 74% of companies claim that good content marketing significantly boosted their lead generation success rates

They say content is king for a reason.

It can help attract and nurture leads, enabling you to subtly promote your brand through helpful and educational content.

This is why 36% of businesses report spending between 10% and 29% of their budget on content marketing alone.

15. 84% of B2B businesses think that content marketing helped the most with raising brand awareness

A majority of businesses report that they have successfully increased brand awareness and established an industry presence thanks to content marketing strategies.

At the same time, 76% of businesses cite that content marketing boosted demand and lead generation across levels, whereas 63% report that lead nurturing was the key outcome of using content marketing.

16. Businesses that use content marketing as a lead generation channel get 6x the conversion rates compared to competitors that don’t

Companies that use content marketing to attract and nurture leads experience much higher conversion rates than those that neglect this strategy.

What’s more, personalized content performs even better, yielding 120x better results than generic content.

17. 87% of marketers say that using videos has helped them generate more leads

Visual content, such as videos and infographics, can often be more engaging than other content types, as not everyone is fond of reading through lengthy articles.

In fact, 44% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a product or a service through video content.

This makes videos a crucial part of the sales funnel, as they can be used for everything from raising brand awareness (90% of companies report that videos have had a positive impact in this area) to increasing sales (87%).

18. 57% of marketers find that creating the right content for their target audience is the biggest challenge they face

With so many innovations and constant disruptions in both the digital and physical spheres, marketers often find it difficult to adjust their strategies to their audience’s needs and preferences.

Moreover, the market has never been this overwhelmed with content, as businesses from almost every industry are leveraging it for lead generation, making cutting through the noise trickier than ever before.

Doing careful market research, determining your ICP, and continuously analyzing and refining your strategies based on emerging trends and relevant changes is key to success.

In fact, 79% of businesses believe that knowing their audience well is critical to efficient lead generation. 

19. Short-form content dominates in B2B marketing, with 94% of marketers using it the most in their strategies

In addition to short articles and posts, B2B businesses focus on videos (84%) and case studies or customer stories (78%).

Source

Long articles are up next (71%), illustrating that modern leads need educational and engaging content that delivers enough value to compel them.

Marketing automation tools and AI in lead generation 
20. Marketing automation software can increase the number of qualified leads by 451%

Leveraging automation tools can help you identify quality leads faster and more accurately than when done manually.

Moreover, many of these tools can automatically add leads to personalized campaigns, allowing you to put lead nurturing on autopilot.

21. 72% of marketers agree that AI and automation tools like chatbots help them personalize customer experience across levels

Chatbots and other AI tools can significantly improve your lead generation efforts.

They can be used for anything from engaging leads on relevant landing pages, offering contextual resources, answering questions, etc.

22. More marketers use generative than predictive AI

Generative AI is leveraged by as many as 64% of marketers for lead generation and other marketing processes, with 35% trialing it or planning to trial it within the next 18 months.

Source

Conversely, predictive AI is used by 54% of marketers, while 42% are currently piloting it or intending to in the next 18 months.

This illustrates that at the moment, more businesses feel at ease with using AI to generate content than relying on it for predictive analysis and forecasting.

23. 36% of marketers are currently using AI chatbots for handling their day-to-day marketing tasks

As mentioned above, chatbots can be useful for both lead generation and lead nurturing. With the rise of AI, they’ve become smarter and better at communicating with potential customers.

This is why a third of marketers are already using chatbots, and 58% plan to increase their investment in AI-powered chatbots and similar tools to boost lead generation and other marketing efforts.

Lead generation channels
24. 63% of leads say they rely on social proof more than the brand name when making a purchase decision

More than half of all potential customers in both B2B and B2C industries prefer to get information on a certain product from other users or industry experts.

This is why most of the best-performing companies invest in influencer marketing and partner with other relevant brands and subject matter experts as lead generation strategies.

25. Web traffic is the most efficient lead generation channel for generating MQLs

16% of MQLs are generated by organic and referral traffic, indicating that your website and content could be your most powerful tools for sourcing qualified leads.

Interestingly, the other two most efficient channels are third-party in-person events (11%) and paid social advertising (9%).

26. The top 3 results on Google get 75% of all traffic

This emphasizes the importance of producing quality content and investing in SEO, as three-quarters of all potential leads will get distributed between just the top three SERP results.

As a result, most leads won’t even find out about your product unless you can break through to the top.

In contrast, less than 1% of visitors will ever go to page 2 of Google search results. 

So, even if you can’t make it to the top 3, at least make sure you’re on the first page, or your lead generation efforts won’t yield positive results.

27. Most businesses focus their personalization efforts on emails and website content

Most marketers leverage personalized emails (84%) and websites (80%) to attract new customers.

However, even more marketers primarily invest in personalizing content aimed at existing customers, such as support (87%) and retention (85%) content.

28. 47% of brands report that micro-influencers helped them generate more leads

Counterintuitively, micro-influencers might be a better choice for raising brand awareness than influencers with large audiences.

Niche influencers are often more successful in driving loyalty and trust among their followers, making them more likely to choose your brand if the influencer promotes it.

In fact, in 2023, one in four consumers bought a product because an industry influencer recommended it.

29. 56% of B2B marketers consider in-person events to be the most successful lead generation channel

Despite the digital era we live in, face-to-face contact and interaction are still greatly valued.

This is especially true for B2B, as it involves higher-value contracts and multiple decision-makers, making building lasting relationships with leads a must.

Other top-performing channels include webinars (51%) and email (44%).

Lead nurturing and conversion
30. 40% of companies state that one of the biggest lead nurturing challenges is identifying anonymous website visitors

Regardless of how many leads your website generates, you won’t be able to do much about it.

Using website traffic tracking tools like Warmly can help reveal quality leads who land on your while enriching them with detailed B2B and intent data.

That way, you’ll know exactly who to contact and when for optimal results.

31. 49% of brands cite leveraging intent data to improve lead generation and nurturing techniques

Intent data is crucial for a number of reasons.

It can help you identify leads who are most likely to convert right now, as well as enable you to create a highly personalized approach based on the insights you have on them.

Source

Social media for lead generation
32. Facebook is the most popular platform for running paid ads

Social media, in general, is emerging as one of the most powerful lead generation channels.

However, some platforms seem to be performing better than others.

For instance, 94% of B2B and B2C marketers prefer Facebook for social selling, thanks to its advanced ad targeting options.

At the same time, Instagram is also growing in popularity. Over 200 million users visit at least one business profile every day, creating a rich lead pool that should not be missed out on.

33. LinkedIn is B2B marketers’ favorite

94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their sales and lead generation efforts.

So, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn accounts for 80% of all B2B leads generated through social media.

34. Most businesses prefer organic to paid social media for lead generation

73% of businesses rely on organic social media to distribute content and reach and engage with their audience.

This number illustrates that you don’t always have to pay big money for paid ad campaigns - quality content and regular lead engagement can often speak for themselves.

Email lead generation
35. 50% of businesses feel that email has the most impact on the success of their multichannel lead generation strategies

Email marketing is most certainly not dead, and for a good reason.

Email is an excellent channel for distributing content, following up with potential leads and existing customers, and other lead generation activities, making it one of the most versatile channels.

Moreover, 60% of leads cite that they prefer that brands contact them via email rather than any other channel, which smart markets will surely leverage to their own benefit.

36. Segmenting email lists can lead to higher open and engagement rates according to 65% of marketers

The whole point of email campaigns is to get your leads to actually open emails and click through your CTAs.

To increase the chance of that happening, you need to tailor email copy and your offers to each lead, and the best way to do that is to segment your target audience.

Once that’s done, you can create separate email campaigns, each optimized for a specific segment. The results will not disappoint.

37. Best-performing lead generation emails have no more than 1-2 CTAs

73% of marketers report using one or two highly engaging and compelling CTAs.

The fewer CTAs you include, the more likely leads will click through and advance down the funnel.

38. Sending too many emails can lead to significant lead churn

69% of leads say they unsubscribe from newsletters and other email content because they’re getting spammed with too many emails.

So, although there’s nothing wrong with follow-ups, try not to overdo it and limit your efforts to three follow-up emails at most.

Additionally, 56% claim that they will lose interest in a brand if their email content becomes irrelevant.

To avoid losing leads and customers, make sure that the emails you send deliver enough value for leads to be interested in engaging with your brand further.

39. Emails with special offers and promotions have the highest open rates

Leads love getting personalized offers and discounts so much that they make one of the most efficient ways to get them to open your email and click through.

31% of marketers say that emails featuring exclusive offers and promotions have the highest open rates, followed by emails announcing new features and products (30%).

40. Dynamic email content personalization can lead to a 44% increase in generated leads and closed deals

AI-powered personalized recommendations, location-specific information, and images tailored to the specific stage of the customer journey are just some of the ways brands leverage dynamic content.

This advanced type of personalization is sure to delight leads, and in some cases, it can increase conversions by 52%.

Start generating more leads today

These figures can help you better understand the state of marketing and lead generation today, enabling you to adjust your strategies accordingly.

And if you need an extra hand with capturing and converting leads visiting your website, Warmly can help.

The platform can identify both companies and individual stakeholders surfing your website and enrich them with in-depth intent data, enabling you to:

• Identify who your hottest leads are right now.
• Tailor your approach to each lead, enhancing the chance for successful conversion.

But why take our word for it?

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and discover how easy it is to fill your pipeline with qualified leads within minutes.

The digital era has transformed virtually every aspect of life and work, including B2B lead generation.

The introduction of new tools and technology on the one hand, and increased customer expectations and market competitiveness on the other, have spawned new ways of conducting B2B lead generation.

What does this mean for B2B companies?

Well, any B2B business looking to stay competitive in 2024 and beyond should ensure that its B2B lead generation funnel is properly designed and optimized to:

• Continuously attract and convert new quality leads.
• Deliver a steady revenue stream.
• Enable targeted growth and better scalability.

This is exactly why this article is here: to help you master the art of B2B lead generation and teach you how to build a high-converting B2B lead generation funnel step-by-step.

We’ll begin by drilling down into the basics.

What is B2B lead generation?

B2B lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting potential business customers - i.e., leads - who could benefit from your company’s products or services.

Unlike B2C lead generation, which targets individual consumers, B2B focuses on creating relationships with other businesses. 

As a result, this process involves using various marketing and sales tactics to engage decision-makers within target companies and guide them through the buyer's journey, with the goal of converting them into long-term clients.

This would be a good place to break down other key differences between B2B and B2C lead generation for easier navigation and a better understanding of the two concepts.

Namely, although both approaches aim to generate more quality leads, they differ in terms of:

1. Target audience - This is the main difference, as B2B lead generation targets businesses, typically dealing with multiple decision-makers and longer sales cycles. In contrast, B2C lead generation focuses on individual consumers, often with shorter buying cycles.
2. Content and messaging - B2B marketing emphasizes expertise, ROI, and long-term value, often using in-depth content like whitepapers, case studies, and webinars. B2C marketing, however, focuses more on emotional appeals, brand experience, and immediate needs, often through simpler and visually driven content.
3. Sales process - B2B sales involve a more complex decision-making process consisting of multiple touchpoints and stakeholders, which requires personalized communication and long-term relationship building. B2C sales are generally more straightforward, with a focus on quick conversions and individual customer satisfaction.

Consequently, B2B lead generation funnels function differently than B2C ones, although they include the same stages. 

Let’s get a closer look at a typical B2B sales funnel.

B2B sales funnel overview

The whole point of a sales funnel is to let you control a lead’s buyer journey, guiding them from awareness to consideration and, finally, decision.

The same goes for B2B sales funnels, with each stage including specific tactics designed to attract, delight, and convert business leads:

1. Awareness - At this stage, potential leads become aware of a problem they need to solve or an opportunity they wish to explore further. B2B marketers use tactics like SEO, content marketing, and social media to make their target audience (stakeholders of ICP-matching companies) aware of their solutions.
2. Consideration - Once a lead is aware of their need, they move into the consideration stage, where they research and compare different solutions. Here, B2B companies provide detailed information through expert resources such as webinars, case studies, and product demos to position themselves as the best choice.
3. Decision - The focus here is on reinforcing the value proposition, addressing any remaining objections, and guiding the lead toward a final purchase. Sales teams often play a crucial role in this stage by providing personalized offers, negotiations, and customer testimonials.

When guiding leads down the funnel, one key component to focus on throughout the customer journey is lead nurturing.

Namely, given the longer and more complex buying cycles in B2B, nurturing helps keep leads engaged and informed, ensuring they remain aligned with your solution as they progress through their decision-making process.

Effective lead nurturing strategies could include a variety of tactics, such as:

• Personalized email campaigns tailored to specific lead segments (i.e., businesses that match your ICP, companies that have already expressed interest in your solution by attending your webinars, etc.).
• Targeted content creation, with a focus on resources that bring clear value and are highly industry-relevant, such as detailed whitepapers, checklists, guides, etc.

• Consistent follow-ups to address the lead’s specific needs or concerns. 

All these efforts can pay big time by enabling you to increase conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, and ultimately build stronger and lasting customer relationships.

So, neglecting to invest in proper lead nurturing is a no-go if you want your lead generation funnel to yield actual results.

Why is B2B lead generation important in 2024?

The answer to this question is pretty straightforward.

If you don’t design and apply B2B lead generation strategies tailored to your business, objectives, and target audience, your business will go under before you know it.

Without quality leads, you can forget about successful conversions, regardless of how good your product actually is.

So, you must ensure that you’ve promoted your business through approaches carefully designed to reach, attract, and convert your ICPs.

However, as businesses become more digital and global, traditional methods of reaching and converting leads don’t really work anymore. This is urging companies to switch to new strategies and refine existing ones if they want to stay in the game.

The new, more dynamic landscape creates a mix of both new challenges and opportunities to generate more quality leads and conversions, including:

• Increased competition - As more companies invest in high-converting strategies like digital marketing, the competition for high-quality leads has intensified. To stand out in a hyper-crowded market, businesses must leverage unique value propositions, innovative content, and exceptional customer experiences.
• Changes in buyer behavior - Today's B2B buyers are more informed and have higher expectations. They conduct extensive research before engaging with sales and marketing teams, often preferring self-service options and peer reviews. This shift requires businesses to provide valuable, easily accessible information throughout the buyer's journey (e.g., comprehensive documentation and help centers, ample social proof, interactive demos, etc.).
• Technological advancements - While technology offers opportunities for automation and optimization, it also presents challenges in terms of integration and staying updated with the latest sales tools, or they risk falling behind. Businesses must continuously evaluate and adopt new technologies to remain competitive in lead generation.

Despite these challenges, the current market also offers opportunities for agile and innovative businesses. 

By leveraging tech innovations, such as AI-powered tools, automation, and advanced analytics, you can:

• Run more efficient and highly targeted lead-generation campaigns.
• Streamline critical sales and marketing processes.
• Gain deeper insights into customer needs and preferences, allowing you to tailor your lead generation efforts more effectively.

The role of data in B2B lead generation in 2024

Data also plays a critical role in successful lead generation today for leads and businesses alike.

On the one hand, leads have more easily accessible information at their fingertips than ever before, enabling them to carefully research your solution and the alternatives. As a result, delighting them is much more difficult than before the rise of the internet.

On the other hand, you can make data one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, as it can help you:

• Improve targeting - You can identify the most promising leads based on behavioral data, past interactions, and predictive analytics. For instance, tools like Warmly can identify your website visitors and reveal valuable B2B and intent data, helping you understand which leads are most likely to convert right now.
• Enhance personalization - Tailor marketing messages and content to the specific needs and preferences of individual leads or segments. Again, using the intent and B2B data Warmly unearthed, sales teams can create highly personalized, contextual messages bound to resonate with leads.
• Optimize campaigns - You can continuously monitor and refine campaigns based on real-time data, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently and effectively. Various analytics tools can help you understand which of your campaigns are working well, identify bottlenecks, and pinpoint what resonates best with leads.

This way, you’ll show your leads exactly what they want to see and hear, enabling you to position your product as the best solution for their pain points and needs.

Key strategies for effective B2B lead generation

When it comes to the most efficient strategies for successful B2B lead generation, it’s important to differentiate between outbound and inbound marketing strategies you can leverage.

Typical inbound strategies include:

• Content marketing and SEO
• Social selling
• Lead magnets and landing pages

• Nurturing email campaigns (i.e., emails sent to newsletter subscribers, leads who downloaded an ebook, etc.)

Outbound, on the other hand, focuses on:

• Cold calls
• Cold email campaigns
• Networking events

• Advertising

Each approach has its own pros and cons, so it’s best to combine them to maximize your reach.

Namely, inbound is generally focused on long-term relationship building that takes more time, whereas outbound lead generation provides more immediate results but loses something on engagement levels.

And now, without further ado, here’s our pick of the best B2B lead generation strategies - both inbound and outbound - that you can implement throughout the sales funnel for optimal results.

1. Developing a strong value proposition

This is the first step to creating a high-converting B2B lead generation strategy, as it enables you to set your brand apart from the competition and position it as the ideal answer to your leads’ needs.

Therefore, a compelling value proposition should clearly communicate your business's unique benefits and solutions while addressing the specific pain points of your target audience. 

When developing a strong value proposition, you should focus on showcasing:

1. How your tool helps solve your leads’ problems and needs - For instance, if you have a marketing automation tool, you should highlight points like increased productivity and efficiency across levels, better results than when handling tasks manually, etc.
2. What makes your tool different from all the other similar platforms - This can include factors like price, unique features, convenience, a solid free plan, etc.

Once that’s completed, ensure that your value proposition is prominently featured in all marketing materials, including your:

• Website

• Social media profiles
• Content
• Email campaigns, etc.

2. Optimize your website

Your website is another critical part of any B2B lead generation strategy because it introduces your brand to potential leads and can be used as a powerful tool for nurturing and converting them.

For optimal results, your website needs to check several boxes:

• It has to follow SEO guidelines - Its structure (title tags, meta tags, etc.) and technical aspects (loading speed, mobile optimization) should meet SEO requirements in order to rank higher on SERPs and drive more organic traffic to it.
• It has to be easy to navigate - All the crucial bits, such as your blog page, help center, pricing, features, etc., must be easy to find. If you make leads waste too much time finding what they need, they’ll simply switch to the competition.

• It has to convey your value proposition clearly - As mentioned above, your website is one of the key places to position your value proposition. That way, new leads will know what to expect from the get-go.
• It needs to include CTAs - Implement CTAs that urge leads to take action that will lead them further the sales funnel (convert into an MQL, SQL, or paying customer). Ensure that the CTAs are contextual and relevant to the landing page they’re on to increase the chance of leads clicking through.

Once all this is done, a question remains:

How to capture all the leads who’ve landed on your website.

You could use lead-capturing forms and magnets, but not all leads will be compelled enough to fill them out or download these resources, meaning many will go to waste.

This is why you need a website visitor identification tool like Warmly. 

The platform can identify both companies and actual stakeholders visiting your website in real-time, at the same time uncovering relevant data on each identified lead, including:

• Essential contact data (name, email address, phone number).
• Detailed B2B data (firmographics, technographics, etc.).
• Intent data (insights into leads’ interactions with your website and their entire digital buyer’s journey that help you pinpoint which leads are at the brink of conversion right now).

By leveraging solutions like Warmly, you’ll be able to kill several birds with one stone:

1. You can assess how well your website attracts your target audience. If most of your visitors don’t match your ICP, it’s a clear sign that something is off.
2. You’ll tap into a rich lead pool of companies that have already shown interest in your product by surfing your website.
3. You’ll be able to pinpoint the hottest leads and focus on them from the get-go.

3. Leverage content marketing

Content marketing remains one of the most powerful strategies for lead generation in general, including B2B. 

Namely, by creating and sharing valuable, relevant content, businesses can attract, engage, and nurture leads throughout the buyer's journey. 

Additionally, positioning your brand as a thought leader in your industry can build trust and credibility, making it a crucial part of lead nurturing and helping you convert leads into customers more easily.

The content you should focus on can include:

• Blog posts - Just make sure that the blogs you publish are relevant to your audience, i.e., that they help them find a solution to their problems, answers to their questions, etc., while at the same time adequate for subtly pushing your product as the best solution.

• Whitepapers and case studies - B2B audiences are much more demanding than B2C ones, as you have to impress and hook other industry experts and stakeholders. This means you need to focus on expert content, such as whitepapers and case studies, that position you as a thought leader and provide potential customers with significant value.
• Educational videos and podcasts - Going beyond the typical content used in B2B can help you cut through the noise more efficiently. Engaging videos and podcasts that break down relevant topics can also help you reach more leads, create trust, and build brand authority.

4. Use social media platforms

Social media platforms can be particularly useful for building relationships with potential leads and nurturing them over time. 

Namely, you can use social media to share valuable content, engage in conversations, and provide insights that address the needs of your target audience.

LinkedIn is probably the most famous social media platform used for B2B sales and lead generation and for a good reason - it gathers together professionals across industries and borders, providing B2B companies with a rich lead pool.

To efficiently use LinkedIn for B2B sales and lead gen, there are several steps to take:

• Optimize your profile - Make sure that your company profile stays true to your overall messaging and value proposition while at the same time introducing your brand to potential leads in a clear and compelling way.
• Invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator - This is virtually a must if you want to run LinkedIn lead generation campaigns, as it enables you to apply more advanced search filters, get lead suggestions based on your previous searches, etc.
• Post regularly - Make a habit of sharing compelling and relevant posts. These can include your views on current industry trends, valuable tips for practitioners in your target vertical, links to interesting articles, useful infographics, and more.

• Engage with leads - No point in being on social media if you don’t interact with your network. Like, reshare, and comment on other people’s posts, join groups and relevant discussions, and more, to build meaningful relationships and show leads you can be trusted.
• Urge leads to action - Using interactive content like polls or simply asking for your leads’ opinions, questions, or comments in your posts can get you a long way. Getting them to actively participate will make leads feel more valued and see you as more of a friend or a thought leader than someone trying to sell at all costs.

5. Focus on email campaigns

If you think cold email is dead, think again.

Email campaigns remain one of the most effective and reliable strategies for B2B lead generation, as they provide direct, personal, and measurable ways to reach potential leads and nurture them through the sales funnel. 

However, to get the results you want, there are several key areas to focus on:

• Build targeted email lists - Rather than sending generic emails to a broad audience, focus on building lead segments based on criteria such as industry, job title, company size, or past interactions. This allows you to tailor your messaging, making your emails more relevant and increasing the likelihood of engagement.
• Personalize everything - When it comes to personalization, it’s important to know that it extends beyond just personalized greetings. It can include things like customized product recommendations, content suggestions, and offers based on the recipient's behavior or preferences.
• Use attention-grabbing subject lines - The subject line is often the first—and sometimes only—thing a recipient sees, making it crucial for sparking their interest. Subject lines should be concise, clear, and relevant, enticing the recipient to open the email. 
• Don’t forget to include a CTA - Once opened, the email’s content should have a clear and strong CTA that guides the recipient toward the desired next step, whether it’s downloading a resource, signing up for a webinar, or contacting your sales team.

6. Implement marketing automation and AI tools

Marketing automation and AI tools can help you scale B2B lead generation efforts while maintaining a personalized approach. 

Automation tools can streamline email marketing, lead nurturing, and customer segmentation, allowing your team to focus on higher-level strategies.

Email drip campaigns are the one marketing process that’s most commonly automated, as putting it on autopilot can help you reach more qualified leads in less time.

Get a tool that can:

• Automatically add leads who match predefined criteria in email cadences.
• Ensure that each email is personalized (based on the lead’s interests, interactions with your website, downloaded content, etc.).
• Send emails and follow-ups in specified frequencies.

AI-powered tools, on the other hand, can predict lead behavior, pull relevant information based on predefined criteria, and personalize messaging thanks to their ability to analyze large datasets and detect patterns.

This makes them perfect for:

• Lead enrichment.
• Lead scoring and qualification.
• Powering smart chatbots.

7. Host and attend networking events

In-person, virtual, and hybrid events can also be leveraged as a solid B2B lead gen strategy, enabling you to:

• Connect with key stakeholders from companies fitting your ICP and build rapport.
• Position your brand as an industry leader.

Both hosting and attending these events can help you generate leads, each in their own way.

When it comes to hosting events, you should focus on:

• Choosing the right format - Depending on your target audience and goals, decide whether a virtual, hybrid, or in-person event is most suitable. Webinars, roundtable discussions, and industry conferences are all effective formats for B2B networking.
• Curating valuable content - Content is king, even in networking events. Aim to deliver high-value content that addresses your target audience's key pain points and interests. This could include expert panels, keynote speeches, and interactive workshops that not only engage attendees but also showcase your expertise.

• Engage attendees - Encourage your audience to participate actively by implementing things like Q&A sessions, live polls, or breakout discussions. This interaction not only enhances the attendee experience but also provides valuable insights into their needs and challenges, which can improve your follow-up strategies.
• Collect leads - This is the key advantage of choosing to host your own event, as you can use registration forms, surveys, and interactive tools like polls to gather information on attendees. 

At the same time, attending industry-relevant events can also help you generate more quality leads, as you can:

• Focus on connecting with key attendees - Research the attendee list beforehand and pinpoint the prospects who might be the best match for your product and service so you’ll know who to prioritize and how to approach them.
• Maximize booth engagement - When it comes to industry conferences and trade shows, you should ensure that your booth or exhibit (if you have one) is visually appealing and staffed with knowledgeable representatives who can engage attendees. Offer incentives like free trials, exclusive content, or giveaways to attract visitors and capture their contact information.
• Leverage speaking opportunities - If possible, secure a speaking slot at the event. Presenting at an event gives you a platform to showcase your expertise to a large audience, positioning your company as a leader in the industry and attracting potential leads.

How to build an efficient B2B lead generation funnel step-by-step

Finally, once you’ve explored all these strategies and narrowed down on the ones you’d like to implement first, it’s time to design your very own B2B lead generation funnel.

Here are the key steps you should follow to ensure that each funnel stage performs the best it possibly can:

1. Define your target audience, ICP, and unique value proposition - This step precedes actual funnel building because you can’t do much unless you know who you’re supposed to target with it. Determining who your target audience is, defining ICP attributes, and crafting a compelling value proposition enables you to create a funnel optimized for companies most likely to convert.
2. Leverage software tools that can help you maximize conversions - Data enrichment platforms, website traffic identification solutions, chatbots, sales automation, and various marketing tools can all be used to strengthen and improve your funnel.
3. Attract leads with TOFU content - At the awareness stage, you must attract and capture leads’ attention by providing educational and informative content that helps them understand their challenges and potential solutions. Key strategies include content marketing and Search Engine Optimization, as well as lead magnets.
4. Nurture them by leveraging MOFU content - In the consideration stage, you need to deliver deeper insights into how your product or service can solve leads’ specific problems while at the same time building trust and meaningful relationships. Effective strategies at this stage include email campaigns, case studies and testimonials, product demos, and webinars.
5. Convert them with BOFU content and strategies - At the decision-making stage, your goal is to convince leads that your solution is ideal for their needs by removing any remaining doubts and objections and urging them to take action. Strategies include free trials, personalized meetings, special offers, etc.
6. Focus on retaining customers - The relationship doesn’t end at conversion. Post-conversion follow-up is crucial for building long-term relationships and encouraging repeat purchases. The best way to achieve this is to provide excellent onboarding and overall user experience, continuously engage with customers through check-ins and personalized offers, have good customer support, etc.

The best way to grasp what an efficient B2B lead generation funnel looks like is through a practical example using Warmly as our lead generation tool of choice:

1. Design a compelling company website - Follow the guidelines explained above and optimize your website for your target audience and SEO requirements. Make sure to include all the relevant sections that can help raise brand awareness, such as a blog page, feature breakdown, etc.
2. Implement website visitor identification tools - Use solutions like Warmly to detect website visitors and narrow down those who are most likely to convert.

3. Engage high-intent sales leads - Use Warmly’s AI Chat function to engage and further qualify leads. The chatbot can be trained to engage only leads who show high buying intent or all website visitors by:

• Sending personalized, contextual messages based on info such as the lead’s name, company, the page they were surfing, etc.
• Offer additional resources based on the content the lead was consuming (e.g., send a case study detailing how a product feature they were exploring helped another company overcome a specific problem).
• Ask questions to urge them to interact with your brand and qualify them (questions like “What brings you here?” or “How can I help you today?”).

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• Book meetings.

4. Nurture them through personalized LinkedIn and email campaigns - Warmly’s Orchestrator can automatically add leads who match specified criteria (e.g., engaged with the chatbot, visited the pricing page, came back to your website several times, etc.) in nurturing campaigns by:

• Sending a personalized LinkedIn request or DM.
• Sending a personalized email that can include special resources leads may find useful (free checklists or templates), exclusive offers, customer testimonials, etc.

5. Convert them by leveraging the insights Warmly provided - Ensure that your sales reps nail every sales meeting by providing them with actionable insights on each lead, including their buyer intent level, interests, pain points, etc. That way, they’ll be able to tailor their approach to every individual lead, improving the chance of successful conversion.

How to measure the success of your B2B lead generation funnel

Once you’ve designed and applied your B2B lead generation funnel, monitoring it to ensure it’s performing as intended is crucial. 

There are several key metrics you should track to understand how effective your B2B lead gen funnel is:

1. Conversion rates show the percentage of leads who progressed from one funnel stage to the next. There are several to keep an eye on:

• Visitor-to-Lead - The percentage of website visitors who provide their contact information in exchange for a resource or lead magnet or exhibit high-intent behavior.
• Lead-to-Marketing Qualified Lead - The percentage of leads that meet the criteria set by your marketing team to be considered qualified (e.g., attended a webinar).
• MQL-to-Sales Qualified Lead - The percentage of MQLs that are deemed ready for direct sales engagement (e.g., requested a demo).
• SQL-to-Customer - The percentage of SQLs that ultimately convert into paying customers.

2. Cost per lead, which measures the average amount of money you spend to acquire a single lead. To calculate it, divide your total lead generation costs by the total number of leads generated.

3. Customer lifetime value, which estimates the total revenue a business can expect from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship, helping you better understand overall customer acquisition costs. To calculate it, multiply the average purchase value by the purchase frequency and the average customer lifespan.

In addition to helping you figure out how your funnel is performing, these metrics are critical for one other thing - determining the ROI of your lead generation efforts.

To calculate it, use the following formula:

(Total Lead Gen Revenue - Total Lead Gen Costs) / Total Lead Gen Costs x 100

To accurately measure ROI this way, you’ll need to:

• Track all revenue generated by various lead-generation channels.
• Include all costs associated with lead generation, such as marketing spend, software subscriptions, and labor.
• Analyzing CLV in relation to CPL provides additional context, helping you understand the long-term profitability of your lead generation efforts.

Start generating more quality B2B leads today

Ready to fill your pipeline with quality leads?

All it takes is following our guidelines and tried-and-true practices to start successfully generating and converting hot new leads.

Warmly can help you optimize your lead generation efforts and reach your goals faster by:

• Detecting high-value leads on your website.
• Engaging and nurturing them via automated campaigns.
• Enabling reps to reach out to hot leads straight from your website.

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and find out how it can help your business unlock its full lead generation potential.

Or book a live demo and test the waters first.

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Picking the right lead generation channel is one of the essential prerequisites for running successful lead generation campaigns.

However, given the wide range of online and offline lead generation strategies, finding the most efficient marketing channels to drive business growth takes a lot of work.

This is why, in this article, we'll explore the top 9 lead generation channels that businesses should focus on to:

• Increase their reach.
• Maximize lead acquisition.
• Improve their conversion rates across levels.

The importance of multi-channel lead generation

Before we begin, it’s important to emphasize that sticking to a single lead gen channel is no longer enough, regardless of your industry and target audience.

The market has never been as competitive as today due to various factors - e.g., more businesses migrating online and competing for leads’ attention, potential customers becoming much pickier thanks to being able to research potential solutions independently, etc. - meaning it’s wise to cover as many relevant touchpoints as possible to achieve optimal reach and engagement.

Multichannel lead generation can help you overcome many of these challenges and efficiently cut through the noise thanks to several advantages it provides, including:

Diversifying the risk

You know the saying that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket?

Well, the same goes for lead generation. Investing all your efforts and resources in a single channel can wreak havoc on your business if something unexpected happens in that particular avenue (e.g., your email automation tools stop working as intended, or your content doesn’t perform as expected).

Relying on multiple channels can help reduce the overall risk because if one channel fails, the others will keep going, helping you create a resilient and risk-proof strategy.

Increasing your reach and brand visibility

Using a single lead gen channel will limit your reach only to leads who can be reached via that channel and respond well to that particular strategy. 

At the same time, all other potential customers will go to waste, as different leads have different preferences for consuming content and engaging with brands.

Some leads (particularly younger generations) may prefer to interact with your brand on social media via innovative, interactive content, whereas B2B leads, for example, might best respond to email campaigns.

Therefore, multichannel strategies can help you:

• Reach the right target audience in the right place, increasing your chance of successful conversion.
• Display your brand in front of your Total Addressable Market.

Improving brand engagement 

Enabling your potential leads to come across your brand on various platforms helps establish your presence in their minds, making it more likely for them to consider your solution first when deciding to buy.

Moreover, by ensuring your messaging is tailored to each platform’s advantages, characteristics, and primary audience, you can build trust and credibility more easily, positioning your brand as an industry leader.

Boosting conversion rates

Finally, all these advantages combined result in the one outcome all businesses strive for - more conversions.

Covering various channels and engaging with potential leads in a way best suited to the platform and audience in question can make guiding prospects down the funnel faster and easier.

Successful multichannel lead generation campaign examples

If you need any extra proof of the efficiency of multichannel lead generation, it’s best to look at major brands, as they all use some variation of this approach.

Take Coca-Cola, for instance. 

The company has successfully integrated digital marketing, traditional advertising, and experiential marketing to create a cohesive brand experience. 

Their campaigns often span social media, TV, in-store promotions, and events, ensuring they reach consumers wherever they are.

Here’s a custom example of a multichannel lead gen campaign that you can implement today, using only your website and Warmly:

1. Add Warmly’s code snippet to your website and/or all the landing pages for which you want to track traffic.
2. Start capturing the companies and individuals visiting your website and getting detailed B2B and intent data on each so you can easily detect the hottest ones/those who best match your ICP.

3. Leverage Warmly’s AI Chat to get leads to engage with your brand by asking them contextual questions, offering valuable resources, answering their questions, etc.

4. Use Warmly’s Orchestrator to automatically add leads matching specified criteria (they visited a specific page, downloaded your whitepaper, etc.) to email and/or LinkedIn sequences to nurture and guide them further down the funnel.

5. Have sales reps use the insights Warmly unearthed on each lead to tailor their messaging and overall approach in meetings and calls to increase the chance of conversion.

By combining your website, LinkedIn and email outreach, and chatbot engagement to attract, engage, nurture, and delight leads, you’ll improve conversion rates throughout the sales funnel.

Expert tip for optimizing multichannel lead generation campaigns

To make the most of multichannel lead generation, there’s one thing you shouldn't neglect, and that’s the integration of online and offline channels into a single holistic strategy.

Although you might be tempted to rely on digital channels alone, as they can generally help you reach a global audience, offline channels can still find their place in optimized lead-gen campaigns for several reasons:

Not everyone can be reached via digital channels

As incredible as it may sound while you read this article from your computer or mobile device, approximately one-third of the global population doesn’t have internet access. 

Moreover, older generations often don’t navigate the digital landscape as easily, meaning they can only be reached via offline tactics. And as they account for 1B+ of the global population, you may be missing out on a lot if you stick to digital alone.

You can create more resilient lead-generation campaigns

Imagine the worst possible scenario - the Internet just stops working, or we start experiencing power outages.

If you rely only on online channels, imagine the impact this could have on your business.

We don’t have to go that far, as even a small hiccup in the lead gen platforms you use could negatively affect your ability to generate leads.

Therefore, having offline channels as a safety net is always a good idea.

In-person contact can often tip the scales in your favor

Humans love to interact with each other, meaning that you can be much more convincing and successful in building trust and driving sales through in-person contact.

This is why hosting and attending industry-relevant events and even cold calling can significantly boost your success rates, enabling your leads to put a friendly face to the brand.

Most importantly, this is an offline lead generation approach that you can apply even if you are conducting SaaS lead generation. In contrast, some others (e.g., brick-and-mortar stores, direct mail, etc.) may be impossible or unsuitable.

And now, let’s get a closer look at the best lead generation channels to focus on to generate and convert more quality leads.

1. Organic traffic

Organic traffic is one of the first things to focus on when handling lead generation, as it can be a rich source of high-quality leads.

However, to ensure that you’ll drive quality traffic, there are a few things to take care of first:

• Optimize your website for conversions - Your website needs to be created with your target audience in mind, meaning that the messaging and overall structure need to be tailored to your ICP’s needs, pain points, and expectations. Include a compelling value proposition and actionable and engaging CTAs, and ensure the website is easy to navigate.
• Invest in Search Engine Optimization - SEO can help your website rank higher on SERPs, increasing brand visibility and the chance that you’ll attract qualified website traffic. SEO is a wide concept, but when it comes to website SEO, there are several areas to cover:
• Technical SEO (loading speed, mobile optimization, etc.).
• On-site SEO (ensuring that titles, meta titles, images, and overall structure align with current SEO requirements).
• Keyword optimization (including keywords relevant to your product and target audience, making it easier for them to find you).

• Backlinks and internal linking - Backlinks can help improve your domain rating and brand reputation, whereas internal linking also helps with better navigation.

However, even attracting hundreds of thousands of website visitors each month will not do much good if most of them remain casual onlookers.

You need to capture the actual leads among them, which can be done in several ways:

• Leverage lead magnets - Offer valuable resources in exchange for leads’ contact information. The best-performing content usually includes templates, checklists, ebooks, etc.

• Implement lead capture forms - You can hook leads to provide you with their information by having them submit lead gen forms with info such as email address, name, etc., to subscribe to a newsletter or get a discount, a chance to participate in a contest, and more.
• Use website traffic tracking tools - Solutions like Warmly can identify website visitors and provide you with detailed data on each, including everything from basic contact info to B2B data (firmographics, technographics, etc.) and intent data that reveals their readiness to buy.

Pro tip: You can combine these lead acquisition methods for the best results.

Not all leads will submit forms or download lead magnets - a website visitor identification platform can ensure you’ve covered them as well.

2. Content marketing

Creating and distributing relevant, engaging, and valuable content is one of the most efficient lead generation channels that can be used by any business, regardless of their specific industry, target market, whether they’re B2B or B2C, etc.

When designing your content strategy, it’s important to note that understanding your audience's needs, pain points, and interests is the foundation of successful content marketing. 

Delivering content that addresses these aspects can help you attract the right prospects and guide them toward conversion. 

To ensure that your content will generate leads with maximum efficiency, focus on the following steps:

1. Research your audience - You have to get to know your audience and ICPs to understand what resonates the most with them, what challenges they’re facing, what problems they’re looking to solve, etc. Once you have an intimate knowledge of that, you’ll be able to create content that caters to their needs and preferences.
2. Make it educational and relevant - Content that addresses specific pain points or answers common questions is more likely to attract attention. For example, a blog post that offers actionable tips on solving a common industry problem can draw in leads searching for solutions, making this type of content perfect for the awareness and consideration stages of the funnel.
3. Be unique - Hyper-production of content means that lots of companies will be producing content similar to yours, making it more difficult to stand out. Aim to be original by using interactive content types (interactive demos, quizzes, assessments, etc.) or creating articles and other resources that bring value and stay true to your unique brand messaging.
4. Don’t forget SEO - Your content needs to follow SEO guidelines, just like your website. Include relevant keywords and make sure it’s well-structured.

There's no simple answer when it comes to the types of content you should leverage for lead generation. It all depends on your product, audience, and the resources you’re willing to allocate.

However, there are some best practices when it comes to choosing the type of content to produce.

For instance, expert resources such as whitepapers, case studies, and industry benchmark reports typically perform better with B2B leads who are more demanding and are led by reason and practicality more than by emotions.

Videos, quizzes, and customer testimonials that focus on compelling storytelling, on the other hand, usually resonate better with B2C leads.

Content such as blogs, simpler infographics, and even ebooks are equally useful for both lead types as they can provide relevant value to all.

Of course, these are not strict rules, meaning you’re free to choose whichever content type you prefer - and think your audience will respond the best to.

However, creating quality content is just half the battle, as you have to ensure it reaches the right audience.

In addition to leveraging SEO efforts and relying on organic traffic, you can distribute your content via email, social media, and more.

3. Podcasts

Podcasts have rapidly emerged as one of the best channels for lead generation, offering a unique way to connect with audiences through engaging, long-form content. 

‎Namely, not everyone enjoys reading lengthy articles, and podcasts have popped up as a nice way to overcome that challenge, providing education and entertainment simultaneously.

Podcasts are a useful lead generation channel for several reasons, including:

• Building trust and authority - Similarly to blogs and other relevant content types, podcasts let you establish authority and thought leadership within your industry by sharing insights, discussing trends, and offering valuable advice.
• Engaging leads - Podcasts' audio format allows for deeper engagement compared to other content types. Listeners often consume podcasts while commuting, exercising, or working, enabling them to engage with your brand while doing other things. 
• Amplifying reach through guest appearances - Hosting interesting experts not only adds value to your content but also expands your reach. When guests share their episode with their own audience, it introduces your brand to new potential leads who might not have discovered you otherwise.
• Promoting brand loyalty - If you produce an engaging and educational podcast, chances are you’ll build a loyal audience of listeners who will, in turn, be more likely to turn to your brand when they need a product or service you offer instead of going to your direct competitors.

To effectively use podcasts for capturing leads, you could either use gated content (e.g., offer additional resources relevant to a specific topic, such as a checklist) or leverage podcast notes where you add links to landing pages, downloadable resources, or special offers.

So, should you start a podcast to generate more leads?

While podcasts have a significant lead generation potential, their actual efficiency depends on a variety of factors, such as:

• Your industry and offering - Unless you can find enough relevant topics and industry experts to host, it’s better not to embark on this journey at all.
• Your target audience - Market research is key here as well, as you have to determine whether your audience would consume podcasts in the first place.

4. Paid advertising

Paid ads are one of the most commonly used lead generation channels that enable you to display your brand to highly targeted audiences.

However, since PPC advertising involves competing for relevant keywords and paying for each click, it can quickly lead to overspending unless you’ve optimized your PPC campaigns by:

• Doing extensive keyword research - Identify the search terms your target audience is using to find products or services like yours and bid on those keywords. Focus on a mix of high-intent keywords (e.g., “buy,” “compare,” etc.) and broader terms that can attract leads earlier in the buying process.
• Crafting compelling ad copy and CTAs - Ensure that your ad copy is concise, persuasive, and directly addresses your target audience's needs or pain points. Highlight your unique selling points and include a strong CTA encouraging users to click. 
• Optimizing the associated landing pages - Create landing pages relevant to the ad, ensure they load quickly, and have a clear, easy-to-follow structure.
• Using retargeting campaigns - Retargeting lets you re-engage users who have previously interacted with your website or ads but didn’t convert. By serving tailored ads to these prospects as they browse other sites or social media platforms, you can keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage them to return and complete their purchase.

5. Email campaigns

No lead generation channel list would be complete without email marketing, as emails remain one of the most widely used strategies for attracting and nurturing leads.

Leveraging email enables you to create more personal relationships with leads, as direct and personalized contact can significantly boost your success rates regarding building trust and rapport.

However, because everyone’s using email for lead generation, it’s expected that your leads’ inboxes will be overcrowded, meaning you’ll have to walk the extra mile to hook them in.

This includes paying attention to:

• Personalization from top to bottom, as no one will bother even opening, and much less reading a generic email.
• Having attention-grabbing subject lines and introductions, as you have only a few seconds to compel leads to actually give you a chance.
• Including relevant CTAs, as there’s no point in sending emails just for the sake of it. You’re aiming to urge leads to take an action that drives them down the sales funnel, so make sure you use the right CTA for their stage, email context, etc.

Pro tip: When running email campaigns on scale, it would be wise to use automation tools to help you reach more leads in less time.

Modern sales tools are often AI-powered, enabling them to take personalization one step further and ensuring that your leads feel valued and appreciated.

6. Social media channels

Nowadays, almost everyone is on social media, which makes it the ideal lead-generation channel for all kinds of businesses.

Platforms like LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, and others are great sources of relevant leads, provided you know how to harness their potential.

Just having a profile won’t do you much good if you don’t use social networks as intended - to communicate and engage with other users. 

In this case, the users in question include potential customers, meaning you have to design a social media outreach platform according to your target audience.

Regardless, there are some things you can do to increase your chances of generating more leads, including:

• Creating a compelling and informative profile that shows leads everything they need to know about your brand and offering.
• Sharing valuable content, such as articles, links to blogs, checklists, infographics, your views on industry trends, etc.

• Running contests and giveaways to boost engagement and popularity.
• Engaging with leads regularly by commenting on their posts, replying to their comments, joining groups, participating in discussions, etc.

7. Webinars 

Webinars have become another great lead generation channel. They can help you identify and capture qualified leads, position yourself as an industry leader, and engage leads more actively.

The best part about them is that they are hosted online, meaning you can easily reach audiences across continents without significant expenses.

To ensure that they successfully attract qualified leads, choose a compelling topic that resonates with your target audience and present it in an engaging way.

Moreover, to drive active participation, you can include live polls, Q&A sessions, and chat features, encouraging leads to ask questions, give their views on a specific topic, or share personal experiences and best practices.

By including your leads in your presentation, you’ll gain a closer look at their needs, pain points, and expectations while building rapport.

Finally, webinars are a sort of evergreen content, as you can use recordings of prior events to generate new leads over time. Make them available on demand, asking viewers to provide their email addresses to access them.

8. Conferences and trade shows

In-person events like conferences and trade shows can help you build lasting relationships faster and more easily than by relying on online methods alone.

Attending industry-relevant events provides you with a wonderful opportunity to showcase your brand and product while staying in complete control over your brand image and the way potential leads interact with you.

This is why you should ensure that your booth or exhibit is compelling and engaging enough to give leads all the information they may need on your product.

You can even consider incorporating multimedia displays, product demonstrations, or interactive elements that encourage participation. 

The more engaging your booth, the more likely attendees are to stop by and engage with your team, increasing your chances of capturing qualified leads.

9. Cold calling

Cold calling is one of the oldest lead generation channels that remains in use to this day.

In fact, it’s probably the most widely used offline channel for generating leads in both B2B and B2C.

Similarly to in-person events, it allows for direct engagement and interaction with potential leads, making it more personal than email campaigns.

Additionally, cold calling enables you to get immediate feedback, meaning you’ll know on the spot how well your approach is working, letting you improvise and adjust your offering on the go.

Cold calling can be used at various funnel stages, from building product awareness to following up on a previous interaction or closing a deal, making them one of the more versatile lead generation channels.

For best results, you should carefully prepare for each call - having sales call templates and scenarios crafted beforehand is a solid practice to adopt. 

Come equipped with all the relevant product info and lead data you can get your hands on to ensure you’ll overcome objections and be as convincing as possible.

Create a powerful multichannel lead generation strategy today

Ultimately, you’re the only one who can tell which of these channels fits the best with your overall approach, audience, and product offering.

You can combine them any way you want, just make sure to cover all the channels where your target audience primarily lives.

The one aspect you should never neglect, though, is your website. 

It’s the one piece of the puzzle you already have, so you should ensure you use its lead generation potential to the fullest—and Warmly can help with that.

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and fill your pipeline with qualified leads in minutes.

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In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses continuously search for effective ways to convert casual visitors into committed customers.

However, with tons of businesses competing to grab your ideal audience’s attention, how do you ensure success? 

Enter the lead generation funnel—an essential framework that translates marketing efforts into tangible results. 

Namely, a well-designed lead generation funnel can help:

• Raise brand awareness and attract potential prospects.
• Educate them on why your product is the best solution for their needs.
• Nurture them every step of their customer journey.
• Successfully convert them.

In this detailed step-by-step guide, we’ll explain the lead generation funnel and how it can help you convert interested leads into loyal customers and drive business growth across levels.

What is a lead generation funnel?

Let’s begin with the basics - by explaining what a sales lead funnel is.

The best way to understand a lead generation funnel is to think of it as a step-by-step process that guides prospects through several stages of the buyer journey - from initial awareness to final purchase -  while ensuring they’re provided with an optimal nurturing and engagement experience.

Unlike a traditional sales funnel, which focuses primarily on closing deals, a lead generation funnel also emphasizes the earlier stages of the customer journey. 

It starts with attracting potential leads through content marketing, social media, or other outreach methods. 

Once these leads are engaged, the funnel uses targeted strategies to guide them through a series of steps—such as lead magnets, nurturing emails, and personalized content—to build trust and move them closer to deciding to buy.

As a result, each funnel stage, including awareness, consideration, and decision, requires specific guidance.

This means you need to create tailored content and engagement strategies for every funnel stage to appeal to your prospects’ growing expectations and needs.

Here’s a practical example of a website-focused lead generation funnel to get a better grasp of the entire concept:

Your website is like a shop window - the first thing customers come in contact with regarding your brand. 

As such, it must be well-designed to drive traffic, raise brand awareness and educate potential leads on things essential for solving their problem or handling their needs. 

To ensure that your website is optimized for attracting your ICP, here’s a quick checklist:

1. Clear, concise, and to-the-point copy.
2. Relevant and actionable CTAs.
3. Lead magnets and lead capture forms positioned in strategic places.
4. SEO, including both website structure and technical aspects (mobile friendliness, loading speed, etc.).

Pro tip: To check whether your website is attracting your ideal audience and capture quality leads who landed on it so you can nurture and guide them further down the funnel, you’ll need a website visitor identification tool such as Warmly.

With it, you’ll reveal who’s visiting your website in real-time and how they interact with it. Moreover, based on intent data, you’ll be able to gauge which of them are most likely to convert into paying customers.

         

Once you’ve identified website visitors and detected those who best match your ICP or show high buying intent, you can nurture them to build trust and establish a lasting relationship.

You can do this by sending personalized emails, chatbot messages, etc., ensuring your communication is tailored to each lead.

         

Finally, once all this is done, your sales team will just have to handle sales meetings and close deals, leveraging the intent data Warmly revealed.

Why is a lead generation funnel important?

So, why should businesses care so much about lead funnels?

Simply put, implementing a lead generation funnel can positively impact your business's success by optimizing how leads are acquired and converted into customers. 

Several key benefits stem from using lead generation funnels, including:

• Improving lead conversion rates - The funnel effectively targets and nurtures leads by systematically guiding prospects through each journey stage while applying a tailored approach. This means that prospects receive relevant content and messaging fitting their needs and interests, increasing the likelihood of taking the desired action and becoming paying customers.
• Enhancing the overall customer journey - Leveraging personalized content and strategic engagement at each stage enables businesses to address their prospects' unique concerns and needs. This customized experience builds trust and credibility and keeps prospects engaged, making them more likely to move further down the funnel and ultimately purchase.
• Reducing customer acquisition cost - Businesses can allocate their marketing resources more efficiently by focusing on nurturing high-intent leads. This reduces budget waste on poor-quality leads, ensuring your efforts will be spent on qualified leads alone.

How to build a lead generation funnel: Step-by-step

And now, let’s explain step-by-step how to build an effective lead-generation funnel.

Step 1: Identify your target audience

To create an efficient lead generation funnel, you first need to know the audience you want to attract.

To do that, you need to research the market by:

• Identifying website visitors and tracking how they interact with the site can help you determine which companies and individuals are showing the most interest in your products or services.

         

• Analyze historical customer data to reveal their behavior patterns, overall customer satisfaction, and potential high-churn areas.
• Conduct surveys and analyze your competitors.

Once you do that, you can identify key traits your existing customers and prospects showing interest in your offering have in common and use them to define your ICP.

Those traits can include factors such as industry, company size, technographic data, common pain points, interests, etc.

Finally, you can use those buyer personas to guide content and messaging accordingly, making sure that it’s optimized to achieve certain goals, depending on the specific funnel stage, including:

• Attract and educate potential customers.
• Engage and nurture them.
• Successfully convert them.

Step 2: Create a high-converting lead magnet

Once you know your target audience and ICP, it’s time to create relevant content that can help attract them and establish your brand as a source of truth.

In addition to regular content, such as blogs, how-to-videos, etc., you can also leverage lead magnets.

Lead magnets should include the highest-quality resources you can offer - such as ebooks, templates, industry reports, checklists, etc. - which bring so much value to prospects that they’ll be willing to provide their contact information to access them.

         

For example, if your target audience consists of digital marketers, an ebook on “Advanced SEO Techniques” or a webinar on “Maximizing ROI with PPC Campaigns” could be highly appealing.

The key to success is to ensure that your lead magnet aligns with the interests and needs of your ICP, delivering content that is both relevant and useful.

In addition to creating lead magnets, you also need to ensure that all the relevant landing pages - including those that contain lead magnets, as well as pricing, demo, trial, and similar pages - are optimized for generating more conversions.

When designing landing pages, focus on several elements:

• Engaging copy - Use persuasive and concise copy throughout the landing page, keeping it relevant to the page type. For instance, if the focus is on a lead magnet, emphasize its benefits and explain how it solves the visitor’s problems. If it’s a landing page for leads who’ve come through a specific email campaign, match it to the email’s content and provide personalized offers.
• Social proof - Include reviews, testimonials, or case studies that illustrate the value and efficiency of your lead magnet or product in general, depending on the type of landing page.
• Use simple forms - Keep the lead capture form short, asking only for essential information such as name and email address. This significantly reduces friction, improving your chance of getting more form submissions.

Pro tip: Sometimes having a good website and landing pages can replace traditional lead magnets.

If your website is optimized for attracting your target audience - i.e., includes relevant copy, compelling visuals, social proof, etc. - you can use a website traffic tracking tool to identify website visitors and pull their contact info regardless of whether they filled out forms.

This way, you’ll ensure no quality lead falls through the cracks.

Step 3: Set up an email nurturing campaign

After getting leads’ email addresses, it’s time to move on to the next step and funnel stage: lead nurturing.

One of the best ways to do this is via email.

Namely, sending engaging follow-up emails at different funnel stages is crucial for nurturing leads further down the funnel.

For instance, you can send:

• Thank you emails to leads who signed up for your webinar, showing them that they matter to you.
• Bonus resources to leads who downloaded a relevant resource (e.g., a PPC optimization checklist to leads who downloaded an ebook on PPC advertising).
• Special offers to leads who’ve interacted with your website in a high-intent way (e.g., frequently visited your pricing page, etc.). 

         

Of course, to optimize email campaigns for success, you need to personalize each email for each lead based on their specific interests, backgrounds, previous brand interactions, etc., which will boost your open and response rates.

Firstly, adequately segment your email list to ensure that different lead groups receive emails tailored to their specific traits.

With Warmly, you can segment email lists and send customized emails on autopilot by using its Orchestrator feature,

The Orchestrator will automatically add website visitors who match the criteria you defined in personalized email campaigns, ensuring every lead gets an email that resonates with their interests and behavior.

The criteria you can specify includes:

• Trigger action (e.g., sending emails to all leads who visit your pricing or other high-intent page, engage with your chatbot, download a lead magnet, etc.).
• Type of company and persona you want to reach out to (based on filters like industry, size, employee count, job role, seniority, etc.).

After defining that, the Orchestrator will take care of the rest.

Step 4: Implement a strong CTA

Use compelling CTAs throughout the funnel, as they’re vital for converting visitors into leads (or leads into paying customers) by prompting them to take specific action. 

To ensure your CTA is effective and drives conversions, there are several key principles to follow:

• Use clear and attention-grabbing messaging -Your CTA should clearly state what action you want the visitor to take. Use precise language that leaves no room for ambiguity. Instead of a generic "Submit," opt for more descriptive CTAs like "Download Your Free eBook" or "Start Your Free Trial."
• Highlight benefits of taking a specific action - Emphasize the instant value the visitor will receive by clicking the CTA. For example, if you’re offering a free resource, your CTA might be "Get Instant Access to Expert Tips" to make the benefit straightforward.
• Make them visually compelling - Use contrasting colors to help the CTA stand out, place it where it’s visible without scrolling, and ensure it’s big enough to be easily clickable.
• Create a sense of urgency - This is especially useful for the later stages of the funnel when you aim to convert leads into customers. Phrases like "Limited Time Offer," "Act Now," or countdown timers can create a psychological push for visitors to act more quickly.

         

To pinpoint CTAs that resonate the best with your target audience, you should conduct A/B tests on various elements (e.g., wording, size, placement, etc.). This approach allows you to find the CTA that drives the most conversions.

Step 5: Monitor and optimize your funnel

Finally, once everything is set up, you’ll need to monitor the funnel’s performance to ensure efficiency.

To do so, you should:

• Track relevant metrics, such as conversion rates, lead quality, and cost per lead.
• Analyze key data to identify potential bottlenecks and determine how your leads engage with your content and CTAs.
• Use customer feedback by conducting surveys and interviews and analyzing customer reviews to understand what delights your customers and what puts them off.

Finally, you should regularly review funnel performance and refine your lead generation strategy based on insights.

This could involve anything from updating lead magnets and revising email copy to adjusting CTAs to better align with your audience’s evolving needs.

The stages of a lead generation funnel

Typically, lead generation funnels consist of 4 stages:

1. Awareness 
2. Consideration 
3. Decision 
4. Retention 

Let’s quickly break down these stages of the lead generation process to help you better understand what each entails and what strategies to deploy in each.

Awareness stage

The awareness stage is the first step in the lead generation funnel, where potential customers first encounter your brand. 

At this stage, you aim to capture their attention and introduce them to your offerings. 

Here are some techniques you should apply at this stage:

1. Create high-quality content - Focus on developing content that’s informative, relevant, and valuable content to your target audience. Depending on your vision, goals, and audience, this could include blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and other content types. Just ensure the content addresses their pain points, answers their questions, or provides solutions.
2. Leverage SEO - Use relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags to enhance search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic. This increases the chances of attracting potential leads who are actively searching for information related to your solution.
3. Use social proof - Customer testimonials, case studies, and reviews can help build trust and credibility. Showcasing positive experiences from existing customers can reassure new prospects of the value and effectiveness of your offerings.

         

1. Deploy paid advertising - This helps increase brand visibility further and reach a broader audience. Of course, you need to tailor your ads to align with this stage's overall content and messaging (e.g., promote webinars and ebooks instead of urging leads to buy).
2. Use lead magnets - Offering valuable resources is the perfect incentive for leads to provide their contact information in exchange for getting access to them.

Consideration stage

This is the stage where new leads who have already become aware of your brand evaluate their options and determine whether your solution is a good fit for their needs. 

As a result, at this stage, you should focus on providing deeper insights and building relationships to guide leads toward making a decision. 

Here’s how to effectively engage and nurture leads during this phase:

1. Offer valuable content - More advanced resources, such as detailed whitepapers, case studies, or expert webinars, can be used as lead magnets at this stage. These can help position you as an industry leader while providing in-depth information that builds credibility and showcases your expertise.
2. Use automated email campaigns to keep leads engaged - Ensure that leads get personalized and timely emails based on their interests, behavior, and interactions with your brand.
3. Provide free trials or demos - Free trials enable your leads to experience your product’s value firsthand, letting them try it out before paying. Personalized demos and walkthroughs can also help show leads how your product works and what benefits they might experience from using it. As a result, your leads will be more likely to choose your solution in the end.

         

Decision stage

At this stage, prospects are ready to buy, so your goal is to provide the final push needed to convert leads into customers. 

Here’s how to effectively influence their decision and close the deal:

1. Offer discounts, personalized proposals, and limited-time offers - Crafting personalized offers that align with your customers’ specific needs and pain points increases the likelihood of converting. Discounts and limited-time offers, on the other hand, provide a greater incentive for them to decide faster.
2. Use customer reviews and testimonials - This technique can be leveraged in this stage with equal success as in the awareness stage. At this stage, testimonials can help further establish your solution’s credibility and success in tackling specific pain points and requirements.
3. Implement strong CTAs to encourage decisive action - To urge users to convert, ensure your CTAs are clear and compelling enough. Use clear, actionable language, position them in prominent places on key decision-making pages, and make them visually attractive for optimal results.

         

Retention stage

Although some businesses think that the funnel ends with a successful conversion, one more stage ensures that one-time buyers will transform into loyal, long-term customers.

Here are a few best practices for engaging and retaining existing customers:

1. Use loyalty programs and rewards for recurring customers - A loyalty program that rewards customers for continuing to buy or subscribe (by providing tiered rewards, membership benefits, etc.) can further incentivize repeat buys. You can also offer special rewards for customers who refer others or make additional purchases (e.g., discounts, gifts, exclusive offers, etc.).

         

2. Provide exceptional customer support - Ensure that your customer support is responsive, helpful, and available through multiple channels, such as phone, email, and chat. You can also leverage chatbots that can answer simpler queries or route customers to adequate customer support reps. Quick damage control and problem resolution help maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

3. Engage with customers post-purchase - Send personalized thank-you notes, follow-up emails, or satisfaction surveys to gather feedback to show that your customers matter to you to keep the relationship strong.

4. Leverage email marketing to upsell and cross-sell - Using targeted email campaigns to promote higher-class products, premium versions of your offering, or related products that complement what the customer has already bought can result in more purchases and higher ROI.

Best practices for optimizing your lead generation funnel

To ensure that your lead generation funnels work as intended - i.e., generate leads and high conversion rates - you can implement several of our tested and tried tips and best practices:

1. Focus on personalization - Providing personalized experiences is a must throughout the entire funnel, as it can help build lasting relationships with leads much faster. Therefore, ensure your content and offers are personalized based on lead behavior, preferences, and interactions. Personalized messaging is also necessary, meaning that every email and message you send must be tailored to each lead’s specific interests and needs.
2. Use marketing tools - Tools that help identify quality leads and automate engagement can streamline your sales and marketing operations, making them more efficient across levels.
3. Test and refine - Conduct A/B tests on various elements of your funnel, such as landing pages, CTAs, and email campaigns. Afterward, analyze the results to identify which variations perform the best and make necessary adjustments.
4. Continuously improve your techniques - Regularly review funnel performance and make improvements based on data insights and feedback. Don’t forget to keep an eye on market trends and lead behavior to ensure your lead funnel is always fine-tuned to your target audience.

Common mistakes to avoid when building a lead generation funnel

If you’re new to building lead generation funnels, it’s easy to fall into certain traps that can significantly damage your funnel’s efficiency.

Here’s a quick checklist of things to avoid at all costs:

• Failing to define your target audience - If you don’t know who you’re targeting, you can easily create generic funnels that won’t lead you anywhere.
• Overcomplicating the funnel - Adding too many stages or steps can confuse or overwhelm leads. Keep the funnel as simple as possible to ensure a smooth progression from one stage to the next.
• Using inadequate lead magnets - Make sure you offer lead magnets that are valuable and relevant enough to your target audience to compel them to share their contact information. Failing to do so will result in lower lead generation rates.
• Neglecting lead nurturing - Not having a structured lead nurturing and follow-up strategy can result in lost opportunities to engage and convert leads. Develop and implement follow-up and nurturing processes to build relationships and move leads further down the funnel.
• Ignoring data and analytics - Not tracking key metrics and performance data can prevent you from understanding how well your funnel performs, resulting in suffering losses across levels.

Generate more leads with Warmly

So, are you ready to build your first high-converting lead generation sales funnel?

Our actionable tips and best practices are sure to help you on your journey, ensuring that high-quality leads will start trickling down your sales pipeline in no time.

Warmly can further improve the process by:

• Identifying high-intent leads that land on your website.
• Engaging them via personalized chat messages and emails.
• Providing live, on-site engagement options that enable your reps to close more deals from the comfort of your website.

Want to give it a go?

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and generate more quality leads within hours.

Or, book a live demo to see it in action first.

Outbound lead generation is a necessary part of any B2B sales strategy for a simple reason:

It allows you to get your product in front of prospects who might not even be aware yet that they could benefit from it.

This means that a well-crafted outbound lead generation strategy could significantly expand your lead pool and result in more conversions & higher ROI - something all businesses strive for.

In this article, we’ll share the top 6 tested and tried outbound lead generation strategies to help you figure out how to build your own successful outbound lead generation funnel.

We’ll begin by answering the quintessential question 👇

What is outbound lead generation?

The simplest definition of outbound lead generation would be that it is a strategic marketing approach in which businesses actively reach out to potential prospects, aiming to convert them into leads and paying customers.

To achieve that, outbound lead generation strategies usually rely on several common tactics:

• Cold calling
• Cold email campaigns
• Direct mail 
• TV and radio advertisements
• Social selling
• Networking events

So, as can be seen from this, unlike inbound lead generation campaigns, which attract leads through content and by driving organic interest, the outbound lead generation process involves direct outreach methods.

To make sure there’s no room left for misconceptions, let’s quickly list the key differences between inbound and outbound lead generation:

1. Approach - Outbound lead generation involves a proactive and outreach-based approach, that entails reaching out to potential leads to generate interest. Inbound is more passive, focusing on drawing leads to your brand through more subtle strategies (content, SEO, etc.).
2. Main focus - Outbound lead generation emphasizes direct product promotion, leveraging persuasion to close more sales quickly, regardless of potential leads’ interest levels. Inbound, on the other hand, relies on quality content to raise brand awareness and attract leads who are already aware of their needs and are actively searching for a solution.
3. Target audience - Outbound marketing targets a much broader audience, including leads at the awareness or consideration stage and prospects who might not know they could use your product. Inbound marketing is focused solely on leads who have already expressed a certain level of interest in your product.
4. Personalization - Outbound strategies are usually more generic and widely set due to their wider audience and product focus. Conversely, Inbound is all about personalization and appealing to leads’ specific needs and interests.
5. Cost - Outbound can be more expensive per lead, as you have to invest in large-scale marketing campaigns and risk generating very few leads. Inbound, on the other hand, is typically more cost-efficient, as highly targeted, personalized campaigns usually yield better results in terms of the number of generated leads and successful conversions.
6. ROI - Outbound is faster to yield ROI due to its focus on generating quick, short-term results (e.g., one-off sales). Inbound tends to nurture long-term relationships, meaning you typically have to wait longer to get ROI.

Seeing these differences—especially ones regarding cost, ROI, and the general approach—might make you wonder why businesses still leverage outbound lead generation strategies in the digital age, which is all about personalization and highly targeted efforts.

There are a few very good reasons why outbound marketing still has an important place in effective B2B sales strategies, including:

• Immediate results—Since outbound directly reaches out to prospects, pushing your message across channels to generate more leads and conversion, it can often deliver results much faster than inbound, which focuses on nurturing lasting relationships.
• More control - Relying on outbound methods gives businesses more control over the entire outreach process, as they are in charge of everything from messaging to where and how potential customers come into contact with their brand.
• Direct engagement - Engaging potential prospects directly and persuading them to buy your solution can get them to convert into leads and customers faster than inbound methods, which rely exclusively on self-driven interest.
• Expanding on new markets more easily - Outbound tactics can help enter new markets where brand or problem awareness is very low, making inbound strategies pointless or too slow to generate results.

The importance of outbound lead generation in today's market

Today’s market is oversaturated with everything - information, content, special offers, etc. - as everyone is competing to attract leads’ attention and position their brand as the best among many others.

So, in an age where consumers have more choices and information at their fingertips than ever, outbound lead generation continues to play a vital role in marketing strategies, helping you beat your competition to the punch.

Namely, relying on inbound alone means waiting for leads to notice and come to you, which can result in many lost opportunities. Outbound, on the other hand, lets you take control of your growth by proactively reaching out to potential customers and helping them understand why your solution is the best for them. 

Moreover, outbound can be especially beneficial in B2B sales, as decision-makers are often too busy to be actively looking for new solutions. 

By initiating contact through various outbound methods (e.g., cold emails, calls, etc.), companies can introduce their offering to businesses fitting their ICP that might not have found them otherwise.

Finally, in addition to its direct impact on sales, outbound lead generation supports broader business goals by expanding market reach, ensuring that your message is heard even by prospects who may not yet be familiar with your solution. 

This makes it perfect for filling in the gaps in audience engagement left by inbound, which focuses only on leads who already know they might benefit from your solution.

Therefore, combining outbound and inbound methods, depending on specific goals and the type of product you sell, might be the best choice for most companies, enabling you to maximize your reach and conversions.

Top 6 outbound lead generation strategies from experts

When aiming to build a high-converting outbound lead generation funnel, it’s best to stick to tested tactics backed by industry experts.

Below, we’ll explore some of the best outbound lead-generation strategies, helping you design a winning outbound approach for your product and specific audience.

1. Cold calling

Cold calls are one of the oldest outbound lead generation tactics that entail calling potential customers via phone to introduce your product or service and determine their interest levels.

However, despite being one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book, cold calling remains a powerful tool in today’s digital landscape - provided it’s done right. 

To minimize the chances of potential prospects hanging up on you before you’ve even had the chance to make a pitch, there are several best practices you can apply, including:

• Start with thorough preparation - Before picking up the phone, you should research the prospect (visit their website, LinkedIn profile, or use lead enrichment tools to find the necessary information), identify key decision-makers within companies to ensure you’re speaking with the right person, and define the goal of the call (book a meeting, gather information, introduce your product, etc.).
• Personalize your approach - Avoid generic, one-size-fits-all pitches at all costs. Tailor your calls by referencing specific pain points, industry trends, or relevant news, making them more engaging and relevant to prospects.
• Mind the timing - Research suggests that certain times of day and days of the week yield better results for cold calling. However, as this is not strict science, it’s best to experiment with different times to identify when your target audience is most responsive.
• Don’t forget to follow up - If your first call doesn’t result in a conversion, don’t give up, as a well-timed follow-up call or message can make all the difference. Just remember - persistence is key in marketing.
• Draft good call scripts—Improvisation can only get you so far regarding cold calling. To ensure better results, it’s best to design good call scripts your reps can use when reaching out.

When it comes to the last point - creating call scripts - you must be wondering how to do that, especially if you’ve never dabbled in the art of cold calling.

To ensure that your calls will be as effective in generating leads as possible, focus on the following elements:

• Opening statement - How you begin your call is crucial for how it will end. Try to hook your prospect straight away by mentioning something relevant and compelling that grabs attention from the get-go (e.g., industry trend, their recent achievement, major pain points for their industry, etc.).
• Value proposition - You should communicate the value your product or service offers clearly and concisely, without much fluff. Highlight how you can solve a specific problem or improve the prospect’s current situation.
• Engagement questions - Ask open-ended questions to engage the prospect and uncover their needs or pain points. This helps to create a two-way conversation rather than a monologue, increasing the chance that the call will last long enough for you to score.
• Close with a CTA - End the call with a clear CTA, whether it’s setting up a meeting, sending more information, or another specific next step. Be polite but assertive in steering the conversation towards this goal.

However, there’s a catch with cold calling.

Regardless of how well-prepared you are, you’ll often face objections and point-blank rejections.

To handle them, you should:

• Prepare responses for the most common objections you can anticipate (e.g., lack of resources, satisfaction with a current solution, etc.).
• Pay close attention to objections, as they can often provide insight into prospects’ deeper concerns, which you can turn to your advantage.
• Stay positive and persistent when faced with rejection, and try to use it as an opportunity to refine your strategy by politely asking for feedback.

2. Cold email outreach

Cold email outreach is one of the most effective outbound lead-generation strategies to date, especially now when most businesses rely on emails as their primary communication tool.

However, to stand out in a crowded inbox and generate high open and response rates, it’s essential to craft emails that are:

• Attention-grabbing 
• Personalized 
• Strategically timed

Here are some tips to help you master cold email outreach in no time:

• Craft compelling subject lines - Most prospects will take one glance at an email and shoot it down unless it has something that stands out. To increase the chance of having your email opened, you should pique their curiosity by hinting at some unique value or opportunity while staying clear and concise.
• Create engaging opening statements - This is the second most important thing in cold emailing, as it can encourage prospects to actually read through the email and consider it. Make the opening sentence personalized and highlight the value as soon as possible.
• Focus on personalization throughout the copy - Everything from the first to the final sentence in your email should be tailored to the leads you’re reaching out to. This will help build trust and credibility and increase open, response, and, hopefully, conversion rates.
• Pay attention to the timing and frequency of follow-up emails - Some prospects need an extra nudge in the form of follow-up emails. However, try to strike the right balance between being politely persistent and downright pushy. Limit the number of follow-ups to no more than 3-5, send them after 2-3 days for the first and 4-7 days for subsequent follow-ups, and aim to provide a new angle or extra value with each to avoid being repetitive.

Bonus resource: We’ll share some customizable cold email templates that have proven their efficiency below.

Template 1: Problem-Solution Approach

Subject: {Prospect’s Name}, Solving {Specific Problem} at {Company Name} 

Hi {Prospect’s Name},

I noticed that {Company} is focused on {industry-specific goal}. Many businesses in your space struggle with {specific problem}, leading to {negative consequence}.

At {Your Company Name}, we specialize in {solution} that helps companies like yours {positive outcome}. For instance, {brief success story of a similar company}.

Would you be open to a brief call to discuss how we can help {Company} achieve {specific benefit}?

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Best regards,

[Your Name]

Template 2: Curiosity and Value

Subject: {Prospect’s Name} Here’s a Quick Idea to Boost {Specific Outcome}

Hi {Prospect’s Name},

I’ve been following {Company Name} and am impressed with your work in {specific area}. I wanted to share a quick idea that could potentially boost {specific outcome} by {percentage or specific metric}.

We recently helped {similar company} achieve {specific result} using {brief description of solution}. I think it could be a great fit for {Company} as well.

Could we set up a quick call next week to explore this further?

Thanks for your time,

{Your Name}

Template 3: Follow-Up After No Response

Subject: {Prospect’s Name}, Did You Get a Chance to Look at My Previous Email?

Hi {Prospect’s Name},

I wanted to follow up on my last email regarding {specific solution} that could help {Company Name} with {specific problem}.

I understand you’re busy, so if this isn’t the right time, just let me know. However, I’d love to discuss how we can assist with {specific benefit} at your convenience.

Would {specific date/time} work for a quick chat?

Best regards,

{Your Name}

3. Social selling

Social selling is another powerful outbound lead generation strategy that has transformed how businesses engage with prospects.

Namely, social selling is all about leveraging social media presence to build strong personal brands and meaningful engagement with prospects.

LinkedIn is the first social media platform that comes to mind regarding prospecting and outbound lead gen, as B2B businesses in particular rely on it. 

If you’d like to make the most of social selling on LinkedIn, you should focus on several things:

• Optimize your profile - Your LinkedIn profile is often the first impression prospects will have of you. Ensure it’s professional, complete, and aligned with your brand. 
• Use advanced search - LinkedIn’s advanced search features enable you to find and connect with prospects based on specific criteria, such as industry, job title, company size, and location. You can use these filters to create a targeted list of potential leads.
• Buy LinkedIn Sales Navigator - LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers additional tools for more sophisticated prospecting, such as lead recommendations, real-time insights, and enhanced search capabilities. 
• Share valuable content that resonates with your target audience - This can include anything from industry insights and case studies to your own thought leadership articles. Regularly engaging with your network through content helps establish your authority and keeps you top-of-mind with prospects.

• Personalize connection requests - Instead of just sending an empty connection request, you can mention something specific about the prospect’s profile, such as a recent post they shared or a mutual connection. This shows that you’re genuinely interested in them, helping you lay the foundation for a relationship early on.

Regardless of whether you rely on LinkedIn and/or other social media, some outbound lead generation principles apply to each platform, such as:

• Maintaining consistent messaging across all platforms you use for social selling.
• Positioning yourself as an industry expert by regularly sharing valuable insights and articles. 
• Engaging with your network in a genuine and helpful way by commenting on posts, participating in relevant discussions, joining industry groups, etc.

4. Paid advertising

Paid advertising, or PPC, can also help generate more outbound leads, pushing your brand and product on all the platforms where your target audience resides.

To ensure optimal efficiency, there are several steps to follow:

1. Choose the right platforms - Consider where your potential customers are most active and focus on those platforms to avoid wasting your budget.
2. Create compelling ad copy and visuals - Regardless of the type of ad and platform you display it on, ensure your ad is visually appealing, concise, and includes a clear and compelling CTA.
3. Optimize corresponding landing pages - Ensure that the landing page linked to your ad is optimized for conversions. It should be relevant to the ad content, easy to navigate, and feature a clear CTA.

Finally, although precise targeting isn’t as important in outbound as in inbound campaigns, you should still ensure that you’re reaching the audience that’s most likely to convert into leads and paying customers to maximize your campaigns’ efficiency.

5. Networking events

Networking events - conferences, expos, tradeshows, workshops, seminars, etc. - provide opportunities to build personal relationships, establish trust, and create meaningful connections with potential leads. 

Although in today’s digital world, the value of face-to-face interaction is often underestimated, networking events remain one of the more effective ways of generating high-quality leads. 

Of course, just showing up at random events won’t do you much good, meaning you have to think this strategy through from top to bottom. To ensure success, you need to:

• Pick the right events based on your industry, product, and target audience.
• Prepare your pitch beforehand and bring the right materials, such as business cards, brochures, or other marketing materials, to hand out to prospects.
• Engage in meaningful conversations to make as many valuable connections as possible.
• Follow up after events by connecting with prospects on LinkedIn or sending personalized emails referencing a chat you had at the event and offering additional value (e.g., a relevant case study, article, or introduction to another important contact).

Pro note: Webinars and online workshops also count as networking events, enabling you to reach audiences who are not geographically close.

You can use these just as successfully to build meaningful relationships and establish your brand as an industry leader.

6. Automating sales outreach

Finally, no marketing strategy is complete without automation.

Automation has revolutionized sales and marketing, enabling marketers and sales reps to streamline various processes and boost efficiency and productivity across levels.

Namely, sales automation tools, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, etc., can help with various outbound lead generation processes, such as:

1. Lead scoring - Automation tools can automatically score and prioritize leads based on predefined criteria, ensuring that your outbound sales team focuses on the most promising leads, improving efficiency and conversion rates.
2. Email sequencing - This enables you to put cold email campaigns on autopilot while ensuring that each email is personalized and sent at the right time.

1. Task assignment - Sales automation tools can create and assign tasks to team members based on specific triggers, such as a lead reaching a certain stage in the sales funnel. This reduces the manual workload and ensures no step in the sales process is missed.
2. Data collection and analysis - Most automation tools gather and analyze data from various touchpoints, providing valuable insights into what strategies are working and where adjustments are needed. 

Finally, you should integrate your sales automation tools with your CRM systems to ensure that all the necessary data is stored in a single place for better management.

This way, you’ll be able to streamline relevant processes better, especially lead nurturing. Namely, leads can be automatically segmented and placed into targeted campaigns based on their behavior, data, and previous interactions with your sales and marketing, ensuring a personalized approach across levels.

How to build an outbound lead generation funnel (Step-by-step guide)

All that’s left is to explain how to create your very own high-converting outbound lead generation funnel.

Let’s go!

Step 1: Identify and target your ICP

Naturally, the first step to crafting an efficient outbound lead generation funnel is knowing who your ICP is.

That way, you can focus your efforts on audiences most likely to respond well to your outreach, getting higher conversion rates and optimizing budget spend across levels.

It’s in your best interest to create very detailed ICPs, which will help your outbound marketing team understand who to target with their campaigns.

To do that, you should:

• Collect data on existing customers, including demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data, to determine their common traits and who’s most likely to buy your product.
• Incorporate negative personas to contrast your ICP. These are the individuals and companies that are unlikely to convert or deliver very little value, making them better to avoid altogether.
• Pinpoint key characteristics shared between your best-performing customers and deals.

Once you’ve done this, you should segment your audience to enable better targeting. 

You can do this by applying various filters and criteria, such as:

• Demographic factors (age, gender, job role, etc.).
• Firmographic (industry, revenue, employee count, etc.).
• Technographic (the tool stack a company uses).
• Behavioral factors (buying habits, intent, product usage, etc.).

This is where tools like Warmly come in especially handy.

With it, you can identify your website visitors, i.e., existing leads, and enrich them with detailed B2B and intent data, allowing you to detect their common traits.

The platform provides insights into everything from basic contact info and demographics to firmographics and technographics, revealing how they interact with your website and how likely they are to buy.

In turn, identifying your current hottest leads can help create a detailed and accurate ICP, allowing you to generate more leads and conversions across levels.

Step 2: Craft an irresistible value proposition

Once you’ve determined who you’re going to focus on, it’s time to create a value proposition potential leads will find difficult to resist.

A good value proposition clearly communicates your product or service's unique benefits and why it’s the best choice for your target audience.

And the best ones not only grab attention but also resonate deeply with your audience by aligning with their needs and pain points.

To ensure that your value proposition is as compelling as it gets, follow several guidelines:

• Identify your unique selling points—Determining what sets you apart from the competition can help create a strong value proposal. This could be anything from price to quality, customer service, innovation, or any other distinctive feature.
• Be clear and concise - Your value proposition should answer the question: “Why should I choose your product or service?” Avoid overly complex terms and fluff, and focus on delivering a straightforward and impactful message.
• Emphasize the exact benefits prospects will experience - Instead of just listing features, explain how these features translate into tangible benefits for the user. For example, instead of saying “Our software has a user-friendly interface,” say “Save time and reduce frustration with our easy-to-use software that simplifies your daily tasks.”
• Use customer-centric language - Focus on your audience’s pain points, needs, and priorities and align your messaging with their expected outcomes.

Here are a few examples of brands that have nailed it with their value proposition to get a better idea of how it should look like:

1. Spotify: “Music for everyone.” - Simple, to-the-point, and memorable.
2. Trello: “Trello brings all your tasks, teammates, and tools together.” - The focus is on the convenience of smoother team collaboration anywhere, anytime.

3. Warmly: “Convert website visitors. Instantly.” - No fluff, straight to the point, and focuses on what Warmly delivers.

Step 3: Design and implement your outreach strategy

Next is designing your outreach strategy - placing your messaging in front of potential prospects and getting them to consider it.

To achieve that, you first need to choose the right channel for your outbound campaign, considering factors like:

• Target audience and where they’re most likely to be found.
• Budget and resources you have at hand.
• Pros and cons of each channel (e.g., LinkedIn is great for B2B outreach but can be less efficient for B2C, cold calling provides direct engagement but can be difficult to pull off, etc.).

However, the best approach that ensures you’ll reach as many potential customers as possible is developing a multichannel outreach strategy that involves engaging prospects across multiple channels.

Here’s an example of how you might create a multi-touch approach:

• Start by mapping out the typical journey your prospects take from initial contact to conversion - Identify key touchpoints where engagement is most effective, such as initial awareness, consideration, and decision-making stages.
• Create a touchpoint sequence accordingly, which could look like this:
• Initial email introduction outlining the value proposition.
• LinkedIn connection request or message referencing the email.
• Personalized direct mail or additional mail with extra resources.
• A follow-up call to discuss the prospect’s needs and expectations and book a demo.
• Remember to personalize each step of the way—tailor every outreach action to the individual lead’s needs and context.
• Find the optimal timing for every touchpoint - Don’t overwhelm prospects with too much contact, but also try not to let too much time pass between steps to keep them engaged and interested.

After that, you just have to constantly monitor and optimize your strategies, as we’ll explain below.

Step 4: Analyze and optimize your funnel

By continuously monitoring the performance of each stage of your funnel, testing different approaches, and making data-driven adjustments, you can enhance conversion rates and drive better results over time.

Namely, regular monitoring and analysis is essential, as it can help you identify potential bottlenecks, adapt to market changes promptly, enhance lead quality, optimize budget spend, and much more.

One of the best ways to check how well your funnel performs and whether there’s room for improvement is to perform A/B testing of various funnel stages.

You can apply A/B testing to virtually any segment and aspect, including:

• Email subject lines and copy
• Call scripts
• Landing pages
• Ads
• Closing techniques
• And more

Finally, once you’ve identified what works well and what can use some adjustments, there are several things you can do to optimize your funnel and boost your conversion rates, such as:

• Refine lead qualification criteria to prioritize those that are most likely to convert.
• Personalizing outreach and nurturing to improve engagement.
• Improve follow-up timing by analyzing historical data to find optimal intervals for sending follow-ups.
• Leveraging social proof such as reviews, testimonials, and case studies, especially at critical decision-making points.

Wrapping up

There it is - all you need to know about the nuances of outbound lead generation and how to master it.

So, what next?

Well, one thing is certain. While outbound lead generation is here to stay, as it can help you cut through the noise faster in today’s competitive market, some refinement over time will be necessary for optimal results.

Emphasizing quality over quantity is the only way to ensure sustainability and long-term success. This means leveraging quality data to ensure that you’re targeting the right leads and applying tailored outreach and nurturing strategies across levels.

Therefore, the best approach is to combine both inbound and outbound lead generation strategies for optimal results, ensuring you’ll reach your TAM from top to bottom.

And if you’re looking for an extra hand, Warmly can help optimize both inbound and outbound funnels by uncovering your hottest leads and providing you with all the insights you need to close more deals easily.

Sign up for its free plan and start generating more quality leads today.

Regardless of how experienced a marketer you are, we all sometimes need additional inspiration or a new perspective to achieve our goals—especially when it comes to complex processes such as lead generation.

In today’s digital landscape, being original while staying true to tested and tried sales and marketing principles has become necessary to remain competitive.

That’s why in this article, we’ll share the 10 best lead generation ideas you can adopt to generate leads and successfully convert them.

TL;DR

• The onset of the digital era transformed the way businesses handle lead generation by introducing new technologies, tools, and requirements.
• To stay ahead of the curve, companies need to implement innovative strategies that ensure they’ll generate qualified leads despite all the challenges of today’s market.
• Some of the best lead generation ideas and strategies in 2024 include:
• Harnessing AI
• Optimizing your website
• Using email marketing
• Running omnichannel campaigns
• Using customer testimonials
• Leveraging influencer marketing and strategic partnerships
• Hosting virtual and hybrid events
• Creating instructional resources
• Using social media platforms 

Top 10 lead generation ideas for 2024

Although the essential concept of lead generation has remained the same - the process of attracting, identifying, nurturing, and converting leads into customers - the way it’s done today has changed significantly due to:

• Technological advancements, e.g., increased digitization, the rise of AI, etc.
• Changes in consumer behavior, as today’s customers are much more demanding given the variety of choices and information they have at their fingertips.
• The importance of providing personalized experiences across channels to delight leads and build strong relationships.
• The market being more complex and competitive than ever before, partly due to everything going digital.

To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must design more innovative lead generation strategies that can successfully tackle all these modern challenges and yield positive results over time.

This is why our list of the best lead generation ideas includes all the marketing tactics capable of keeping up with 2024 trends and helping your business thrive.

Let’s start breaking them down one by one.

Idea 1: Implementing AI-powered tools

If there’s one trend that has marked the past few years, it’s AI.

So, naturally, AI-powered tools are the first thing to implement in your lead generation strategies to ensure you’ll be able to meet all the requirements of the modern sales and marketing landscape.

There’s a variety of tools you can use to run AI-powered lead generation, including:

• Chatbots - These can be trained to perform various tasks, from engaging leads who’ve landed on your website to asking questions to qualify them, booking meetings, routing them to adequate reps, etc.

• Outreach automation tools - AI has made automation smarter and more precise, enabling you to create complex multitouch cadences that include personalized messaging tailored to each lead.
• Lead enrichment platforms - Solutions like Warmly can help reveal and aggregate all the relevant lead data, including their buying intent, enabling you to prioritize those most likely to convert right now.
• Lead scoring tools - These platforms can automatically score and qualify leads generated through various channels based on pre-defined criteria faster and more accurately than human reps.

Overall, although similar solutions were leveraged long before the rise of AI, new technologies have made these tools more precise, efficient, and smarter.

As a result, marketers can streamline their operations more easily while ensuring they’ll get optimal results.

Idea 2: Website optimization

Your website is the cornerstone of every lead generation strategy, and with more businesses and customers migrating online than ever, investing in your website has never been as important.

To generate, capture, and convert quality leads, you should ensure that your website checks the following boxes:

• It’s SEO optimized - Your website’s structure should follow basic SEO guidelines (structure, headings, meta tags, relevant keywords, etc.) as well as meet certain technical standards (loading speed, mobile friendliness, etc.) to ensure high SERP ranking and more organic traffic.
• It’s tailored to your ICP - Your website needs to be optimized for attracting, delighting, and converting your ICP. Make sure you’ve included keywords relevant to your product and audience and a clear, concise, and compelling value proposition that leaves no room for misunderstanding.
• It has clear and engaging CTAs - CTAs are the most efficient way of guiding leads further down the funnel by urging them to take a certain action. Use CTAs everywhere they fit while ensuring they stand out, are prominent, and use strong and clear messaging.

• Use lead magnets and lead-capturing forms - The whole point of having an optimized website is to actually capture lead contact info so you can reach out and nurture them further down the funnel. Leverage lead capture forms and lead magnets whenever possible while ensuring they’re relevant to the specific landing page on which you placed them.

Pro tip: Use website visitor identification tools like Warmly to capture the leads who landed on your website.

With it, you won’t have to rely on lead-capturing forms and lead magnets to get leads’ contact data, as the platform will automatically identify the companies and individuals visiting your website.

In addition to providing basic contact info, Warmly also reveals other B2B data (technographics, detailed firmographics, demographics, etc.) and intent data, allowing you to pinpoint which of your leads are most likely to buy now.

Idea 3: Using content marketing 

Content marketing is another staple point in lead generation and it’s still going strong in 2024.

Creating compelling, educational, and engaging content of various types is crucial for:

• Attracting potential leads.
• Positioning your brand as an industry leader.
• Building trust.
• Nurturing relationships.

When it comes to the types of content you should use, the actual content plan will greatly depend on your product, industry, and target audience.

However, the most widespread content types include:

• Blogs

• How-to videos and tutorials
• ebooks, whitepapers, and case studies
• Templates and checklists

In addition to these more traditional content forms, audio and interactive content have been steadily rising over the last few years.

Podcasts, quizzes, interactive demos, personalized assessments, etc., have all shown to perform well with leads, providing them with an immersive, engaging, and original experience.

So, to stand out from the crowd, you can always leverage these more unique content types, with a special focus on content that lets your leads take a more active part instead of being passive receivers.

Idea 4: Leveraging email marketing

No lead generation idea and strategy would be complete without email marketing.

Namely, despite the rise of new marketing channels, email remains unmatched in its ability to deliver targeted content, nurture leads over time, and drive conversions.

However, with so many businesses using email for lead generation, you need to ensure that your emails are optimized for your target audience to increase your chances of generating more conversions.

Here’s what you can do:

• Build a quality email list - A “spray and pray” approach has definitely become a thing of the past, as sending generic emails to broad audiences will only result in massive budget losses. You should create a highly targeted list consisting only of quality leads, such as those who downloaded your lead magnet, subscribed to your newsletter, attended your webinar, or engaged with your brand on social media.
• Segment your audience for personalized campaigns - Some leads share lots of common traits, which you can leverage to create audience segments. You can use different criteria, such as type of interaction with your brand, funnel stage, buyer intent level, etc. Once that’s done, you can craft personalized email copy that will resonate with each specific segment and individual lead.
• Create compelling email copy - Use engaging and enticing subject lines and opening sentences to hook your leads from the start and get them to open your emails. The rest of the copy should also be intriguing, concise, and to the point, clearly conveying the value they’ll get from your solution.
• Include valuable resources - Everyone loves getting freebies, especially useful ones. You can send insightful articles or simple checklists to compel leads to give your brand a chance.
• Use strong CTAs - Every email should include a clear and compelling CTA that guides the reader toward the next step, whether it’s downloading a resource, signing up for a webinar, or making a purchase. 

Of course, when running email campaigns on scale, you can always leverage various outreach automation tools that enable you to create email lists and send personalized emails on autopilot.

For instance, Warmly’s Orchestrator automatically adds leads who match certain specified criteria (e.g., company size, industry, ROI, role, seniority, etc.) to email sequences, sending highly personalized emails based on the relevant data Warmly revealed.

Idea 5: Running omnichannel marketing campaigns

Multitouch campaigns are the future of lead generation, as they enable you to cover as many relevant channels as possible at the same time, ensuring you’ll reach and convert more quality leads than by sticking to a single channel.

Here’s an example of a multichannel marketing campaign:

• Use your website to attract quality leads and a website visitor identification tool to capture them.
• Add those leads to automated LinkedIn sequences, sending them connection requests that can be accompanied by personalized messages.
• Send them contextual emails based on how they interacted with your website, their specific interests, intent levels, pain points, etc.
• Book a call in one of the follow-up emails and have your sales reps do the rest.

This way, you push leads further down the funnel by using a multi-touch approach that introduces diversity and establishes your presence in more than one channel.

Idea 6: Using success stories

The key step in building trust is demonstrating your brand is credible and capable of delivering what it promised.

While using techniques like content marketing and industry events can certainly help with that, your leads prefer using additional, unbiased sources of truth - your customers.

That’s all the appeal of platforms like G2 and Capterra, as they enable prospective customers to see how actual users of a specific product feel about its UX, UI, features, value for money, customer support, and other important factors.

Therefore, including strong social proof, such as success stories, case studies, real user testimonials and reviews, etc., on your website, relevant landing pages, or social media posts can be hugely beneficial for your lead generation efforts.

Of course, you must first ensure that your customers will give you good ratings and favourable reviews by providing them with a first-class experience.

That way, you’ll get free brand advocates to spread the word about your product among their peers without asking for anything in return.

Idea 7: Leveraging influencer marketing and partnerships

The evolving digital landscape has introduced a growing role of influencer marketing and strategic alliances in lead generation. 

Namely, by collaborating with influencers and complementary brands, you can tap into new audiences, build credibility, and drive more targeted traffic to your lead capture channels.

Let’s take a closer look at these two strategies. They’re similar but also have significant differences.

Influencer marketing

When it comes to influencer marketing, to do it right, you first need to choose the right influencers.

Pick those who already have a strong following among your target audience and are recognized as experts in your industry, and then leverage their credibility and popularity for your own purposes.

Once you’ve made your pick, you need to create compelling campaigns in collaboration with the influencer, which can include:

• Your product unboxing or review.
• Giveaways, contests, and challenges featuring your product.

This allows you to subtly promote your brand with no obvious active participation of your own.

Strategic partnerships

Strategic partnerships with complementary brands can help you achieve the same goal - expand your reach and tap into a wider audience through joining forces with other businesses.

Again, you need to focus on finding complementary businesses, meaning they’re not direct competitors or completely unrelated to your brand. Instead, search for companies whose products, combined with yours, could provide you both with additional value.

For instance, if you have a data management solution, you could partner up with cloud providers to:

• Provide existing clients with more functionality that might create room for cross and upselling.
• Attract new leads looking for cloud data management.

Some of the ways to make the most out of your partnerships include:

• Co-hosted events - You can host virtual, hybrid, and physical events that generate value for both of your audiences, such as a product demonstration, educational workshop, or a Q&A session with experts.
• Cross promotions - Share each other’s content, run joint social media campaigns, or feature each other in newsletters to introduce your brand to a new audience that could benefit from your product.
• Bundled offers - Create bundled offers that combine your products or services with those of a partner brand. Promote these bundles through email campaigns, social media platforms, and your website, using lead capture forms to gather information from interested customers.

Idea 8: Hosting virtual and hybrid events

Before the internet, you could only host physical events that severely limited your reach.

Today, you can get your brand in front of global audiences by hosting virtual and hybrid events that educate and engage while promoting your product.

Moreover, many hosting platforms - such as Hopin, Zoom Events, Microsoft Teams, etc. - offer numerous interactive features, such as live polls, Q&A sessions, and breakout rooms. 

This functionality lets businesses engage with attendees in real-time, creating more personalized experiences that resonate with potential leads the same way as they could in live events.

When it comes to hybrid events, they take the experience one step further by offering the best of both worlds - you can leverage both face-to-face engagement in networking with leads who can physically attend while reaching remote audiences at the same time.

The best part of these events is that you can use them as evergreen content by enabling leads to access session recordings on demand. That way, you can continue capturing relevant lead information and engaging leads long after hosting the event.

To maximize their lead generation potential, you should take several steps:

• Targeting and setting objectives - Decide who your target audience is and what goals you’re aiming to achieve with the event before organizing it so you can ensure everything will be well aligned across levels.
• Pre-event promotions  - Promote your event through email marketing, social media, and paid ads, targeting your ideal audience segments. Use landing pages with lead capture forms to register attendees and collect essential information such as job roles, company size, and specific areas of interest.
• Personalized event experience - Use the data gathered during registration to personalize the event. For instance, segment attendees based on their interests and offer customized session recommendations. 
• Leverage interactive features - During the event, use interactive features to keep attendees engaged. For example, live polls can provide instant feedback, while breakout rooms allow for more intimate discussions. 
• Post-event follow-up - After the event, follow up with attendees based on their engagement. Use the data collected during the event to tailor your follow-up communications. For instance, send relevant content or product recommendations based on the sessions they attended or the questions they asked during the event.

Idea 9: Creating instructive resources

Leveraging instructional resources and implementing them on your website, relevant landing pages, etc., is a strong lead generation strategy for several reasons:

• It helps potential leads understand the exact value your product offers.
• It enables existing customers to make the most of your product by breaking down more complex or hidden features.
• It improves onboarding experiences, helping new users adopt your product faster and more successfully and boosting retention rates.

Common types of instructive resources you can deploy include:

• Detailed help or documentation centers - Making all the necessary resources for getting a deeper understanding of your product available is always a plus, as it can significantly improve the general user experience. Make sure that your help center is easy to find and access on your website.

• Interactive demos - These provide leads with immersive experiences of your product, enabling them to learn through practice. In turn, you’ll successfully convert more leads and improve product usage across levels.
• How-to guides and ebooks - You can use valuable and educational content such as this as lead magnets, as potential leads will be more than willing to provide contact information in exchange for important resources.

Idea 10: Using social media

These days, everyone’s on social media, making it an excellent place to find, engage with, and nurture potential leads.

Some of the key social media platforms that are often used for lead generation include:

• Facebook and Instagram - These Meta platforms are ideal for both B2C and B2B lead generation. Businesses can use Facebook Lead Ads, which allow users to submit their contact information without leaving the platform. Instagram’s visually-driven content, on the other hand, can attract and engage audiences, with features like Stories, Reels, and Shopping enabling seamless lead capture.
• LinkedIn - LinkedIn is the go-to platform for B2B lead generation. It allows businesses to target professionals based on their industry, job title, and company size. More advanced LinkedIn packages like Sales Navigator let you take prospecting and lead gen one step further by applying more sophisticated filtering and features.
• X - X, formerly known as Twitter, is effective for real-time engagement and content sharing. Engaging in relevant industry conversations and using trending hashtags can help boost visibility and lead generation.

To ensure you’ll successfully generate qualified leads via social media, you need to focus on several aspects, such as:

• Sharing engaging content, such as posts containing interesting visuals, statistics, relevant industry information and trends, link to an educational blog, etc., to establish and maintain a strong presence.
• Continuous social media engagement by commenting on industry relevant posts, joining groups, participating in discussions, etc.
• Social media ads, which can help you target and reach your ideal audience across platforms.
• Use interactive content like polls and quizzes to increase engagement further and provide a gamified brand experience.

Generate more leads in 2024

While all the strategies discussed in this article offer a diverse toolkit for generating high-quality leads, experimentation is the true key to success. Each audience is unique, and what works for one business may not work for another. 

That’s why it’s essential to test different approaches, measure their effectiveness, and be willing to adjust when necessary.

However, regardless of the lead generation idea - or ideas - you choose to implement, there’s one thing you shouldn’t neglect: your website.

In the digital era, your website remains at the forefront of every lead-generation process, being one of the first touchpoints leads have with your brand.

Warmly can help you maximize your website’s lead generation potential by revealing quality leads and detecting those most likely to convert right now, allowing your reps to engage them while they’re still hot.

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and start generating leads today.

Inbound lead generation is a necessary part of successful sales and marketing, as it helps attract potential customers by raising brand awareness and creating tailored experiences for them.

In this guide, we’ll explore the 10 tested and tried inbound lead generation strategies to enable you to design your own approach based on your unique needs, goals, and target audience.

But first, let’s answer the essential question.

TL;DR

• Inbound lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers by using relevant resources and providing personalized experiences instead of pitching your sales offer directly.
• It’s more subtle than traditional and outbound marketing, focusing on long-term, sustainable results and targeting specific, qualified leads rather than a broad audience.

Several strategies are crucial for efficient inbound lead generation, such as:

• Content marketing
• SEO
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Lead magnets
• Landing pages
• Affiliate marketing
• Content upgrades
• Chatbots
• Webinars and online events

Warmly can help you handle various segments of inbound lead generation, from identifying inbound website leads to nurturing them.

What is inbound lead generation?

Inbound lead generation is a strategy where businesses attract potential customers through valuable content and experiences rather than pushing their message out through traditional marketing methods. 

The idea is to draw prospects in by providing helpful, relevant information that addresses their needs or interests instead of reaching out to them and pitching your offer point blank.

As such, inbound lead generation can include a range of techniques, such as:

🎯 ‎ Content marketing - Creating compelling content, such as blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, videos, etc., that educates or entertains your target audience.

🎯 SEO - Optimizing your content and website to rank higher in search engine results, making it easier for people to find you when searching for related topics.

🎯 Social media marketing - Sharing content, participating in discussions, and building relationships on social media platforms where your target audience resides.

🎯 Lead magnets - Offering free resources or tools in exchange for contact information, such as downloadable guides, templates, or webinars.

🎯 Email marketing - Sending targeted, valuable content to leads who have shown interest in your offerings by subscribing to your newsletter, downloading a playbook, etc.

We’ll cover these and other techniques in more detail later on.

How is inbound lead generation different from traditional marketing?

The best way to understand the difference between lead generation and traditional marketing is to use the pull vs. push approach (and no, it has nothing to do with the gym).

Inbound lead generation aims to pull leads in by providing valuable content and experiences that resonate with their needs, interests, and pain points.

In this case, leads come to your business on their own accord, drawn in by the resources you provide because they find them useful, helpful, or intriguing.

Of course, this means that you’ll focus on leads who have already expressed an interest in your solution, i.e., who are aware of a need or problem that they need to address. 

This interest is the very thing that pulls them to your brand.

Traditional marketing, on the other hand, actively pushes your offer and marketing messaging through various channels, aiming to persuade a broad audience to act immediately—buy your product, subscribe, etc.

This approach usually interrupts leads’ activities, hoping your message will catch their attention, regardless of whether they are actively looking for a similar solution.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet to help you differentiate the two:

Inbound lead generation:

1. Attraction-based - Focuses on drawing prospects in by offering valuable content and experiences. The goal is to engage people who are already interested in or searching for solutions related to what you offer.
2. Content-driven - Relies heavily on creating high-quality content such as blog posts, ebooks, and videos to attract and engage potential leads.
3. Permission-based - Involves gaining permission from users to send them information, such as through email subscriptions or downloadable resources.
4. Customer-centric - Tailors content and interactions to address the specific needs and pain points of potential customers.
5. Long-term relationships - Aims to build trust and nurture relationships over time, leading to higher quality leads and more sustainable growth.

Traditional marketing: 

1. Outbound - Focuses on pushing messages out to a broad audience through channels like TV ads, radio, print media, and direct mail, often interrupting the recipient’s activities.
2. Product-focused - This approach emphasizes promoting products or services directly, often using persuasive techniques to capture attention and drive immediate responses.
3. Interruption-based - Often interrupts the target audience’s routine, hoping that the message will resonate and prompt action regardless of their current needs and interest level.
4. Less personalization - Tends to be more generic, aiming to reach as broad an audience as possible without considering their specific interests that much.
5. Short-term results: Often focuses on generating quick sales or leads, with less emphasis on building long-term relationships with prospects.

What are the best inbound lead generation tactics?

And now, without further ado, let’s break down the 10 best inbound lead generation strategies you should deploy to attract more quality leads across channels.

Pro tip: You can use as many tactics as you want, as they’re not mutually exclusive. When deciding, just keep in mind who your target audience is and where they are most likely to be found, what goals you want to achieve, and how much time and money you’re willing to spend.

1. Content marketing

As mentioned above, content marketing is one of inbound lead generation’s crucial components, as it’s one sure way of attracting potential customers and positioning your brand as a source of truth.

Namely, leads who are looking for information or solutions for their pain points will be drawn to your brand if you provide them with the answers they need. 

As a result, you’ll build trust and authority, encouraging leads to opt for your solution when they decide to buy.

Here’s a helpful example of how you can use well-crafted and optimized BOFU content to monetize on leads who are still in the consideration stage and push them further down the sales funnel. 

You can create various content types, depending on your objectives, including:

• Blogs - Regularly publishing informative, educational, and relevant posts that address your target audience’s pain points can help you gain significant traction in your industry. Don’t forget to update posts to ensure they’ll be fresh and relevant year-round.

• Ebooks and whitepapers - These are more in-depth resources that offer even more value than blogs, as they tend to break down crucial questions in more detail. As such, they’re usually used as lead magnets, where visitors provide their contact information to access them.
• Case studies—These allow you to incorporate social proof into your content strategy by showcasing real-life examples of how your product or service has solved problems for other customers.
• Podcasts and videos - Video content can be highly engaging. Just make sure to cover interesting topics, host industry experts, etc.

Pro tip: Creating quality content can help not only with attracting leads but also with getting backlinks. If your content is good enough, other sites - including those with higher domain rankings - will be more likely to link back to your website.

2. SEO and organic traffic

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) boosts your brand visibility by helping you to rank higher on SERPs. In turn, you’ll be able to drive more organic traffic.

Namely, having good SERP positioning increases the likelihood that web surfers looking for relevant information or solutions will click through to your website instead of turning to your competitors.

Remember, regardless of how good your product actually is, it won’t mean much if you can’t get people to look at it.

To ensure a steady stream of organic traffic, there are several SEO aspects to focus on, including:

• Keyword research and optimization - Use industry and topic-relevant keywords in your content and website to improve search engine rankings and to attract the right kind of audience. After all, you can’t expect to draw in quality leads if you don’t use targeted keywords bound to spark their interest. Invest in keyword research tools such as Ahrefs to identify the right keywords.

• On-page SEO - Optimize crucial elements of your web pages and content, such as meta tags, headings, and images. Publishing content and web copy following SEO guidelines will help search engines understand and rank your content and enhance reader experience and readability.
• Link building - Getting backlinks from reputable sites improves your domain rating and visibility. You can achieve this by leveraging guest blogging, link exchange, or by creating high-value content others will want to refer to (think of content that features things like industry benchmarks, trends and statistics, etc.).

3. Social media marketing

Since the whole point of lead generation is to entice prospects to come to you, social media is one of the first places to focus on, as nowadays, everyone is online.

Of course, you don’t have to disperse your efforts across all platforms. The right social media platform for your business depends on two main factors:

• Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company and your vertical - Some platforms are designed for professionals alone (e.g., LinkedIn), while others include more versatile demographics. For instance, focusing on Instagram won't be the ideal choice if you target businesses in a highly specific vertical, such as the banking sector. Conversely, if you’re in B2C e-commerce, LinkedIn alone won’t help you generate as many leads as some other social media.
• Your target audience - Different audience types reside in different social media. For instance, Gen Z is most likely to be found on TikTok, decision-makers on LinkedIn, gamers on Discord and Reddit, etc. Define your target audience and determine where they live online before designing a social media lead generation strategy.

To engage with leads online, you should focus on:

• Sharing engaging content as frequently as possible - Being regular and persistent is key in social media marketing, so just make sure to post intriguing content as often as possible.
• Creating compelling content - Posts that include visuals, such as infographics or videos typically perform better and can increase engagement. Content like listicles, short how-to guides, etc., can also resonate well with your audience - just make sure they’re relevant for your ICPs.

Whether for yourself 👇 ‎

Or your brand👇

• Interacting with your followers - Engagement is a two-way street, meaning you must give some to get some. You can’t afford to ghost your followers, so you should dedicate time to answering questions and comments, participating in discussions, and creating interactive content (e.g., polls, quizzes, etc.) to drive engagement and build rapport.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing might initially sound like an outbound lead generation technique, given that you send emails to potential leads. 

However, inbound email campaigns differ from cold email campaigns in one key aspect - you reach out to people who’ve already shown a certain interest in your solution, e.g., downloaded an ebook, subscribed to your newsletter, etc.

So, to create efficient email marketing campaigns, you first need to build and segment email lists based on leads’ interests, behavior, and previous interactions with your marketing efforts.

For instance, leads who have expressed interest in a particular product can receive emails with detailed information, case studies, or special offers related to that product. 

Conversely, those who have engaged with educational content such as ebooks might receive emails featuring new blog posts or upcoming webinars.

Another key point in email campaigns is personalization. Ensure that each email is tailored to the specific audience segment and individual lead, as that’s your best shot that your emails will have high open and click-through rates.

💡 Pro tip: Instead of dealing with all this manually, you can use marketing automation tools. These can help you cover all aspects of inbound email lead generation, from list building and segmentation to crafting and sending personalized emails.

For example, Warmly can add website visitors who match certain criteria (e.g., match your ICP, show high intent, etc.) to automated email and LinkedIn sequences.

Each lead will receive a contextual email or LinkedIn DM based on their interests, interaction with your website, demographics, etc.

5. Lead magnets

Lead magnets are another way of monetizing your most valuable content, such as ebooks, guides, detailed reports, etc.

Namely, gatekeeping your best resources will incentivize leads to provide their contact information in return for access to them.

However, keep in mind that people value their privacy more than anything, especially given the sheer number of spammy emails an average person receives daily. 

This means you’ll have to ensure that the content you’re offering is really valuable enough for leads to be ready to give their contact in return. This content typically includes:

• Ebooks and guides - In-depth resources that provide a more detailed view of topics and issues relevant to your audience.
• Reports and whitepapers - Detailed documents on industry trends, benchmarks, research findings, etc.
• Templates and checklists - Ready-to-use tools, such as marketing plans, budget templates, lead generation checklists, etc.
• Quizzes and assessments - Interactive content that gamifies lead engagement by providing personalized results based on users’ unique inputs.

6. Landing pages

Creating dedicated landing pages for specific content, offers, or campaigns is another crucial part of inbound lead generation campaigns.

For optimal results, design landing pages that are:

• Simple, concise, and to-the-point - Most leads will just skim over it, so save your writing skills for other content types.
• Include compelling offers and CTAs leads will find difficult to resist - Feature strong value propositions relevant to the source that brought leads to that specific page. For instance, if they clicked through your newsletter that addresses LinkedIn prospecting best practices, the offer and CTA could include actions like “Download Free Ebook,” “Try For Free,” etc.

💡 ‎Pro tip: To determine how a landing page performs, use a website traffic tracking tool like Warmly. That way, you’ll be able to monitor who lands on your web pages, how they interact with them, and more.

Find out how to identify companies and individuals visiting your website here.

7. Influencer marketing

Partnering up with key influencers in your industry is another great way to capture the attention of your ideal audience.

Industry influencers already have a large following, many of which are businesses and/or individuals who match your ICP, so there’s no reason to let that go to waste.

Offer incentives to influencers - the most common way is to give them commission rates for each sale, lead, or click-through - in return for them to subtly promote your brand to their followers.

This can be done in various ways, including:

• Guest blogging.
• Giveaways and contests.
• Product reviews and demonstrations.

Source

8. Content upgrades

This is a more advanced inbound lead generation technique, as it involves offering additional value or content related to the content your audience is already consuming.

For example, you could offer downloadable cold email templates to readers of a blog that breaks down cold email outreach.

This enables you to make the most of the leads who have already shown interest in your content and solution, which makes them much more likely to provide their contact info in exchange for access to content upgrades.

In addition to templates and checklists, typical content upgrades include resources similar to basic lead magnets, such as:

• Ebooks.
• Exclusive interviews.
• Playbooks and worksheets.
• Benchmark reports.
• Bonus content.

Source

9. Chatbots 

Chatbots are another excellent way to engage and qualify specific inbound leads - website visitors.

If an individual or a stakeholder lands on your website, that’s typically a sign that they’re interested in what you have to offer. Therefore, you should pounce on them as soon as possible to capitalize on their interest.

Source

Smart chatbots, like Warmly’s AI Chat, can help with that, as they can:

• Engage website visitors in conversation by sending contextual messages and offering valuable resources (e.g., product tours, case studies, etc.).
• Answer visitors’ questions.
• Qualify and score them by asking qualification questions (e.g., “What brings you here?”).

• Schedule meetings.
• Route leads to adequate human reps.

10. Webinars and online events 

Webinars and online events can boost lead generation across levels by:

• Positioning you as a thought leader in a specific vertical.
• Increasing your visibility.
• Capturing leads’ contact information when they register for these events.
• Helping you expand your network and build a strong community of potential leads and partners.

Source

To attract the right audience and compel them enough to sign up for it, ensure that your webinars delve into relevant and valuable topics for your potential leads.

Inbound Lead Generation vs. Outbound: What are the Differences?

Although there’s a high chance that you already know what makes inbound lead generation different than outbound, it can’t hurt to include a quick refresher.

As mentioned above, inbound lead generation focuses on attracting potential customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to their needs and interests. This is done by leveraging personalized content and educational resources and providing tailored experiences.

In contrast, outbound lead generation involves proactively reaching out to potential customers through direct methods, such as cold calling and emails, advertising, etc. 

Several additional differences stem from this key one, including:

1. Engagement

Inbound lead generation attracts and engages prospects by providing value and addressing their needs, compelling them to come to your brand in a non-intrusive and subtle way.

On the other hand, outbound lead generation relies on direct and to-the-point outreach, often interrupting prospects’ current activities to capture their attention.

Of course, outbound lead generation also targets a specific audience based on attributes and characteristics relevant to your product’s ICPs, although a much broader one than inbound.

2. Cost efficiency and ROI

The great thing about content is that it can be repurposed and updated over time, keeping it fresh and relevant.

As a result, the content you publish once can continue to generate leads long after it’s been created, making inbound lead generation very cost-effective.

However, inbound lead generation takes time, as building trust and authority among potential leads cannot happen over time. This means that you’ll have to be patient to start getting ROI.

Outbound lead generation, on the other hand, requires more up-front costs related to advertising, email campaigns, and other direct outreach methods.

On the bright side, outbound typically yields results faster, making it a good choice if you’re in a hurry to get an ROI.

3. Lead quality

Inbound lead generation is focused on higher-quality leads from the get-go: 

• Leads who are already interested in your content and solution.
• Leads who are actively looking for information regarding their needs and pain points.
• Leads who are engaging with your content.

This means that these leads are more likely to convert soon.

At the same time, outbound results in a higher volume of leads, but they are usually less qualified and require more time and effort to convert.

4. Customer experience

Inbound strategies are focused on creating and nurturing meaningful, lasting relationships.

As a result, they’re intent on providing each lead with a tailored experience that resonates with their needs, interests, behavior, etc.

In turn, this approach encourages leads to convert sooner and become long-term customers.

Outbound lead generation is more aggressive and intrusive than inbound due to its focus on immediate results. 

Consequently, the general lead experience might not be as positive as it is with inbound leads, who are more likely to feel valued, appreciated, and listened to.

5. Long-term impact

Since inbound lead generation tends to build long-term relationships and trust, it’s more likely to result in higher retention rates.

Namely, if leads create a positive association with your brand thanks to all the valuable resources and experiences you provided, they’ll be readier to stick with your brand through thick and thin later on.

Outbound lead generation is intent on selling as quickly as possible, meaning it focuses less on building lasting relationships and more on selling right now.

However, regardless of its success and initial ROI, outbound isn’t capable of establishing brand loyalty among leads and existing customers, as they won’t have that many reasons to be loyal to begin with.

If all you’re looking for is a quick sale and are treating customers as numbers, you can’t really expect to get much more in return.

How does inbound lead generation work?

Finally, let’s explain how inbound lead generation works by dissecting the stages of the inbound marketing funnel and breaking down how they work together to deliver results:

Awareness stage

The main objective in the awareness stage is to attract potential leads and raise brand awareness by addressing their needs and pain points in your content.

In this stage, you should develop high-quality, informative content that deals with specific challenges, questions, and interests of your target audience, helping them understand:

1. How to handle their problems and requirements. 
2. Why your solution is the best for their specific needs.

This content could include anything from blog posts, articles, and social media content to infographics, videos, and more.

SEO and social media marketing are also crucial at the awareness stage, as they:

1. Make your content easily discoverable by your target audience by providing higher SERP rankings.
2. Increase brand visibility and engagement through posts that resonate with your audience, replying to their comments, etc.

Consideration stage

The main objective at this stage is to engage leads further by providing more detailed information and solutions to help them assess their options and, ideally, conclude that yours is the best.

To achieve this, you should:

• Offer more advanced resources that delve deeper into key topics, such as ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and detailed guides.
• Host webinars and online workshops that provide valuable insights and drive direct interaction with your audience.

• Leverage email marketing using segmented email lists to send personalized content recommendations, follow-up messages to leads who have downloaded a resource, etc.

Decision stage

This is the final stage that leads to conversion.

In it, you should focus on converting leads into customers by presenting compelling offers and CTAs that encourage them to make the final leap and become paying customers.

Several tactics work the best here, including:

• Providing irresistible offers that incentivize leads to buy, such as free trials, demos, discounts, or limited-time offers.

• Highlighting success stories and testimonials from satisfied customers to build trust and credibility.
• Use strong, clear CTAs that guide leads to take the desired action, whether it’s signing up for a service or contacting your sales team.
• Having your sales team follow up with leads who have shown strong interest or engaged with your offers via personalized messaging based on leads’ interactions and behaviors.

Once you combine all these actions into a holistic strategy, you’ll get a well-oiled lead generation machine that constantly brings new leads to your pipeline.

Convert more leads with Warmly

Handling lead generation manually is no easy task in today’s competitive market. 

Besides, some lead generation metrics vital for success can’t be tracked without help from tools designed to monitor specific lead generation channels and capture relevant data - such as Warmly.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that lets you harness your website’s full conversion potential by:

1. Tracking and identifying website visitors - both companies and individual stakeholders.
2. Enabling email campaign attribution by letting you track visitors who come through specific campaigns.
3. Revealing B2B and intent data on each identified lead, enabling you to score and qualify them.
4. Providing automated and human-handled options for engaging leads on your website while they’re still hot.

Sign up for Warmly’s free forever plan and discover how it can help you generate and convert more leads today.

Or book a live demo to see it in action first.

Choosing the right lead generation strategy is crucial for achieving your business goals, as it makes all the difference between a pipeline filled with quality leads and a complete disaster.

In this guide, we’ll share the best lead generation tactics, tips, and best practices backed with practical examples, helping you design the optimal lead generation strategy for your unique needs.

TL;DR

A lead generation strategy is a set of systemic approaches designed to attract, nurture, and convert high-quality leads.

The best lead generation strategies include:

• Website optimization
• Chatbots and live chat options
• Content marketing
• SEO
• Lead magnets
• Lead-capturing forms
• PPC advertising
• Free trials and freemiums
• Webinars and other online events
• Referral and affiliate programs

To ensure the efficiency of your lead generation strategies, focus on defining your target market, lead nurturing, and prioritizing quality over quantity.

Warmly can help you unlock your website’s full lead generation and conversion potential by covering all the important segments of the lead generation funnel.

What are the best lead-generation strategies?

Before we get to the best part, a quick reminder of what a lead generation strategy is.

A lead generation strategy is a set of techniques designed to attract potential leads, coax them into sharing their information with you, and guide them further down the sales funnel.

Although there’s no simple answer to which strategy is the best for you - as it depends on your goals, needs, industry, budget size, etc. - several lead-generation techniques are bound to yield results for just about anyone.

We hand-picked such strategies, which resulted in a list of the 10 best lead-generation strategies for attracting qualified sales leads and nurturing them into conversion. 

Let’s begin!

Pro tip: You don’t have to stick to a single strategy, as most of these tactics can be combined into a multifaceted approach that covers more than one lead gen channel, as you’ll see in more detail below.

1. Optimize your website and landing pages

No lead generation strategy can be complete without website and landing page optimization.

The digital era we live in means that most of your buyers - and all of them if you’re a SaaS business - will look for solutions and products online.

As a result, the first thing they’ll come face-to-face with regarding your brand is your website.

To make the most of your website’s lead generation potential, you need to take several measures:

➡️ ‎ Ensure that it’s optimized for your target audience and ICP - When designing landing pages and your website, always keep in mind who you’re aiming to attract. For instance, a company that sells clothes to young adults and a company that offers credit ratings and data must have websites structured for their ideal audience (i.e., more casual vs a more professional approach, focusing on sentiments and personal preferences vs business value, etc.).

➡️ ‎ Make it easy to navigate - Ensure that all the vital segments of your website, such as product descriptions, pricing, case studies, etc., are easily accessible. No one wants to spend ages looking for pricing information or a help center. 

➡️ ‎ Take care of loading speed - Optimize your website for desktop and mobile devices, or you risk losing quality leads.

➡️ ‎ Sprinkle CTAs and lead magnets across important landing pages—Make the CTAs and lead magnets relevant to the page they appear on and provide leads with enough incentive to click on them. For instance, you can include a “Try For Free” or “Book A Demo” CTA or add a downloadable case study on a product feature description page, as they all enable leads to learn more about your product or experience it firsthand.

➡️ ‎ Include social proof - There’s nothing that leads love more than to hear about your product from satisfied customers, meaning that strong social proof is one of the most powerful weapons in your lead generation arsenal. Include case studies, testimonials, reviews from G2 and Capterra, etc., and let your customers become brand advocates. 

Pro tip: To determine how successful your website is in attracting and engaging the right audience, invest in a website traffic tracking tool like Warmly.

With it, you’ll be able to:

• Identify website visitors.
• Figure out how they interact with your website, as the platform lets you monitor their sessions in real-time.
• Detect hot leads based on intent signals, such as visiting high-intent pages (pricing, demo landing page, etc.), frequently returning to your website and specific pages, downloading resources, etc.

2. Use chatbots and live chat

This lead generation strategy is directly related to website optimization, as chatbots and live chat options are essential parts of most well-designed websites.

For instance, Warmly’s chatbots can greatly leverage lead generation, as they can be trained to do a range of valuable actions:

• Engage leads in conversation by sending personalized messages and asking questions aiming to qualify them (e.g., what they’re looking for, what they need to know more about, whether they’re interested in buying or just looking around, etc.).

• Capture leads’ contact information by offering something in return, e.g., a valuable and contextual resource such as a case study that breaks down a feature a lead inquired about.
• Answering leads’ simpler questions, such as those regarding a specific feature or the existence of a free trial.
• Book qualified meetings.

However, although chatbots are available 24/7 and can handle more straightforward requests and operations on their own, it’s wise to include a human rep in the flow, as human interaction is essential for conversion.

This is why having a live chat option is critical. With it, your sales team can personally engage leads in conversation and guide them down the sales funnel.

Inside Warmly, you can set up an automated workflow that will notify sales reps via Slack or email when their attention is required, for example, when a lead asks a high-intent question or asks to speak with a real human.

That way, you’ll ensure that a rep will be kept in the loop, enabling them to jump in when necessary.

Pro tip: Warmly offers an option for hopping on a live video call with website leads while they’re still hot. This allows you to have a qualified meeting with them then and there, increasing the chance of a successful conversion. 

Check out our Warm Calls best practices to boost your video call response rates.

3. Create engaging content 

Regardless of industry, most modern businesses invest in content marketing strategies for a good reason - it works.

Providing prospects with valuable resources such as highly educational blogs, how-to-videos, valuable newsletters, and engaging podcasts helps with several things:

• Positions your brand as a thought leader.
• Brings value to leads, building trust and nurturing loyalty.
• Increases brand awareness and visibility.

By offering valuable resources to potential leads without necessarily asking for something in return or trying to sell upstart, you’ll encourage those leads to choose your products or services over your competition’s precisely because you’re already familiar and credible.

To achieve optimal efficiency of your content marketing strategy, make sure that the content you deliver is:

• Relevant to your target market - If you’re in the medical industry, writing blogs about current fashion trends won’t get you anywhere, regardless of how popular that content type is at the moment.
• Focused on bringing immediate value—Create content that educates leads on an important topic or helps them solve a particular problem. For example, if you’re in the marketing industry, you could create step-by-step guides on conducting targeted lead generation, produce podcasts with industry leaders, etc.
• Not too salesy - It’s ok to promote your product. After all, that’s the entire point of content marketing. However, aim to find the right balance between shameless self-promotion and product-led content.

Pro tip: You can take content marketing one step further by creating gated content, but we’ll discuss that in more detail in the section dealing with lead magnets.

4. Invest in SEO 

If you ever wondered why Search Engine Optimization is a non-negotiable in the lead generation process, just remember: “The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results.”

Good SEO ensures a high SERP ranking, increasing brand visibility and greatly improving the chance that leads will click through.

The further down you are, the less likely it is that anyone will bother to check what you’ve got to offer. 

This means that even if you have the world’s best product in a given category, you wouldn't be able to monetize it simply because you’d go under your ideal audience’s radar.

To get optimal SERP positioning, there are several aspects to take care of:

• Keyword research - Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can help you find keywords and phrases your target audience uses when searching for your products or services. Focus on less competitive keywords while ensuring they’re still relevant to your business.

• Drilling down on the competition - Keep an eye on what the competition’s doing and how well it’s performing to get a better idea of what approach to take to attract quality leads. Again, platforms like Ahrefs and Semrush offer free tools for website domain checking, which you can leverage to see how your competitors are faring and what they’re doing to stay competitive.
• Technical SEO - This includes everything from loading speed to mobile-friendliness and URL structure. 
• Building backlinks - Try getting backlinks from reputable sites to improve your own domain reputation. You can achieve this through guest blogging or by creating content that’s good enough for other websites and bloggers to cite and use as reference.

Pro tip: Note how SEO, website optimization, and content marketing have multiple touchpoints. This proves you should combine several lead-generation techniques and strategies to generate more high-quality leads.

5. Leverage lead magnets

One of the best things about creating quality resources is that leads are often willing to give something in return for access to them.

And that’s the entire philosophy behind lead magnets.

You take your most valuable content - templates, industry reports, ebooks, etc. - and offer it in exchange for leads’ contact information.

If the resources you offer provide sufficient value, leads will have just the right incentive to provide their names, email addresses, job roles, etc., to access them.

So, to ensure that this strategy will successfully generate leads, use only first-class content as lead magnets.

6. Use lead-capturing forms 

Lead-capturing forms are a typical way of getting leads’ information.

However, for them to succeed, you have to place them strategically.

For instance, you can use lead-capturing forms when leads:

• Subscribe to your newsletter.
• Book a demo.
• Request a quote, etc.

You should also keep in mind the stage of the funnel your leads are in when crafting these forms. 

Leave more detailed and elaborate forms for later funnel stages, when leads are more likely to provide more information.

Conversely, use short and simple forms for leads at the beginning of their buyer’s journey.

Pro tip: Some lead enrichment tools include lead form optimization, which means that the platform will auto-populate most of the form’s fields based on the basic contact info the lead provided. 

That way, you can display only very short forms to leads, which increases the chance that they’ll take the time to fill them out.

7. Craft compelling ads

Advertising can further increase brand visibility by displaying your brand wherever your target audience is.

This is why running targeted pay-per-click ads on search engines and relevant social media platforms is always a good investment when it comes to lead-generation campaigns.

‎

To improve the lead generation efficiency of ad campaigns, focus on:

• Choosing highly-targeted keywords to bid for while trying to avoid those that are too competitive.
• Defining your target audience.
• Continuous optimization of your ad campaigns (e.g., identifying negative keywords, analyzing performance and adjusting strategies accordingly, etc.).
• Retargeting, which shows ads to users who have previously visited your site or interacted with your content to remind them of your product and encourage them to return.

8. Offer free trials and freemiums

Giving potential customers a chance to test your product for free is a powerful lead generation strategy, as it lets them experience your offering firsthand.

Both freemiums and free trials are efficient, so you can choose the approach that fits your vision better:

➡️ ‎ Freemiums are free forever versions of your product that include some essential features. 

➡️ ‎ Free trials provide access to all product features on a specific plan for a limited period.

The reasoning behind both strategies is pretty much the same—once leads recognize the value your product provides, they’ll be more likely to upgrade to a paid plan.

9. Host webinars and online events

Hosting webinars and other industry events is valuable for several reasons:

• It helps with networking by connecting you with other professionals and leaders within your industry.
• Increases brand visibility and establishes you as a thought leader.
• Lets you collect valuable lead information.

Namely, to register for your workshops or webinars, leads will have to provide their contact information.

As a result, you’ll get a rich new lead pool your sales reps can focus on in the future.

Moreover, if your webinars provide enough educational and other value, leads will likely opt for your product, as they’ll associate your brand with a positive experience.

10. Launch referral programs

Referral programs enable you to transform paying customers into brand advocates and generate scores of qualified leads.

You can use various methods to incentivize existing customers to recommend your product to their peers, such as special rewards (e.g., free shipping) or discounts (20% off their monthly subscription).

Source

Of course, first you have to ensure that your customers are satisfied with your offering. Otherwise, no incentive will be strong enough to encourage them to refer new leads to you.

Pro tip: In addition to referrals, you can also use affiliate marketing to generate more leads in B2B lead generation campaigns. Affiliates are usually influencers, industry experts, or established companies with a strong following among your target audience.

In return for a reward - a commission rate for each sale, lead, or click - affiliates promote your brand to their followers and peers, increasing your visibility and helping you get highly targeted leads.

What are the best practices for lead generation?

Finally, regardless of your unique lead generation strategy, there are some tips and best practices that you should always implement:

Define your target audience and ICP

Trying to perform lead generation without understanding who you’re supposed to target and engage is a lot like fishing in the desert.

You might have all the fancy equipment at hand, but it won’t do you any good if you keep casting your line in scorching sand.

The same goes for your lead generation efforts. You can design the best lead generation strategy the marketing world has ever seen and use all the cutting-edge tools, but you still won’t get any high-quality leads if you apply your strategy randomly.

So, before you start doing anything regarding your lead generation strategy, make sure that you’re well aware of:

• Who your target audience and ICP is.
• Where you can find them.
• What drives them.
• What problem they’re looking to solve.

That way, you’ll be able to focus on the right lead generation channels and create a tailored approach bound to resonate with your audience.

Focus on quality instead of quantity

Imagine the following scenario:

The lead generation strategy you invested lots of time and money into results in thousands of new leads. However, less than 10 of those leads end up converting into paying customers.

Is that strategy a hit or miss?

The entire point of lead generation isn’t just filling your pipeline with any leads but with qualified leads that are likely to convert and bring you ROI.

If most of your leads churn before subscribing at least once, you’ll experience serious revenue loss across levels.

Ensure that your lead generation strategy focuses on generating quality leads, i.e., leads that show actual buying intent for your specific offering.

In the end, it’s much better to generate 10 leads and convert 9 than to generate 10,000 and convert 2.

Right?

Don’t forget to engage and nurture leads

Attracting, identifying, and capturing high-quality leads gets you only halfway to your intended goal - conversion.

To make sure that most of your leads eventually become paying customers, you need to engage with them to build rapport and trust.

Regardless of the engagement channel you choose - i.e., social media, email marketing campaigns, etc. - make sure the communication is personalized.

You’ve surely received generic, spammy sales emails or offers at least once, so you know how off-putting they can be.

Make sure you have as much relevant information on your lead as possible, ranging from basic contact info and firmographics to more detailed insights such as their interests, pain points, etc., to draft compelling messaging that will resonate with them. 

Pro tip: You can use automation tools to streamline engagement and nurturing. For instance, Warmly lets you create personalized email and LinkedIn outreach workflows to contact the highest-quality leads that match your ICP.

Start converting more leads with Warmly

Handling lead generation manually is no easy task in today’s competitive market. 

Besides, some lead generation metrics vital for success can’t be tracked without help from tools designed to monitor specific lead generation channels and capture relevant data - such as Warmly.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that lets you harness your website’s full conversion potential by:

1. Tracking and identifying website visitors - both companies and individual stakeholders.
2. Enabling email campaign attribution by letting you track visitors who come through specific campaigns.
3. Revealing B2B and intent data on each identified lead, enabling you to score and qualify them.
4. Providing automated and human-handled options for engaging leads on your website while they’re still hot.

Sign up for Warmly’s free forever plan and discover how it can help you generate and convert more leads today.

Or book a live demo to see it in action first.

In the ever-evolving lead generation landscape, staying ahead of the curve requires more than just intuition and guesswork. 

The key to unlocking your sales and marketing efforts' full potential lies in tracking the right lead generation metrics and KPIs, as they can point you in the right direction, helping you identify and convert high-value leads.

But with so many data points to consider, how do you determine which lead generation metrics truly matter?

We’re here to help! In this detailed guide, we’ll discuss the 15 essential lead generation metrics and KPIs every marketer—beginner and pro alike—should monitor for optimal results.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• Lead generation metrics and KPIs are measurable values vital for assessing the efficiency of your lead generation strategies.
• Choosing the right metrics for your business depends on business objectives, lead generation channels, your business stage, and type.

Top lead generation metrics to track include:

• Number of generated leads
• Lead conversion rate
• Website traffic
• Cost per lead
• Lead quality score
• Customer acquisition cost
• Marketing Qualified Leads
• Sales Qualified Leads
• Lead source attribution
• Lead velocity rate
• Time to conversion
• Customer lifetime value
• Churn rate
• Engagement rate
• MRR

💡 ‎ Warmly can help boost your website lead generation and conversion rates by identifying website visitors, detecting the hottest leads among them, and engaging them while they’re still hot.

What is a lead generation KPI?

Before we begin, here is a quick reminder of what lead generation metrics and KPIs actually are.

Lead generation KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable values that help you evaluate the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. 

As such, they are crucial for:

1. Tracking progress.
2. Determining whether your strategies are achieving their intended goals.
3. Helping you figure out which segments require tweaking and improvements.

How do you choose the right lead generation metrics?

Not all lead generation metrics are equally useful for different businesses, goals, and needs.

Therefore, you should consider several factors before deciding on which lead generation metrics to track:

1. Business objectives - This one is a no-brainer. Focus on metrics that are most relevant to your specific goals and requirements. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, focus on metrics related to lead conversion rates and lead-to-customer ratios.
2. Preferred lead generation channels—Different lead generation channels (e.g., social media, email marketing, content marketing) may require specific metrics. For instance, tracking click-through rates (CTR) is relevant for email campaigns, engagement metrics for social media, etc.
3. Available data - Choose metrics you can track accurately and continuously based on the data you can access. If collecting relevant data is impossible or too difficult, switch to those you can track more easily or use tools that can help you find that data. For example, you can’t accurately track website engagement if you can’t tell who your website visitors are and how they interact with your content.

Another important factor to consider before choosing which KPIs to monitor is the type, size, and stage of your business:

• Startups and early-stage businesses can keep things simple and focus on growth metrics (number of generated leads, conversion rates, etc.) and lead and customer acquisition costs.
• Growing companies can start to introduce granularity by focusing on metrics that indicate how to ensure sustainable scaling, such as customer lifetime value, performance of different lead generation channels, etc.
• Established enterprises can use advanced metrics, such as multi-channel attribution, customer retention rate, and more, to expand into other markets, retain more customers, cross-sell and upsell, and more.
• B2B companies often place more focus on account-based metrics (e.g., success rates of account-based campaigns, number of targeted and converted accounts, etc.), and lead quality and conversion rates, as these ensure they’re targeting the right accounts and appropriate stakeholders within them.
• B2C companies should prioritize metrics that reflect consumer behavior and engagement, such as social media engagement metrics, multichannel buyer sentiment, customer retention rate, and more.

Finally, if you’re wondering when is the best time to start tracking metrics and KPIs, the answer is - as soon as possible. That way, you’ll avoid missing out on actionable insights.

Early tracking allows you to measure the effectiveness of your strategies and make informed adjustments from the get-go, so make sure to track metrics:

1. At the start of every new lead generation campaign.
2. When implementing changes to existing strategies, in order to determine their impact.

What are the top lead generation metrics to track?

Regardless of your industry and stage of business, there are some lead generation metrics and KPIs that everyone should track.

Let’s break down each!

1. Number of generated leads 

The number of generated leads is the total count of leads collected over a specified period.

Knowing how many leads you generated over a certain period helps you assess the efficiency of your lead generation strategies and provides insights into which parts require adjustment or improvement.

Tracking the number of generated leads involves 2 key steps:

➡️ ‎ Use lead capture tools - Web forms, landing pages, website traffic trackers, etc., can all help capture relevant lead information.

➡️ Focus on regular reporting and analytics - Create regular reports to review the number of leads generated over specific periods (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly). Analyze trends and compare lead generation volumes across different campaigns and channels.

2. Lead conversion rate

Lead conversion rate measures the percentage of leads that progress to the next stage in the sales funnel, such as becoming an MQL or SQL or eventually converting into a customer. 

This metric is essential for assessing the effectiveness of your lead nurturing processes and overall lead generation strategies.

It’s directly related to the number of generated leads, as the whole point of lead generation is to find leads who are most likely to convert. 

If you generate thousands of leads but manage to convert just a dozen, this is usually a sign that something is seriously off with your marketing strategy.

The formula for calculating your lead conversion rate is:

Lead Conversion Rate = (Total Number of Leads/Number of Leads Converted) × 100

For example, if you start with 1,000 leads and 200 of them are converted into paying customers, the lead conversion rate would be:

(200/1000) × 100 = 20%

When it comes to tracking lead conversion rates, you should:

1. Define conversions - Clearly define what a lead conversion in your context entails. This could be moving from a cold lead to an MQL or SQL or becoming a paying customer. Ensure that your marketing and sales teams understand these stages well for accurate measurement.
2. Use conversion tracking systems - Leverage CRMs, automation tools, website visitor identification tools, etc., to accurately track lead progression through the sales funnel and capture their transition from one stage to the next.

3. Website traffic 

Website traffic measures the number of visitors to your website over a specific period. 

As such, it’s crucial to understand how well your website attracts visitors and how many match your ICP.

There are several segments of these metrics to keep an eye on:

• Total number of website visitors over a period of time.
• Unique visitors, i.e., specific companies and individuals that visit your website, especially if they’re returning visitors.
• Page views, i.e., the pages your visitors land on most frequently or spend the most time on.

To accurately track website traffic, you should:

➡️ Use a website traffic tracking tool - These solutions can help you identify website visitors, so you’ll know not only how much traffic you’re generating but also who your unique visitors are.

➡️ Analyze visitor behavior - Use solutions that can uncover insights into visitors’ buyer intent by monitoring how they interact with your website. If your solution of choice can reveal more details of their digital buyer journey (e.g., how they interact with competitors’ websites and ads or topics they researched on the web), all the better.

➡️ Track where your traffic is coming from - This includes sources like organic search, paid advertising, social media, referral sites, and direct traffic, helping you understand which channels are most effective in driving visitors to your site. For instance, you can add a snippet of tracking code to your cold emails to know which visitors came through specific outbound campaigns.

Pro tip: You can achieve all this with a single tool - Warmly. Our solution has options for identifying website visitors, revealing intent, and even tracking leads that came through email campaigns. Try it out here.

4. Cost per lead (CPL)

Cost per lead (CPL) is the average cost of acquiring a single lead. 

By understanding CPL, you can determine whether your marketing investments are yielding a good return and make informed decisions about where to allocate your resources.

The formula to calculate CPL is:

CPL = Total Cost of Lead Generation/Number of Leads Generated​

For example, if you spend $5,000 on a lead generation campaign and generate 500 leads, the CPL would be:

5000/500 = $10

This means that, on average, you are spending $10 to acquire each new lead.

Of course, since businesses differ in size, budgets, and objectives, there’s no definition of the optimal CPL value, as it depends on the individual business. Only you can tell what’s economical for you and what isn’t.

To track these metrics, you need to:

➡️ Keep tabs on your lead generation expenses - This includes all the costs related to lead generation efforts, such as advertising (e.g., PPC campaigns, social media ads), content creation (e.g., blog posts, ebooks), lead capture tools, and other relevant costs.

➡️ Monitor the total number of leads generated.

Pro tip: Although a lower CPL is ideal, it’s also important to ensure that the leads are high-quality and have a good chance of converting into customers. Balancing the costs with lead quality helps in maximizing overall ROI.

5. Lead quality score

Lead quality score helps businesses determine how likely a lead is to convert into a paying customer based on certain criteria and characteristics, allowing for more effective prioritization and resource allocation. 

A higher lead quality score indicates that the lead is more likely to engage and convert, while a lower score suggests that additional nurturing or qualification may be needed.

Calculating this metric can be more complex than other KPIs because your definition of a high-quality lead might differ from the next business’s.

The scoring process involves several steps, including:

1. Calculating your lead conversion rate.
2. Defining the behaviors and attributes that indicate buyer intent and good ICP fit in your specific case.
3. Determining the impact each action and behavior has on conversion (e.g., if 2 out of 3 leads who frequently returned to your pricing page converted in the end, it’s a good sign that this is high-intent behavior).
4. Creating your scoring and qualification system based on the most relevant buying signals you defined 

That’s why doing it manually isn’t the best of options. 

Instead, you could use a tool to automate lead scoring and qualification based on the criteria and data attributes you specified as relevant.

Pro tip: You can achieve this with Warmly, as the platform enables you to put lead qualification and routing on autopilot.

6. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

This metric measures the average cost of acquiring a new customer.

Monitoring CAC helps you ensure that your customer acquisition activities are sustainable and profitable and that they will not exceed your marketing budget.

The formula to calculate CAC is:

CAC = Total Cost of Acquisition/Number of New Customers Acquired

Where:

• Total Cost of Acquisition includes all expenses related to acquiring new customers, such as marketing and sales costs.
• Number of New Customers Acquired is the total number of new customers gained during a specific period.

For example, if you spend $50,000 on marketing and sales efforts in a quarter and acquire 500 new customers, your CAC would be:

50000/500 = $100

This means that, on average, you’re spending $100 to acquire each new customer.

To track it, you need to:

➡️ Monitor overall acquisition expenses, including all relevant marketing and sales expenses.

➡️ Record new customers acquired over a specific period.

7. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

MQLs are leads who are considered more likely to become customers based on their engagement with your marketing team and activities. 

These leads have demonstrated a higher level of interest and engagement compared to other leads, making them more promising for further nurturing by the sales team.

There’s no direct formula for calculating MQLs. 

Instead, the process involves defining criteria that indicate a lead’s potential to become a customer (e.g., engagement metrics, demographics, behavioral signals, etc.) and scoring them based on those criteria.

The best way to do this is to use marketing automation and lead intelligence tools that can identify, score, and qualify leads on your behalf.

8. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

SQLs are leads who have been evaluated by the sales team and considered ready for direct sales engagement. 

These leads have passed through initial marketing evaluations and shown a significant level of interest or intent, indicating they are more likely to convert than MQLs.

Being able to identify them is crucial for your lead generation and conversion success, as they’re the ones who are most likely to convert right now.

Similarly to MQLs, SQLs are typically identified based on specific criteria or behaviors that align closely with your sales team’s requirements.

As a result, the process of tracking them is the same:

➡️ Define the criteria that set a lead out as qualified for sales (high-intent behavior, e.g., booking a demo, contacting sales for a custom quote, returning to your website, and visiting high-intent pages, etc.).

➡️ Score leads based on that criteria.

Again, the fastest, most efficient, and most accurate way of tracking and identifying SQLs is to use designated tools for lead enrichment and qualification.

9. Lead source attribution

Lead source attribution tracks and identifies the origin of your leads, such as which marketing channels or campaigns contributed to generating them. 

Accurate attribution helps you understand which sources provide the best quality leads and contributes to more informed decision-making in your marketing strategy. 

To track it, make sure you monitor all your lead generation channels (e.g., website, email campaigns, PPC campaigns, etc.) and capture lead data to determine which lead came from which source.

10. Lead velocity rate (LVR)

This metric tracks the speed at which your lead pipeline is expanding, providing insights into the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts and the overall health of your sales funnel.

The formula to calculate it is:

LVR = (Number of Leads This Month − Number of Leads Last Month) / Number of Leads Last Month × 100

For example, if you had 500 leads last month and 600 leads this month, the LVR would be:

(600 − 500) / 500 × 100 = 20%​

This indicates a 20% growth in your lead pipeline over the period.

To track it, you should:

➡️ Regularly track the number of generated leads, ideally every month or even week.

➡️ Calculate LVR periodically using the formula above to understand the lead growth rate for a specific time interval. This helps detect anomalies and track changes in lead volume over time.

Pro tip: Analyze how LVRs change over time to understand your lead pipeline’s growth dynamics. This can help you understand and predict growth trends.

11. Time to conversion

Simply put, this is the average time it takes a lead to progress from initial contact to becoming a customer.

Tracking time to conversion is crucial for assessing the speed of your sales cycle, identifying potential bottlenecks, and making data-driven decisions to enhance your lead generation strategies and overall conversion rates.

To calculate it, apply the following formula:

Time to Conversion = Sum of Time Taken for All Conversions/ Number of Conversions​

For example, if you have 10 leads that converted over a period of 30 days, and the total time taken for all conversions is 300 days, the average time to conversion would be:

300/10 = 30 days

To track it, you’ll have to:

1. Determine the individual time to conversion for each lead (you can do this by applying timestamps in your CRM that will help you pinpoint the actual time it took you from initial contact to conversion).
2. Add all those individual times to conversion together to get a sum of time taken for all conversions.
3. Keep tabs on the number of conversions over that specific period.

12. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

This metric shows the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship.

As such, CLV helps you understand the long-term value of acquiring and retaining customers, allowing you to optimize marketing spend and fully monetize your customer base.

The formula to calculate CLV is:

CLV = Average Purchase Value × Average Purchase Frequency × Customer Lifespan

Where:

• Average Purchase Value is the average amount of revenue generated per purchase.
• Average Purchase Frequency is the average number of purchases made by a customer within a specific period.
• Customer Lifespan is the average duration a customer remains active with your business.

For example, if a customer makes an average purchase of $100, purchases 4 times a year, and stays with your business for 3 years, the CLV would be:

100 × 4 × 3 = $ 1,200

To track CLV, take the following steps:

1. Gather data on average buying values and frequencies from your sales and CRM systems. 
2. Analyze historical data to calculate the average customer lifespan. This can be done by tracking the time from a customer’s first purchase to their last purchase or when they become inactive.

13. Churn rate

Churn rate is one of sales and marketing teams' least favorite metrics, as it shows the percentage of customers who stopped engaging or making purchases over a specified period.

This KPI is crucial for assessing customer retention, understanding the reasons behind customer loss, and evaluating the overall health of your business. 

The formula to calculate churn rate is:

Churn Rate = Number of Customers Lost During a Period/Number of Customers at the Start of the Period × 100

For example, if you had 1,000 customers at the start of the month and lost 50 customers by the end of the month, the churn rate would be:

50/1000 × 100 = 5%

This indicates that 5% of your customers churned during the month.

You can track this metric by:

1. Maintaining accurate records of customer numbers at the beginning and end of the measurement period. 
2. Tracking the number of customers who have canceled or stopped using your product or service. Ensure that this information is updated regularly to reflect recent changes.

14. Engagement rate

Engagement rate measures how actively leads interact with your marketing content, such as email open rates, click-through rates, and social media interactions.

It is an important indicator of how well your content resonates with your audience and how effectively it drives actions such as likes, shares, comments, and clicks.

Although the formula to calculate engagement rate varies depending on the type of content and the platform, there’s a common formula that can be applied to most cases:

Engagement Rate = Total Engagements/Total Impressions or Reach × 100

Where:

• Total Engagements includes actions such as likes, shares, comments, clicks, and other interactions.
• Total Impressions or Reach represents the number of times the content was displayed or seen.

For example, if a social media post received 200 likes, 50 comments, and 30 shares (totaling 280 engagements) and had 5,000 impressions, the engagement rate would be:

280/5000 × 100 = 5.6%

This indicates that 5.6% of the people who saw the post actually engaged with it.

To track it, you have to:

1. Define engagement actions, i.e., which types of interactions are considered engagements for your content. This can include likes, shares, comments, replies, clicks, and other relevant actions based on the platform and content type.
2. Collect engagement data by using analytics tools provided by social media platforms, email marketing systems, content management systems, or a third-party tracking and analytics platform.

15. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR measures the total revenue generated from your subscription-based business models on a monthly basis. 

MRR provides a clear view of the stability and growth of your revenue stream by focusing on recurring income rather than one-time sales. 

As such, it’s essential for SaaS companies as it helps forecast revenue and assess business performance.

To calculate it, use the following formula:

MRR = Number of Active Subscribers × Average Revenue Per User 

Where:

• Number of Active Subscribers is the total count of customers with active subscriptions.
• Average Revenue Per User is the average revenue generated per subscriber per month.

For example, if you have 200 active subscribers, each generating an average of $50 per month, the MRR would be:

200 × 50 = $10,000

To track MRR, you first need to:

1. Track active subscribers.
2. Calculate average revenue per user by dividing total monthly revenue by the number of active subscribers. This helps you understand each subscriber's revenue contribution.

Common mistakes to avoid when tracking lead generation metrics

Tracking lead generation metrics is essential for optimizing your marketing and sales strategies, but it’s easy to fall into certain traps. 

Avoiding these common mistakes can help ensure that your data is accurate and actionable:

1. Neglecting data quality - Relying on inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to misleading insights and poor decision-making. To avoid this, invest in good data enrichment tools and regularly audit and clean your data to ensure accuracy.
2. Ignoring context - Evaluating metrics without considering the broader picture can lead to misinterpretation. Always analyze metrics together with other relevant data, such as market conditions, campaign goals, and customer feedback.
3. Focusing on vanity metrics - Prioritizing metrics like the total number of leads generated without considering lead quality or conversion rates or focusing on social media engagement alone will get you nowhere. Balance vanity metrics with meaningful lead generation KPIs that reflect lead quality, buying intent, and conversion rates to gain a clearer picture of your lead generation effectiveness.
4. Failing to set clear goals - Tracking metrics without having specific objectives or benchmarks can lead to a lack of direction and actionable insights. Establish clear, measurable goals for your lead generation efforts, use metrics to track progress towards these goals, and adjust strategies as needed.
5. Inconsistent tracking methods - Using different tracking methods or tools inconsistently across campaigns or periods. Standardize your tracking methods and tools to ensure consistency and comparability of data, which will help you make accurate comparisons and analyses.
6. Not reviewing and adapting - Failing to regularly review your analytics reports and the insights metrics and KPIs provide, results in a very limited picture of your overall business health. Make sure to continuously review your metrics, assess performance, and adapt your strategies based on these data-driven insights.

Start converting more leads with Warmly

Handling lead generation manually is no easy task in today’s competitive market. 

Besides, some lead generation metrics vital for success can’t be tracked without help from tools designed to monitor specific lead generation channels and capture relevant data - such as Warmly.

Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that lets you harness your website’s full conversion potential by:

1. Tracking and identifying website visitors - both companies and individual stakeholders.
2. Enabling email campaign attribution by letting you track visitors who come through specific campaigns.
3. Revealing B2B and intent data on each identified lead, enabling you to score and qualify them.
4. Providing automated and human-handled options for engaging leads on your website while they’re still hot.

Sign up for Warmly’s free forever plan and discover how it can help you generate and convert more leads today.

Or book a live demo to see it in action first.