How To Generate Leads Online (+ 12 Top Ways)

A person shakes hands after finding leads

Abbey Stephan

Lead Editor
July 27, 2023
9 minute read
Abbey is a digital marketer, copywriter, and lead editor. She has worked on over 200 client campaigns and WebFX, and she specializes in marketing strategy analysis and industry-specific digital marketing plans. Outside of writing and editing, you’ll likely find her taking pictures of her cat, making a new playlist, or tending to her houseplants.

For 61 percent of marketers, finding leads is their number one challenge. Your company doesn’t have to struggle when it comes to uncovering the best way to generate leads, though. With this comprehensive, expert-vetted list of lead generation strategies, you can start earning qualified leads now.

This page will divulge how to generate leads online through 12 different strategies, helping you get more customers that convert. Keep reading to learn how to get more leads online for your business, or contact us online to chat about your lead generation strategy directly!

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What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of identifying and nurturing potential customers through conversion. With lead generation, you can find people who are interested in your business — or could be — and turn them into paying customers.

Often, lead generation involves researching your audience and learning their behaviors and online habits to target them with materials. It also means building your website and social media to be attractive representations of your business.

How to generate leads online

Now that we have covered what lead generation is, let’s get into how you can start earning more for your business. Here are 12 different ways to generate leads:

Interacting with them one-on-one
Marketing on social media
Automating lead generation strategies
Trying email marketing for lead generation
Creating tailored landing pages
Optimizing presence in search engines (SEO)
Running paid ads
Personalizing your marketing
Integrating actionable CTA buttons
Creating user generated content (UGC)
Offering a free perk in exchange for information
Adding referral programs

Read on to learn more about each process!

1. Interacting with them one-on-one

You can start finding leads by looking at your website. Every day, you probably have several qualified leads browsing your site, but you aren’t providing the information they need at the moment. With a live customer support channel, or even a chatbot, you can connect with them at a critical point of their purchase journey.

If your company included a live chat service, forum, or a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section, you could provide customers with immediate assistance and instant confidence in making your business a top choice

2. Marketing on social media

Social media has become an outlet for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Investing in a social media marketing and advertising plan is a key way to generate leads online.

With social media marketing and advertising, your company can start generating leads on:

Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn
Twitter
TikTok
YouTube
And more!

Find out who your audience and stick to the sites they use most. You should meet potential leads where they exist already, instead of luring them to new locations.

For B2B companies, Facebook and LinkedIn usually offer the most value when it comes to lead generation. Almost 45 percent of B2B marketers have earned a client through Facebook. In comparison, LinkedIn generates 80 percent of all B2B social media leads.

3. Automating lead generation strategies

A lead generation plan, no matter how simple or complex, can demand a substantial amount of time. Your team needs to develop it, manage it, and assess it routinely. That’s where marketing automation software and B2B lead generation tools can help.

With marketing automation, your internal marketing and sales teams can streamline various processes in your lead generation strategy.

For example, if you’re finding leads via webinar sign-ups, you may automate an email drip campaign for those attendees with a tool like EmailMarketingFX. Or, you may use a marketing automation application, like Buffer, to automate and streamline portions of your social media marketing campaign.

Companies serious about finding leads should invest in a marketing automation suite that includes lead scoring and lead nurturing features.

Measuring the metrics that affect your bottom line.

Are you interested in custom reporting that is specific to your unique business needs? Powered by MarketingCloudFX, WebFX creates custom reports based on the metrics that matter most to your company.

Leads
Transactions
Calls
Revenue

Learn More

4. Trying email marketing for lead generation

If you have experience with lead generation, then you know email marketing is one of the best ways to find leads. Compared to other lead generation strategies, it produces 50 percent more sales.

For the best results from email marketing, your team should segment your subscriber lists and email campaigns. If you offer multiple services and host a webinar related to Service A, for example, you want to include those attendees in a campaign focused on generating leads for Service A. This level of segmentation can help your team deliver personalized, hyper-targeted emails.

You can use these emails to address buyer concerns, highlight product benefits, and more. These emails can also include tailored calls-to-action (CTAs) related to your specific service. If your company’s new to email marketing, consider email marketing services.

With these services, which often include email design offerings, your business can launch a professional campaign with the expertise of email marketing specialists.

5. Creating tailored landing pages

A landing page is the first page a user arrives at when visiting your site. If they find your website from an online ad, they’ll probably enter on a service or product page. Or, if they visit your site from your social media, you’ll probably direct them to your homepage.

For example, say a user finds your construction company while looking for demolition services on Google. If your landing page has nothing to do with demolition, or it’s hard to read, the user will bounce and not come back.

Your landing pages should be:

Attractive
Easy to navigate
Informational (pertaining to the source of traffic)

Studies show that investing $1 in the user experience of a page can provide a return on investment (ROI) of $100. Without a top-notch landing page, your company risks turning away valuable leads, which can result in wasted ad spend, missed revenue goals, and more.

If you already have professionally designed landing pages, then focus on A/B testing. With A/B testing, your team can test variations of your landing pages to discover new opportunities. While you can do the traditional test of comparing colors, you can also experiment with form fields, copy, and more.

6. Optimizing presence in search engines

SEO involves making it easier for search engines (and people!) to find and use your web content. As users search for content, services, or products, Google will pull what it deems to be the best, most relevant results for those users.

For example, if you search “construction companies in Harrisburg,” these are the results:

Since 75% of users don’t go past the first page of results, keeping your website at the top of results is essential. The users who find you organically will already be qualified, since they expressed interest in your services by looking for them.

Optimize your website for SEO by:

Incorporating keywords that explain your services
Optimizing your meta tags
Adding a sitemap
Creating digestible content

7. Running paid ads

Paid ads are everywhere online, and they’re a great tool for helping draw in customers. There are a few different types of paid ads you can use, including the following:

Pay-per-click (PPC): With these ads, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can find these ads on social sites, search engines, and even ecommerce sites.
Retargeting: These ads target people who have previously visited your website but did not convert for whatever reason. You can use these ads to remind customers about your business and keep leads interested.
Social media: Ads on social media fit right into users’ timelines, so they can get ads for your business while they scroll like normal. Using social media ads can help you get a boost of traffic across channels.

8. Personalizing your marketing

Customers want personalized content, whether you do or not. In fact, 73% of consumers prefer brands who personalize their shopping experience.

Read: Guide To Personalized Marketing

Creating personalized content doesn’t have to be anything over the top. It can be as simple as seeing what content your leads respond to and making more of it. Or, it can be looking at trends across age groups and sending emails related to their demographic.

Personalizing your content based on larger groups can show people that you know what they’re interested in and improve your relationship with prospects. Building buyer personas is a key way to keep up with your audience demographics and keep the content rolling.

9. Integrating actionable CTA buttons

Adding a CTA button to an email, blog post, or landing page tells users what the next step is and encourages them to reach out, sign up, or even download something:

It might not be clear what users should do after the interact with your website. Use CTAs throughout your content to guide leads towards conversion and encourage them naturally to give you their information.

10. Creating UGC

UGC is a great way to give back to users as you learn more about them and work with our clients. Gathering data from your clients saves you time on finding new resources and creates an internal information loop.

One great example of UGC is writing case studies based on your past work. As you complete more projects, you can include your case studies on your site to show of your skills and offer client proof. This way, you can use your past work and client remarks to attract more leads!

11. Offering free content in exchange for information

Almost 50 percent of buyers read three to five pieces of content before they talk with a sales representative. If you want to attract potential clients to your site and convince them to become a lead, you need exclusive content, tools, and in-depth resources.

Exclusive or gated content requires a user to provide their contact information, like their name and email address. You can use this contact information to create a dedicated email campaign for nurturing leads.

A few examples include:

A template
A grading, assessment, or calculation tool
An online guide
An ebook
First-party research

Depending on your content strategy, you may build multiple campaigns to target different users and their varying interests in your product or service line.

12. Adding referral programs

Referral programs are word-of-mouth initiatives that encourage your customers to get more people to be customers for some reward. This style of lead generation is great for promoting your business while earning more conversions.

For example, let’s say you own a lawncare company. You could try a referral program where if people give a customer’s name when they sign up for a new service, the original customer gets a discount on their next lawncare service.

This incentive encourages people to do your marketing for and turns one-time customers into frequent purchasers.

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Ready to optimize your lead generation strategy?

If you want to jump into a lead generation strategy, WebFX is here to help. Our lead generation services cover everything from identifying your target audience to transforming organic traffic into leads.

So far, we have generated for our clients — you could be next. Call 888-601-5359 to get started!

Abbey is a digital marketer, copywriter, and lead editor. She has worked on over 200 client campaigns and WebFX, and she specializes in marketing strategy analysis and industry-specific digital marketing plans. Outside of writing and editing, you’ll likely find her taking pictures of her cat, making a new playlist, or tending to her houseplants.
WebFX provides digital marketing solutions with expert marketers, designers, and developers to increase visibility, conversions, and revenue. Learn more

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