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Lead Generation Marketing: 100 Strategies, Ideas and Examples Part 2

16. Video Cliffhanger (Wistia Turnstile)

YouTube is great, don’t get me wrong. But it ain’t got nothing on the lead generation capabilities of Wistia. Sure, YouTube allows you to add little, annoying overlays which direct people to another video. But does it allow you to stop the video at any point and email gate the rest?

Didn’t think so.

My recommendation for this would be to create a 5-part video course and leave the first one free and awesome. Gate the rest.

Wistia allows you to customize your gate message as well as how much information you ask for. All leads are exportable as a CSV or automatically exported through one of Wistia’s email marketing integrations.

wistia turnstile

To learn more, check out Wistia’s awesome “Turnstile” feature.

17. Gated Questionnaire Results

The questionnaire itself isn’t gated of course, but the results are. And once you’ve invested time into answering 5-10 questions on “What kind of content marketer are you?” you damn well want to know the answer.

Another great benefit of this lead generation strategy is that, if you play your cards right, the answers to your questionnaire can be stored as lead information – allowing you to segment and inform your lead nurturing strategy.

A great example of this is SnapApp’s “What Interactive Content Type is Right For You?” questionnaire. It’s hyper-specific, so they know the leads they get are qualified.

It works as a click popup – all of it held within a small window within your browser window. Check out both the title window and the gated results below:

content questionnaire

email-gated questionnaire

To learn more, check out “How to Generate Leads Like These 75 Marketing Wizards.”

18. Add an Inline Blog CTA for a Demo

Let me give you some context with this one, because a “Book a Demo!” CTA in the middle of your article won’t fly, and your readers will hate you.

Instead, try something like this:

inline cta 1

The copy here is, essentially “we recognize that this actionable strategy might be a bit complex. We’d love to help you make it happen. Click here to book a time for one of our marketing experts to explain the details.”

And that’s not a hard message to agree with. If your customer success or marketing expert happens to mention that your platform is built to make part of the complicated strategy easier, whose fault is that?

19. High-Contrast CTAs

This is converoin rate optimization 101, but we see it ignored so frequently that we have to mention it nonetheless.

The goal of your landing page needs to be clear to the visitor the moment they arrive. If you haven’t made it obvious, what can you expect from them except a bounce?

Here’s an example of a clear and obvious CTA button from AdEspresso:

subscription scroll popup

To learn more, check out “9 Examples of Blog Lead Generation Calls to Action Critiqued.”

20. Two-Step Lead-Generation Funnels

Once someone’s clicked on your lead generation form or CTA, they’re committed. Not completely, of course, but more than 50%. So a two-step lead gen funnel just makes sense.

Entice your landing page or website visitors with a simple form or button and then, once they click, show them the rest of the funnel or form.

It’s easier to see than explain. Here’s an example from Writtent:

multistep leadgen 1

multistep leadgen 2

To learn more, check out “The Foundational Guide to your Online Marketing and Sales Funnel.”

21. Source, Referral or Traffic-Specific Popup Offers

This is a cool one.

Many marketing automation platforms can track the behavior and activity of your site visitors, whether they’re leads, customers or visiting for the first time.

That means you can cater specifically to types of traffic – delivering them lead generation offers based on who they are, even before they become leads.

A cool example of this is to trigger an entry or short-timed popup on your pricing page when someone arrives for the second time in one week. Something like this…

javascript-triggered popup

js popup example

To learn more, check out “5 Ways You Can Do More With Your Website Traffic.”

22. Utilize the Punishment vs Reward Ratio

Several years ago, researchers sent Ph.D students a reminder about an upcoming economics conference. Half of the emails sent offered a discount for early registration while the other half phrased it as a penalty fee for late registration.

93% of students registered early when they heard about the penalty fee while only 67% did so when presented with a discount.

Tests like these have been repeated time and again, showing that people respond far more strongly to loss than they do to gain.

To use this within your lead generation strategy, consider a countdown timer or “Lose Access to this Giveaway at Midnight on Saturday.”

To learn more, check out MarketingLand’s “Reward Framing & Its Stunning Impact On Conversion Optimization: What You Need To Know.”

23. Use Images to help people visualize the results (relationship, happiness, money, etc.)

We’re all visual learners. Sure, some people need it more than others. But ultimately, we understand concepts far more quickly when we see them than when they’re described to us.

For instance, if I describe to you a line that is curved such that its ends coalesce and every point on said line is equidistant from the center, I would be describing a circle. However, if I simply show you an image of a circle, you understand what I am referring to far more quickly.

The same goes for the benefits of your business or lead generation offer.

helpscout love image

To learn more, check out “The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization: Chapter 8 – Designing for Conversion.”

24. Use Bullet Point Lists

Whenever you’re writing landing page or popup (any lead generation tool, really) and have a benefit you want to communicate, do so in bullet-point form.

When Unionen (a Swedish company) A/B tested a bullet-point list of “reasons to become a member” against a control paragraph, they found that the list had a 5.3% conversion rate, a 15.9% improvement over the control.

To learn more, check out #99 within “100 Conversion Rate Optimization Case Studies,” from Kissmetrics.

25. Use Colored Icons in your Bullet-Points

You want to grab the attention of your landing page or website visitors, and a simple bullet-point won’t do it.

Here’s an example from the Wishpond landing page product page:

bullet point icons

Whenever you’re listing out the benefits of downloading your ebook or registering for a free trial, make those benefits stand out and appeal visually with colored or icon bullets (Wishpond actually uses FontAwesome icons, enabling you to drag and drop and color over 200 icons into your landing pages and popups).

To learn more, check out “The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization: Chapter 8 – Designing for Conversion.”

26. Add Testimonials

Testimonials are the new word-of-mouth. It’s equivalent to having someone stand in front of your (clearly biased) brand and say, “You can trust them. I’ve worked with them before and gotten excellent results.”

Testimonials feature real people relatable to your website traffic, which increases the chance of that traffic relating to your brand as well as trusting what’s said.

Testimonials can showcase specific value points, metrics and KPI’s in real-world and concrete terms. Something it can be difficult to do in a benefit list or headline.

vwo testimonial

To learn more, check out “Landing Page Customer Reviews: The How the What and the Wherefore” or Visual Website Optimizer’s case study “Placing Testimonials on Lead Generation Page Increases Conversions by 50%.”

27. Use the AIDA framework

You’re probably more familiar with AIDA as a framework for best practice in advertising. It’s been around forever and is But it’s easy adaptable for lead generation marketing as well.

Joanna Weibe, marketing thought-leader and copywriting guru, defines AIDA for lead generation like this:

Attention – Jar the reader out of their boring ol’ lives
Interest – Engage their mind with unusual, counter-intuitive or fresh info
Desire – Engage their heart so they want what you’re offering
Action – Ask them to take the next step

She uses this example from Moz to illustrate her point:

moz aida framework

To learn more, check out “The Ultimate Guide to No-Pain Copywriting (or, Every Copywriting Formula Ever).”

28. Inverted Pyramid Method

Vero, the successful email marketing platform, recommends their users consider the “Inverted Pyramid Method” for creating emails:

pyramid method

It’s just as applicable to lead generation marketing.

Basically, the inverted pyramid method recommends you create messaging which grabs the attention of your visitors (in lead gen that’d be the headline), builds excitement (urgency, a countdown timer, a customer testimonial or a value/benefit list) and closes with a call-to-action.

Whether creating an optimized email or creating an optimized lead generation landing page, the inverted pyramid is best practice for optimizing for conversion.

To learn more, check out “The Inverted Pyramid Method: How to Create Focused Emails That Really Convert

29. Publishing Industry Report

Industry reports are original content (or at least originally collated content). This means that you’ll be the citation everyone uses for that statistic or quote. And that, in the world where we’re all constantly searching for the most recent statistic to use in our content, is a valuable place to be.

And every time your industry report is cited, your website goes up that little bit in the search rankings and anyone who clicks on the link might just become a lead.

To learn more, check out Wishpond’s most recent industry reports on The State of Marketing Automation and the The State of Lead Generation.

30. Academy #1: Create educational, TOFU courses

Setting up a academy is far simpler than you might think. There are many platforms out there (Wishpond uses and recommends local Vancouver startup Thinkific) that make it easy.

And, when you consider your academy as simply an extension of your blog, it’s not all that intimidating.

We simply created slidedecks of our educational, Top-of-Funnel content and uploaded them as a PDF:

academy top-of-funnel

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Strategies, Ideas, Best Practices & Examples

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