“If all you do is follow the herd, you’ll just be stepping in poop all day.”— Wayne W. Dyer

Lead generation is not a new concept. Marketers and business have been working on generating leads since the time marketing as a business function has come into being. Just like any other process, there are standards techniques to get leads for your brand. We’ve coved some of. There’s no denying that you’d get steady results if you implement these techniques. However, is that all you can do?

Even though it’s nice to play safe and use the tried and tested ways, today’s fast-paced world demands out of the box efforts to show extraordinary results. While you can put your thinking hats on and look for unconventional ways to get leads, we thought we’d help you with some initial not-so-common ways to get you started.

Lesser-Known Strategies to Generate Leads

1. Free to use interactive tools

While the world is busy using the standard emails marketing and social media techniques to acquire leads, you can go a step beyond by offering something that people would want. So, instead of pitching your actual product or service to your customer, you can offer them a free tool to use that’d help them out in a way. In order to use that, they’d be more than happy to share their contact information.

One of the most effective and quick ways of doing this is to create assessments that help people know where they stand with respect to the industry standards.

Source: SmartBug

For instance, SmartBug’s Intelligent Inbound Marketing Quiz analyses a company’s marketing strategy and shares actionable recommendations. Another way of creating such a tool is to build some sort of calculators that people can use. Koppr does a fantastic job of building such calculators to help people become more financially independent. While this may feel like too much work, these tools are great in creating a long-term lead generation channel. The effort is just one time, and the benefits are long-standing.

2. Gated videos and webinars

Marketers today know that that video content sells and engages more than anything else. People have better retention and are likely to interact with video content more than long boring pieces of texts. That being said, most companies and marketing professionals under-utilise the potential of the video content they create.

An effective way of using your video content or getting leads through a webinar of sorts is to gate that content. That means you add a quick form (usually with an email submission) that people have to fill in to access a video or register for a webinar.

Source: JotForm

You can preface the form with a nice engaging copy to entice people to want to watch the video or webinar. Not just that, you can actually trim an engaging part from the video, show that to the viewer and then ask them to fill a form to view the rest. That way, they’re hooked and curious to know more and are likely to fill out the form.

3. Cross marketing

Who said barter trade no longer works? When it comes to lead generation, be aware that you’re not the only brand out there wanting to get more leads. In fact, every business wants to continuously reach a wider audience and get prospects they can target. That’s where you can rely on the barter system, or what’s known as cross-marketing or cross-promotion in the present times.

Since there’s no set value in a barter system, how you want to use cross-marketing totally depends on the platform you’re partnering with. For instance, if you’re an employee insurance company, you can partner with the HR portal to promote you on their website in place of providing some discounted price to their customers. Similarly, you could officially state each other as partners and list one another on social media to get leads. Alternatively, sites also look for guest posts from industry leads, so the founder of your company or you (if you’re the founder/CEO) and suggest writing an article on their website that leads to your lead generation landing page. The idea is to find companies, platforms and brands that can benefit from you and vice versa and use that to grow together.

4. Create resources that people can use

Similar to the interactive tools, you can offer a little more by creating some sort of downloadable resources that’ll help people in some way. Once you have the resource, you can create a gated landing page for it which asks visitors to share their email to get their copy of the resource mailed directly to them, and tadaaa, you’ve got a lead.

This resource could be an eBook that people want to read. Hubspot does a great job at creating such eBooks. In fact, it has a complete section dedicated to such resources. Whenever you click to download these books, you’d find a form that’d you have to fill as shown in the image.

Source: Hubspot

However, creating eBooks are not the only way. Companies today are creating easy to replicate templates that other companies can use to get work done faster. For instance, Buffer has an amazing template for creating a content strategy for businesses. Similarly, brands also produce white papers, guides, reports, worksheets and even online courses to get people to sign up or share their personal information.

(Pro-tip: If this resource is not your primary offering, try to keep it for free. You’d get a lot fewer leads if you add a price to it!)

Source: Hubspot

5. Get social media shoutouts from influencers

With new Instagram celebs emerging every fortnight, influencer marketing is the new lead generation trend. Influencers turn their followers into prospects for your brand through the content they create. You could partner with influencers to promote you on their social media or create content for yours.

Netflix does a great job in using such influencers. You’d find social media celebs doing shoutouts to a new series or movie that’s release on the platform. Not just that, they also get these influencers to create content exclusively for Netflix in their trademark influencer gimmicks.

These influencers, masters of their game, are often able to generate relevant leads for the brand.

6. Be a part of the right communities

More often than not, business leaders and marketers are busy leveraging their LinkedIn to network and reach out people to generate more brand visibility and get leads. While LinkedIn is great for networking, most people overlook the power of some other community-driven platforms. The potential of Quora and Reddit is often ignored in these scenarios.

You’d probably be wondering that Quora is heavily moderated and you cannot possibly generate leads from there. That’s not entirely true. While we agree that Quora comes with a lot of moderation, there’s no denying the fact, that it’s the most sought-after platform for answers. So, that’s what you provide there. Find questions that are relevant to your brand, share information and knowledge related to queries or issues that your offering can solve and add links to your website or blog in there. Before you know it, traffic will sweep in on your website where you can add a lead generation form to capture relevant information.

In simpler words, you need to find the community that’s relevant to you and get known in that community, the leads would follow.

7. Offer a free trial, demo or free plan

You’ve built a path-breaking platform that’s so revolutionary that no one’s ever experienced it before. Kudos to that innovation! However, if your idea is so out-of-the-box, then most likely people are not going to understand it or know if they need it without experiencing it themselves. So, you’ve got to offer them a test-drive a.k.a a free trial period. Not just that, you can also offer a free plan/version of your product with restricted features so that you get solid leads to pursue and turn into paid customers.

Every brand from Canva, Spotify, Adobe Shutterstock to even Trello offer a free trial or a free plan. Trials or free plans not only make people engage with your offering, but they also make them accustomed to it. So much so, that your product becomes a habit and then they’re ready to pay for it.

Source: Trello

8. Build closed social media groups

Apart from using Quora to engage with the community, you can in fact create groups catering to your audience specifically on various channels like LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack too. For instance, there’s a Facebook group for SEO and Content Marketing and a Slack group for HR and recruiters.

While you have the liberty to gate the entry to these groups and collect lead information, these group also become your platform to engage directly with possible prospects. This helps in making your lead generation efforts more focused.

Summing Up

We’ve tried to cover most effective, yet lesser-known lead generation strategies for you in this article. However, there’re always plenty of options you can explore here. You can offer a special deal on a third-party platform like App Sumo and get leads. You could do a fun Twitter banter and get leads. There’s always room for more creative ways to attract the people you want as your customers.

It all boils down to a simple question: What would make someone share their personal/contact information with my company? Anything, we repeat, anything that makes a person do that can be a good lead generation strategy. The crux is to make an offer they can’t refuse and are convinced to let you have their information.

In the end, all we’d say is, “The offer determines to a large extent whether you can maintain a dialogue with a prospect rather than a series of episodes. The offer communicates your intention.” – Phil Fernandez