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Lead generation is a pivotal strategy for any business, and it’s no different for technology companies. The strategy focuses on discovering individuals who are interested in your product or service and capturing their contact details for future use.
While a large number of IT companies consider generating sales leads through email marketing campaigns vital for their growth and expansion, there are many other lead-generation tactics a tech company can use. Email marketing is indeed a powerful strategy for lead generation, with every $1 spent delivering an average return on investment of $36, but there are other options.
Keep reading to learn more effective lead-generation strategies for technology companies you can use to amp up your lead-generation efforts.
1. Do Market Research And Understand Your Audience
Whatever strategy you adopt, it’s crucial to have a thorough understanding of your target audience. If you don’t understand your target audience, all your lead-generation efforts are merely clutching at straws.
What you need to define is your company’s Ideal Customer Profile or ICP. This is a detailed description of your ideal customer including factors beyond the usual demographics. They include behavior, interests, and pain points.
Market research is a good approach to learning about your audience. You’ll gather valuable insights about their needs, preferences, and pain points.
Some useful questions to ask include:
- How likely are you to refer our company to a friend?
- Do our products or services meet your expectations?
- Do our products or services solve any problems for you?
- What do you like most or least about our products or services?
- How would you rate your experience with us?
To help you gather data, use surveys, focus groups, and industry reports. Once you’ve collected the data, you can analyze it to better understand customer behavior and preferences.
This allows you to tailor your lead generation strategies and better meet the needs of your target audiences.
2. Cold Outreach
Cold outreach is a digital handshake you can use to reach out to someone you’ve had no previous contact with. Unlike traditional marketing strategies, this approach is personal, taking the form of one-to-one conversation starters with a prospect.
It requires you to contact individuals or businesses who may not be aware of your products or services to generate new leads and ultimately convert them into customers.
Cold outreach can take place via various channels, such as email, phone calls, or social media messages. To increase the effectiveness of any outreach efforts, it’s important to clearly understand your target audience and their needs by researching and identifying potential leads.
Examples of cold outreach strategies include email outreach, cold calling, voicemail, text messaging, social media outreach, and direct mail.
There are also countless tools available for finding qualified prospects. For example, Evaboot, a scraper for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can use Evaboot to export clean data and find emails from the Navigator. Additionally, you can use it to build lists effortlessly and filter leads using a variety of search filters.
3. LinkedIn Outreach
LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals, and many consider it the #1 choice for lead generation. With more than 900 million LinkedIn users, it’s no wonder marketing, recruiting, and sales teams have made LinkedIn outreach part of their daily routine.
LinkedIn cold outreach is a process of sending connection requests and messages to potential clients using the LinkedIn platform. It’s an effective way to expand your network, get in touch, warm up, and build positive relationships with your new leads.
The main benefits of LinkedIn outreach include:
- You can reach high-quality B2B leads with ease
- Increased reply rate
- Target B2B leads with more precision
- Find ideal employees
- Break the wall and reach out to recruiters
LinkedIn offers various ways to reach potential customers, including connection requests, direct messages, and InMail messages.
4. Create a Compelling Content Strategy that Generates Leads
A content marketing strategy is a plan for growing your brand’s audience by creating and distributing content that engages, educates, or informs. It’s not about pitching your products or services; it’s about delivering substance that enlightens your consumers.
There are many ways to do it, including videos, podcasts, blogs, and infographics. Providing knowledge and practical insights related to consumer interests or businesses is a powerful way to drive inbound traffic and engagements.
Invest in SEO Content Marketing
Optimizing your content for search engines is critical. Adopting comprehensive SEO tactics will improve your website rankings, increase visibility, attract high-quality organic traffic, and drive conversions.
Use Gated Content
Another way to optimize your content is to offer gated content, like a spreadsheet or template, that users must provide their email to obtain. This is a relatively easy way to generate more high-quality leads because you’re offering something of value that your ideal customer or client wants rather than simply asking for their email outright.
Gated content can take many forms, including:
Guides/ebooks
Source: LinkedIn
Checklists
Source: LinkedIn
Worksheets/workbooks
Audio recordings
Videos (pre-recorded or live webinar)
Source: LinkedIn
Case studies
Use Videos to Explain Complex Data
The world has become very visually orientated, making videos a critical part of any well-planned strategy. Creating compelling video content that helps people understand difficult technical concepts, demonstrate product features, or demonstrate customer satisfaction is especially important.
Optimize your videos for search engines and share them on social media, your website, and YouTube to reach a wider audience.
5. Ask Your Current Customers To Review Your Products and Provide Social Proof
Generating social proof through customer reviews is a powerful strategy for tech companies to build credibility and convert new leads. Here are some effective ways to do it:
Encourage customer reviews
- Ask existing customers to review your products on various platforms such as social media, Google, and industry-specific review sites.
- Make leaving reviews easy and convenient.
- Send email messages to remind customers to share their experiences.
Display testimonials and reviews
- Showcase positive customer feedback on your website and social media channels.
- Highlight success stories through case studies that demonstrate the impact of your products or services.
Leverage Customer Stories
- Share how clients benefit from your offerings to demonstrate brand value.
- Use logos of well-known clients to build credibility.
Social proof influences consumer decisions, and positive reviews can significantly boost your company’s reputation and lead conversion.
6. Offer Free Trials or Freemiums
Free trials allow potential customers to experience a product’s full functionality for a limited time (typically a few days to a month). During the trial period, users can access all premium features, explore the product extensively, and get hands-on experience, all of which increase the likelihood of conversion. Additionally, a free trial demonstrates product value, reduces hesitations, and is very effective for software products.
A Freemium is a basic software version that’s free, with premium features only available to paying customers. Users can use the software indefinitely with limited features, allowing businesses to build a larger user base. However, conversion from free to paid can sometimes be challenging.
7. Participate and Organize Webinars or Host Podcasts
Webinars and podcasts are powerful tools for lead generation in the tech industry. They offer unique opportunities to connect with your audience, educate them, and ultimately convert quality leads into customers.
Webinars attract an audience genuinely interested in your niche, and attendees are more likely to become qualified leads. During webinars, you can share valuable insights, industry expertise, and solutions to pain points, establishing your company as a trusted authority.
This type of content is also very useful for collecting data as registrants provide contact and demographic information. Additionally, you can use polls, Q&A sessions, and breakout rooms to foster community and build brand loyalty.
Podcasts allow you to share valuable content and build a rapport with listeners. By consistently providing insights, you’re able to nurture potential leads. They are also the perfect opportunity to gather contact information, encourage listeners to subscribe or sign up for updates, and collect their contact details for follow-up.
8. Create Engaging, Well Optimized Landing Pages
Source: Financesonline
Your website is your company’s digital identity, so it needs to be designed well and function efficiently. The same applies to your landing page. It must be well-designed and optimized to provide a good browsing experience for visitors and attract quality leads.
It’s also critical that the landing page and website open fast. A key component of this is choosing the right hosting, depending on your needs.
Your landing page should also align with your lead generation campaigns. If your motive is to get people to become your leads and give you their contact information, this only happens if your page is well-designed and includes engaging content.
9. Work with Industry Influencers
Working with influencers in the IT industry can be a very effective way to increase your visibility, tap into their audience, and improve your brand’s credibility.
If you want to take this approach, you must first identify influencers who align with your brand values and develop a partnership strategy. This strategy might include sponsored content, joint webinars, or product reviews.
Ensuring that the content is authentic and valuable to the influencer’s audience is critical and will increase your chances of generating more quality leads and expanding your brand’s reach.
10. Search Engine Optimization – a Key Point of The Best Lead Generation Strategies
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for amplifying your online presence.
Enhancing your website’s visibility on search engines directly targets those actively looking for your solutions.
You can capture leads across multiple channels by following SEO practices and SEM campaigns.
I personally start by conducting keyword research and identifying terms my target audience uses. I then create content around these keywords and optimize the website’s meta tags and descriptions to attract more traffic.
User intent is a critical part of the SEO process and in my experience it’s the best place to start. You should be certain that it’s right for your targeted keywords and that you can rank with the content you intend to create.
Let’s share an example: I intended to create a guide about LinkedIn marketing. I checked on Google the results for this keyword.
They were blog articles and informative content or guides, so I was on the right track.
However, if the results are service pages or YouTube videos but I want to write an informative blog article about the chosen topic, the user intent is not right. It’s not what users want to find.
It’s essential to check the user intent before you start writing. If it fits, then proceed.
Increasing traffic to your new content is the best sign that you’ve dealt with the entire task correctly. For example: An article I published on May 28, 2024, got 135 organic visitors by the end of June 2024.
And starting to rank for a bunch of keywords in just a month:
Once you achieve that, keep your content relevant and fresh by regularly updating it. It should resonate with your audience, encourage engagement, and drive traffic to your landing pages.
11. Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media platforms, such as X (Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Groups offer an extremely fertile ground for engaging with your ideal customers.
Crafting your content and targeting ads specifically for the various social media platforms can effectively capture the attention of your target audience.
However, before creating any content, you must determine which social media platforms your target audience frequents. The next step is to create a content strategy, including regular posts, interactive stories, and live sessions to keep your audience engaged.
Comments and messages are another important way to engage with your audience, build relationships, and direct them to your website.
12. Run Email Marketing and Survey Campaigns
Email marketing lead gen techniques focus on attracting potential customers and gathering their contact information. It typically involves:
- Capturing leads using sign-up forms or lead rental services and vendors to collect email addresses and basic information about potential leads.
- Initial engagement comes from sending welcome emails or introductory information to newly acquired leads.
- Broader targeting is also possible by communicating with a wide audience to identify those interested in your products or services.
Sending out surveys or putting one on your website will help you find out what tech buyers want, what they’re looking for when investigating new software platforms, and whether they’re looking to save time and money or improve service delivery.
Surveys will bring in new names and give you an idea of what types of offers to make in the future.
13. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are designed to drive traffic to your landing pages. Once there, you can offer visitors something valuable in exchange for their contact information. This might be a free trial, a webinar, an ebook, or a consultation.
It’s worth mentioning here the connection with SEM (Search Engine Marketing). PPC is a significant component of modern SEM strategies. While PPC focuses specifically on paid search advertising, SEM covers a wider range of marketing tactics. Some of these include other paid advertising methods along with SEO.
The key to targeting PPC leads is understanding your audience’s needs, pain points, challenges, and goals. Then you must choose the right keywords, platforms, channels, and ad formats that match your audience’s intent and preferences.
The next step is to create compelling and relevant ads that capture your audience’s attention and entice them to click. Use clear and catchy headlines, benefits-oriented copy, strong calls to action, and appealing visuals. You should also use ad extensions like sitelinks, callouts, or reviews to enhance your ads and provide added value.
14. Monitor Performance
Monitoring the performance of a lead generation strategy is crucial for several reasons:
- Number of leads generated: Tracking the total number of leads generated helps ensure you meet your quota and keep your business flowing smoothly. Generating as many leads as possible is essential for success.
- Conversion rate: This metric measures the percentage of leads that turn into actual sales. A high conversion rate indicates effective lead nurturing and deal closure, while a low rate suggests room for improvement in the sales process. Analyzing MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) will help you determine your conversion rates.
- Average deal size: Calculating the average value of each sale showcases your upsell skills or ability to close larger deals. A high average deal size reflects successful sales efforts.
- Sales Cycle Length: The time it takes to close a deal from initial contact matters. A shorter sales cycle indicates efficient lead movement through the process, while a longer one may signal targeting the wrong prospects.
Wrapping Up
In wrapping up, it’s clear that using a diverse array of lead generation strategies can significantly enhance your technology company’s ability to attract and convert potential customers. From understanding your audience through market research to leveraging the power of social media and SEO, these tactics are designed to help you reach your target audience more effectively. Implementing these strategies can boost your lead generation efforts, drive more conversions, and ultimately grow your business.
Reflect on the benefits of these approaches and consider how you can integrate them into your marketing plan. Experiment with different tactics to see which ones resonate most with your audience and yield the best results.
We encourage you to share your experiences and insights in the comments below. Your feedback is invaluable and can help others in the tech community refine their lead-generation strategies.
Author Bio
Veselin Mladenov is a Digital Marketing enthusiast and SEO strategist with 3 years of experience as a Content and Affiliate Manager of ThriveMyWay and more than 5 years in the content creation and SEO world.
