Everyone who’s in the business of lead generation, like us, talks a lot about content. How important it is, how to do it right, how to make it valuable to your customers. But If everyone’s talking about and doing the same things, what value are you really providing? This is the hardest thing about lead generation. As soon as someone thinks up something that works really well, everyone else jumps on the bandwagon. Nothing is permanent in this business. Doesn’t mean we should just throw our hands up and surrender our businesses to fate, though. We’ve still got to play the game. Let’s take a look at what the current most innovative lead generation strategies look like. If you want to give one of them a shot, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Smart Funnel to help you put it together!
Innovative Lead Generation Interviews That Reveal the Secrets of Success
Take the time to reach out to the top people in the industry your product is designed to help. Get permission to record an interview. If you can do video, you can derive an enormous amount of content from that. Even just an audio recording over the phone will be phenomenal. The key is to ask questions about the specific strategies and practices that led them to success. Ask the great ones how they got great, and offer their secrets to those who want to be like them.
You can ask for an email address or other contact info in exchange for viewing the resulting content. You can also just put it out there as a public service. Either method will drive interest in your brand. We suspect, though, that the latter one will be seen as more trustworthy by your customers.
Videos that Provide Value to a Niche Audience, Even if They’re Not Customers
This is an even more specific version of the first tactic. Rather than an interview, though, it’s more of a how-to presentation. It brings specific problem-solving benefits to people who want to accomplish specific tasks well.
We like the way that video-hosting company Wistia does this. Not only do they do interviews, but they also teach people how to make better videos. They don’t focus on their hosting platform per se. They help their potential customers create better content. That makes them more likely to create more content. This makes it more likely that they’ll want to subscribe to a hosting service in the future. It’s brilliant.
Not Asking for an Email Address
This is the most daring and counterintuitive of the innovative lead generation ideas we’ve seen so far. John Booth, a VP of Marketing at Cipher Systems writing for impactbnd.com, points out that you don’t need everybody’s email. You need the emails of people who are likely to become customers. Prospects are getting tired of surrendering their email to download content that doesn’t turn out to be so valuable. They also really dislike having to unsubscribe from mailing lists that aren’t actually helping them, either.
The solution is to pivot to chat, and other methods of providing value and solving prospects’ problems before asking for anything in return. The law of reciprocity remains in full force here. Customers will be grateful for your orientation towards providing a service, rather than just mining them for data.
As Booth put it,
At the most fundamental level, my goal as a marketer is to build trust and establish credibility with my prospects.
https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/im-a-marketer-and-i-dont-want-your-email-address
I do this by sharing my company’s perspective, experience, and intelligence in a way that is educational and designed to answer their questions and help them solve their problems.
Doing all of this without asking for an email address is a very effective way to build trust and credibility, and it makes great business sense.
In hindsight, it seems like many of these innovative lead generation tactics are actually just ways of being thoughtful. Each of them represents taking a few extra steps to create something that will enhance a relationship. They’re not going to provide you with 100% conversion rates, but they will help you build trust in your brand, and that trust is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.
