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Sales leads are the lifeblood of any small business and a key focus of any effective business marketing strategy. They’re people or organisations that have demonstrated active interest in the product or service you sell. They’ve shown they might well buy from you, either now or later.
How can you generate more of them?
The best way to generate sales leads varies from business to business. And new techniques are evolving constantly. With the spread of digital technologies over recent years, lead generation tactics exist today that weren’t available 20 years ago. Yet some tried and tested analogue techniques remain very effective.
Remember that the purpose of marketing is not to use the latest technology or to focus on this or that sales channel or promotional technique. It's to attract, convert and retain the right customers. Any approach that enables you to generate high quality sales leads efficiently and effectively is a good marketing technique for your company.
In this article, I will run through 15 of the most popular lead generation techniques, so you can select the ones that could work best for your small business. Here's a list of what we’ll cover (in case you want to jump to any section):
Offer free website content in exchange for contact details
You’ve done your SEO homework and organic search has brought lots of visitors to your website. But at this stage, these visitors are no more than prospects. How do you ensure that those who are truly interested in what you sell reveal themselves?
Many brands make free content available to visitors to their website to help establish their brand credibility. But if you offer extra, even more valuable content to visitors who are willing to provide their contact details and agree to receive follow up marketing communications, you can go further. By persuading them to disclose their genuine interest in the products you sell, you have nudged those visitors to qualify themselves as bona fide sales leads.
Here are some examples of content that B2B companies use to good effect for this purpose:
Newsletters. These can include tips and trends related to your industry and which would be relevant and useful for your target customers.
White papers. These are reports that explore a prominent or topical industry issue in depth.
Webinars. B2B companies sometimes host webinars at which expert speakers share their knowledge on topics that are relevant to their target customers. These can be very effective in industries where the audience needs, but lacks, in-depth knowledge (e.g. personal finance).
B2C brands commonly use these types of content:
News about new products and special offers. Brands can promise to update potential customers about special deals first, or exclusively, via their email marketing list.
‘How to’ guides. Companies often provide free advice about how best to use their products. For example: advice on how to style your home from a furniture brand or how to match colours from a paint brand. This content has the added benefit of bringing the audience a step closer to buying.
Let customers ‘try before they buy’
The ‘try before you buy’ technique enables your target customer to experience the value of your product or service in the most compelling way possible — by using it for real.
A common version of this technique, used by service businesses (e.g. software as a service or SaaS), is to enable the potential customer to use a basic version of your service for free, while reserving the full functionality for paying subscribers.
By coming forward to test out the product, the consumer indicates clearly that they have a strong interest. The seller hooks the sales lead with the free plan and can then pitch to them the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan.
The ‘try before you buy’ technique is not restricted to service businesses — far from it. In fact, more or less any physical product whose purchase includes a right of return is being sold on a try before you buy basis. That covers a huge range of articles, including apparel, household appliances, cars and many more things besides.
At some point during the sale process, the customer often accepts to receive promotional communications, enabling the brand to capture the contact details of a validated sales lead. So even when articles are returned, brands can grow their stock of leads for future sales.
Create viral content on social media
At a basic level, B2C businesses use social media to generate sales leads in much the same way that they use their website — they distribute free content that is relevant and valuable for their target audience. By following the channel to benefit from the free content, potential customers expose themselves to marketing messages that should drive subsequent sales conversions.
Yet social media channels are (or should be) distinctively ‘social’ — they are not just another type of website. They are distinguished by users’ propensity to use the platforms to share content with their friends or contacts.
B2C brands use this to generate new sales leads using ‘viral marketing’ techniques. Viral marketing is the practice of creating content that communicates a favourable message about a brand inside a package that is not outwardly commercial and is likely to prompt sharing by users. An example would be a video with an amusing storyline or strong moral message in which the brand appears by association rather than playing the central role. Successful viral marketing campaigns can result in the generation of huge numbers of new sales leads.
For B2B companies, we discuss how to generate leads on LinkedIn in this article.
Publish videos on YouTube
YouTube is a sub-set of social media marketing, but it deserves a separate mention for its size and for the potential it offers brands to monetise their content.
YouTube works really well for brands with products or services that are inherently visual, such as fashion or beauty. It is also very effective for products that benefit from being demonstrated or explained.
My personal favourite is this demo of a Blendtec food blender – part of a series called ‘Will it Blend?’ The videos showcase the rugged quality of the blender brilliantly – a big customer pain point. And I hardly need to tell you they were a viral hit.
Partly thanks to YouTube itself, we are all very accustomed to watching video nowadays — many people prefer watching a video to reading an article. And videos often enable you to convey your brand’s personality in ways that can’t be achieved through a written article.
To start generating sales leads from YouTube, set up your own YouTube channel and begin posting your videos. Include a link to your website with each video, so that viewers know where to go to buy your products. And always prompt viewers to subscribe to your channel if they like the content.
As an added bonus, you can generate income from your videos by applying to join, and being accepted into, YouTube’s Partner Programme. If you’re accepted, you turn on ads (which are then shown before and sometimes during your videos) and you earn a share of the resulting ad revenue.
Generate B2B sales leads using social media
Social media is not only a tool for B2C marketers. In the hands of a well-trained sales team, social media can be a powerful B2B lead generation tool. Sales teams can use social media to identify sales prospects using filtering tools embedded in the platforms. They can then use intelligent outreach approaches to try to convert them into confirmed leads.
The main social media platform for generating B2B leads is LinkedIn (other platforms, including Facebook, can also play a role).
Use paid search
Paid search — also known as search engine marketing — involves paying to have an ad displayed in response to a search query. When most people think of paid search they think of Google Ads but you can advertise on other search engines like Bing as well.
To create a paid search campaign, you need to identify the search terms (‘keywords’) that your target customers would use if they were searching online for the product or service you are selling (e.g. ‘garden furniture’). Then decide how much you are willing to bid for each visitor that the ad brings to your website.
The search engine runs paid search as a continuous auction between the various sellers who are targeting each keyword. If you win in the auction, the search engine displays your ad to the searcher alongside the much larger number of organic search results.
If the searcher clicks on your ad, the link takes them to the page you have created on your website (known as a ‘landing page’) where you showcase your offer. The search engine charges you for the sales lead it has brought you (‘pay per click’ pricing).
You need to be disciplined with your bidding, based on your estimate of the revenue your ad will bring in. On the plus side, the results from paid search are immediate.
Unlike SEO, paid search can start bringing you sales leads as fast as you can compose your ad keywords and set them up in your Google Ads (or other search provider) account.
Using paid search is deceptively complex – there are lots of hidden dos and don’ts that can trip up a first-timer. You may be best to outsource the management of your campaigns to a small business marketing consultant who specialises in paid search.
If you do want to try doing it yourself, I recommend taking the time to get up to speed on the technical ins and outs of how paid search platforms work. If you’re using Google Ads, a great book to start with is Google Ads Workbook [1] by Jason McDonald.
Use digital display ads
Digital display ads are a widely used tool for generating new sales leads. You can place ads across a broad range of websites. You can (and should) choose to have them shown only to some users and not others based on demographic or other factors that match your target customer.
If a prospect clicks on your ad, they are taken to the website landing page you have set up for that ad. You usually pay the publisher per click (i.e. for every visitor to your site) or per ‘impression’ (i.e. for each person who sees your ad, regardless of whether or not they click on it).
Social media ads are the distinct category of display ads that are shown on social media sites. The biggest platform is Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
Thanks to the detailed profiles that social media sites are able to build up on their users, they offer very fine-grained targeting — they can display ads only to users who meet narrowly defined criteria. This minimises wasted ads — ones displayed to people who are a poor match to the advertiser’s target customer base. The flip side is that social media ads are correspondingly expensive to buy.
Leverage affiliate marketing
In affiliate marketing, a brand places its product or service with a partner who promotes it by testing it or otherwise trying it out and includes a link to the brand’s website for users that want to find out more or even buy straight away. The promoter earns a commission linked to subsequent purchases by those users.
Some affiliate marketing programmes are run by dedicated review websites (e.g. restaurant guides). Other programmes are run by non-dedicated publishers, such as online lifestyle magazines that publish reviews of homewares or household appliances.
Whichever is the case, the publisher should always follow best practice and disclose their commercial incentive.
Place your product with influencers
Influencer marketing works in a similar way to affiliate marketing. This time, instead of placing its product or service with a review website, the brand partners with a social media influencer. The influencer tries out the product or service and promotes the results and their experience to their followers, with links to your website and/or your social media page.
The ‘trying out’ process can be as quick and simple as putting on an article of clothing and posting a video or images of the result together with a comment. On the other hand, it can be as complex as posting a long article or even hosting a promotional event complete with a video.
The influencer’s payment is usually linked to the level of purchases by their followers, the extent of the promotional work they have done and their influencer status (i.e. their number of followers and their followers’ engagement level with the influencer).
You should of course partner with an influencer whose followers are a good match to your target customer base.
Buy or build a list of sales leads for use in cold calls or cold emails
What about cold calling or cold emailing contacts using a list of potential sales leads that you have either purchased from a third party or built through your own research efforts?
Cold calling or cold emailing can be a bad idea, but there are occasions when it is appropriate and effective for both you and the contacts you engage with. Before using these tactics, you should consider three issues: regulatory compliance, cost efficiency and brand reputation.
First, regulation. There is a common misperception that cold calling and cold emailing are now prohibited in the EU by GDPR and in the UK by the Data Protection Act 2018. That’s not correct — you usually can still do it, but you must do it in the right way.
Here are some simple and very general principles to get you started:
It's usually ok to cold call someone if you are reaching out to them with a personalised message about a product or service you provide which you have reason to believe could be of benefit to the person you are contacting.
It's usually ok to cold email someone at a business under the same conditions. But it’s not ok to send an unsolicited email to an individual unless there is a pre-existing relationship (e.g. they bought something from you before). So you can’t mass email individuals without their prior consent.
If you do contact someone cold, explain how you obtained their contact details, tell them why you are contacting them (i.e. the benefit you can offer them) and give them an easy way to opt out of receiving any further communications from you (which you must action promptly and effectively).
These general rules of thumb should be valid in most situations, but the laws you need to comply with are complex, with the details falling outside the scope of this article. To begin with, as we have seen, the rules are different for cold calling and cold emailing and for contacting people and businesses. In the UK there are also some exceptions to the general rules (e.g. it’s never ok to cold call individuals about certain products such as pensions).
It's particularly important to note that the applicable laws relate to the handling and storage of personal data more than to the means by which you reach out to a contact. It's very possible to contact someone in a permitted way but fall foul of the law in the way you handle their data. And the penalties for breaching data handling rules are severe, both for businesses and for the individuals working in them.
If you’re thinking of going ahead, bear in mind that this article doesn’t purport to give you legal advice about the dos and don’ts of cold calling and cold emailing. If you are at all unsure about the laws you need to follow, you should consult a lawyer.
The second issue to consider about using cold contact lists is simple economics. Directly contacting third parties with a personalised approach via phone or email is expensive. In addition, you will need to buy your list of cold contacts from a third party or research and build it yourself. How much will that cost? For your campaign to be profitable, you will probably need your cold contacts list to be a tight match to your target customer base. How confident are you that it will be?
Finally, you should consider brand perception. Rightly or wrongly, many customers think all cold calling and cold emailing is spammy behaviour. You may not want to risk tarnishing your brand by association.
In conclusion, to keep the wheels of commerce spinning, companies need to be able to get in touch with potential new customers. Cold contacting people to offer them valuable benefits is an example of business working well for everyone. Why would the law require you to hide your great products from people who would love to hear about them? You just need to do it in the right way.
Use public relations (PR) as a force multiplier
The purpose of PR is to generate positive press coverage for your company. It doesn’t matter what media the coverage is in, as long as it’s likely to be seen and reacted to by your target customers. The right PR can bring you lots of new sales leads as people search for your brand and visit your website or social media site.
PR can be a particularly valuable lead generator for small businesses because it can get you a level of publicity that you couldn’t afford using paid media (advertising etc.). If you have an exceptionally newsworthy story to tell, there’s no reason why it won’t be picked up by national newspapers, TV or radio.
Just getting exposure for your brand can be a great start, even if it doesn’t involve direct promotion of your product or service. Imagine if you secured the opportunity to provide expert advice on an issue in your industry that has suddenly become topical for a larger, more generalist audience?
For example, you might be a food writer who specialises in healthy, low cost recipes — until recently, a niche interest. Then imagine that a national television programme asks you to record an interview about how to eat well on a budget during the current cost of living crisis. By showcasing your expertise, media coverage like this can have customers flocking to find out about your product.
Even better, PR might earn you direct exposure for the great new product or service you have just launched. The bar is higher here — you don’t need to have invented a cure for cancer, but you need to have developed something remarkable that will be of strong interest to your target customer audience. The more remarkable it is, the less topical it needs to be. And of course, it will be easier to get press in your local region or in your trade press than in the national news media.
Contribute a guest article
Contributing a guest article to a good quality website or newspaper is another proven way to generate new sales leads.
Your article shouldn’t directly promote your company — the publisher won’t normally allow that. Instead, it should showcase your expertise and industry credentials. If your article does that, it should mark you out as a thought leader and this will advertise your business indirectly.
When you’re looking for guest posting opportunities, the key factors to bear in mind are:
Your topic. When considering what to write on, make sure you have something distinctive to say that the site you will pitch to has not already published on.
The relevance of the publishing site to your target customers. Is it somewhere that your target audience is likely to spend time?
The quality of the publishing site. You can judge this from the look and feel of the site and the other content that it has published.
If possible, your article should include a link back to your website (a ‘backlink’), which helps readers find their way to your site quickly and easily and also boosts your site’s SEO profile. Failing that, the article must cite your company’s name and contact details.
Securing and delivering on a good guest article opportunity is not as simple as it looks, but the results can be very worthwhile.
Attend in-person industry events
Now that so much small business marketing is done through digital channels, we often overlook traditional analogue marketing opportunities. Yet for some types of small business, analogue marketing techniques continue to work very effectively as sales lead generators.
Industry conferences, trade fairs and the like work particularly well for B2B companies that meet the following criteria:
The industry is very specialised and, as a consequence, all the significant players in the industry tend to participate. This maximises networking opportunities with the people who matter.
The product or service they sell is complex and/or customisable, requiring an in-depth, two-way dialogue that is most effectively achieved face to face.
The product or service is of high value, which means the high cost of in-person event attendance can be readily absorbed by the high revenue that accrues from each sale.
Become a public speaker
Giving a speech at an industry event can be another great way to generate sales leads. Of all the things you can do to demonstrate expertise in your field and communicate intimately and powerfully with an audience, giving a speech is near to the top of the list.
Remember that the speech should not directly promote your product or service, it should promote your expertise (and perhaps your values and goals). But if you’re a good speaker with a topic that’s relevant to the audience and you have a distinctive message to convey, you can drive a lot of potential new customers to your website or social media site.
Of course, if you can’t tick those three boxes, don’t accept the engagement! Nobody appreciates a middling speaker, a topic of limited interest or a routine speech.
Unless you are a superstar speaker, your audience is not going to number in the thousands. To make it worth your while, make sure that the audience will contain a decent number of influential people who could become important sales leads.
In mitigation, bear in mind that event sponsors often post videos of keynote speeches to industry events and conferences online after the event. In this case, you can use your social media site, your website and your PR team to promote it further afterwards.
Distribute local area door to door leaflets
Businesses that focus on a small local catchment area (hair salons, window cleaners, estate agents etc.) often use simple leaflets, delivered door to door, to generate new sales leads. That might sound primitive in the digital era, but it’s not. A good local leaflet campaign can be a cost-effective lead generation technique.
Remember that almost anyone living in the locality is a potential customer of small businesses like these. And most of those local residents will indeed need those services at some point. On top of that, door-to-door leafletting is relatively cheap, so you can afford to waste some of them.
If you’re planning to use door to door leaflets, just follow a few simple rules that apply to most promotional techniques:
Make sure your leaflet leads with a strong message that addresses the customer’s needs or pain points.
Use a leaflet that is appropriate for the purpose and conveys the right message about your business. For example, is it the right size for the amount of content you want to include? Is the quality of the paper and printing suitable? This depends on your business — what is good enough for a fast food outlet won’t be for an estate agency. Don’t forget to check for spelling mistakes.
Make it clear what action you would like the reader to take, together with easy ways for them to get in contact with you.
Still unsure of the way forward? Consider taking outside advice
Are you still feeling unsure about the right tactics to generate more leads for your company? If so, it might be time to seek support from a small business marketing consultant. They should be able to help you clarify any uncertainties and identify the best way forward.
Bear in mind that a slow pace of lead generation isn’t always due to faulty lead generation tactics. It can be that issues elsewhere in your company are what’s holding you back. If that’s the case, doing more marketing may not solve your revenue problem.
By engaging a good small business advisor, you can bring in someone who will see your business challenge with a fresh pair of eyes and suggest solutions that should get you moving forward towards your goals.
[1] McDonald, J. (2022) Google Ads Workbook (2023). JM Internet Group. For Jason’s profile and more about his other books and services, see https://www.jasonmcdonald.org/.
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