There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to lead generation. Every company’s brand, goals, and audiences are different. Instead of chasing a universal playbook, effective lead generation begins with a deep understanding of your own business landscape and buyers’ unique needs. 

To bring you the latest industry insights on lead generation, we interviewed some of our clients to understand what’s working for them and why. Compiling our experience along with their insights, here we break down essential components of a strong lead gen strategy. 

Developing a Lead Gen Strategy
Getting Started
Optimizing Efforts
Content That Works
Measuring Results

Getting started.

For lead generation to take place, there must first be demand. Here's why it all starts with demand generation and accurate buyer personas. 

Build the foundation with demand generation.

If you want to generate leads, you need to create demand for your product/solution. Tara Benyousky, a seasoned marketing professional, explains, “There is a ton of pressure put on marketers to create leads. But that is a byproduct of all the work we set up front with brand positioning and demand generation—so high-quality leads come in organically. Simply trying to generate leads in paid channels is not a sustainable model. To get leads, you must do the other work that comes before it.” 

Getting your message and brand positioning right requires input across the entire organization. What is your company’s point of view on the industry challenge it’s solving? Are you introducing a new product to fix a problem buyers don’t even realize exists? Or are you trying to get customers to replace a competitor's solution and prove how you can serve them better? Ultimately, effective lead generation is a result of building a brand story that resolves these questions.  

Once your story is clear, promote it in your market to raise interest and awareness. Benyousky summarizes, “At the heart of lead generation is provoking change. To provoke change, you must expose a reason or a need; the pain or opportunity that’s being missed.”  

Provide direction with personas and an Ideal Customer Profile.

A targeted focus draws higher-quality leads. Build effective personas by analyzing your current contacts and customers, sales feedback, and industry data, to segment your audience by roles, challenges, motivations, and more.  

Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) will also give your team direction on what industry and type of account to target. Include details such as industry, company revenue, location, pain points, and other attributes that indicate a high likelihood of becoming a valuable customer. It’s good practice to review and update your ICP annually to align it with business goals.  

Making the most of your efforts.

An effective strategy starts by identifying your overall goals, then working backwards to determine how to get there. Here are tips for integrating proven best practices. 

Focus on the right channels.

There are many inbound and outbound channels to leverage, such as Google Ads, social media marketing, email campaigns, trade shows, webinars, advertising in industry publications, cold calling and more. Figure out where your prospects spend most of their time—online and off.  

Avoid spreading your resources too thin by trying to be everywhere at once. Instead, pick your best bets. Focus efforts on a couple of channels, optimize your approach, and only expand to new channels after you’ve built a solid foundation. This focused strategy is more likely to yield meaningful results, versus having a diluted presence across too many platforms. 

Improve campaign performance with operational efficiency.

Lead generation isn’t just about getting attention—it’s about making it easy to convert that attention into action. Reduce friction in the conversion process by minimizing the required form fields, so it’s quick and simple to fill out. And have a plan for what happens once a lead submits their information, to ensure they’re put in contact with someone immediately. The longer it takes your brand to interact with a lead, the less likely you'll be able to engage them later.  

Lyndsey Hearn, Director of Growth Marketing at Dark Matter Technologies, saw extraordinary results by reducing response time. “We’ve had incredible success with automation. Using HubSpot workflows, once we get a lead, they receive an email from our brand or salesperson within the next five seconds. There's literally no delay. Since we implemented that, the time it takes for a lead to engage with us has decreased by 84%. It used to take about 80 hours to get a response from a lead. That's decreased to about 12 hours, which has made a huge difference. We've also seen Sales Qualified Leads increase as a result.” 

Depending on the industry/line of work, your marketing team may need to weed out low-quality leads before sending contacts to Sales. With HubSpot automation, you can enroll leads into a drip campaign that sends an automatic email response and keeps your brand top of mind before a salesperson can get in touch.  

Optimize for conversion across channels.

Each conversion strategy needs to be aligned with the channel leads are coming from and where they are in the funnel. For example, leads that come from a social media ad often are top-of-the-funnel, requiring more retargeting and nurturing with educational, downloadable content. Leads that come from Google Search Ads typically have higher intent, so conversion strategies should include landing pages with shorter forms and immediate follow-up.  

Becky Goplin, Marketing Campaign Manager at Singlewire Software, recommends leveraging intent data: “We bring in high-quality leads through our Google Ad strategy because we are using intent data to target specific users through both Google and programmatic advertising. Every month, I send our media companies a list of accounts that have shown intent so we can serve them ads. These are companies who are searching keywords related to our business, and we can see they're in the market for a solution like ours.” 

If running a heavy cold email approach, create a well-defined outreach sequence to gather valuable data and warm up your leads. You can increase efficiency and help ensure no opportunities are missed by leveraging AI-enhanced workflows to trigger events based on user behavior or intent. For example, you might try a 3-week sequence that includes a series of emails, a LinkedIn connection request or message, and possibly a follow-up call. Not only does this approach increase your chances of connecting, but it also gives you insights into which tactics spark the most engagement—information you can use to refine your future campaigns. 

Content that works.

Creating content that attracts, engages, and converts leads not only drives better results but also helps you allocate resources more efficiently. 

Reduce friction with role-specific content.

Having role-specific content for those involved in the buying decision goes a long way.   After all, time kills all deals. Prolonged group evaluations or unanswered objections often lead to the deal stalling or even falling apart entirely. Every stakeholder brings unique concerns and criteria to the table. By proactively creating content that addresses the needs and questions of both primary and secondary influencers, you help remove roadblocks and build consensus across the buying group.  

Emphasizing the importance of creating relevant content, Benyousky states, “For the folks on the hot seat as decision makers, they must answer to a board, a leadership team, or whomever it might be. So having content that really helps them understand the value of your solution to them professionally, as well as across the organization, is key.” 

Take the time to “check the necessary boxes” for everyone involved—such as supplying technical validation for IT, ROI calculators for finance, or practical implementation guides for end users—ensuring your solution moves efficiently through each stage of the client’s decision process. 

Generate buzz with organic social videos.

Our clients have found that organic channels tend to outperform paid, and social media is often the highest driver. Content has shifted from company-driven content—think whitepapers or one-to-many webinars—to authentic content such as fireside chats or video snippets from company leaders. Companies are finding the most impactful content comes from people in the organization, instead of from the organization itself. 

Benyousky observes, “There was so much emphasis on white papers or lecture-based webinars. Now, you see more authentic content where it could be the CEO in a casual shirt doing a short video or podcast. So many CEOs are routinely posting on LinkedIn, having an authentic voice.”

Video continues to receive the most engagement—but not just any video. In B2B industries, the tendency can be to create what’s already being done—lengthy videos with technical jargon, complex explanations, and an overall “stuffy corporate feel.” Remember, most users are on social media to hear from their peers and be entertained. Keeping it fresh is what produces results.  

Be strategic about gated content.

In today’s world, since buyers do a large portion of research beforehand, it’s crucial not to add points of friction to that process. Leave the majority of your content ungated, such as case studies, product brochures, blog posts and videos. And while it may be harder to attribute lead gen to those pieces of content, there are marketing platforms with intent tools and more that provide insights into those areas. 

An item worth gating could be a research report that shows benchmarks on the state of your industry. Some of our clients have found this type of gated content to be most effective since people are peer-to-peer centric and want to know what others are doing. By promoting snippets of a report, you can generate interest and feature insights, while offering the full version as a download. 

Get high-quality leads from webinars and trade shows.

Many companies find that the highest quality leads come from in-person and online events. Maximizing lead generation from these channels requires thoughtful pre-event targeting, on-site engagement strategies, and prompt, personalized follow-up. For example, post-webinar surveys and content downloads enable more tailored lead nurturing and personalized sales outreach. 

Whether hosting or sponsoring a webinar, webinars done in partnership with another company will also help you reach a larger audience. Goplin finds that including customers in webinars is very beneficial: “People are always interested in hearing from peers about what they are doing and how the solution is working for them. That way, a webinar is truly a thought leadership play instead of a hard sell.” 

Measuring results.

Lead generation doesn’t end when a prospect enters your pipeline—it requires ongoing measurement and analysis to ensure lasting results. 

Understand what works—and why.

Making data-driven decisions is crucial because what works for one company won’t necessarily work for you. For example, some companies find that a high-volume approach can be effective instead of trying to segment efforts into too many verticals. That's why your team needs to continually test and adjust to identify the best approach for your business. By tracking key metrics and calculating ROI, you can prove what’s working, double down on those efforts, and allocate your budget more efficiently.  

At the end of the day, effective lead generation is the result of continual experimentation and strategy optimization. Hearn reiterates, “We’ve thrown everything at the wall to see what sticks. I have a big philosophy: Always be testing. I like to test everything, whether it’s as small as a subject line or as big as personalized content. Because you never know when something is going to work. And we’ve had those things, where we thought it might not work at all, but it ended up being our most successful thing.”