Part of the fun of being a marketer is getting to flex your creative muscles and come up with new ways to bring in leads.

 

That’s not to say the classics don’t work – the mainstays of marketing, such as blogging, still exist for a reason. However, it doesn’t hurt to spice it up sometimes.

 

Here are 5 innovative lead generation ideas you can use to freshen up your 2020 marketing.

 

5 Innovative Lead Generation Ideas for 2020

 

Send Cold Emails

Cold email is an incredibly powerful lead generation tactic that some marketers shy away from. That’s because it’s often misconstrued as being the same as spam. Done right, they’re two very different things.

 

The difference is that spamming is sending marketing emails indiscriminately to random contacts without determining whether they might have any interest in your offer. Blasting a promo email to 100k contacts and hoping it’s relevant to some of them is spamming.

 

On the other hand, if you have gone to a reputable data provider, purchased a high-quality list of professionals who match your target audience, and send a campaign to them, you aren’t spamming, because you have a legitimate reason to think that they have an interest in and need of your product.

 

Cold email lets you reach your audience in much greater numbers, and is totally scalable. For it to work properly, though, you need email lead generation software that can securely and reliably deliver your campaigns to inboxes.

 

 

Create Infographics

Most companies these days have a blog. If you aren’t blogging, you’re missing out on all sorts of opportunities to bring in more leads and strongly improve your search engine optimization (SEO).

 

Your posts can be more than just articles, though. Try creating an in-depth infographic on a topic that’s important to your audience.

 

Infographics are highly engaging and tend to get shared more than a typical text-based article. The trick when designing an infographic is to make it interesting and packed with information without being cluttered or hard to read.

 

Pick a topic that’s central to what your target audience does. Research it in depth, gather plenty of interesting data. Then condense and simplify it until you have short, punchy points of information.

 

When deciding on a look and feel, look at other infographics for inspiration. Don’t forget to remain true to your brand’s style and voice!

 

Make It Interactive

One way to draw people in immediately is to get them to participate in learning something. For example, let’s say you have multiple products, all of which tackle a separate issue for your target audience.

 

You should have the typical product and pricing pages, but you could also use the hero space on your front page to create an interactive way for potential leads to learn more.

 

A quick “quiz” that lets them select what challenge they want to solve and takes them to the right product is a more engaging way to get them where they need to go. Then they don’t even need to hunt for the right page!

 

There are many ways you could do this sort of thing. For more direct lead capture, you could create an interactive tool that ties into your offerings. For example, if you provide an in-depth SEO service, build a tool that lets people enter their website URL and gives them simple pointers on how to improve it.

 

Then gate that behind an email submission form. You’re giving away a little bit of simple advice in exchange for a lead that’s definitely interested in improving their SEO, as well as showing your expertise.

 

Be Your Own Case Study

Often, companies will perform case studies with particularly successful customers to highlight how awesome their product is.

 

Why not do a deep dive into what’s working for you? Especially if it’s around your own product. Nobody knows how to use it better than you do, so why not explain how you do it?

 

Take the intro section, spit that off, and provide that publicly. Then gate the full document behind an email address submission and you’ve got an enticing way to both underscore your product’s benefits and collect leads that are definitely interested.

 

Don’t Neglect Multimedia

Video marketing has been around for a while, and there’s a huge number of ways to go about it. From short video ads for social media to in-depth tutorials for your product, you can use video in all sorts of ways.

 

Podcasts are becoming an increasingly impactful channel for businesses to pursue. They can have a major SEO impact, and many people prefer listening over reading.

 

Podcasts covering specific aspects of a particular industry at an expert level are useful for professional improvement. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for a podcast, think of it this way: if you have a blog, you have plenty of material.

 

Take your most popular blog post and turn it into a podcast. Don’t forget to stick an audio player with the episode at the top of that blog post when you’re done!

 

Here’s our guide on how to start a podcast for your business, including editing tips from a professional sound engineer.