Every business needs leads. Without Marketing delivering high quality leads to Sales, revenue dries up and growth stops dead in its tracks.

However despite the importance of lead generation, only 1 in 10 professional marketers say that their lead generation efforts are highly efficient and effective!

What gives?

Simply put, lead generation is not easy. But, as a marketer there are tactics you can employ to optimize your strategies and ensure you're sending the sales organization a steady stream of high quality leads to close.

Read on for five of our favorite, proven lead generation tips, tricks, and ideas for B2B and B2C!

1. Spend Time to Perfect Your Title

Now more so than ever, the title of your content offer is critical.

You are competing against hundreds of online marketing messages for mere seconds of your prospect's attention.

The title of your content must concisely communicate the value of your offer and convince potential leads to click and learn more.

So how do you go about perfecting your title? One of the best methods is to perform an A/B test!

There are many ways you can approach this. You could for example, create two landing pages and two sets of marketing assets with different titles and promote them both to small samples of your email database before determining which title to go public with.

If you aren't afraid to spend a little money to find a title, you can also A/B test through paid advertising. In Google AdWords you could set up two ads targeting the same keywords related to your content offer, but use your two title options as the headline text in each ad. After letting the ads run for some time, compare the click-through rates and choose the higher one.

To make the tactic even more cost effective, you could run two ads with the different headlines on social media (where average cost-per-click is lower) and see what your target market responds to.

A Case Study

HubSpot ran an experiment by A/B testing two different titles for the same content offer, here are their results:

That's a 776% increase in the number of leads generated just by using a different title!

2. Use Thank You Pages to Boost Conversions

The "Thank You Page" is the page that website visitors see after they fill out the form on your landing page.

Most of the time the Thank You Page is used to provide some sort of generic "thanks for accessing our content"-type of message and an overview of the next steps such as "you will receive a confirmation email with registration information" or "click here to download".

However, you're missing a HUGE opportunity if that's all your Thank You Pages are being used for!

Thank You Pages are prime real estate to host CTAs for other offers, social sharing buttons, or blog subscriptions, to name a few.

Your newly-minted leads are going to be more willing to engage further if you present them with opportunities to do so on the Thank You Page.

Here's an example of a well-executed thank you page for a downloadable Ebook:

Notice how WordStream places the form to start a free trial below where visitors access their guide?

This landing page illustrates another powerful tactic I like to implement on the Thank You Pages of our clients: include an offer that is one more stage down the sales funnel from the offer your lead just converted on.

If somebody downloads a top of the funnel offer like a product or service brochure, maybe they'd be interested in registering for that upcoming webinar on a similar topic or speaking to somebody on your team to learn more about the product or service.

3. Remove Distractions from Your Landing Page

Your landing pages all have one thing in common - the singular goal of convincing visitors to fill out that form and convert into sweet sweet leads.

With that one goal in mind, you're going to want to do-away with anything that does not contribute to achieving that goal.

One of the worst offenses in this vein is leaving your menu navigation on a landing page. Check out the headers of JumpCloud's product page and content landing page:

Product Page

vs.

Landing Page

They decided to leave the "try for free" CTA on their landing page but that's alright. If the visitor to this page suddenly decided they would prefer a free trial over the content download, I think JumpCloud would be A-okay with that.

Other things to be aware of on your landing pages are links to other webpages (even if they're your pages too, they're distracting your visitor from converting) and social media sharing buttons.

A much more appropriate place for those social sharing buttons would be on your Thank You Page like we discussed above!

4. Use Trust Elements to Establish Rapport

Converting leads on your website has a great deal to do with trust. The visitor to your landing page has to feel confident that they can trust you with the personal information they are giving up in exchange for your offer.

This is even more important when you're handling things like credit card numbers or medical information.

One of the best ways to build trust with your visitors is to use "trust elements". Trust elements can take many forms but can be thought of as third party validations.

I'm sure you've seen some of these before but you probably didn't recognize them as trust elements at the time:

Source: Visual Website Optimizer

Or maybe you've seen evidence of a SSL certificate which guarantees your connection to the website you're visiting is secure.

This is the green lock in the url window and the addition of the "s" to "https":

 A final form of trust element that can help support your cause is social proof. People like to see other's opinions when evaluating options and it's no different for your content.

On a landing page it helps convince the visitor your content is worth giving up their personal information for when they see something like this:

5. Promote Content Within Content

For the final technique in this post let's step back from the land of landing pages, forms, and thank you pages, and focus on how to continuously position your content and move leads down the funnel.

It's important to recognize that once somebody has accessed your content, it's more or less in the wild. Despite your best efforts to gate your content and get people to share links to the landing page, there's nothing stopping someone from downloading your brand new Ebook and emailing it to all of their friends.

Because of this, and because you always want the people who are engaging with your content to take the next step, it's critical to promote your content within your content.

What this boils down to can be as simple as including links to other relevant pieces of content within your Ebook, or displaying the url of a resource you refer to in your webinar broadcast.

If you promote other offerings within your content, you're ensuring that no matter where it ends up or who it ends up in front of, you've got a shot at converting more leads.

Wrapping Up

By implementing these tactics into your lead generation process you can help ensure that you're converting every lead you can and getting as much mileage out of your carefully crafted content offerings.

If you're looking for more lead generation tips, I recommend you check out our new Ebook "The 30 Best Lead Generation Tips, Tricks, & Ideas".

Have you used other tactics that helped generate leads? Let me know in the comments below!