5 Little-Known Lead Generation Hacks

Traffic sucks.

That’s right. And don’t tell me that awareness nonsense. Most visitors forget you the moment they drop off.

That’s why turning your traffic into qualified leads is pretty much the backbone of your content marketing.

Every qualified lead gets you closer to ringing that sales bell. And I you know you love that sound…

You might think, “my lead capture system drives good results”, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t get better if you try something different…

Like this marketer who increased conversions by 300% by using multi-step lead forms. Seems a bit counterintuitive, right? But it worked!

So it’s time to step out of your comfort zone and try these five rather cunning hacks that can take your lead generation to the whole new level.

Lead Generation Hack #1: Live chat with lead magnets

There are many effective ways to hit your prospect with a lead magnet. Live chat is one of them.

Imagine someone completely immersed in your content. Suddenly, a chat window opens with a valuable resource tailored for that particular visitor in exchange for an email.

Sounds tempting, right?

There are dozens of live chat tools that you can utilize for lead generation. I’ll use Intercom as an example because I work with it myself.

Here’s how it works.

You can proactively message prospects depending on their behavior on your site. So instead of using the same lead capture for all your visitors, you can offer a personalized lead magnet based on where they are on the site.

You can even pre-qualify your leads and books sales calls with them. This is like having a killer salesperson 24/7.

Imagine you run a business that helps business owners be more efficient. A prospect come across a blog post on how your service saves time. When the potential customer is about to leave the page, an Intercom message pops up with a link to a webinar that promises to reveal more productivity hacks.

Perfect timing!

You can test out different options to see which one gets the most qualified leads

I tested this strategy myself. My conversion rate jumped almost 200%. The thing is, people are not used to see CTAs in message boxes. And if the CTA is highly personalized, the impact can be impressive.

Lead Generation Hack #2: Tracking down leads by IP address

This hack is incredibly valuable for the B2B sector.

Instead of looking at raw visitor data in your Analytics acquisition report, you can use Leadfeeder to track down companies that your visitors are from.

This tools pulls the IP addresses of your visitors from Google Analytics and match them with companies’ network data.

This is like having LinkedIn´s “who viewed your profile” feature in Google Analytics. The only difference is that you won´t be able to see specific users, just their company.

Still, it’s a pretty awesome feature to see what companies are actively searching for your services or products.

Once you identify the companies that showed an interest in your services, search them on LinkedIn or Google and reach out to decision makers.

There you go — another source of leads to tap into.

Lead generation hack #3: Chatbots for lead capture

Chatbots have been the thing in marketing for quite a while now — and not without a reason. Leading provider ManyChat is reporting a 400% ROI on some of their bots.

Although chatbots haven’t reached the level of intelligence to close sales, they can play an important role in customer support and lead generation.

RapidMiner, for instance, proves that chatbots are not just nice-to-have marketing technology. In fact, they are a superstar lead-generation tool for them.

RapidMiner replaced all their lead capture forms with a chatbot. They quickly realized that chatbots could capture and qualify leads in minutes, which can take weeks using drip campaigns.

Since then, they’ve secured 4,000 leads and well over a million in their sales pipeline.

So when employing chatbots, don’t limit them to customer support. Write scripts that not only answer questions but also lead to a personalized lead magnet based on the inquiry.

Lead Generation Hack #4: Guest Post SEO articles

The following is more of an SEO hack, but it will help you drive more traffic, and hopefully, targeted leads.

It’s no secret that competition on Google search is harsh.

But if you are a small player, you can always piggyback on bigger sites. No, I am not talking about guest posting to build backlinks. Of course you should do that as well, but here I am proposing a new angle to that well-known tactic.

The idea is to contribute SEO optimized articles to sites with a high domain authority (DA) rank and drive traffic back to your site.

This hack is pretty straightforward and does not require any external apps or technology. Simply produce content for relevant keywords within your niche and ask sites with a higher DA rank to publish it.

They get free content. Your article gets to rank on the first page for a popular keyword. Perfect.

Apart from writing kickass content, don’t forget to add attractive CTAs. Since the content will not reside on your site, forget about pop ups or fancy subscription forms. You will have to rely on text CTAs in the article body.

I wrote an entire article on this hack, which you can read here.

But how to make your CTAs more irresistible you may ask? Keep on reading.

Lead Generation Hack #5: Employ Scarcity and Urgency Elements in your CTAs

Human beings will do anything to postpone important decisions — this is just how we are wired.

And smart marketers use it to their advantage.

One of the best ways to force your potential customer to take action is to imply scarcity and urgency in your offering.

Booking.com is a great example. Their site is full of urgency triggers like “2 rooms left” or “120 people are viewing this property”.

Scarcity is also an effective action trigger, as it boosts the perceived value of your offering. That’s why invite-only events, product access, and whatnot are so tempting.

But scarcity and urgency are not only sales tools. You can apply them to lead generation, too.

For example, you could release an invite-only e-book or give away only 200 copies of it. This tactic could have a profound impact on your conversion rate as it forces the visitor to make a quick decision. And since the email is not that big of a price, they will likely get tempted in.

You could also make your prospect feel important by giving them a special offer that only a limited amount of lucky visitors will have access to.

This is the cornerstone of a high-converting campaign.

So instead of using this…

“Get access to our FREE special report on secret content marketing tactics for 2018”

…try out this:

“Only 49 FREE copies left! Get access to our special report on secret content marketing tactics for 2018. Claim yours before it’s gone!”

But wait, not so fast.

Before applying these techniques, make sure your actual offer lives up to its perceived value. Otherwise, the prospect will feel as if he was tricked, and most likely won’t follow through the rest of the funnel.