We Share Our 8 Lead Generation Best Practices for Engaging Your Audience

Helpful Summary

• Overview: We outline 8 lead generation best practices through optimizing your lead capture forms, conducting user research, and measuring and repeating your efforts.
• Why you can trust us: Our platform is built on proven expertise and customer success stories, demonstrating our effectiveness and reliability in enhancing lead generation strategies.
• Why this is important: We provide strategies to attract and convert potential customers into leads, ensuring a steady flow of clients.
• Action points: Design lead capture forms using our multi-step form building feature to boost engagement and conversion.
• Further research: Explore the Growform blog for more comprehensive reviews and expert advice on lead generation.

Want to Learn Lead Generation Best Practices?

Lead generation brings in and turns potential customers into leads, making your business bloom. According to Hubspot, 50% of marketers consider lead gen a top priority in their marketing campaigns, with its potential to generate 1,877 leads per month on average.

But many businesses struggle in this area because of poorly targeted marketing and lack of personal engagement. Throw in data privacy laws and the need for maintaining customer trust— the process feels more daunting. 

In this Growform guide, we address all your worries through 8 lead generation best practices to help you navigate and handle common challenges in the lead generation game. 

But before that…

Why Listen to Us?

Simply put, we know our stuff.

We focus on lead generation and sales optimization with our deep insights on the latest trends, tools, and strategies. We have worked with companies like BeMarketable and Heyzine Flipbooks, increasing their conversion rates and improving cost per lead. 

We’ve also been featured on the Landing Page School podcast by Nicholas Scalice, founder of GrowthMarketer, highlighting our next level multi-step forms with a conversational touch to them. 

What Is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is basically how you attract, nurture, and convert potential customers into paying clients. It involves:

• Identifying and researching your target audience
• Understanding their needs and preferences
• Creating engaging content based on these insights
• Promoting it across different platforms to capture leads.

Once you capture leads, nurture them through personalized communication and engagement strategies, like email marketing, to guide leads through the sales funnel.

8 Lead Generation Best Practices to Engage Your Audience

1. Optimize Lead Capture Forms

Let’s kick off with the most important one: lead capture forms. Your lead capture forms are key to capturing high-quality leads and boosting conversion rates. But designing them is just the first step; optimizing them is where the real magic happens.

Keep Your Form Short and Simple

Only ask for necessary information like their name and email. For example, if you have 6-7 fields, reduce them to 3-4 by removing optional fields or deferring them to later stages. 

Fewer fields mean faster fill-outs and higher completion rates.

Use Multi-Step Forms

Break long forms into multiple steps to keep it simple.

Multi-step forms psychologically simplify commitment through gradual progress. Apply autofill where possible, use dropdown menus for longer lists of options, and buttons to speed up form filling and reduce input errors.

At Growform, we let you create simple, mobile-responsive, and visually appealing multi-step forms. They provide an engaging and streamlined experience to guide your users through the form-filling process more smoothly.

Include Progress Indicators

Display a progress bar indicating how much is left to complete. When you provide visual cues of progress, users are more likely to complete it as they see their advancement. 

2. Create Quality Content

Creating valuable content is a great way to attract, engage, and convert potential leads. 

For example, you can portray your business as an industry expert through helpful and informative content that addresses the pain points of your target audience. Go for a wide range of content types like:

• Blogs 
• ebooks
• Short form videos
• Images and infographics
• Live videos and webinars
• And user-generated content through social media

Strategically place relevant keywords into your content to attract leads through search engines, and follow other crucial SEO guidelines to help your content rank well. Top-ranking content will catch more eyes and prompt potential leads to engage. 

Also, add interactive elements like surveys, CTA buttons, comment sections, or embeddable forms at the end of your content to further interact with your prospects and get access to them. This makes it easier to guide them closer to a purchasing decision.

3. Use Social Media Strategically

Social media lets you reach a large audience at a lower cost than traditional advertising methods. On top of engaging content, it uses targeted ads and interactive campaigns to connect with leads, nurture relationships, and save more of your digital marketing budget.

The most effective social media platforms for lead generation are:

• Facebook: Known for its advanced targeting options and large user base. It’s ideal for reaching a broad audience and generating leads through organic content and paid ads.
• LinkedIn: Particularly effective for B2B lead generation. LinkedIn lets you connect with professionals and decision-makers, making it a prime platform for generating high-quality leads.
• Instagram: With its visually-driven content and engaged user base, Instagram is effective for targeting specific demographics through features like Stories and sponsored ads.
• Twitter: Offers opportunities for real-time engagement and targeting specific interests, generating leads through interactions and promoted tweets.
• TikTok: Growing in popularity for lead generation, especially among younger audiences. Its short-form content drives engagement and lead capture through creating campaigns like hashtag challenges.

4. Leverage Landing Pages

Landing pages provide a focused and streamlined experience right from the get-go, capturing visitor information effectively. An ideal landing page should have:

• Eye-catching Headline: It should be concise and immediately convey the value proposition to grab the visitor’s attention and persuade them to keep reading.
• Singular Purpose: The landing page should focus on a single, clear call-to-action (CTA) to not overwhelm visitors so that they head toward the desired action.
• Mobile-responsive Design: Over 60% of internet traffic comes from mobile users, so responsive mobile design is a must!
• Compelling Visuals: High-quality images or videos that align with your message can boost engagement and sell your offer quickly.
• Persuasive Copy: The text should be concise and compelling, effectively presenting the offer’s benefits and addressing potential buyer concerns.
• Strong Call-to-Action: Your CTA should stand out and communicate what they’ll gain by taking the next step, such as “Create Your Website” instead of a generic “Sign Up”.
• Trust Signals: Including testimonials, reviews, or social proof can build credibility and trust with your visitors, making them more likely to convert into long-term clients.

Don’t just focus on creating the perfect landing page, but also align it with your marketing campaigns. This is how you make sure you’re meeting your target audience’s expectations.

By integrating our fully customizable multi-step forms into your landing page, your message will stay consistent throughout the user’s journey. You can tailor them to reflect your campaign’s specific goals and aesthetics. For example:

• Branding Alignment: Customize our forms to match your brand’s colors, fonts, and overall design language to make every touchpoint reinforce your brand’s identity.
• Message Consistency: Our form fields step-by-step process can be designed to align with the message and objectives of your campaign, guiding users through a narrative that complements your campaign’s voice.
• Targeted User Experience: By tailoring your forms to specific audience segments, you can guarantee that your questions and fields are relevant to potential leads— further reinforcing the targeted messaging of your campaign.

5. Personalize Your Approach

Personalization enhances how effective your marketing efforts are. It:

• Boosts engagement by individually aligning content and offers with each prospect’s preferences and needs.
• Offers data-driven insights by analyzing user behavior, preferences, and interactions, making your lead generation strategies more impactful.
• Gives a brand its competitive edge in a crowded marketplace through more targeted products, services, and experiences.
• Leads to positive word-of-mouth, organic referrals, and an expanded customer base by making customers feel valued and understood. 

At Growform, our multi-step forms use conditional logic to create a customized experience by dynamically showing or hiding fields and steps based on user input. 

This ensures that your respondents interact with a form that speaks specifically to them, improving the quality of collected data.

6. Research Your Audience

Understanding your target audience is essential for tailoring lead-generation tactics effectively. Conduct thorough market research to identify:

• Demographic Information: Include age, gender, location, and income to understand the basic characteristics of your target audience.
• Psychographic Details: Capture values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles to get a peek into their personality and motivations.
• Pain Points and Challenges: Identify the specific challenges which your product or service can address.
• Goals and Aspirations: Understand what your audience hopes to achieve personally and professionally to tailor your offerings to their plans.
• Buying Behavior and Patterns: Analyze how your audience makes purchasing decisions, including factors like pricing, convenience and emotional appeal that guide their choices.

Create a buyer persona, which is a fictional representation of your target audience. Give them a name and possibly use a stock photo to humanize the persona and make it realistic for your team.

For valuable user research, use a combination of surveys, interviews, and focus groups with potential customers to gather qualitative and quantitative data for a better grasp of their challenges and needs.

But what if there’s limited information?

Don’t worry. Just make a few educated guesses through competitor analysis and market research. This involves observing competitor’s customer interactions, analyzing their social media engagement, and using forums and reviews to work out potential customer profiles.

7. Measure and Repeat

Analyzing lead generation efforts by repeating your strategies based on data can help you optimize performance and achieve higher conversion rates.

Our Google Analytics integration offers advanced analytics like:

• Form Abandonment Rate: Identifies at which steps users drop off to spot areas for improvement.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete the form indicates overall form effectiveness.
• Field Drop-off: Tracks which specific fields cause users to abandon the form, allowing for targeted adjustments.
• Form Error Rates: Highlights errors users encounter, enabling form optimization for a smoother user experience.

• Device Usage: Provides insights into which devices users are accessing the form from, ensuring mobile responsiveness and accessibility.
• User Feedback: Collects qualitative data from users about their form experience, offering insights for further enhancements.

On another note, our upcoming A/B testing feature can help you optimize your form’s performance by testing variations like field order, button phrasing, or the inclusion of personal details. By splitting traffic between two form variants, you’ll be able to identify which version converts better. 

Also, focus on measuring these key metrics to refine your lead gen strategies:

• Number of Leads Generated: See whether you are meeting your lead generation target and maintaining a steady flow of potential customers.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL): Understand how much it costs to acquire each lead to track and evaluate your marketing budget.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric assesses the total cost of acquiring a new customer, providing insights into the overall efficiency of your lead gen efforts.
• Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs):  Tracking SQOs helps measure the quality of leads and their potential to generate revenue, which is crucial for improving conversion rates and sales outcomes.
• Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC): This indicates the profitability of your leads by showing the average revenue generated per customer.
• Lead Quality: Evaluate the quality of leads to ensure that marketing efforts are directed toward prospects most likely to convert.

8. Use Data Responsibly

Ethical data collection and storage ensures compliance with privacy regulations, builds trust with prospects, and protects sensitive information from unauthorized access.

Practice Transparency and Informed Consent

Communicate data collection practices to users and have their consent before collecting their information. Use clear privacy policies and opt-in mechanisms so that users understand what data is collected and how your business will use it.

For instance, you can give your potential customers a chance to learn how you handle their data by making it accessible via a privacy policy link. Place it at a prominent location within the form, like near the submit button or in the footer so that it’s easily accessible and visible to users.

Respect User Preferences

Provide users with the options to manage their data preferences, such as opting out of communications or specifying the type and frequency of messages they want to receive.

Ensure Data Minimization and Retention

Collect only the necessary data for specific purposes and retain it for as long as needed. Regularly review and delete the unnecessary ones to minimize risks like data breaches, liability, and privacy infringements. 

Perform Regular Audits and Compliance Checks

Regularly audit data handling practices to ensure compliance with privacy regulations and ethical standards. Stay informed about changes in data protection laws and adjust your practices accordingly.

Optimize Your Lead Generation Efforts with Growform

Effective lead-generation practices are the ingredients for driving business growth. By optimizing lead capture forms, creating engaging content, and leveraging social media and landing pages, your business can attract and convert high-quality leads in no time. 

Experience the benefits of these best practices firsthand with our 14-day free trial at Growform.