The Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Marketing in 2023

Every marketing team is challenged to do more with less — especially nonprofit organizations. Often, resources are tight, and teams are small. Sound like your organization?

We want to help. That’s why we created this nonprofit marketing guide. Your organization might not operate for profit, but it can still get value from the traffic, funds, and awareness marketing brings in.

Bookmark this guide for later and use the chapter links below to jump around to sections of interest.

 

 

Inbound Marketing for Nonprofits

Your nonprofit organization likely takes up all of your time, and building a marketing plan might seem like an added responsibility that’s just not worth it.

We’re here to convince you otherwise. Inbound marketing is all about creating valuable experiences that positively impact people and your business.

Inbound marketing for nonprofits can help you attract new supporters for your cause, connect to valuable donors, engage your constituents, and inspire your community.

Boost your organization’s awareness and compel action. See firsthand how HubSpot can transform your nonprofit organization.

Here's how else nonprofit marketing can help.

Nonprofit marketing raises awareness.

Your nonprofit organization is a brand. Therefore you need to raise awareness just like any other business or company. Marketing raises awareness, and brand awareness spreads the word about your organization and your overall cause.

Nonprofit marketing raises funds.

Nonprofit marketing and nonprofit fundraising go hand-in-hand. The more people know about your organization, the more potential funding you can bring in.

Nonprofit marketing drives donor memberships and recurring donations.

Many nonprofit organizations offer donation memberships and monthly giving programs, like this one from charity: Water. These programs are valuable because your organization doesn’t have to fundraise so actively and often. Also, they can actually help you raise more money — the average monthly online donation is $52 ($624 per year) compared to the average one-time gift of $128.

Marketing your nonprofit gets your cause in front of fresh eyes and informs your donors about how they can consistently contribute.

Nonprofit marketing recruits volunteers.

Nonprofit marketing isn't just for funding. It also drives manpower (and woman-power!) to your organization. Regardless of industry or size, all nonprofits benefit from volunteers, and marketing your organization can help bring in new hands.

Moreover, volunteers are twice as likely to donate as non-volunteers.

Nonprofit marketing promotes your services.

Awareness, funding, and volunteers are integral to your nonprofit, but what about the purpose of your organization? What about the people, animals, or cause you're helping? Marketing can help with that, too.

The more people who know about your nonprofit organization, the more people you can help.

These are just a handful of reasons you should invest in your nonprofit's marketing strategy (particularly inbound marketing). Now, let's discuss how to build a nonprofit marketing plan so you can start bringing in new funds, volunteers, and constituents.

Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template

Download your free nonprofit marketing plan template.

Hubspot’s nonprofit marketing plan template can help you organize your nonprofit’s budget, team structure, and channels of choice to create your marketing strategy.

The nonprofit marketing plan template includes sections for developing your nonprofit’s summary, business initiatives, target market, marketing strategy, budget, marketing channels, and marketing technology.

Our nonprofit marketing plan template can help you:

• Complete a SWOT analysis for your organization.
• Develop a marketing strategy.
• Determine the industries and personas of your target donors.

Crafting a nonprofit marketing plan might not be too different from a for-profit marketing plan, but debatably, it's more important. Increasing awareness and constituent engagement without exhausting your hardworking team requires approaching your marketing systematically.

That's where a nonprofit marketing plan comes into play. Putting systems in place to produce and distribute your marketing content allows you to focus on operating and scaling your nonprofit.

Here's how to create a successful nonprofit marketing plan.

1. Define your marketing goals.

Your nonprofit marketing plan exists to transform your organization's mission and big-picture objectives into strategic, actionable goals.

For example, let's say one of your objectives was to protect the welfare of animals in your community (like one of my favorite local rescues, ALIVE Rescue). I'd ask you to brainstorm three to five marketing ideas to advance that objective.

Some ways you could use marketing to advance that objective include:

• Creating and publishing content that educates your community on the state of animal welfare.
• Posting on social media about your organization and the animals you have for adoption.
• Sending a weekly email newsletter sharing your content, adoptable animals, and volunteer needs.
• Hosting a quarterly event with educational resources, foster training, and adoption opportunities.

Next, I'd ask you to turn these ideas into SMART goals. Let's use idea number one as an example:

acronym	goal
Specific	Educate the community on the state of animal welfare by producing one blog post per week.
Measurable	Increase traffic by 15%.
Attainable	Our blog traffic increased by 10% last year when we upped our publishing frequency to twice a month. A 15% boost in traffic with a 100% increase in production seems attainable.
Relevant	An increase in blog traffic will boost awareness of our organization, educate the community, and alert more people of our adoption opportunities — thus, saving more animals and bringing in more funding.
Timely	We will start producing one post per week and the start of next month.

SMART Goal: By the start of next month, our blog will see a 15% boost in traffic by increasing our content production from two posts per month to one post per week. This increase will boost awareness of our organization, educate the community, and alert more people of our adoption opportunities — thus, saving more animals and bringing in more funding.

See how I turned the organizational mission into a marketing objective and a SMART goal? SMART goals are especially important when it comes time to analyze and measure your marketing performance (which we will talk about later), so be sure to finish this step before moving forward in your nonprofit marketing plan.

2. Understand your audiences.

Nonprofit marketing is different from other types of marketing because your organization is likely targeting multiple groups: constituents, customers, volunteers, and donors.

It's imperative to define and understand each of these audiences (a.k.a. buyer personas) because your marketing will differ based on who you're talking to. (We'll get into key messaging next.)

For example, following our animal shelter example from above, an email targeting donors will have different messaging than an email calling for volunteers.

One easy way to organize your different audiences is using a CRM to segment the different groups. By separating contacts with tags and lists, you can easily send marketing messages to the appropriate groups.

3. Craft Your Key Messages

Key messages encompass the information you want your audiences to hear, remember, and share about your nonprofit organization. Crafting these before you employ your marketing is important for a few reasons:

• Key messages keep your organization aligned. No matter who's doing the marketing, you can be confident the same thing is being said and promoted.
• Key messages simplify your marketing. With these created ahead of time, you already know what you will say in your marketing messaging.
• Key messages help organize your different audiences (as discussed above). As a nonprofit organization, you're likely talking to donors, volunteers, constituents, and your community — more personas than a typical for-profit business. Developing key messages for each audience informs your team and your marketing to make sure you're targeting the right groups.

Continuing with our animal shelter example, here's a look at how you can craft a key message for different audiences.

Key message: We protect the welfare of animals in our community through education, adoption and fostering, and animal advocacy.

• For adoption customers/constituents: By adopting or fostering, or by alerting us of animals in need, you can help us protect the welfare of animals in our community.
• For volunteers: We protect the welfare of animals through round-the-clock animal care and advocacy.
• For donors: You can help us protect the welfare of animals by donating to support animal care, advocacy, and adoption promotion.

All of these key messages have the same purpose and undertone, but they vary slightly depending on your audience. Together with your nonprofit organization's mission, vision, and goals, these messages will help effectively communicate and market your organization's needs and purpose.

4. Choose, plan, and create your marketing strategies.

Many marketers jump right to this step — creating and publishing various marketing tactics. Marketing encompasses much more than an advertisement, blog post, or event. To execute successfully, you must complete all the steps before this.

Now that you've established your goals (what you want), your key messages (what you're going to say), and your audience (who you're going to say it to), you can determine your marketing tactics (how you're going to say it).

Marketing tactics refer to channels like email marketing, social media, events, and more. We've dedicated an entire section to these marketing strategies. Read about them in detail below.

Regardless of which tactic you choose, be sure to conduct thorough planning before and as you execute it. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you prepare:

• What will you do with this marketing tactic?
• When will these marketing activities take place?
• Why is this tactic important?
• Who will be responsible for these activities?
• How much do we plan to spend?
• How does this tie to our organization’s marketing goals?

Tactical planning is an integral part of your overall nonprofit marketing plan. How you approach your marketing strategies and how they impact your organization is just as important as how you execute them.

Before you hit the ground running on any of these strategies, be sure your team has a solid game plan and a full understanding of it.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Download for Free

5. Analyze your marketing performance.

Your marketing probably won't perform perfectly from the get-go. That's OK. Routine reporting and analysis help you figure out what's working and what you need to change.

As you choose and establish your marketing channels, pay attention to their measurable performance indicators. Here's a list of examples from our list of marketing strategies below:

Marketing Strategy	Performance Indicator
Email marketing	Email opens
Event marketing	Ticket sales
Video marketing	Video views
Social media	Shares and comments
Website	Page views
Public speaking	Referrals
Content marketing	Subscriptions

Remember the goals you defined in step one? Measuring your marketing performance is essential to stay aligned with those goals.

You can track these performance indicators using tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and the analytics tools built into Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

If you know what you want to measure before you start marketing your nonprofit, you'll know exactly what to look for — and how to determine success and impact — when your marketing is in play.

You've created your nonprofit marketing plan. Now, let's talk about executing that plan with actionable marketing strategies.

Many of these nonprofit marketing strategies will overlap, like sharing your blog content on social media or releasing an event invite over email. These methods can and should be used in tandem, but we recommend introducing each strategy slowly, so your team doesn't overwhelm itself.

In fact, we recognize that your nonprofit is likely operating with a small (but agile) marketing team. For this reason, throughout these sections, we’ll recommend tips for doing more with less. Ultimately, though, don't hesitate to outsource your nonprofit marketing where needed.

Nonprofit Email Marketing

You might be using email sporadically to call for volunteers or confirm an online donation, but that's not enough. Email marketing for nonprofits is a highly effective marketing resource. Why? It's personal and powerful.

Here are a few ways to leverage email marketing to reach all of your audiences:

• Send a weekly newsletter with your newest content, updates about your organization, industry data, and volunteer needs.
• Send monthly emails with donation needs and opportunities.
• Set up an email sequence for new subscribers, thanking them for joining and educating them on your organization.
• Set up an email sequence for new donors, thanking them for their contribution and sharing how else they can support your organization.

Also, don't forget to put information on your website about how to subscribe to your email list. Nonprofit organization, Acumen, does a great job of this by putting subscription opportunities on its homepage and in its main menu.

👉🏼Nonprofit marketing tip: Automate as much as possible. Email marketing automation (like HubSpot) saves precious time and energy for your team and can be the key to growing your email list, donations, and memberships. You can also automate an email sequence triggered by website visitor behavior indicating a high level of interest, such as downloading educational content.

Nonprofit Event Marketing

Event marketing is one of the most effective (and enjoyable) ways to grow awareness of your organization, connect with your community, raise funds, and garner support for your cause.

PAWS, which stands for Pets Are Worth Saving, is another local animal rescue I'm a fan of. They hold a PAWS 5K race every summer to raise awareness and funding for the organization.

This type of event is impactful for multiple reasons:

1. It inspires competition and physical activity. Runners raise money for the organization and participate in the run.
2. It brings people in the community together to celebrate the organization and bring awareness to the PAWS cause.
3. It provides PAWS a channel to promote their services and adoptable pets.
4. It's fun to attend and be a part of! Many people go to the event to support runners, play with dogs, and simply be a part of the fun, all while supporting and sharing PAWS.

From fundraisers to auctions to competitions, you can organize many different kinds of events to market your nonprofit organization.

Nonprofit Video Marketing

Whether they're consuming content for work, school, or fun, people prefer video content. As a nonprofit organization, video marketing is a surefire way to garner interest and support from all of your audiences.

Here are a few reasons video can help you market your nonprofit:

1. Video is visual. We process visual content 60,000 times faster than written content. We also remember more content longer.
2. Video is personal. It inspires empathy and emotions, which can't be said about other types of marketing.
3. Video is educational. Many organizations need to educate their communities on their causes in order to garner attention and funding. Video can help you do that.
4. Video is shareable. 92% of consumers on mobile will share videos with others. Consumers love sharing videos, especially those that inspire and resonate with them.
5. Video is interesting. 60% of people report that video is a media they consume thoroughly. Keep your visitors, followers, and supporters engaged and interested using video.

The Girl Effect, a nonprofit that works to empower girls worldwide, is a great example of video marketing. The organization's homepage is a video that captures visitors' attention right away. Moreover, when you click "See more," the site opens an informative video telling you all about The Girl Effect.

Nonprofit Social Media Marketing

Social media is a highly popular marketing strategy among nonprofits. Not only is it free, but it also provides an avenue for organizations to show their brand personalities and engage with their followers and supporters.

Here are some ways to use social media for your nonprofit marketing, as inspired by a HubSpot study of 9,000 nonprofits:

• Share news about your organization and cause
• Boost brand awareness and recognition
• Fundraise
• Recruit volunteers and employees
• Recognize donors, employees, and volunteers

Don't forget to use the key messaging you crafted in your nonprofit marketing plan to keep your social media posts consistent and targeted. Also, make the most of each platform to promote your organization, such as the Donate button on Facebook.

HubSpot customer, FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is a nonprofit organization that works to advance STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education among children.

FIRST makes use of social media in many different ways, such as using Facebook to post videos, news, fundraisers, and reviews, as well as making use of the Donate button. The organization has amassed almost 100,000 followers.

👉🏼Nonprofit marketing tip: Curate content from volunteers, customers, supporters, event attendees, and donors. Implementing a user-generated content (UGC) campaign lessens your workload and acts as strong social proof. To enact your UGC campaign, put out a call for constituent stories, images, and videos. Create a hashtag that people can use to alert you of new UGC.

Also, let curation tools work for you. Use Google Alerts and social monitoring tools to alert you when your organization, hashtags, or relevant topics or keywords are mentioned. This provides opportunities to source UGC, get inspiration for new topic ideas, and participate in relevant conversations.

Nonprofit Website

Every nonprofit organization should have a website, which can be created on a CMS such as Content Hub or WordPress. A website serves as a digital home base for your organization and includes critical information — what you stand for and how visitors can participate and help.

Your website also houses important assets like your blog, social media streams, event information, videos, and the rest of your marketing strategies. Lastly, your website serves as a way to intrigue, inspire, and engage your audiences.

Nonprofit organization (and HubSpot customer), American Nursing Association (ANA), is an example of an organization with an outstanding nonprofit website. The site clarifies the ANA mission, shares news and educational content, and informs visitors how to get involved through memberships, events, certifications, or donations.

Nonprofit Public Speaking

People buy into other people, not products. The same can be said about nonprofit organizations. If consumers believe in the people behind your organization, they're likely to buy into your cause and donate money or time.

Public speaking is one of the best ways for consumers to get to know your leadership team, not to mention spread the word about your cause and organization. Whether you speak at a local event of 100 people or a multi-day conference with thousands, the impact is the same: telling a powerful story to real people who may not yet know about your cause.

Scott Harrison, the founder of charity: water, spoke at INBOUND. While he shared information about the conception and organization of the nonprofit, he mostly talked about the people that his organization helps and how the audience can support the mission. Harrison not only moved an audience of thousands but also effectively marketed the charity: water purpose and brand.

 

Nonprofit Content Marketing

Content marketing and blogging are valuable marketing assets for any nonprofit organization. Here's why:

• Content educates your audiences about your mission, cause, and industry news and trends.
• Content (and SEO) bring in new visitors, subscribers, donors, and leads.
• Content is shareable and serves as free PR among your audiences.
• Content can be repurposed and made into different types of media, saving your marketing team precious time and energy.

Creating a nonprofit marketing blog isn't always easy. Teams are short-staffed, budgets are low, and time is precious. Thankfully, there are many ways around those blogging challenges, such as sourcing story ideas from volunteers, donors, and customers and implementing an editorial calendar so you can plan ahead.

One of my very favorite nonprofit organizations is called Blurt Foundation. This UK-based organization exists to increase awareness and understanding of depression and support those who struggle with it. There are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about depression, so Blurt Foundation uses its blog content and other content resources to educate constituents and supporters. It also incorporates these content assets into its emails, social media posts, and online store.

👉🏼Nonprofit marketing tip: Save time and resources by repurposing your content. It’s an appreciating asset you can reuse and re-promote repeatedly. Repurposing content to create new marketing assets costs far less than creating entirely new content.

Outline all the ways you could repurpose the content you produce. For example, you could create the following list for your blog content:

• Short versions of posts for use in emails or newsletters with links back to full posts.
• Groups of related posts for report
• Two to three visuals images to share on social
• Infographics with post information
• Reaction pieces to the original post

Since you're not going to promote and distribute each piece of repurposed content immediately, your content pipeline is never empty.

Check out HubSpot's free nonprofit content today.

Nonprofit Digital Marketing

You can market your nonprofit using search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEO is the process of optimizing your nonprofit’s content to get traffic from organic search results. On the other hand, SEM is the process of getting traffic and visibility from both organic and paid search.

Nonprofits can use keywords in their blogs, videos, podcasts, and other digital content to improve their search engine rankings.

Image Source

The American Red Cross uses many forms of digital content in its marketing, including YouTube videos. The organization uses keywords to help search engines rank the content for SEO and help their audience find their content through organic search. For example, the above video uses the keywords “red cross” and “disaster” in its description to rank in search engine results.

Nonprofits can leverage search engine marketing to increase their contributions through search engine ads.

Google’s Ad Grants program gives nonprofits grants of up to $10,000 per month to advertise their organizations. Many nonprofits — including DonorsChoose.org, We Care Animal Rescue, and SOS Children’s Villages — use Google Ad Grants to attract donations, drive awareness, and recruit volunteers.

Strengthen Your Marketing, Promote Your Cause

Raise your hand if your organization has to constantly do more with less. 👋🏼

If that sounds like your organization, we recommend you use this guide to build a nonprofit marketing plan ASAP. Your organization might not operate for profit, but it can still gain value from the traffic, funds, and awareness that systematic marketing brings in.

These activities and strategies will help promote your organization and take a valuable load off your team’s and volunteers' backs, freeing them to dedicate more time to your cause and constituents.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

 

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-run-a-lean-mean-nonprofit-marketing-machine

Every marketing team is challenged to do more with less — especially nonprofit organizations. Often, resources are tight, and teams are small. Sound like your organization?

We want to help. That’s why we created this nonprofit marketing guide. Your organization might not operate for profit, but it can still get value from the traffic, funds, and awareness marketing brings in.

Bookmark this guide for later and use the chapter links below to jump around to sections of interest.

 

 

Inbound Marketing for Nonprofits

Your nonprofit organization likely takes up all of your time, and building a marketing plan might seem like an added responsibility that’s just not worth it.

We’re here to convince you otherwise. Inbound marketing is all about creating valuable experiences that positively impact people and your business.

Inbound marketing for nonprofits can help you attract new supporters for your cause, connect to valuable donors, engage your constituents, and inspire your community.

Boost your organization’s awareness and compel action. See firsthand how HubSpot can transform your nonprofit organization.

Here's how else nonprofit marketing can help.

Nonprofit marketing raises awareness.

Your nonprofit organization is a brand. Therefore you need to raise awareness just like any other business or company. Marketing raises awareness, and brand awareness spreads the word about your organization and your overall cause.

Nonprofit marketing raises funds.

Nonprofit marketing and nonprofit fundraising go hand-in-hand. The more people know about your organization, the more potential funding you can bring in.

Nonprofit marketing drives donor memberships and recurring donations.

Many nonprofit organizations offer donation memberships and monthly giving programs, like this one from charity: Water. These programs are valuable because your organization doesn’t have to fundraise so actively and often. Also, they can actually help you raise more money — the average monthly online donation is $52 ($624 per year) compared to the average one-time gift of $128.

Marketing your nonprofit gets your cause in front of fresh eyes and informs your donors about how they can consistently contribute.

Nonprofit marketing recruits volunteers.

Nonprofit marketing isn't just for funding. It also drives manpower (and woman-power!) to your organization. Regardless of industry or size, all nonprofits benefit from volunteers, and marketing your organization can help bring in new hands.

Moreover, volunteers are twice as likely to donate as non-volunteers.

Nonprofit marketing promotes your services.

Awareness, funding, and volunteers are integral to your nonprofit, but what about the purpose of your organization? What about the people, animals, or cause you're helping? Marketing can help with that, too.

The more people who know about your nonprofit organization, the more people you can help.

These are just a handful of reasons you should invest in your nonprofit's marketing strategy (particularly inbound marketing). Now, let's discuss how to build a nonprofit marketing plan so you can start bringing in new funds, volunteers, and constituents.

Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template

Download your free nonprofit marketing plan template.

Hubspot’s nonprofit marketing plan template can help you organize your nonprofit’s budget, team structure, and channels of choice to create your marketing strategy.

The nonprofit marketing plan template includes sections for developing your nonprofit’s summary, business initiatives, target market, marketing strategy, budget, marketing channels, and marketing technology.

Our nonprofit marketing plan template can help you:

• Complete a SWOT analysis for your organization.
• Develop a marketing strategy.
• Determine the industries and personas of your target donors.

Crafting a nonprofit marketing plan might not be too different from a for-profit marketing plan, but debatably, it's more important. Increasing awareness and constituent engagement without exhausting your hardworking team requires approaching your marketing systematically.

That's where a nonprofit marketing plan comes into play. Putting systems in place to produce and distribute your marketing content allows you to focus on operating and scaling your nonprofit.

Here's how to create a successful nonprofit marketing plan.

1. Define your marketing goals.

Your nonprofit marketing plan exists to transform your organization's mission and big-picture objectives into strategic, actionable goals.

For example, let's say one of your objectives was to protect the welfare of animals in your community (like one of my favorite local rescues, ALIVE Rescue). I'd ask you to brainstorm three to five marketing ideas to advance that objective.

Some ways you could use marketing to advance that objective include:

• Creating and publishing content that educates your community on the state of animal welfare.
• Posting on social media about your organization and the animals you have for adoption.
• Sending a weekly email newsletter sharing your content, adoptable animals, and volunteer needs.
• Hosting a quarterly event with educational resources, foster training, and adoption opportunities.

Next, I'd ask you to turn these ideas into SMART goals. Let's use idea number one as an example:

acronym	goal
Specific	Educate the community on the state of animal welfare by producing one blog post per week.
Measurable	Increase traffic by 15%.
Attainable	Our blog traffic increased by 10% last year when we upped our publishing frequency to twice a month. A 15% boost in traffic with a 100% increase in production seems attainable.
Relevant	An increase in blog traffic will boost awareness of our organization, educate the community, and alert more people of our adoption opportunities — thus, saving more animals and bringing in more funding.
Timely	We will start producing one post per week and the start of next month.

SMART Goal: By the start of next month, our blog will see a 15% boost in traffic by increasing our content production from two posts per month to one post per week. This increase will boost awareness of our organization, educate the community, and alert more people of our adoption opportunities — thus, saving more animals and bringing in more funding.

See how I turned the organizational mission into a marketing objective and a SMART goal? SMART goals are especially important when it comes time to analyze and measure your marketing performance (which we will talk about later), so be sure to finish this step before moving forward in your nonprofit marketing plan.

2. Understand your audiences.

Nonprofit marketing is different from other types of marketing because your organization is likely targeting multiple groups: constituents, customers, volunteers, and donors.

It's imperative to define and understand each of these audiences (a.k.a. buyer personas) because your marketing will differ based on who you're talking to. (We'll get into key messaging next.)

For example, following our animal shelter example from above, an email targeting donors will have different messaging than an email calling for volunteers.

One easy way to organize your different audiences is using a CRM to segment the different groups. By separating contacts with tags and lists, you can easily send marketing messages to the appropriate groups.

3. Craft Your Key Messages

Key messages encompass the information you want your audiences to hear, remember, and share about your nonprofit organization. Crafting these before you employ your marketing is important for a few reasons:

• Key messages keep your organization aligned. No matter who's doing the marketing, you can be confident the same thing is being said and promoted.
• Key messages simplify your marketing. With these created ahead of time, you already know what you will say in your marketing messaging.
• Key messages help organize your different audiences (as discussed above). As a nonprofit organization, you're likely talking to donors, volunteers, constituents, and your community — more personas than a typical for-profit business. Developing key messages for each audience informs your team and your marketing to make sure you're targeting the right groups.

Continuing with our animal shelter example, here's a look at how you can craft a key message for different audiences.

Key message: We protect the welfare of animals in our community through education, adoption and fostering, and animal advocacy.

• For adoption customers/constituents: By adopting or fostering, or by alerting us of animals in need, you can help us protect the welfare of animals in our community.
• For volunteers: We protect the welfare of animals through round-the-clock animal care and advocacy.
• For donors: You can help us protect the welfare of animals by donating to support animal care, advocacy, and adoption promotion.

All of these key messages have the same purpose and undertone, but they vary slightly depending on your audience. Together with your nonprofit organization's mission, vision, and goals, these messages will help effectively communicate and market your organization's needs and purpose.

4. Choose, plan, and create your marketing strategies.

Many marketers jump right to this step — creating and publishing various marketing tactics. Marketing encompasses much more than an advertisement, blog post, or event. To execute successfully, you must complete all the steps before this.

Now that you've established your goals (what you want), your key messages (what you're going to say), and your audience (who you're going to say it to), you can determine your marketing tactics (how you're going to say it).

Marketing tactics refer to channels like email marketing, social media, events, and more. We've dedicated an entire section to these marketing strategies. Read about them in detail below.

Regardless of which tactic you choose, be sure to conduct thorough planning before and as you execute it. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you prepare:

• What will you do with this marketing tactic?
• When will these marketing activities take place?
• Why is this tactic important?
• Who will be responsible for these activities?
• How much do we plan to spend?
• How does this tie to our organization’s marketing goals?

Tactical planning is an integral part of your overall nonprofit marketing plan. How you approach your marketing strategies and how they impact your organization is just as important as how you execute them.

Before you hit the ground running on any of these strategies, be sure your team has a solid game plan and a full understanding of it.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Download for Free

5. Analyze your marketing performance.

Your marketing probably won't perform perfectly from the get-go. That's OK. Routine reporting and analysis help you figure out what's working and what you need to change.

As you choose and establish your marketing channels, pay attention to their measurable performance indicators. Here's a list of examples from our list of marketing strategies below:

Marketing Strategy	Performance Indicator
Email marketing	Email opens
Event marketing	Ticket sales
Video marketing	Video views
Social media	Shares and comments
Website	Page views
Public speaking	Referrals
Content marketing	Subscriptions

Remember the goals you defined in step one? Measuring your marketing performance is essential to stay aligned with those goals.

You can track these performance indicators using tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and the analytics tools built into Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

If you know what you want to measure before you start marketing your nonprofit, you'll know exactly what to look for — and how to determine success and impact — when your marketing is in play.

You've created your nonprofit marketing plan. Now, let's talk about executing that plan with actionable marketing strategies.

Many of these nonprofit marketing strategies will overlap, like sharing your blog content on social media or releasing an event invite over email. These methods can and should be used in tandem, but we recommend introducing each strategy slowly, so your team doesn't overwhelm itself.

In fact, we recognize that your nonprofit is likely operating with a small (but agile) marketing team. For this reason, throughout these sections, we’ll recommend tips for doing more with less. Ultimately, though, don't hesitate to outsource your nonprofit marketing where needed.

Nonprofit Email Marketing

You might be using email sporadically to call for volunteers or confirm an online donation, but that's not enough. Email marketing for nonprofits is a highly effective marketing resource. Why? It's personal and powerful.

Here are a few ways to leverage email marketing to reach all of your audiences:

• Send a weekly newsletter with your newest content, updates about your organization, industry data, and volunteer needs.
• Send monthly emails with donation needs and opportunities.
• Set up an email sequence for new subscribers, thanking them for joining and educating them on your organization.
• Set up an email sequence for new donors, thanking them for their contribution and sharing how else they can support your organization.

Also, don't forget to put information on your website about how to subscribe to your email list. Nonprofit organization, Acumen, does a great job of this by putting subscription opportunities on its homepage and in its main menu.

👉🏼Nonprofit marketing tip: Automate as much as possible. Email marketing automation (like HubSpot) saves precious time and energy for your team and can be the key to growing your email list, donations, and memberships. You can also automate an email sequence triggered by website visitor behavior indicating a high level of interest, such as downloading educational content.

Nonprofit Event Marketing

Event marketing is one of the most effective (and enjoyable) ways to grow awareness of your organization, connect with your community, raise funds, and garner support for your cause.

PAWS, which stands for Pets Are Worth Saving, is another local animal rescue I'm a fan of. They hold a PAWS 5K race every summer to raise awareness and funding for the organization.

This type of event is impactful for multiple reasons:

1. It inspires competition and physical activity. Runners raise money for the organization and participate in the run.
2. It brings people in the community together to celebrate the organization and bring awareness to the PAWS cause.
3. It provides PAWS a channel to promote their services and adoptable pets.
4. It's fun to attend and be a part of! Many people go to the event to support runners, play with dogs, and simply be a part of the fun, all while supporting and sharing PAWS.

From fundraisers to auctions to competitions, you can organize many different kinds of events to market your nonprofit organization.

Nonprofit Video Marketing

Whether they're consuming content for work, school, or fun, people prefer video content. As a nonprofit organization, video marketing is a surefire way to garner interest and support from all of your audiences.

Here are a few reasons video can help you market your nonprofit:

1. Video is visual. We process visual content 60,000 times faster than written content. We also remember more content longer.
2. Video is personal. It inspires empathy and emotions, which can't be said about other types of marketing.
3. Video is educational. Many organizations need to educate their communities on their causes in order to garner attention and funding. Video can help you do that.
4. Video is shareable. 92% of consumers on mobile will share videos with others. Consumers love sharing videos, especially those that inspire and resonate with them.
5. Video is interesting. 60% of people report that video is a media they consume thoroughly. Keep your visitors, followers, and supporters engaged and interested using video.

The Girl Effect, a nonprofit that works to empower girls worldwide, is a great example of video marketing. The organization's homepage is a video that captures visitors' attention right away. Moreover, when you click "See more," the site opens an informative video telling you all about The Girl Effect.

Nonprofit Social Media Marketing

Social media is a highly popular marketing strategy among nonprofits. Not only is it free, but it also provides an avenue for organizations to show their brand personalities and engage with their followers and supporters.

Here are some ways to use social media for your nonprofit marketing, as inspired by a HubSpot study of 9,000 nonprofits:

• Share news about your organization and cause
• Boost brand awareness and recognition
• Fundraise
• Recruit volunteers and employees
• Recognize donors, employees, and volunteers

Don't forget to use the key messaging you crafted in your nonprofit marketing plan to keep your social media posts consistent and targeted. Also, make the most of each platform to promote your organization, such as the Donate button on Facebook.

HubSpot customer, FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is a nonprofit organization that works to advance STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education among children.

FIRST makes use of social media in many different ways, such as using Facebook to post videos, news, fundraisers, and reviews, as well as making use of the Donate button. The organization has amassed almost 100,000 followers.

👉🏼Nonprofit marketing tip: Curate content from volunteers, customers, supporters, event attendees, and donors. Implementing a user-generated content (UGC) campaign lessens your workload and acts as strong social proof. To enact your UGC campaign, put out a call for constituent stories, images, and videos. Create a hashtag that people can use to alert you of new UGC.

Also, let curation tools work for you. Use Google Alerts and social monitoring tools to alert you when your organization, hashtags, or relevant topics or keywords are mentioned. This provides opportunities to source UGC, get inspiration for new topic ideas, and participate in relevant conversations.

Nonprofit Website

Every nonprofit organization should have a website, which can be created on a CMS such as Content Hub or WordPress. A website serves as a digital home base for your organization and includes critical information — what you stand for and how visitors can participate and help.

Your website also houses important assets like your blog, social media streams, event information, videos, and the rest of your marketing strategies. Lastly, your website serves as a way to intrigue, inspire, and engage your audiences.

Nonprofit organization (and HubSpot customer), American Nursing Association (ANA), is an example of an organization with an outstanding nonprofit website. The site clarifies the ANA mission, shares news and educational content, and informs visitors how to get involved through memberships, events, certifications, or donations.

Nonprofit Public Speaking

People buy into other people, not products. The same can be said about nonprofit organizations. If consumers believe in the people behind your organization, they're likely to buy into your cause and donate money or time.

Public speaking is one of the best ways for consumers to get to know your leadership team, not to mention spread the word about your cause and organization. Whether you speak at a local event of 100 people or a multi-day conference with thousands, the impact is the same: telling a powerful story to real people who may not yet know about your cause.

Scott Harrison, the founder of charity: water, spoke at INBOUND. While he shared information about the conception and organization of the nonprofit, he mostly talked about the people that his organization helps and how the audience can support the mission. Harrison not only moved an audience of thousands but also effectively marketed the charity: water purpose and brand.

 

Nonprofit Content Marketing

Content marketing and blogging are valuable marketing assets for any nonprofit organization. Here's why:

• Content educates your audiences about your mission, cause, and industry news and trends.
• Content (and SEO) bring in new visitors, subscribers, donors, and leads.
• Content is shareable and serves as free PR among your audiences.
• Content can be repurposed and made into different types of media, saving your marketing team precious time and energy.

Creating a nonprofit marketing blog isn't always easy. Teams are short-staffed, budgets are low, and time is precious. Thankfully, there are many ways around those blogging challenges, such as sourcing story ideas from volunteers, donors, and customers and implementing an editorial calendar so you can plan ahead.

One of my very favorite nonprofit organizations is called Blurt Foundation. This UK-based organization exists to increase awareness and understanding of depression and support those who struggle with it. There are many misconceptions and misunderstandings about depression, so Blurt Foundation uses its blog content and other content resources to educate constituents and supporters. It also incorporates these content assets into its emails, social media posts, and online store.

👉🏼Nonprofit marketing tip: Save time and resources by repurposing your content. It’s an appreciating asset you can reuse and re-promote repeatedly. Repurposing content to create new marketing assets costs far less than creating entirely new content.

Outline all the ways you could repurpose the content you produce. For example, you could create the following list for your blog content:

• Short versions of posts for use in emails or newsletters with links back to full posts.
• Groups of related posts for report
• Two to three visuals images to share on social
• Infographics with post information
• Reaction pieces to the original post

Since you're not going to promote and distribute each piece of repurposed content immediately, your content pipeline is never empty.

Check out HubSpot's free nonprofit content today.

Nonprofit Digital Marketing

You can market your nonprofit using search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEO is the process of optimizing your nonprofit’s content to get traffic from organic search results. On the other hand, SEM is the process of getting traffic and visibility from both organic and paid search.

Nonprofits can use keywords in their blogs, videos, podcasts, and other digital content to improve their search engine rankings.

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The American Red Cross uses many forms of digital content in its marketing, including YouTube videos. The organization uses keywords to help search engines rank the content for SEO and help their audience find their content through organic search. For example, the above video uses the keywords “red cross” and “disaster” in its description to rank in search engine results.

Nonprofits can leverage search engine marketing to increase their contributions through search engine ads.

Google’s Ad Grants program gives nonprofits grants of up to $10,000 per month to advertise their organizations. Many nonprofits — including DonorsChoose.org, We Care Animal Rescue, and SOS Children’s Villages — use Google Ad Grants to attract donations, drive awareness, and recruit volunteers.

Strengthen Your Marketing, Promote Your Cause

Raise your hand if your organization has to constantly do more with less. 👋🏼

If that sounds like your organization, we recommend you use this guide to build a nonprofit marketing plan ASAP. Your organization might not operate for profit, but it can still gain value from the traffic, funds, and awareness that systematic marketing brings in.

These activities and strategies will help promote your organization and take a valuable load off your team’s and volunteers' backs, freeing them to dedicate more time to your cause and constituents.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

 

via Perfecte news Non connection

Lead Generation: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads the Inbound Way

Have you ever noticed that telemarketers have a way of calling at the worst possible time? Say, right when you’re about to sit down and enjoy dinner? I used to get these pesky dinnertime calls all the time.

Not only were they frustrating, but they never seemed successful for the companies trying to drum up leads (at least at my house).

Well, I’m here to tell you that the days of these dinnertime cold calls are long over.

In this post, we’ll talk best practices for inbound lead generation that are effective, strategic, and don’t ruin anyone’s dinner.

First, we’ll start with defining a lead, and then we’ll cover what online lead generation is, and why you need it. Next, we’ll go into how to qualify someone as a lead, how to label lead types, how you generate leads, and why inbound lead generation is much more effective than simply buying leads.

What is a lead?

A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service.

Leads typically hear from a business or organization after opening communication (by submitting personal information for an offer, trial, or subscription), instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased their contact information.

Let’s say you take an online survey to learn more about how to take care of your car. A day or so later, you receive an email from the auto company that created the survey. This process is far less intrusive than if they’d just called you out of the blue.

From a business perspective, the information the auto company collects about you from your survey responses helps them personalize that opening communication to address your existing problems.

Leads are part of the lifecycle of transitioning visitors to customers. Not all leads are the same. There are different types of leads based on how they are qualified and what lifecycle stage they’re in.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Marketing qualified leads are contacts who have engaged with your marketing team’s efforts but aren’t ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form for an offer.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve taken actions that expressly indicate their interest in becoming paying customers. An example of an SQL is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

Product qualified leads are contacts who’ve used your product and taken actions that indicate interest in becoming a paying customer. PQLs typically exist for companies who offer a product trial or a free or limited version of their product with options to upgrade.

An example of a PQL is a customer who uses your free version but asks about paid features.

Service Qualified Lead

Service qualified leads are contacts or customers who’ve indicated to your service team that they’re interested in becoming paying customers.

For example, a customer could tell their customer service representative that they’d like to upgrade their product subscription. At this time, the customer service representative would up-level this customer to the appropriate sales team or representative.

These lead generators are just a few examples of lead generation strategies you can use to attract potential customers and guide them toward your offers.

Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I create content for lead generation.” I’d get some really confused looks.

So instead, I say, “I work on finding unique ways to attract people to my business. I want to provide them with enough goodies to get them interested in my company so they eventually warm up to the brand and want to hear from us!”

That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business. This gets them on the path to eventually making a purchase.

Why do you need lead generation?

When someone shows an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural. You enhance this transition through inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a methodology to attract loyal customers to your business by aligning with your target audience's needs.

Creating tailored marketing experiences through valuable content is the core of an inbound marketing strategy that helps you drive customer engagement and growth.

Lead generation falls within the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience and are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team.

As you can see in the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental starting point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer.

The Lead Generation Process

Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the inbound marketing methodology, let’s walk through the steps of the lead generation process.

1. First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, or social media.
2. That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) — an image, button, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action.
3. That CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.
4. Once on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for the offer. Voila! You have a new lead. That is, as long as you follow lead-capture best practices.

Note: An offer is the content or resource that’s being promoted on the landing page, like an ebook, a course, or a template. The offer must have enough value for a visitor to provide their personal information in exchange for access to it.

See how everything fits together?

To sum it up: A visitor clicks a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form to get an offer, at which point they become a lead.

By the way, you should check out our free lead generation tool. It helps you create lead capture forms directly on your website. Plus, it's easy to set up.

How to Generate Leads

Once you put all of these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page to start generating leads.

But what channels should you use to promote your landing page? Let’s talk about the front end of lead generation — lead gen marketing.

If you’re wondering how to generate leads in digital marketing specifically, it’s time to analyze your existing online channels and identify opportunities for conversion. This can include everything from your website to your organic and paid social media presence.

If you’re a visual learner, this chart shows the flow from promotional marketing channels to a generated lead. There are even more channels you can use to get visitors to become leads. We’ll discuss the most impactful below.

1. Create compelling content.

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Content — and its trusty companion, SEO — are often the go-to methods businesses use to generate leads. And for good reason, too! According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, 16% of marketers say that the content-and-SEO combo resulted in the best ROI this year.

Ryan Robinson, the founder and CEO of RightBlogger explains that content marketing and SEO “allow you to attract leads who are already interested in what you offer, rather than interrupting people with disruptive ads and promotions.”

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, at the bottom of the post, in the hero section, or even on the side panel.

Robinson shared an anecdote with me to illustrate just how powerful content and SEO can be for generating leads.

“I vividly remember one client who initially found us after reading a blog post … That post showed him how AI writing assistants could streamline his process while still allowing for human oversight and quality control. A few weeks later, he signed up for one of our AI writing packages,” Robinson recalls.

In other words, the more delighted visitors are with your content, the more likely they are to click your CTA and move onto your landing page.

Featured Resource: HubSpot Ebook Templates

2. Send regular emails.

Email is a great place to reach people who already know your brand, product, or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list.

Noel Griffith, the CMO at SupplyGem, knows all about using email marketing for lead generation. Griffith explains that within a few months of launching a new email newsletter, “it became the top source of new leads for our business.”

He says that “by consistently providing helpful information for free, we were able to build strong relationships… When the time came for them to make a purchase or renewal decision, we were the first ones they thought of.”

Pro tip: When writing emails, use CTAs with compelling copy and an eye-catching design to grab your subscriber’s attention.

Featured resource: The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing

3. Use social media.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (previously Twitter), and LinkedIn are powerful tools for reaching potential leads directly.

These platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe-up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to URLs on X.

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You can also promote your offerings on social media and include a CTA in your caption. Learn more about social media campaigns in this post.

While you can organically build an audience on social media, these platforms also allow you to run paid ads that help you build brand awareness and generate leads in a shorter period of time.

Jason Hunt, the co-founder and CMO at Merged Media, shares that “the real power of social media advertising lies in its ability to segment audiences very precisely and test different messages to see which performs best. This approach … ensures that the message is being seen by a highly relevant audience, increasing the chances of turning those individuals into leads.”

Pro tip: If you want people who see your ads to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad and that the action you want users to take is crystal clear.

If you need help with your email and ad campaigns, check out HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant, a free AI-powered tool that can help you create landing page copy, email copy, and paid ads copy for your marketing campaigns.

4. Write informative blog posts.

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The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal.

Suppose your offer is an instructional video on setting up Google Search Console. In that case, you can write a blog post about selecting your marketing metrics, making your CTA highly relevant and easy to click.

For a quick overview, check out our video guide.

Not sure what to write about? Use HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator to brainstorm blog post ideas, create a blog outline, write your first draft, and publish to your website.

Featured resource: 6 Free Blog Post Templates

5. Offer product trials.

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You can break down many sales barriers by offering trials of your product or service. Once a prospect uses your product, you can entice them with additional offers or resources to encourage them to buy.

Another best practice is to include your branding in your free versions so you can capture other potential customers, too.

6. Ask for referrals.

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Referral, or word-of-mouth marketing, is helpful for lead generation in a different way. It gets your brand in front of more people, increasing your chances of generating more leads.

According to Daniel Nyquist, the CMO at Crosslist, referral marketing is effective because you’re asking satisfied customers to refer you to their network.

Nyquist says that once he implemented a referral program to reward existing clients, “within 6 months, referrals accounted for over 40% of new business.” Nyquist says that, “The key is building genuine relationships and delivering exceptional value so people are eager to tell others about you.”

Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a landing page that converts, the rest will handle itself.

7. Organize industry events.

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Industry events are a great way to get face-to-face with members of your target audience. Through networking at events, you can nurture new contacts into qualified leads.

If you have the marketing budget, you can take this further and exhibit at events.

Exhibitions make qualifying new leads from your booth easier with a personalized demo or consultation.

8. Collaborate with other businesses and creators.

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Business partnerships are often a source of huge untapped potential for lead generation. Your target audiences are usually closely aligned, even if your products and services differ.

Partner marketing can be as simple as a logo placement on your partner’s website. But you can take it further with joint content strategies, promotional materials, and more. This way, you both get your respective brands in front of each other's customer bases in a mutually beneficial way.

Another way to explore this is through partnerships with influencers that align well with your brand and objectives. Mike Falahee, the owner of Marygrove Awnings, has experienced a lot of success by collaborating with micro-influencers.

He shares, “You can generate leads by working with micro-influencers whose followership is highly engaged and who fit your target demographic and brand values.”

9. Build a community.

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Communities are ideal for turning visitors into leads. They’re also a great way to nurture and qualify existing leads.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a new free trial user. They have a question about the product, so they head to your knowledge hub only to find a forum of engaged promoters discussing your product and providing guidance on how to use it.

Seeing how others use your product and the extent of your existing customer base can make the difference between a user who chooses to upgrade and one who simply walks away.

Why not just buy leads?

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. Enter: The temptation to buy leads.

Buying leads, as opposed to organically generating them, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. But you might be paying for advertising anyway, so why not just buy leads?

First and foremost, any leads you’ve purchased don’t know you. Typically, they’ve “opted in” at some other site when signing up for something and didn’t opt into receiving anything from your company.

The messages you send them are unwanted messages. Sending unwanted messages is intrusive. If the prospect has never been to your website and indicated an interest in your products or services, then you’re interrupting them, plain and simple.

And if they never opted in to receive messages specifically from you, then there’s a high chance they could flag your messages as spam, which is dangerous.

Once enough people flag your messages as spam, your email address will be flagged and shared with other email providers. Once you get flagged, it’s really, really hard to become credible again. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It’s always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.

How to Qualify a Lead

As we covered in the first section, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about how someone can actually show that interest.

Essentially, a sales lead is generated through information collection.

This could result from a job seeker applying for an open role, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content.

Gauging a Lead’s Level of Interest

Below are a few ways you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples shows that the amount of collected information used to qualify a lead, as well as their level of interest, can vary.

Let’s assess each scenario:

• Job Application. A candidate shares personal information because they want to be considered for a position. That application shows their interest in the job, qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team — not marketing or sales.
• Coupon. If a shopper finds a valuable coupon, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for a deal. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has an interest in their company.
• Content. While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product, content (like an ebook or webinar) does not. To understand the nature of the person’s interest, you’ll probably need to collect more information.

These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company and from person to person.

You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a genuine interest in your product or service — how much information is enough will vary depending on your business.

Here's a great example of what to ask for in a lead gen form:

• Full Name. This is the most fundamental information needed to personalize your communication with each lead.
• Email. This serves as a unique identifier and is how you will contact your lead.
• Company. This will allow you to research your lead’s industry and company and how the lead might benefit from your product or service (mainly for B2B).
• Role. Understanding an individual’s role will help you understand how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will have a different take and perspective on your offering (mainly for B2B).
• Country. Location information can help you segment your contact by region and time zone and help you qualify the lead depending on your service.
• State. The more detailed information you can obtain without sacrificing conversions, the better. Knowing your lead’s state can help you further qualify them.

If you’d like to learn more intermediate-level tips on information collection and what you should ask for on your lead gen forms, read our post about it here.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads quantitatively. Using this technique, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale.”

The criteria for these actions are up to you, but they must be uniform across your marketing and sales departments so that everyone works on the same scale.

A lead’s score can be based on actions they’ve taken, the information they’ve provided, their level of engagement, or other criteria that your sales team determines.

For instance, you may score someone higher if they regularly engage with you on social media.

Borrowing from the examples above, you might give a lead a higher score if they used one of your coupons — an action that would signify this person is interested in your product.

The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a SQL, which is only a step away from becoming a customer.

You may need to tweak criteria until you find the formula that works, but once you do, you’ll transform your lead generation into customer generation.

Lead Generation Strategies

Online lead generation encompasses various tactics, campaigns, and strategies depending on the platform you use to capture leads.

We talked about lead capture best practices once you have a visitor on your site, but how can you get them there in the first place?

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Let’s dive into lead generation strategies for a few popular platforms.

Facebook Lead Generation

Facebook has been a method for lead generation since its inception. Originally, companies could use outbound links in their posts and information in their bios to attract strangers to their websites.

However, when Facebook Ads was launched in 2007, and its algorithm began to favor accounts that used paid advertising, there was a major shift in how businesses used the platform to capture leads.

Facebook created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has a feature that lets you put a simple CTA button at the top of your Facebook Page, helping you send Facebook followers directly to your website.

Get some lead generation tips for Facebook.

Featured Resource: 50 Facebook Ad Examples We Actually Clicked

X Lead Generation

X has X Lead Gen Cards, which let you generate leads directly within a tweet without leaving the site.

A user’s name, email address, and X username are automatically pulled into the card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to become a lead.

(Hint for HubSpot users: You can connect X Lead Gen Cards to your HubSpot Forms. Learn how to do that here.)

Featured Resource: How to Use X for Business (+ Follower Tracking Template)

LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn has been increasing its stake in advertising since its early days.

Regarding lead generation, LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms, which auto-populate with a user’s profile data when they click a CTA, making it easy to capture information.

Get tips from our experience using LinkedIn ads.

PPC Lead Generation

When we say pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to ads on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google gets 3.5 billion searches a day, making it prime real estate for any ad campaign, especially lead gen.

The effectiveness of your PPC campaign relies heavily on a seamless user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and a few other factors.

Learn more about how to set up successful PPC ads.

B2B Lead Generation

B2B companies require a different approach to lead generation.

SmartInsights found that referrals are the top source for capturing business leads. Not to mention, effectiveness varies by channel.

Learn the B2B lead generation techniques for every channel.

Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns

In any given lead generation campaign, there can be many moving parts.

It can be challenging to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which need fine-tuning. Here are a few tips that can help when building lead gen campaigns.

1. Follow your data.

If you’re looking to build a lead generation engine, start with the bevy of data already at your fingertips. Begin by archiving which posts consistently rank well, bring in traffic, and have a clear connection to your product.

Once you know what performs well, you can determine where to place CTAs.

“For these posts, ask yourself what the missing middle piece is between what someone is reading about and what you can offer them,” suggests AJ Beltis, a senior marketing manager focused on media conversion at HubSpot.

Beltis continues, “Perhaps it’s an actionable template, a more in-depth guide, or even a demo if the content is intended for those further along in the buying cycle.”

Remember, your CTA should not be a reach from the topic in the post. “Keep it straightforward and logical and the leads will come flowing in,” Beltis says.

2. Use the right lead generation tools.

As you saw in our data, the most successful marketing teams use a formal system to organize and store their leads. That’s where lead generation tools and lead generation software come into play.

How much do you know about the people visiting your website? Do you know their names or their email addresses? How about which pages they visited, how they’re navigating around, and what they do before and after filling out a lead conversion form?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, chances are you’re having difficulty connecting with the people visiting your site. These are questions you should be able to answer — and you can with the right lead generation tools.

There are a few different tools and templates out there that’ll help you create different lead gen assets to use on your site:

• CTA Templates. Create clickable CTA buttons to use on your blog, landing pages, and elsewhere on your site.
• Lead Generation Software Tools. This free tool from HubSpot includes lead capture insights features, which will scrape any pre-existing forms you have and add those contacts to your existing contact database. You can also create pop-ups, hello bars, or slide-ins — called “lead flows” — to help you immediately turn visitors into leads.

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• Visitor Tracking. Hotjar's virtual heatmap tool creates a color-coded representation of how a user navigates your site. You can then understand what users want and care about.
• Form-Scraping Tool. A form-scraping tool that collects submissions on your website’s existing forms helps you consolidate all your leads into your contact database.
  • HubSpot customers can create and embed forms using HubSpot, which automatically populate into your CMS.
  • Non-HubSpot customers can use a form creation tool like Contact Form 7, JetPack, or Google Forms, and then use HubSpot’s free collected forms feature to automatically capture form submissions and input them to a contact database.

3. Create offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.

Not all of your site visitors are ready to talk to your sales team or see a demo of your product.

Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in an informational piece like an ebook or a guide.

In contrast, someone more familiar with your company and near the end of the journey might be more interested in a free trial or demo.

Make sure you’re creating offers for each phase and offering CTAs for these offers throughout your site.

Yes, it takes time to create valuable content that nurtures your leads down the funnel, but if you don’t offer anything for visitors who aren’t ready to buy, they may never return to your website.

Here are 20 ideas for lead generation content to get you started.

If you want to take personalization a step further, try using smart CTAs. Smart CTAs detect where a person is in the buyer’s journey, whether they’re a new visitor, a lead, or a customer, and display CTAs accordingly.

Personalized CTAs convert 202% better than basic ones.

4. Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.

The highest-converting lead gen campaigns are the ones that create a seamless transition from ad copy and design to the deliverable itself.

Ensure you’re presenting a consistent message throughout the process and providing value to everyone engaging with your lead capture.

The aspects of your lead gen campaign should mirror everything else on your website, your blog, and the product you will eventually try to sell. If not, you’ll have difficulty getting your lead to the next lifecycle stage.

5. Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.

This may seem obvious to you, but you’d be surprised how many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. CTAs are meant to send visitors to a landing page where they can receive a specific offer.

Don’t use CTAs to drive people to your homepage, for instance. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product, you should still send them to a targeted landing page that includes an opt-in form. If you can use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

If you want to learn more about building and promoting high-converting landing pages, download our ebook on optimizing landing pages for conversions.

6. Get your sales team involved.

Remember when we talked about lead scoring? Well, it isn’t exactly doable without your sales team’s input. How will you know what qualifies a lead for sales without knowing if your defined SQLs are successfully sold?

Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned on the definitions and the process of moving a lead from MQL to SQL to opportunity before you even begin to capture leads.

Be open to evolving your relationship with sales and how you guide leads along your funnel. Your definitions will likely need to be refined over time — just make sure everyone involved is up-to-date.

7. Use social media strategically.

While marketers typically think of social media as top-of-the-funnel marketing, it can still be a helpful and low-cost source for lead generation, as shared in the lead gen strategies above.

Start by adding links directly to the landing pages of high-performing offers within your Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and other social media posts.

Tell visitors that you’re sending them to a landing page. That way, you’re setting expectations.

You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to determine which posts generate the most leads and then make a point of regularly linking social media posts to them.

Another way to generate leads from social media is to run a contest. Contests are fun and engaging for your followers and can also teach you a ton about your audience. It’s a win-win.

Read our step-by-step guide for growing your email list using social media contests, which covers everything from choosing a platform to picking a winner.

8. Leverage your partnerships.

When it comes to lead generation, co-marketing can be powerful. If your team works with partner companies, put your heads together and create some mutually beneficial offers.

“On the Content Offers team at HubSpot, we run campaigns with partner companies that have a similar target audience and brand values to create and promote gated content like ebooks, reports, and templates,” says Jasmine Fleming, a marketing manager at HubSpot.

Fleming says both HubSpot and our partners generate leads with the offer, and that “co-marketing offers have the potential to generate significantly more leads than a content piece created by one company alone.”

9. Remain flexible and constantly iterate.

Your lead generation strategy needs to be as dynamic as the people you’re targeting. Trends change, behaviors shift, opinions morph, and so should your lead gen marketing.

Use A/B split testing to see what CTAs perform best, which landing pages convert better, and which copy captures your target audience. Experiment with layout changes, design, UX, content, and advertising channels until you find what works.

Lead Generation Statistics

HubSpot surveyed over 1,400 global marketing professionals and compiled all the findings into the 2024 State of Marketing Report. Here are some lead generation and conversion statistics from this report:

• 15% of marketers face challenges with generating traffic and leads.
• Approximately 56% of marketers use Facebook and Instagram to execute their marketing campaigns.
• 56% of marketers using TikTok for lead generation plan to increase their investment next year.
• 51% of marketers say their company worked with creators or influencers in 2023 to generate leads.
• 87% of marketers plan to continue using mobile messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger) to generate leads.
• 87% of marketers plan to maintain or increase their investment in email marketing to generate more leads in 2024.

Lead Conversion Statistics

• 17% of marketers say that short-form videos have generated strong results for their business.
• 47% of marketers say they find the most success from partnering with micro-influencers, rather than big, broad niche creators.
• 25% of marketers who had effective marketing strategies in 2023 used AI and automation tools like chatbots (as opposed to only 5% of marketers who had ineffective strategies).
• Email marketing has an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
• AI-powered personalization in marketing emails can increase ROI by up to 70%.
• 77% of marketers who use generative AI say it helps them create more personalized content, which improves lead conversion.

Lead Generation Trends & Benchmarks

So you’re getting web traffic and generating leads. But how are you doing compared to other companies in your industry?

Read on to discover what other marketers are doing with lead generation in 2024, along with important stats to consider.

Lead generation is the top marketing priority.

HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2024 found that marketers report one of their top priorities for the next 12 months is generating more leads. Converting these leads to customers is another top priority, according to SmartInsights.

Most B2B leads come from referrals.

B2B marketers say that 65% of their leads come from referrals, 38% from email, and 33% come from Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

If you’re interested in getting in on this trend, it’s worth considering revamping your referral strategy and helping existing customers bring you new leads.

Content marketing helps drive leads.

Marketers also report that content marketing has helped them successfully generate demand and leads over the past 12 months.

To get in on this trend, read this helpful blog post on creating content for different stages of the buyer's journey.

Top Content Types that Generate the Most Leads or Conversion ROI

According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, some top channels for conversion ROI include:

• Website/Blog (16%).
• Social media shopping tools (16%).
• Paid social media content (14%).
• Email marketing (14%).
• Content marketing (14%).

You can also explore more top channels for lead generation in this blog post.

Within these channels, there is also an opportunity to dig into short-form video, influencer marketing, and other trends that deliver ROI.

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Grow Better With Lead Generation

Now that you know more about how to generate leads for your business, we recommend you try HubSpot’s free lead generation tool. Use it to add simple conversion assets to your site and see what content prompts visitors to convert.

The basics we’ve gone over in this blog post are just the beginning. Keep creating great offers, CTAs, landing pages, and forms — and promote them in multi-channel environments.

Be in close touch with your sales team to make sure you’re handing off high-quality leads on a regular basis.

Last but not least, never stop testing. The more you test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/beginner-inbound-lead-generation-guide-ht

Have you ever noticed that telemarketers have a way of calling at the worst possible time? Say, right when you’re about to sit down and enjoy dinner? I used to get these pesky dinnertime calls all the time.

Not only were they frustrating, but they never seemed successful for the companies trying to drum up leads (at least at my house).

Well, I’m here to tell you that the days of these dinnertime cold calls are long over.

In this post, we’ll talk best practices for inbound lead generation that are effective, strategic, and don’t ruin anyone’s dinner.

First, we’ll start with defining a lead, and then we’ll cover what online lead generation is, and why you need it. Next, we’ll go into how to qualify someone as a lead, how to label lead types, how you generate leads, and why inbound lead generation is much more effective than simply buying leads.

What is a lead?

A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service.

Leads typically hear from a business or organization after opening communication (by submitting personal information for an offer, trial, or subscription), instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased their contact information.

Let’s say you take an online survey to learn more about how to take care of your car. A day or so later, you receive an email from the auto company that created the survey. This process is far less intrusive than if they’d just called you out of the blue.

From a business perspective, the information the auto company collects about you from your survey responses helps them personalize that opening communication to address your existing problems.

Leads are part of the lifecycle of transitioning visitors to customers. Not all leads are the same. There are different types of leads based on how they are qualified and what lifecycle stage they’re in.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Marketing qualified leads are contacts who have engaged with your marketing team’s efforts but aren’t ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form for an offer.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve taken actions that expressly indicate their interest in becoming paying customers. An example of an SQL is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

Product qualified leads are contacts who’ve used your product and taken actions that indicate interest in becoming a paying customer. PQLs typically exist for companies who offer a product trial or a free or limited version of their product with options to upgrade.

An example of a PQL is a customer who uses your free version but asks about paid features.

Service Qualified Lead

Service qualified leads are contacts or customers who’ve indicated to your service team that they’re interested in becoming paying customers.

For example, a customer could tell their customer service representative that they’d like to upgrade their product subscription. At this time, the customer service representative would up-level this customer to the appropriate sales team or representative.

These lead generators are just a few examples of lead generation strategies you can use to attract potential customers and guide them toward your offers.

Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I create content for lead generation.” I’d get some really confused looks.

So instead, I say, “I work on finding unique ways to attract people to my business. I want to provide them with enough goodies to get them interested in my company so they eventually warm up to the brand and want to hear from us!”

That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business. This gets them on the path to eventually making a purchase.

Why do you need lead generation?

When someone shows an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural. You enhance this transition through inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a methodology to attract loyal customers to your business by aligning with your target audience's needs.

Creating tailored marketing experiences through valuable content is the core of an inbound marketing strategy that helps you drive customer engagement and growth.

Lead generation falls within the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience and are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team.

As you can see in the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental starting point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer.

The Lead Generation Process

Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the inbound marketing methodology, let’s walk through the steps of the lead generation process.

1. First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, or social media.
2. That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) — an image, button, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action.
3. That CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.
4. Once on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for the offer. Voila! You have a new lead. That is, as long as you follow lead-capture best practices.

Note: An offer is the content or resource that’s being promoted on the landing page, like an ebook, a course, or a template. The offer must have enough value for a visitor to provide their personal information in exchange for access to it.

See how everything fits together?

To sum it up: A visitor clicks a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form to get an offer, at which point they become a lead.

By the way, you should check out our free lead generation tool. It helps you create lead capture forms directly on your website. Plus, it's easy to set up.

How to Generate Leads

Once you put all of these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page to start generating leads.

But what channels should you use to promote your landing page? Let’s talk about the front end of lead generation — lead gen marketing.

If you’re wondering how to generate leads in digital marketing specifically, it’s time to analyze your existing online channels and identify opportunities for conversion. This can include everything from your website to your organic and paid social media presence.

If you’re a visual learner, this chart shows the flow from promotional marketing channels to a generated lead. There are even more channels you can use to get visitors to become leads. We’ll discuss the most impactful below.

1. Create compelling content.

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Content — and its trusty companion, SEO — are often the go-to methods businesses use to generate leads. And for good reason, too! According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, 16% of marketers say that the content-and-SEO combo resulted in the best ROI this year.

Ryan Robinson, the founder and CEO of RightBlogger explains that content marketing and SEO “allow you to attract leads who are already interested in what you offer, rather than interrupting people with disruptive ads and promotions.”

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, at the bottom of the post, in the hero section, or even on the side panel.

Robinson shared an anecdote with me to illustrate just how powerful content and SEO can be for generating leads.

“I vividly remember one client who initially found us after reading a blog post … That post showed him how AI writing assistants could streamline his process while still allowing for human oversight and quality control. A few weeks later, he signed up for one of our AI writing packages,” Robinson recalls.

In other words, the more delighted visitors are with your content, the more likely they are to click your CTA and move onto your landing page.

Featured Resource: HubSpot Ebook Templates

2. Send regular emails.

Email is a great place to reach people who already know your brand, product, or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list.

Noel Griffith, the CMO at SupplyGem, knows all about using email marketing for lead generation. Griffith explains that within a few months of launching a new email newsletter, “it became the top source of new leads for our business.”

He says that “by consistently providing helpful information for free, we were able to build strong relationships… When the time came for them to make a purchase or renewal decision, we were the first ones they thought of.”

Pro tip: When writing emails, use CTAs with compelling copy and an eye-catching design to grab your subscriber’s attention.

Featured resource: The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing

3. Use social media.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (previously Twitter), and LinkedIn are powerful tools for reaching potential leads directly.

These platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe-up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to URLs on X.

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You can also promote your offerings on social media and include a CTA in your caption. Learn more about social media campaigns in this post.

While you can organically build an audience on social media, these platforms also allow you to run paid ads that help you build brand awareness and generate leads in a shorter period of time.

Jason Hunt, the co-founder and CMO at Merged Media, shares that “the real power of social media advertising lies in its ability to segment audiences very precisely and test different messages to see which performs best. This approach … ensures that the message is being seen by a highly relevant audience, increasing the chances of turning those individuals into leads.”

Pro tip: If you want people who see your ads to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad and that the action you want users to take is crystal clear.

If you need help with your email and ad campaigns, check out HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant, a free AI-powered tool that can help you create landing page copy, email copy, and paid ads copy for your marketing campaigns.

4. Write informative blog posts.

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The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal.

Suppose your offer is an instructional video on setting up Google Search Console. In that case, you can write a blog post about selecting your marketing metrics, making your CTA highly relevant and easy to click.

For a quick overview, check out our video guide.

Not sure what to write about? Use HubSpot’s Blog Idea Generator to brainstorm blog post ideas, create a blog outline, write your first draft, and publish to your website.

Featured resource: 6 Free Blog Post Templates

5. Offer product trials.

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You can break down many sales barriers by offering trials of your product or service. Once a prospect uses your product, you can entice them with additional offers or resources to encourage them to buy.

Another best practice is to include your branding in your free versions so you can capture other potential customers, too.

6. Ask for referrals.

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Referral, or word-of-mouth marketing, is helpful for lead generation in a different way. It gets your brand in front of more people, increasing your chances of generating more leads.

According to Daniel Nyquist, the CMO at Crosslist, referral marketing is effective because you’re asking satisfied customers to refer you to their network.

Nyquist says that once he implemented a referral program to reward existing clients, “within 6 months, referrals accounted for over 40% of new business.” Nyquist says that, “The key is building genuine relationships and delivering exceptional value so people are eager to tell others about you.”

Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a landing page that converts, the rest will handle itself.

7. Organize industry events.

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Industry events are a great way to get face-to-face with members of your target audience. Through networking at events, you can nurture new contacts into qualified leads.

If you have the marketing budget, you can take this further and exhibit at events.

Exhibitions make qualifying new leads from your booth easier with a personalized demo or consultation.

8. Collaborate with other businesses and creators.

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Business partnerships are often a source of huge untapped potential for lead generation. Your target audiences are usually closely aligned, even if your products and services differ.

Partner marketing can be as simple as a logo placement on your partner’s website. But you can take it further with joint content strategies, promotional materials, and more. This way, you both get your respective brands in front of each other's customer bases in a mutually beneficial way.

Another way to explore this is through partnerships with influencers that align well with your brand and objectives. Mike Falahee, the owner of Marygrove Awnings, has experienced a lot of success by collaborating with micro-influencers.

He shares, “You can generate leads by working with micro-influencers whose followership is highly engaged and who fit your target demographic and brand values.”

9. Build a community.

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Communities are ideal for turning visitors into leads. They’re also a great way to nurture and qualify existing leads.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a new free trial user. They have a question about the product, so they head to your knowledge hub only to find a forum of engaged promoters discussing your product and providing guidance on how to use it.

Seeing how others use your product and the extent of your existing customer base can make the difference between a user who chooses to upgrade and one who simply walks away.

Why not just buy leads?

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. Enter: The temptation to buy leads.

Buying leads, as opposed to organically generating them, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. But you might be paying for advertising anyway, so why not just buy leads?

First and foremost, any leads you’ve purchased don’t know you. Typically, they’ve “opted in” at some other site when signing up for something and didn’t opt into receiving anything from your company.

The messages you send them are unwanted messages. Sending unwanted messages is intrusive. If the prospect has never been to your website and indicated an interest in your products or services, then you’re interrupting them, plain and simple.

And if they never opted in to receive messages specifically from you, then there’s a high chance they could flag your messages as spam, which is dangerous.

Once enough people flag your messages as spam, your email address will be flagged and shared with other email providers. Once you get flagged, it’s really, really hard to become credible again. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It’s always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.

How to Qualify a Lead

As we covered in the first section, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about how someone can actually show that interest.

Essentially, a sales lead is generated through information collection.

This could result from a job seeker applying for an open role, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content.

Gauging a Lead’s Level of Interest

Below are a few ways you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples shows that the amount of collected information used to qualify a lead, as well as their level of interest, can vary.

Let’s assess each scenario:

• Job Application. A candidate shares personal information because they want to be considered for a position. That application shows their interest in the job, qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team — not marketing or sales.
• Coupon. If a shopper finds a valuable coupon, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for a deal. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has an interest in their company.
• Content. While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product, content (like an ebook or webinar) does not. To understand the nature of the person’s interest, you’ll probably need to collect more information.

These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company and from person to person.

You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a genuine interest in your product or service — how much information is enough will vary depending on your business.

Here's a great example of what to ask for in a lead gen form:

• Full Name. This is the most fundamental information needed to personalize your communication with each lead.
• Email. This serves as a unique identifier and is how you will contact your lead.
• Company. This will allow you to research your lead’s industry and company and how the lead might benefit from your product or service (mainly for B2B).
• Role. Understanding an individual’s role will help you understand how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will have a different take and perspective on your offering (mainly for B2B).
• Country. Location information can help you segment your contact by region and time zone and help you qualify the lead depending on your service.
• State. The more detailed information you can obtain without sacrificing conversions, the better. Knowing your lead’s state can help you further qualify them.

If you’d like to learn more intermediate-level tips on information collection and what you should ask for on your lead gen forms, read our post about it here.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads quantitatively. Using this technique, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale.”

The criteria for these actions are up to you, but they must be uniform across your marketing and sales departments so that everyone works on the same scale.

A lead’s score can be based on actions they’ve taken, the information they’ve provided, their level of engagement, or other criteria that your sales team determines.

For instance, you may score someone higher if they regularly engage with you on social media.

Borrowing from the examples above, you might give a lead a higher score if they used one of your coupons — an action that would signify this person is interested in your product.

The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a SQL, which is only a step away from becoming a customer.

You may need to tweak criteria until you find the formula that works, but once you do, you’ll transform your lead generation into customer generation.

Lead Generation Strategies

Online lead generation encompasses various tactics, campaigns, and strategies depending on the platform you use to capture leads.

We talked about lead capture best practices once you have a visitor on your site, but how can you get them there in the first place?

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Let’s dive into lead generation strategies for a few popular platforms.

Facebook Lead Generation

Facebook has been a method for lead generation since its inception. Originally, companies could use outbound links in their posts and information in their bios to attract strangers to their websites.

However, when Facebook Ads was launched in 2007, and its algorithm began to favor accounts that used paid advertising, there was a major shift in how businesses used the platform to capture leads.

Facebook created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has a feature that lets you put a simple CTA button at the top of your Facebook Page, helping you send Facebook followers directly to your website.

Get some lead generation tips for Facebook.

Featured Resource: 50 Facebook Ad Examples We Actually Clicked

X Lead Generation

X has X Lead Gen Cards, which let you generate leads directly within a tweet without leaving the site.

A user’s name, email address, and X username are automatically pulled into the card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to become a lead.

(Hint for HubSpot users: You can connect X Lead Gen Cards to your HubSpot Forms. Learn how to do that here.)

Featured Resource: How to Use X for Business (+ Follower Tracking Template)

LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn has been increasing its stake in advertising since its early days.

Regarding lead generation, LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms, which auto-populate with a user’s profile data when they click a CTA, making it easy to capture information.

Get tips from our experience using LinkedIn ads.

PPC Lead Generation

When we say pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to ads on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google gets 3.5 billion searches a day, making it prime real estate for any ad campaign, especially lead gen.

The effectiveness of your PPC campaign relies heavily on a seamless user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and a few other factors.

Learn more about how to set up successful PPC ads.

B2B Lead Generation

B2B companies require a different approach to lead generation.

SmartInsights found that referrals are the top source for capturing business leads. Not to mention, effectiveness varies by channel.

Learn the B2B lead generation techniques for every channel.

Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns

In any given lead generation campaign, there can be many moving parts.

It can be challenging to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which need fine-tuning. Here are a few tips that can help when building lead gen campaigns.

1. Follow your data.

If you’re looking to build a lead generation engine, start with the bevy of data already at your fingertips. Begin by archiving which posts consistently rank well, bring in traffic, and have a clear connection to your product.

Once you know what performs well, you can determine where to place CTAs.

“For these posts, ask yourself what the missing middle piece is between what someone is reading about and what you can offer them,” suggests AJ Beltis, a senior marketing manager focused on media conversion at HubSpot.

Beltis continues, “Perhaps it’s an actionable template, a more in-depth guide, or even a demo if the content is intended for those further along in the buying cycle.”

Remember, your CTA should not be a reach from the topic in the post. “Keep it straightforward and logical and the leads will come flowing in,” Beltis says.

2. Use the right lead generation tools.

As you saw in our data, the most successful marketing teams use a formal system to organize and store their leads. That’s where lead generation tools and lead generation software come into play.

How much do you know about the people visiting your website? Do you know their names or their email addresses? How about which pages they visited, how they’re navigating around, and what they do before and after filling out a lead conversion form?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, chances are you’re having difficulty connecting with the people visiting your site. These are questions you should be able to answer — and you can with the right lead generation tools.

There are a few different tools and templates out there that’ll help you create different lead gen assets to use on your site:

• CTA Templates. Create clickable CTA buttons to use on your blog, landing pages, and elsewhere on your site.
• Lead Generation Software Tools. This free tool from HubSpot includes lead capture insights features, which will scrape any pre-existing forms you have and add those contacts to your existing contact database. You can also create pop-ups, hello bars, or slide-ins — called “lead flows” — to help you immediately turn visitors into leads.

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• Visitor Tracking. Hotjar's virtual heatmap tool creates a color-coded representation of how a user navigates your site. You can then understand what users want and care about.
• Form-Scraping Tool. A form-scraping tool that collects submissions on your website’s existing forms helps you consolidate all your leads into your contact database.
  • HubSpot customers can create and embed forms using HubSpot, which automatically populate into your CMS.
  • Non-HubSpot customers can use a form creation tool like Contact Form 7, JetPack, or Google Forms, and then use HubSpot’s free collected forms feature to automatically capture form submissions and input them to a contact database.

3. Create offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.

Not all of your site visitors are ready to talk to your sales team or see a demo of your product.

Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in an informational piece like an ebook or a guide.

In contrast, someone more familiar with your company and near the end of the journey might be more interested in a free trial or demo.

Make sure you’re creating offers for each phase and offering CTAs for these offers throughout your site.

Yes, it takes time to create valuable content that nurtures your leads down the funnel, but if you don’t offer anything for visitors who aren’t ready to buy, they may never return to your website.

Here are 20 ideas for lead generation content to get you started.

If you want to take personalization a step further, try using smart CTAs. Smart CTAs detect where a person is in the buyer’s journey, whether they’re a new visitor, a lead, or a customer, and display CTAs accordingly.

Personalized CTAs convert 202% better than basic ones.

4. Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.

The highest-converting lead gen campaigns are the ones that create a seamless transition from ad copy and design to the deliverable itself.

Ensure you’re presenting a consistent message throughout the process and providing value to everyone engaging with your lead capture.

The aspects of your lead gen campaign should mirror everything else on your website, your blog, and the product you will eventually try to sell. If not, you’ll have difficulty getting your lead to the next lifecycle stage.

5. Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.

This may seem obvious to you, but you’d be surprised how many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. CTAs are meant to send visitors to a landing page where they can receive a specific offer.

Don’t use CTAs to drive people to your homepage, for instance. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product, you should still send them to a targeted landing page that includes an opt-in form. If you can use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.

If you want to learn more about building and promoting high-converting landing pages, download our ebook on optimizing landing pages for conversions.

6. Get your sales team involved.

Remember when we talked about lead scoring? Well, it isn’t exactly doable without your sales team’s input. How will you know what qualifies a lead for sales without knowing if your defined SQLs are successfully sold?

Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned on the definitions and the process of moving a lead from MQL to SQL to opportunity before you even begin to capture leads.

Be open to evolving your relationship with sales and how you guide leads along your funnel. Your definitions will likely need to be refined over time — just make sure everyone involved is up-to-date.

7. Use social media strategically.

While marketers typically think of social media as top-of-the-funnel marketing, it can still be a helpful and low-cost source for lead generation, as shared in the lead gen strategies above.

Start by adding links directly to the landing pages of high-performing offers within your Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and other social media posts.

Tell visitors that you’re sending them to a landing page. That way, you’re setting expectations.

You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to determine which posts generate the most leads and then make a point of regularly linking social media posts to them.

Another way to generate leads from social media is to run a contest. Contests are fun and engaging for your followers and can also teach you a ton about your audience. It’s a win-win.

Read our step-by-step guide for growing your email list using social media contests, which covers everything from choosing a platform to picking a winner.

8. Leverage your partnerships.

When it comes to lead generation, co-marketing can be powerful. If your team works with partner companies, put your heads together and create some mutually beneficial offers.

“On the Content Offers team at HubSpot, we run campaigns with partner companies that have a similar target audience and brand values to create and promote gated content like ebooks, reports, and templates,” says Jasmine Fleming, a marketing manager at HubSpot.

Fleming says both HubSpot and our partners generate leads with the offer, and that “co-marketing offers have the potential to generate significantly more leads than a content piece created by one company alone.”

9. Remain flexible and constantly iterate.

Your lead generation strategy needs to be as dynamic as the people you’re targeting. Trends change, behaviors shift, opinions morph, and so should your lead gen marketing.

Use A/B split testing to see what CTAs perform best, which landing pages convert better, and which copy captures your target audience. Experiment with layout changes, design, UX, content, and advertising channels until you find what works.

Lead Generation Statistics

HubSpot surveyed over 1,400 global marketing professionals and compiled all the findings into the 2024 State of Marketing Report. Here are some lead generation and conversion statistics from this report:

• 15% of marketers face challenges with generating traffic and leads.
• Approximately 56% of marketers use Facebook and Instagram to execute their marketing campaigns.
• 56% of marketers using TikTok for lead generation plan to increase their investment next year.
• 51% of marketers say their company worked with creators or influencers in 2023 to generate leads.
• 87% of marketers plan to continue using mobile messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger) to generate leads.
• 87% of marketers plan to maintain or increase their investment in email marketing to generate more leads in 2024.

Lead Conversion Statistics

• 17% of marketers say that short-form videos have generated strong results for their business.
• 47% of marketers say they find the most success from partnering with micro-influencers, rather than big, broad niche creators.
• 25% of marketers who had effective marketing strategies in 2023 used AI and automation tools like chatbots (as opposed to only 5% of marketers who had ineffective strategies).
• Email marketing has an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
• AI-powered personalization in marketing emails can increase ROI by up to 70%.
• 77% of marketers who use generative AI say it helps them create more personalized content, which improves lead conversion.

Lead Generation Trends & Benchmarks

So you’re getting web traffic and generating leads. But how are you doing compared to other companies in your industry?

Read on to discover what other marketers are doing with lead generation in 2024, along with important stats to consider.

Lead generation is the top marketing priority.

HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2024 found that marketers report one of their top priorities for the next 12 months is generating more leads. Converting these leads to customers is another top priority, according to SmartInsights.

Most B2B leads come from referrals.

B2B marketers say that 65% of their leads come from referrals, 38% from email, and 33% come from Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

If you’re interested in getting in on this trend, it’s worth considering revamping your referral strategy and helping existing customers bring you new leads.

Content marketing helps drive leads.

Marketers also report that content marketing has helped them successfully generate demand and leads over the past 12 months.

To get in on this trend, read this helpful blog post on creating content for different stages of the buyer's journey.

Top Content Types that Generate the Most Leads or Conversion ROI

According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, some top channels for conversion ROI include:

• Website/Blog (16%).
• Social media shopping tools (16%).
• Paid social media content (14%).
• Email marketing (14%).
• Content marketing (14%).

You can also explore more top channels for lead generation in this blog post.

Within these channels, there is also an opportunity to dig into short-form video, influencer marketing, and other trends that deliver ROI.

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Grow Better With Lead Generation

Now that you know more about how to generate leads for your business, we recommend you try HubSpot’s free lead generation tool. Use it to add simple conversion assets to your site and see what content prompts visitors to convert.

The basics we’ve gone over in this blog post are just the beginning. Keep creating great offers, CTAs, landing pages, and forms — and promote them in multi-channel environments.

Be in close touch with your sales team to make sure you’re handing off high-quality leads on a regular basis.

Last but not least, never stop testing. The more you test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

via Perfecte news Non connection