13 Proven Marketing Hacks to Generate Guaranteed Leads

Do you want to grow your business rapidly? Want to learn how to use digital marketing hacks to generate more leads?

Marketing has become extremely competitive in recent years. In every niche, you’ll find brands that sell similar products and lookalike features within a similar price range.

And if you do what others are doing in your industry, you won’t achieve your brand’s true potential.

With all the noise and competition around you, finding new and creative ways to capture your audience’s attention can be extraordinarily challenging.

So how do you build a healthy lead generation pipeline to ensure rapid business growth?

In this post, I’ll share 13 digital marketing tips that will give you a leg up over the competition and help you improve your lead generation.

You can click on any of the hacks linked below to jump directly to that section.

1. Use Various Growth Marketing Tactics to Get Leads
2. Leverage Video Marketing
3. Spread the Word With Influencer Marketing
4. Use Ads to Reach Goals Faster
5. Focus on the Data
6. Always Test Your Campaigns
7. Be Informed About the Latest in Marketing
8. Use FOMO to Improve Lead Generation
9. Introduce a Freemium Pricing Model
10. Host Webinars and Online Workshops
11. Start an Affiliate Marketing Program
12. Go All Out with Content Marketing
13. Give Out Lead Magnets for Free

1. Use Multiple Tactics to Get Leads

Generating quality leads is the #1 priority for most small business owners. If you aren’t generating leads for your website, metrics like website traffic or ranking on the search engine results page don’t mean anything.

Here are 3 marketing hacks that you can use to capture leads on your website.

Use Popups to Entice Visitors

On average, popups convert between 1-8%. Some OptinMonster customers report improving their conversion rate by as much as 600%.

With popups, you can convert casual visitors into leads before they decide to drop off. OptinMonster offers powerful triggers and targeting features to help you personalize your popups for higher conversions.

For instance, triggering an Exit-Intent® popup can help you recover customers who are about to leave your website or abandon their shopping carts.

Here’s an example from Rich Page, a conversion rate optimization (CRO) expert, who used OptinMonster to create an interactive popup. The campaign improved his website conversions by 225%.

Run Giveaway Contests

Giving away a freebie that your audience wants or running an online competition is an excellent growth marketing hack to help you generate leads in bulk.

At OptinMonster, we have witnessed this first-hand. When we were preparing to launch our annual Black Friday marketing campaign in 2020, we wanted to get more people to participate in the sale and improve our revenue.

We decided to use RafflePress to run an online giveaway contest. RafflePress is the best, beginner-friendly giveaway plugin for WordPress websites.

Here’s a quick summary of the social media campaign we created to promote the Black Friday sale:

1. First, we created an offer we knew our audience would love: a chance to win a brand-new 13-inch Macbook Pro.
2. To enter the giveaway contest, people had 2 options:
   1. They either had to share the contest on social media platforms.
   2. Or, they could refer a friend from their network.

As a result, we achieved amazing results with the campaign:

• 24,372 contest entries
• 3,500 new users
• 3X increase in our email list

Running giveaway contests or online quizzes is like managing your lead generation in automation. You just have to set it up once and see the leads flow through the website.

You too can create a giveaway like this with RafflePress. It also has bonus entry actions you can use to increase your leads.

For example, participants can get extra giveaway entries for completing specific tasks like signing up for your email list, referring a friend, or liking your page on Facebook.

Make Use of Gated Content

Do you have high-quality long-form content, such as an ebook, white paper, or other downloadables published on your website? If yes, you can use them as a marketing hack to generate qualified leads.

You simply have to put them behind a lead capture form that requires visitors to sign up with their contact information in exchange for the download.

The content that you behind sign-up forms or paywalls is called gated content or lead magnets. We’ll cover how to create lead magnets in more detail in just a bit.

HubSpot uses its buyer persona templates as a piece of gated content in its resource library. Marketers have to sign up with HubSpot to download the templates. Then they can easily develop buyer personas from one of the templates instead of starting everything from scratch.

To create a great offer like this, you first should know your audience and where they are in the customer journey.

For more ideas like these, read our guide about proven growth hacking strategies. Or, check out how to create a paywall to reserve premium content for paying subscribers.

2. Leverage Video Marketing

Video is one of the most popular forms of media across the board. Over 90% of marketers admit that using videos helps their brands increase website conversions and generate more leads.

Video marketing is a powerful tool that’s growing in popularity. Research shows that 68% of people would rather learn about a new product or service from a short video than other mediums.

Here’s a great video marketing hack from Marketo. One of its landing pages offers visitors the option to watch demo videos in exchange for a sign-up.

This is great not only for lead generation but also will make the follow-up and closing of the sale more personalized.

But have you wondered what makes some videos more successful than others? The key differentiator is visual storytelling.

Animoto provides the following tips that can help you tell your business’ story more effectively:

• Craft an easy-to-understand script with a simple call-to-action (CTA).
• Use a character in your video to make your storytelling more effective.
• Break up the video into a beginning, a middle, and an end to make it easy to follow.
• Conclude it with a clear CTA for the viewers to act on.

This short video ad from Barbie uses storytelling to enforce that the viewer ‘Can Be Anything.’

3. Spread the Word With Influencer Marketing

According to Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising report, 71% of buyers trust ads, opinions, and product placements from influencers.

Influencer marketing is a great way to earn your audience’s trust by using a face and name that they recognize and admire.

But it’s crucial that you identify the right influencer for your audience. For example, if you’re running a makeup business like Revlon, a celebrity such as Emma Stone could be a convincing influencer to your audience.

On the other hand, it makes more sense to use Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk as influencers for your enterprise-focused software startup.

To help you identify the ideal influencers for your campaign, you can leverage growth hacking tools such as BuzzSumo, Tagger, or Afluencer.

Related Content: See our ultimate guide to growth hacking to find out the shortcuts Groupon, Airbnb, and Dropbox used to skyrocket their success.

4. Use Ads to Reach Goals Faster

Advertising doesn’t have to be expensive, especially if you invest in pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

PPC ads or ‘paid search’ lets you place various ad formats on search platforms, such as Google or Bing, paying the platform each time someone clicks the ad.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can take a long time to get you the organic results you want. But if you run targeted Google ads, for example, you can keep down your marketing costs and get faster results.

Here are a couple of marketing hacks to use paid search to your advantage.

Create Your Search Ads

You’ll lose a lot of money if you don’t have a proper PPC campaign strategy. While the exact steps to create a PPC ad campaign vary by the platform, here are the most common steps you can follow to create ads on search engines such as Google:

• Set goals on what you want to achieve such as brand awareness, website traffic, or lead generation.
• Include the right keywords to attract the right audience. Use a keyword research tool to identify the best keywords.
• Write your ad copy, use suitable images or videos, and craft a compelling CTA.

For more tips on crafting the best PPC ad campaign, read our guide on PPC best practices to get the most out of your marketing budget.

Create Conversion-Optimized Landing Pages

Once visitors click your ad, the page that they land on can either make or break your campaign. A landing page is often one of the first impressions your prospect will have of your brand.

Optimizing your offer, messaging, and CTA on this page is very important for maximizing your ad ROI.

You’ll lose your time and money if there’s a mismatch between your paid search ads and the landing page that it links to. Consistency and message match are essential characteristics of an optimized search ad.

Justin Rondeau, a PPC expert, suggests the following:

“Make sure your copy (on your landing page) answers these 3 questions within the first 5 seconds of a page load:

• Who you are
• What you’re offering
• Why that matters to the visitor

If you can do this, then most of the heavy lifting is done.”

Want more tips on creating the perfect landing page? You can go through the following resources to improve your landing page conversions:

• Anatomy of the Perfect Optin Landing Page (Tips & Best Practices)
• Landing Page Ideas That Are Strikingly Simple (and Actually Work)
• Landing Page Optimization: 7 Best Practices and 5 Case Studies
• 10 Expert Tips for Writing Landing Page Copy that Converts

5. Focus on the Data

Being data-driven in marketing is important, especially when you consider that leading marketers are 58% more likely to use analytics compared to others.

As a start, you can use SeedProd to build your campaign-specific landing page. SeedProd offers native integration with Google Analytics, major email service providers, and Zapier which makes it easy for you to track your landing page performance.

Other tools such as Google Analytics, Heap Analytics, and Mixpanel can help you understand your real-time and historical website data, traffic attribution, and the ROI from your ongoing marketing efforts.

6. Always Test Your Campaigns

A/B testing is a crucial part of an effective marketing strategy. It allows your brand to bank on data to make important business decisions.

You’ll need to always test and optimize your campaigns to offer a delightful user experience and yield the best results. A/B testing allows you to compare multiple versions of a page to determine which one converts better.

You can test only one element within a campaign, such as longer copy versus shorter copy, images versus videos, and red versus blue CTA button. Or, you can test between 2 campaigns to track which one gets more views, clicks, and signups.

You should run the test until you reach conclusive evidence on what works best. A/B testing works not just on your website, ads, or landing pages, but also for your popup campaigns.

The importance of A/B testing is indisputable. In most cases, changing something as small as the placement of your popup or the headline copy gets you drastic results.

Here’s one such example from Escola EDTI. The Brazilian management firm used OptinMonster to split test their popup’s color variations and increased their conversions by 500%!

Similarly, Logic Inbound split tested its free trial optin copy which improved its conversions by 1500%.

7. Be Informed About the Latest in Marketing

Staying up to date with relevant marketing trends in your industry is a digital marketing hack that doesn’t get talked about much.

But have you heard about Facebook’s new Creator Studio? How about the latest with Amazon programmatic advertising?

The above are growth hacking examples that are popular among marketers. It’s helpful to stay on top of them if you don’t want to miss out on something that may help you generate more leads.

At OptinMonster, we publish blogs that offer practical tips to boost your site’s conversions. You can subscribe to OptinMonster blogs to get free conversion optimization tips and resources directly in your inbox.

There are plenty of other resources sharing the latest and greatest in marketing. Here are 8 growth-related blogs to get you started that regularly share valuable information and insights as it breaks:

• Moz
• MarTech
• Hootsuite
• Kissmetrics
• Digital Marketer
• Search Engine Land
• Social Media Examiner
• Content Marketing Institute

To know more about the latest marketing trends, you might want to read the mind-blowing digital marketing statistics to learn from.

8. Use FOMO to Improve Lead Generation

‘FOMO’ stands for the fear of missing out, a psychological trigger that compels people to take action when faced with scarce or fleeting opportunities.

In marketing, FOMO taps into people’s emotional responses triggered by the potential loss of a valuable opportunity by creating a sense of exclusivity, scarcity, and limited-time offers.

FOMO works like a charm when you use it right. According to research:

• Nearly 7 in 10 (69%) of millennials experience FOMO, the most of any age group.
• 92% of buyers go through product reviews before making a purchase.
• Households with incomes above $75,000 a year are most likely to experience FOMO. They are also the most likely to share their experiences on social media with the intent of creating a sensation in others.

If you want to improve your lead generation with FOMO, you need to create urgency-based campaigns, such as:

• Flash Sales
• Social Proof
• Exclusive Access
• VIP Memberships
• Limited-Time Offers
• Influencer Partnerships
• User-Generated Content

Here are 3 examples of real-life brands that have used FOMO in their marketing campaigns to generate more leads.

Human Food Bar generates 1800+ monthly email subscribers by using countdown timer popups like this:

DateID offers its users a chance to upgrade their subscription plan to a Gold Membership, but adds a sense of urgency with the countdown timer. Their campaigns built on OptinMonster have yielded a 175% email list growth.

And at OptinMonster, we use social proof in our optin campaign to grow our email list.

Want to learn more about how to leverage FOMO to create urgency in customers? Here are 3 resources to help you get started:

• 25+ Powerful FOMO Statistics to Skyrocket Sales
• How to Use Urgency Words to Improve Your Conversions
• Unlock the Power of FOMO: 17 Clever FOMO Marketing Examples

9. Introduce a Freemium Pricing Model

Freemium is a pricing model that online businesses use to offer products with basic features for free while charging money for products that have more advanced features.

The best freemium products give customers enough features that they can use to get hooked on and make them want to upgrade to higher plans with more advanced features.

For example, HubSpot gives the basic version of its CRM completely free for users. But users feel the need to upgrade once they start to see results and exceed the limitations in the freemium product.

Freemium is not just great at improving your free trial conversion rates, but it’s also a genius marketing hack that can help you improve your free-to-paid conversions.

10. Host Webinars and Online Workshops

Hosting webinars and workshops can establish your brand as an authority in your niche, attract a targeted audience, and generate leads in bulk.

Research shows that webinars are highly effective in improving brand awareness and generating leads. According to the findings:

• Webinars retain 40% of viewers’ attention.
• Between 2–5% of webinar attendees will buy something at the end of a webinar.
• Between 20–40% of webinar attendees become qualified leads.

To make your online event successful, identify topics that your audience will be interested in. You can use platforms like Zoom or GoToWebinar to host your events.

Promote these events through email campaigns, social media, and partnerships with influencers in your industry.

At OptinMonster, we host live free webinars every Wednesday on topics ranging from lead generation to email marketing, topics that are relevant to our target audience.

Pro-tip: Want to know how to create a webinar marketing strategy? Here’s everything you need to know about leveraging webinars for lead generation.

11. Start an Affiliate Marketing Program

An affiliate program is a marketing strategy that lets online businesses partner with 3rd-party partners, known as affiliates, to promote their products. Investing in an affiliate program for your business means letting your most loyal customers share your success.

The return on investment (ROI) for an affiliate marketing program is also great because you only have to pay your affiliates if you actually make a sale.

For businesses that haven’t dabbled with an affiliate program before, starting one sounds a bit complicated. But setting up an affiliate program is easier than you think.

You can use affiliate tracking tools such as ThirstyAffiliates, AffiliateWP, or AffJet to manage your affiliate partners, track your campaigns, and handle payments.

For an in-depth understanding of how to create an affiliate program from scratch, read our guide on what is an affiliate program and how to create one.

12. Go All Out with Content Marketing

Content marketing means promoting your business with content, such as blogs, ebooks, podcasts, videos, or even social media marketing.

Content is one of the most popular marketing tools because of how effective it is. According to research by Content Marketing Institute, 57% of businesses they surveyed use content to generate more sales while 64% of them leverage it to nurture leads.

Content marketing can help you elevate your online presence and generate a steady stream of leads. But for your brand to succeed with content, you first need a thought-through content marketing strategy.

With a good content strategy, you can:

• Improve Brand Awareness: Quality content can increase organic traffic to your site, exposing your brand to a wider audience.
• Build Trust with Your Audience: Regularly posting valuable content makes your brand a thought leader in your industry.
• Boost SEO Efforts: Search engines favor brands that publish high-quality content consistently since content is a powerful ranking factor in SEO.
• Generate Leads: Content marketing helps generate leads by providing potential customers with the information they need to make informed decisions.

13. Give Out Lead Magnets for Free

Many businesses use lead magnets on their websites to grow email lists. They are also one of the best ways to acquire more leads online.

A lead magnet is a valuable piece of content that businesses provide to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses. It can be an ebook, a template, an infographic, or other downloadable that you have published on your site.

Generating leads is a breeze when you have the perfect lead magnet. And Beacon is the perfect lead magnet tool that can help you do exactly that. Beacon is a user-friendly tool that offers 3 products to help you acquire more customers:

• Lead Magnet Creator to create ebooks, checklists, or workbooks without hiring an expensive designer.
• Lead Capture Forms to build highly customizable lead-gen forms on your best-performing landing pages.
• Free Resource Library to create a library of gated content without any technical setup.

The Lead Magnet Creator comes with a drag-and-drop builder and multiple templates to save you time. The Lead Capture Forms also handles the content delivery to customers and lets you track conversions from Beacon’s dashboard.

And you can use the Free Resource Library to create a library of lead magnet content within 23 seconds!

Want to learn how to create the perfect lead magnet for your business? Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a lead magnet (with examples).

If you aren’t sure about what lead magnet ideas to offer, check out our guide of lead magnet ideas to grow your email list.

What Marketing Hacks Will You Try?

These marketing hacks are only half the story if you never apply them to your campaigns.

Take a look at your ongoing marketing efforts that aren’t giving you desired outcomes. Replace them with one of the hacks we discussed in this post. Or look for ways to incorporate new ideas to hack your marketing for generating more leads.

Want to start with the simplest marketing hack to get more leads on your website? Create engaging popups that grab people’s attention and make them want to sign up for your email newsletter. Get started with OptinMonster today.

Published by Manish Nepal

Hi, I'm a writer and content marketer with 10+ years of experience. Over the years, I have helped several B2B SaaS brands grow their online presence and get more customers. At OptinMonster, I write about all things marketing — ranging from how-to guides to the best-of tools to help you improve your email marketing, lead generation, and website conversion campaigns.

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.