What are leads? What is lead generation? Lead generation means turning your web visitors into qualified leads. Sounds easy, right? Lead generation has always been a challenging topic for marketers or business owners. It’s also the most frequent reason potential clients get in touch with us. That’s why we decided to share our top 3 lead generation methods with you all. But first, a little background as always to get you familiar with the different terminology.
Buyer’s journey
In a wonderful world, strangers easily find their way to your website, become qualified leads and purchase your products right away. But that’s definitely not the case today as competition is higher than ever.
To grow a business with digital marketing, first you need to understand the core steps that customers go through towards a purchase. Often referred to as the buyer’s journey, consumers complete a three-stage journey (awareness, consideration, and decision) towards a purchase.
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The four pillars of inbound marketing
The four pillars of inbound marketing are: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight.
Some marketing authorities recently merged the convert and close stages into a new Engage stage.
Therefore, today we are dealing with three pillars of inbound marketing which is far more simplified: attract, engage, delight.

According to this theory:
- First, we attract strangers so that they become website visitors.
- If we convert (engage) these visitors, they become leads (prospects), and if you close (engage) your leads, they become customers.
- Finally, when you delight your customers, they can become promoters for your business.
As digital marketers, we have a strong desire to create this never-ending cycle, constantly onboarding new customers and keeping them. Here is when Lead generation (converting visitors) comes into play within the whole process.
What is lead generation?
New to marketing? You might have difficulty understanding what a lead is. We all did!
Just take a look at one of the many meanings of the lead word by Cambridge Dictionary. This can help you understand the concept of leads.
LEAD (INFORMATION) [NOUN]: a piece of information that allows discovery to be made or a solution to be found.
This meaning is pretty self-explanatory, right? In our cases, the piece of information is usually the contact information, and discovery refers to connecting with a potential customer.
Leads are also divided into two; people interested in a product or a service can be described as marketing qualified leads. If the purchasing power supports that interest, they are sales qualified leads.
3 Best Lead Generation Methods To Generate Qualified Leads On Your Website
If you got the idea, now it’s time to move on to some practicality. Leads are vital, but how to create them? Let us explain our three favourite lead generation methods to generate high-quality leads at your website.
1- Lead Forms (Smart Calculators)
Although a simple contact form at your website might come in handy, qualified lead generation often needs more sophisticated forms. Forms that your target persona can fill in a few basic steps and get a vital piece of information in return.
Below is a perfect example from second-hand car buy & sell startup VAVACARS. They use a three-step form to value web visitors’ cars.

When you click on Value My Car, the form’s second step shows up. You provide details like model, transmission and fuel type, mileage, and plate number.
The key thing is every car owner can answer these questions. You don’t even think twice; you fill it to get your car valued at the end. By the way, the UX in these forms is spectacular.
Check out the second step of the lead form below.

In the last step, they ask for your full name, e-mail and mobile, which makes sense because once they value your car, they want to send you an offer and need your contact info.
It looks all-natural, and the forms are not looking like a lead form at all. You can see the final step of the lead form below.

These forms help the persona to solve a problem. And that’s key if you want to generate qualified leads: genuinely help your persona at your site. In return, they might give you a chance to engage with them. When engagement happens, you can finally start selling!
2- Live Chat (Conversational Marketing)
A couple of years ago, chat tools started to become overly popular. Some of these tools are plain live chat tools, but there are AI-powered bots as well.
Most chat tools ask for contact information before the conversation begins, so that’s marketing qualified lead is generated in a matter of seconds. Then you can start engaging with your prospect even further, and once you start doing that, it’s only a numbers game. You will start selling at a certain conversion rate for sure!

Startups love this type of marketing because, thanks to conversational marketing, marketers can take website visitors, easily turn them into leads and even turn these leads into customers. That means a shorter marketing funnel, fewer human resources to get the ball rolling!
3- Premium Content or Offer for lead generation
If you are an industry thought leader with extensive knowledge; you should definitely turn that know-how into small pieces of premium content such as an e-book or a white paper, industry report etc.
Place that content on your websites front page and ask for contact information in return. Alternatively, you could offer a free consultation session; that way, you might even skip the lead generation and start selling!
If one company nailed this tactic for years, it’s definitely HubSpot. HubSpot is an extensive marketing automation tool. Their target persona is often digital marketers and salespeople.
To move these kinds of people further in their funnel, they have been coming up with premium digital content in return for contact information.

They even stepped forward and built stunning certification programs for marketers. Why do you think they are putting in all these efforts?
Obviously, not for the sake of creating content but to proactively turn their site visitors into qualified leads. If someone watches 10 hours of video content, takes a certification exam, fails and retakes, that person is qualified, right?
Lead generation is a vital activity for any business out there, and as you can see from our three best methods to create leads, simplicity is the common element to pay attention to. Also, we want to underline that lead generation itself is not a complete growth strategy. You will still have to convert those leads into customers. Therefore, when you generate leads, we still encourage you to start selling if you can! Because what’s better than a lead generation is generating new business!
Struggling to generate leads? We would love to help. Get in touch today!