The best lead generation tools for technology companies

Technical companies face similar problems as traditional organizations: attracting new customers, increasing their interest in your product, and, eventually, selling it. The essential difference between the two kinds of businesses is the speed of change. As a result, they need to adjust their products to what customers need, and still, they need to sell them.

Nowadays, customers' attention is a thing that companies need to fight for. It's like a trophy that increases the critical metric of any business — revenue. That's why attracting customers' attention requires an intelligent lead generation strategy. And tools to implement it.

Lead generation strategy and the sales funnel

To make your tech company stand out in a crowded market and drive leads, create a path they can take from their concern to your product that can solve it. Take leads to the point where they are ready to start a conversation with your company and make a purchase. It's what a lead generation strategy and implementation tools can do.

Even though tech companies have to keep up with the speed of digital transformation and maintain rapid growth, the main principle is the same as for other industries. First, you need to attract prospects' attention and tell them about your product to increase brand awareness. Then, let them try your product for consideration and motivate them to make the target decision: pay for it. A successful lead generation strategy corresponds with the sales funnel:

Awareness → Consideration → Decision

A significant part of these steps is content creation and spreading. Today content is a superpower in the digital world. It includes blog posts, newsletters, social media content, webinars, and more. To attract customers to your brand, you need to put targeted content to appeal to your ideal customer. It has crucial power to motivate your target audience to decide to purchase. To create content that will generate new leads, you need to define your target audience first and find the best way to communicate with them and deliver your content.

A strategy that fits your business

A good strategy is when you get what you aim for at an affordable price. In other words, you set a goal, analyze your resources, find tools, make a plan and follow it. Then, you measure the results and decide whether you want to modify your strategy or try another one. Based on your goals and resources, you might like to use a classic lead generation strategy or try something new. Or even both at the same time. In this part, we’ll look at examples of lead generation strategies.

Building interactive landing pages

A landing page is usually built for a specific campaign. Its design can be simpler than on your main websites, but focus the content on attracting more leads and encouraging them to do the action. On your landing page, you can request more information from visitors or, on the contrary, tell them about your product updates, special offers, trials, or more. Add a button like ‘Try free’ or ‘Sign up,’ highlight the value for visitors, and include an interactive form to gather personal data for future follow-ups with your leads.

Giving good offers

Most tech companies offer free trials. But, to attract leads to your brand, offer something more than that. Consider what makes your product unique and valuable to customers and use it in your offer. It might be a free demo with your expert, product guides, YouTube channel, or blog articles. Or something else. Tell your leads about each exciting part of your product that can value them. And to you, when your leads become your customers.

Running surveys

This strategy works for both sides: your leads and your business. Ask people what kind of new software they’re searching for, what features they need, what they want to save their money on, and what solution they would pay for. Use the answers to learn your leads better, improve your product and get ideas on what you work on to offer in the future. You can build a survey on your website and share the link across channels to increase traffic.

Organizing and hosting webinars

It's an excellent opportunity to improve relationships with leads, educate them and introduce your experts. During the webinars, attendees feel more comfortable because the atmosphere is more casual and seeing the real people behind the brand name builds trust. In addition, it's beneficial for both sides (your leads and you) to ask and answer questions because each tech company exists to meet specific needs. The positive impact of webinars doesn't end with the event: you can record and re-use it to generate leads and follow up with attendees later to keep them engaged.

Lead generation tools for tech companies

Depending on the lead generation strategy (or strategies) you find the most suitable for your tech company, you'll need different tools to implement it. For example, you can use Tilda to create a beautiful landing page without any code. Then, add high-quality visual and text content, call-to-actions that correspond with your goals, and launch it.

While building a landing page needs most of your attention before launching, the strategies from the previous part of this article require you to organize the whole process. And a big time-consuming part of this process is gathering lead data and notifying them about your attractive offers, interactive surveys, webinars, and sending follow-ups. So let's look at some tools for that.

Email marketing

In 2015 research, 48% of marketers claimed that email marketing is the most effective strategy for generating leads online. Sending out newsletters via email is a well-known, classic marketing way of communication. The procedure includes gathering leads' information, at least names and email addresses, creating content, and sending it out.

In reality, though, emails meet problems that can ruin your lead generation strategy and waste your time. It's not only wrong email addresses or a spam folder where many emails get in but, most importantly, low rates. For example, in 2022 research, the open email rate is 30.35%, and the click rate is 1.11%. So no matter how good your product or offer is, most leads won't even open an email. And no matter how strong a call-to-action in your email is because the majority of people won't see or click it.

That's why marketers who use email for lead generation have similar concerns: how to increase the open email rate and improve email deliverability, and can a newsletter software, platform, or service help with that. But low email marketing performance doesn't mean you have to choose a different lead generation strategy. Instead, you only need to select another tool. And use it to boost your lead generation.

CRM or customer relationship management

CRM is a mix of techniques and technologies. The goal is to build and generate more leads, improve customer relationships by analyzing customer data, and identify sales opportunities. A CRM system gathers customer data for marketing campaigns from different channels: a company website, social networks, email, and more. That data includes customer personal information, preferences, and concerns.

Managing tons of information about leads isn’t easy, especially when it comes to analyzing and tracking this data for lead generation. CRM platforms help to deal with data massive. But even there’s still a problem with using it properly. Software sometimes can’t create a report based on such different data, which goes to employees. So that, instead of bringing value, a data overdose can make lead generation based on CRM unsuccessful.

When it comes to lead generation, knowing the target audience is essential. CRM software works well to gather data for analytics. But lead generation doesn’t stop learning the audience because you need to move leads through the sales funnel to the final step: making a purchase decision.

Scheduled messages and automated Facebook Messenger

You probably have heard about chatbots for Facebook Messenger and other platforms. According to Statista, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide, with roughly 2.93 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2022. It takes Messenger bot marketing to an entirely new level. You don't have to worry about the email addresses in your CRM, spam folders, and low click and open rates.

After Meta expanded its messaging features, it's now more convenient for businesses and customers. Now, users can subscribe to the topics they're interested in and choose the frequency of receiving those messages from companies that can now send proactive, relevant, and personalized messages. To create your own automated marketing channel, you can use Broadcasts by Chatfuel, an official partner of Meta (https://bit.ly/3P9c3s1).

It is similar to its well-known chatbots but offers predictive segmentation that helps you deliver relevant information in a few clicks — daily, weekly, or monthly. Plus, you don't need to gather and store each lead's email address and name since all their details are available on their Facebook Page. You can now craft and send instant broadcasts via Messenger with open and click rates at least 80% higher than email.

Once you learn your audience better, you can segment it and send different broadcasts to different groups of leads. For example, send attractive offers to warm leads or tell more about your brand to those who are just getting familiar with your brand. Or, invite different people to your webinars with various topics and dates. Broadcasts can also share your regular product updates, industry news, events, and special offers. Besides, you can run surveys and collect feedback and use this info to improve your business.

Generating more leads for your tech company

Whether your tech company provides services or sells software, attracting customers is the key to growth and expansion. While you constantly develop your product, lead generation strategies and tools do the same. Once you find the best solution for your growing business, you keep your sales funnel full.

What lead generation strategy and tools work best for your brand?
What are your criteria and goals?