Business Lead Generation: Marketing Professionals Love These Tools

July 17, 2017

No top marketer says they got where they are today with no help at all. While achieving goals will lead to climbing the corporate ladder – and we can all look to the people who help and guide us through our careers – we tend to overlook the software and apps we use to get those results. Here are a few tools that will be especially helpful for your business. Lead generation, marketing and engagement are the lifeblood of your customer acquisition and retention efforts, so what should be in your marketing stack?

Email Automation

SharpSpring is your one-stop-shop for marketing automation. Whether you’re working on business development, lead generation or nurture campaigns, SharpSpring goes beyond the basics, integrating with other commonly-used tools and CRMs. SharpSpring allows you to customize lead generation and new business forms, create behavioral-based email automation to engage leads at critical points, and build landing pages.

“SharpSpring has helped us solve is the ability to focus our sales efforts on individuals that are truly ready to purchase our services. With SharpSpring we can focus our efforts on prospects that have spent their time researching who we are and what we do.”
– Kirk H.

Social Media

If you’re looking for a marketing tool that lets you automate social media using advanced scheduling, SproutSocial is the tool for you. Social Sprout allows you to monitor and engage with customers and others in the industry by bringing all your messages from various accounts into one single stream. The platform allows you to run several of your accounts from one dashboard, simplifying the daunting task of running multiple accounts across different platforms.

The tool also provides intuitive analytics so you can measure your performance and analyze your company’s social media results. Once you understand how your audience perceives your business, lead generation ideas can be refined to improve conversion rates through your social channels.

“Sprout allows us to post interesting articles and thoughts and then manage the comments quickly. The greatest benefit we have realized is the reporting feature. We don’t focus on followers or engagement that much but would love to put a focus on those in the future and Sprout Social will allow that to happen.”
– Janine H

Sales Intelligence

Winmo is much more than just an advertising contacts database for agencies, brands and media professionals. If you’re an agency looking for a brand, or a brand looking for an agency to work with, Winmo is the number one way to take your business leads generation process to the next level.

The platform provides access to thousands of brand, media and agency contacts, points you to decision maker job titles, and saves hours of non-sales time every week. Can get daily opportunity emails from WinmoEdge. Formerly known as DailyVista, WinmoEdge reports on business changes, marketing campaigns, and will even predict when there will be business possibilities for you. As a sales lead generation business tool, Winmo makes it easy to stay ahead of the game.

“Winmo is extremely useful for someone who works in sales (like myself.) By using Winmo, I can find pretty much any contact at any given company or agency without having to go through a typical Google or LinkedIn search. By using Winmo, I am saving hours of my work day.”
– Erin L.

Website Analytics

Google Analytics knows where you search, what ads you click and even what sites you go to – even if you don’t use Google to find them. Most websites use Google Analytics (though some use Adobe) to track visitors and visitor behavior so their experiences can be optimized. If you want it to, Google Analytics can track how many 18-24 year old foodies looked at your website last Thursday around 1pm. While all this is borderline creepy, when it comes to business lead generation, all this data at your fingertips can be very powerful.

The knowledge of when your visitors hit your site, where they live, what their interests, demographics and content consumption habits are puts you firmly in control of creating a business lead generation process to turn site visitors into customers.

There’s no point in spending a ton of time on content for a website in the hopes it will reach customers if you can’t see the results of your efforts. Google Analytics works to give you valuable insights into your customers so you can improve content and results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s difficult to talk about using Google Analytics without going into questions of keywords and search ranking. Search engine optimization is a massive sprawling subject we’re not getting into here, but you should be using SEO to help decide what content to publish.

Open Site Explorer from Moz lets you track your domain and page authority, inbound links, and provides link opportunities that can increase the search visibility of your content. If organic search traffic is a good predictor of lead generation, can your business really afford to ignore practices that will drive customers to your site?

Open Site Explorer will give you three free reports everyday, but after that you’ll have to subscribe.

Graphic Design

When you’re looking to make a quick infographic or banner, look no further than Canva. The platform is easy to use, and comes preloaded with a variety of pictures and drag-and-drop templates. Even a not-so-savvy marketer can make their visuals look like a million bucks for free with Canva. We use it here at Winmo for everything from ebooks to infographics to blog headers and social media images.

“Designers will find ready to go templates and plenty of functionality in Canva. If you’re not a designer, you’ll find can’t go wrong templates and an extremely intuitive interface – highly recommended. Someone on every marketing team should know how to use Canva.”
– SaraMarie B.

 The testimonials used in this article were originally posted on G2Crowd.

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