Lead Generation, defined as the action or process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for business products or services, is a significant part of a digital marketer’s work. That is to say, a digital marketer should identify his/her ideal buyers and cultivate his/her potential customers regardless of the challenges brought by the crowded vendor panorama, the fast-multiplying, and constant-changing online channels and the interrupted connection to the target audiences.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to identify ideal buyers:

• Do a complete research on current clients.
• Dig out more information about the shared customers from competitors. Without a doubt, the more a digital marketer knows about the ideal buyers, the more valuable leads can be dug out from the specific and precise channels.

Promoting a product or a service is a process to educate people what it is and how it works, so when speaking of cultivating potential customers, a digital marketer should consider how to deliver the ideas to the target groups without being noticed. Therefore, to make the job easier, using some content curation tools could make your job easier.

Shortly, digital marketers should equip themselves with some suitable and powerful "weapons" to fulfill their business targets.

In this article, let’s take a glance at the "weapon" list: 10 of the best lead generation tools.

1 – SurveyMonkey
2 – Ahrefs
3 – SEM rush
4 – MobileMonkey
5 – Hunter.io
6 – Octoparse
7 – HubSpot’s Blog topic generator
8 – Feedlyblog
9 – Blog Post Templates
10 – Visual Website Optimizer

1 – SurveyMonkey -Get to know your current clients

SurveyMonkey is a questionnaire software that helps with getting feedback from current clients and enhance the interaction with them. After getting enough data, digital marketers can build the customer model, guiding the next marketing activities.

SurveyMonkey provides a free version with limited services:
*10 questions
*100 respondents
*15 question types
*Light theme customization and templates

2 – Ahrefs - Learn the key words form your competitor

Ahrefs is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool that can help audit the situation of one's website and find out the competitors’ keywords. Digital marketers might get some hints from the auto-generated report and find the best direction for their marketing plan.

Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free version but gives an extra 2-month period for annual billing. The functions of the paid version (From $99.95 per month) are:

Rank Tracker
*Site Audit
*Site Explorer
*Content Explorer
*Keywords Explorer
*Alerts

3–SEMrush - optimize your site to get more organic traffic

SEMrush is an SEO tool that focuses more on website self-checking. With it, we can quickly locate the problems of the sites, like broken links, incorrect tabs, and so on. Google spider would love to rank you higher for the ongoing website optimization.

Same as Ahrefs, SEMrush only offers paid versions (From $99.95 per month). It provides:

Branded reports
Historical Data
Extended limits
White-label reports
API access
Extended limits and sharing options
Google Data Studio Integration
.....

4–Mailchimp- leads generation with email marketing

Based on 2018 data, email marketing, the old fashion way, still works effectively for marketing today. Despite the reasons, it’s much important to figure out how an email marketing automation platform, like MailChimp, brings more business leads.

Digital marketers can use Mailchimp to cover the whole process of a marketing campaign by scheduling emails or setting up trigger emails or Drip-Feed emails.

specifically, for the e-Commerce business, MailChimp is available for link tracking, offering a relatively complete report on the total orders and the average revenue brought by the email campaign.

Mailchimp offers a robust free version for customizing the layout of an email and conducting small-scale (up to 2000 email could be sent once) marketing promotion:

*7 marketing channels
*1-click automation
*Basic templates
*Marketing CRM

Email automation is only one of the automation ways to make our promotion process more efficient. Actually, we can try more automation tools, like MobileMonkey’s free chatbot tools, to serve our client better.

5–hunter.io - Find the email of the ideal buyers

Before using Mailchimp for email marketing, hunter.io is an excellent tool to help find the right person’s email to reach out. It’s a browser extension (available for Chrome and Firefox) that can be installed quickly and added on. Though it might not be able to show every single email with complete career and personal information, it would be a good start.

Hunter.io provides a free version that provides:

Limited requests

• Campaigns
• Check more information about the paid version https://hunter.io/pricing.

6–Octoparse - Capture emails/phone numbers for lead generation

Octoparse is a web scraping tool that helps with capturing data from target websites by simply clicking.

Easy: Task Template Mode provides pre-setup crawlers for every user to use.

Flexible: Advanced Mode is designed for complicated websites and designated data. Example: scrape required data from Yelp.com.

Octoparse free version covers almost all the functions but the cloud extraction. Compared with the price of the other web scraping tools, like Mozenda and Import.io, Octoparse offers more affordable paid versions (From $19 per month).

Octoparse free version covers:

*Unlimited pages per crawl
*Unlimited computers
*10,000 records per export
*2 concurrent local runs
*10 Crawlers
*Community and email support

7 – HubSpot’s Blog topic generator-Attract your target group with attractive and appealing topics

HubSpot’s Blog topic generator, as its name indicates, helps digital marketers with raising product-relative issues to appeal target groups and then educate them further.

Additionally, Octoparse could be regarded as a topic generator as well. For example, use the Octoparse task template to capture the search result of the keywords. The list could inspire you a lot for a topic generation.

8 – Feedlyblog - Content curation

Generate topics with HubSpot’s Blog topic generator (or Octoparse) and curate the content with Feedlyblog. Feedlyblog also offers some hints to help with using their product, such as 8 Ways to Streamline Your Curation Process.

9 – Blog Post Templates

If a digital marketer works for a startup or small business with a limited budget, blog post templates could be extremely cost-effective and productive.

Recommended templates are here>> https://offers.hubspot.com/blog-post-templates

10 – Visual Website Optimizer - Run A/B testing

Visual Website Optimizer is a user-friendly tool, featuring the point-and-click test designer. Besides, Visual Website Optimizer is a flexible multivariate testing software as well.

Final thoughts:

Get B2B leads overnight? Barely possible.
It could take a relatively long curve, like months or even years before momentum takes over. Though it’s a stringent process, digital marketers can always ease themselves with lead generation tools.

Author: Erika