4 Effective Cold Lead Generation Tactics
Your cold lead generation strategy is one of the four core pillars of your entire marketing plan. It’s honestly the least important of the four, but the one that most businesses care the most about.
The entire point of your cold lead gen strategy is to fill the top of your funnel. This is the process of taking complete strangers and converting them into leads. Then, over time, you nurture those leads to convert them into prospects, then paying customers.
In slightly different terminology, lead gen is where people get to know you. Then, via your follow up strategy, they get to like and trust you. Know. Like. Trust. KLT. I’m sure you’ve seen that acronym before.
Within this cold lead generation strategy, you will deploy specific lead generation tactics. Tactics are the actual things you implement on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in order to make the strategy reach fruition.
In the current day and age, there are four specific marketing tactics that effectively generate warm leads from a cold audience than anything else. Without further ado, they are:
Educational presentations to targeted groups and organizations.
Referrals from professional service providers.
Digital content marketing.
Outbound multi-step direct response campaigns to highly targeted lists.
If you wanted to be more pithy, you could shorten the list to: Speaking, referrals, SEO/socials, Dream 100+.
These four tactics are not only “what’s working now” for companies of all sizes — from kitchen table solo practitioners to publicly traded B2B SaaS companies — but really what’s been working for decades. There is nothing particularly exciting or sexy about some of this, which surprises some entrepreneurs that are brand new to marketing stuff.
I’ll cover each of these tactics in more depth in future articles. But before then, I’d encourage you to evaluate your current marketing efforts against these four tactics.