10 Lead Generation Trends to Watch in 2023

If you look back at the previous decade in marketing, you can get an idea of how quickly things are moving these days. Trends have come and gone, some of them have transformed the way lead generation works (e.g.: automation) and others have flopped harder than Google Glass (remember the beacon revolution?).

In fact, my favourite thing about trends is how many of them are doomed to fail and I think I’ve developed a pretty good eye for spotting the ones that are going to stick around – although, I’m not sure it’s all that difficult.

So, in this article, I’m looking at lead generation trends that actually matter and I promise there’s no mention of this being the year of voice search, VR marketing or chatbots (again).

Which lead generation trends matter now?

The thing with trends is they come and go and the lifecycle of these things seems to be getting shorter every year. I count this as something positive because bogus trends are called out sooner and the hype dies down faster.

What we’re left with is lead generation strategies that are actually going to make a positive impact on the volume and quality of leads you’re able to capture.

Here are ten good examples:

1. Account-based marketing is the new normal for B2B brands.
2. Hyper-personalisation might sound like a buzzword but I’ll explain why this is the real deal.
3. On-page lead qualification.
4. Automated marketing and sales integration.
5. Community-based marketing.
6. Multimedia thought leadership.
7. Featured snippets are where the SEO battles are won and lost.
8. Page experience as a ranking signal makes UX all the more important.
9. Making GDPR compliance usable.
10. Maximising customer lifetime value.

My basic formula for assessing marketing trends is to look at the technology currently available, how users actually used said technology and what problems this combination could potentially solve.

For example, if people aren’t using voice search to buy products in significant numbers, there’s no way for tech giants like Google to successfully implement ads and users can’t somehow view images or compare prices, voice search clearly isn’t ready to change the way people shop online.

So let’s move on to some lead generation trends that are becoming increasingly important.

#1: Account-based marketing is the new normal for B2B brands

In the 2019 ABM Benchmark Survey Report from Demand Gen Report, 94% of B2B marketers questioned in the survey said they’re engaged in account-based marketing, up from 47% in the 2016 version of the same report.

Half of respondents said their AMB strategies have been in place for more than a year while another 25% have been engaged in ABM between 6-12 months.

Interestingly, 46% of those asked in the survey said they’re confident they have identified their target customer profiles while admitting there’s still room for improvement, particularly in terms of coverage.

These stats tell us that account-based marketing is the new normal for B2B brands. There’s been a lot of talk about this over the past few years but AMB is a genuine growth tactic – one that’s not going to fade away like dozens of buzzwords that crop up every year.

So what are B2B brands actually buying into with account-based marketing?

According to HubSpot, “Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalised buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.”

The key phrases in that definition are growth, marketing and sales, personalised experiences and high-value accounts.

AMB exists because B2B businesses have a long history of casting wide nets with their marketing efforts, launching campaigns with broad, anonymous target audiences and then simply passing leads over to sales teams.

There are a number of problems with this:

• Lead quality varies greatly
• Customer value also varies (many simply aren’t worth pursuing)
• Your marketing and sales goals are misaligned
• Your sales team has to work incredibly hard to close deals
• You invest a lot in leads that never materialise
• Some of the leads that do materialise don’t generate enough ROI

With account-based marketing, you define a list of target customers and profiles, based on the value they will add to your business. You then focus your resources on capturing these prospects as leads, knowing that every success will achieve your ROI targets.

By targeting high-value prospects, your marketing and sales teams are both working towards the same goal: securing customers that will generate the most profit for your business. You’re no longer running campaigns that aim to generate the highest amount of leads; you’re running campaigns to generate the most profitable leads.

Best of all, you’ve already qualified these leads so your sales team only puts resources into potential customers that are truly worth the investment.

#2: Hyper-personalisation drives customer experiences

Crossing over into B2C marketing for a moment, one of the most significant trends making traction right now is hyper-personalisation. While this is a relatively new trend for consumer-focused brands, it’s a strategy that B2B businesses should take a serious look at, too, especially with the greater emphasis on personalisation that comes with account-based marketing.

In fact, towards the end of 2019, I wrote a previous article looking at B2C hyper-personalisation examples that B2B brands should learn from.

Take a look at the top priorities marketers cite for their hyper-personalisation strategies and you’ll perfectly align with the concepts of account-based marketing, customer experience (CX) and effective lead nurturing.

Examples of B2C hyper-personalisation range from the likes of Stitch Fix, which delivers personalised clothing and outfit packages to customers based on their style preferences, to software platforms like Spotify that not only offers personal recommendations but also encourages deep account customisation to keep users locked in.

Now, let me take a moment to acknowledge how much hype there is around personalisation. This is a buzzword concept marketers love talking about without actually providing any useful examples, data, implementations or strategies.

When I first heard the phrase hyper-personalisation I actually laughed out loud (genuine lols) because it just sounds like a poor attempt of making personalisation sound new and exciting.

I mean it’s even got the word “hype” in it, for crying out loud.

So I’m not a fan of the phrase itself but, when you analyse what the strategy actually involves, things start to make a lot of sense.

Last year, a report from SmarterHQ revealed that 72% of consumers now only engage with personalised marketing messages that are tailored to their interests. The same report also found that 86% of consumers are concerned about their data privacy.

Previous studies have also found that, despite security concerns, people are willing to exchange their personal data for personalised offers. In one study, 90% of respondents said they were willing to share their behavioural data if it results in cheaper prices and easier shopping experiences.

The message is clear: people want personalisation and they’re willing to hand over their data in exchange for it – as long as the reward and experience justify it.

Hyper-personalisation provides a truly individual experience that improves as users provide more of their behavioural data. The result is more relevant clothing recommendations, suggested playlists, movie recommendations and purchase advice.

In the case of a brand like Stitch Fix, users receive a 100% personalised experience and they understand all of the data they submit contributes to improved experiences. There’s no issue here with data privacy issues because the entire business model revolves around data exchange and people uncomfortable with this would never sign up in the first place.

Software brands can learn a lot from the likes of Spotify, too, which encourages heavy account customisation, to the point where it becomes difficult to imagine leaving. The thought of losing all those playlists you’ve created, albums you’ve saved and artists you’ve followed makes $9.99 feel like a measly fee.

In contrast, it’s easy to ditch the Netflix subscription because you haven’t invested hours upon hours into customising the platform. You lose nothing by hitting the pause button or cancelling your subscription entirely.

SaaS and software companies, take note.

#3: On-page lead qualification

Going back to a concept we touched on in this first section, marketing strategies always generate a percentage of “leads” that don’t have any value to your business. There are all kinds of reasons you might end up with unwanted prospects on your lists, for example:

• They don’t match any of your target buyer personas
• They don’t live in a country your business operates in.
• They don’t have the authority to make purchase decisions.
• They won’t spend enough to generate a reasonable ROI.
• They were never interested in buying from you in the first place – e.g.: someone who downloads your content for research purposes only.

The list could go on. It all depends on what you require from a lead for it to be worth pursuing.

Lead qualification is the process of vetting prospects to determine which ones deserve a place on your list of leads. I’ve discussed this topic in detail in previous blog posts but the point I want to make here is that effective lead qualification can be tricky.

Manually qualifying leads is unworkable and even automated solutions rely on collecting enough data to make informed decisions. Capturing this data is a challenge and you have to find the right balance between positive UX and data capture through your lead generation strategies.

One solution is to create a friction-free sign-up process and push leads for more information after they’ve signed up. The problem is, this relies on users actually providing the follow-up data you need before you can determine whether they’re worth your time and effort.

The other option is to forget about friction and demand the data you need upon sign-up, knowing that some prospects will refuse to sign up as a result.

Luckily, there is a third option that allows you to capture the data you need for qualifying leads while maintaining a positive user experience.

We use Leadformly to create multi-step forms that capture user information while prospects sign up and send this data to our CRM platform (ActiveCampaign), which automatically qualifies leads, as soon as they hit the submit button.

Our forms use a technology called conditional logic, which filters out irrelevant questions based on the information users provide. So users only answer see the questions that matter to them and we’re able to ask all of the questions we need without hurting UX.

We also reduce typing load with image buttons and a range of other techniques to reduce negative friction but the key point here is lead qualification.

This implementation allows us to automatically qualify leads on our website so our lists are filled with high-value leads and nothing else.

#4: Automated marketing and sales integration

Going back to the 2019 ABM Benchmark Survey Report we looked at earlier, respondents say their biggest challenge with account-based marketing is aligning their marketing and sales efforts.

Of course, this challenge doesn’t only affect account-based marketing, either. Any company with dedicated marketing and sales teams faces this challenge and we’ve already addressed a number of the difficulties this poses.

One benefit of account-based marketing is that it forces you to align marketing and sales (as they should be) but many companies simply never address their mismatched marketing and sales efforts.

This means your marketing strategies are going to generate a higher volume of leads that never materialise and your sales team is going to spend significantly more time trying to close deals.

First, you’re going to need a software system that allows you to integrate your marketing and sales processes. This means a customer relationship management (CMS) system with integrated email marketing, sales and marketing automation.

This automation will bring your marketing and sales efforts together.

Take a look at our in-depth guide to the best CRM platforms for every business type to find the right platform for your business.

In the last section, we looked at how you can use Leadformly to qualify leads as they complete your forms by feeding this data into a CRM platform like ActiveCampaign which will automatically viable leads to relevant lists for your sales team – no manual action is needed at all.

This means your sales team only receives leads that have genuine potential, which means less time wasted on prospects that will never convert or simply aren’t worthwhile. As you can see from the sample workflow above, you can also automate lead statuses for sales reps, send instant and timed email responses and send notifications to sales teams so they’re always up-to-date.

One of the biggest challenges with aligning marketing and sales processes is knowing where one ends and the other begins. Most of your leads aren’t ready to buy at the first interactions and require some nurturing until they’re ready to make the purchase and you’re confident the purchase is worth enough to pursue.

At this point, your sales team needs to know when to jump in at the right moment and take over.

With the right workflow, you can automate this process, too – as illustrated above. So when prospects complete an action that signifies purchase intent, the status of the lead/deal is updated automatically. You can also apply qualifiers to ensure the deal is worth a certain amount before your sales team is notified and told to step in.

If the deal isn’t worth enough yet, your automated lead nurturing campaigns will continue to work the lead until the deal hits your value target.

#5: Community marketing

Community marketing as a concept has been around for years but few brands have really taken the lead with this strategy. Sure, you could argue LinkedIn, Quora and Facebook groups are forms of community marketing but the brand presence is all-too-often overshadowed by discussion.

According to AdRoll, “Community marketing is a brand growth strategy centred around bringing customers together over a topic that is aligned with, or directly related to, a brand in an engaging and non-intrusive way that puts customers first.”

So how do implement a community marketing strategy that puts customers first while still putting the brand in a position of influence?

SEMrush is currently my favourite example of a company that nails community marketing. This is noticeably the most active account I follow on Twitter and it seems like the company engages with every tweet, retweet and mention of its brand.

It doesn’t matter how influential you are in the industry or how many followers you’ve got, SEMrush will engage with you.

Now, a lot of these tweets are superficial mentions of the company’s software or its content and I’m sure these likes are automated. But, the point is, SEMrush engages with people and this encourages people to interact with its brand. After all, people like me who follow SEMrush are going to see these liked tweets and everybody benefits from the exposure.

SEMrush has built its own engagement community on Twitter and the reach is impressive.

SEMrush feeds this reach back into its community and you can see the results when it holds one of its weekly #SEMrushchat sessions on Twitter. Once a week, my feed is filled with people answering the questions posed by SEMrush with experts and community members weighing in with their advice and experiences.

The community clearly comes first and SEMrush works hard to engage with every member but it also manages to keep its brand centre stage without ever pushing its product.

Everyone knows what its software platform has to offer and the company simply keeps the product at the forefront of everyone’s mind while providing genuine advice and insights for its community.

#6: Multimedia thought leadership

According to the 2020 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, published by Edelman and LinkedIn, 89% of business decision-makers say thought leadership is effective at improving their perception of a brand.

To add a little more context, 90% of respondents said thought leadership increases their respect for organisations while 89% said their perception of the brand’s capabilities increase and 89% also said they trust brands more that produce convincing thought leadership content.

So thought leadership is an important strategy but publishing content on LinkedIn isn’t enough to demonstrate your authority.

Thought leadership is a multimedia strategy and you have to think bigger than LinkedIn, SlideShare and infographics (these are all still viable options, though).

Some of the most impressive thought leadership content right now is being published on YouTube where people like Bryan Elliot (Behind the Brand) and Marie Forleo have built their own personal communities.

Major names like Google and TED have their own YouTube channels for sharing insights and thought leadership content, too.

Podcasts are gaining a lot of traction right now, too, with a 51% increase in listeners since 2019 in the US alone.

It’s important to understand the benefits and limits of each content type, too, and diversify your efforts. For example, videos are great for times where you want to sit down and concentrate on something but they’re not ideal when you’re on the move and listening to a podcast can be more suitable.

At the same time, there are moments where simply reading an article is more useful or information is easier to scan, reread and take notes from. So consider the role your content aims to play and which format is most useful to your audience.