For any business or brand seeking to garner the attention of its audience, capturing their attention for extended periods is the primary struggle of long-term brand permanence. Ultimately, some brands may seek to sell products, while others provide services. To make the process even more complex, some may simply want to enlist various, specific forms of engagement from their audiences that don’t directly involve a financial transaction.

Lead generation is a vital tool in all of these actions. Today, we’ll take a look at which forms of lead generation work best for cultivating an active, robust and dedicated following.

Provide Free Services

One of the simplest methods in generating attention – and therefore leads – for your brand is to provide simple yet free tools that encourage engagement. Every business or brand must demonstrate its inherent value to potential readers, clients and customers: by developing one or more free solutions that accomplish this, you can not only demonstrate worth, but be sure that you’re pinging search engines and users alike with valuable content.

These tools and services can create an ample number of referrals, backlinks and other indicators that slowly but surely drive additional traffic to your brand. Additionally, doing so can provide ample opportunity for your brand to collect email addresses or other forms of personal information from users that can then be leveraged into email marketing campaigns and other forms of promotion.

Host Giveaways and Promotions

If your brand offers products and/or services, then providing them to a select number of people for no cost can generate a disproportionate amount of leads. Through contests, giveaways and promotions, brands can cultivate mailing lists and other lists filled with personal details that highlight individuals within their target audiences who are naturally interested in what they have to offer.

These giveaways and promotions can attract attention from individuals both within and outside your core audience, helping you to better identify and message to select audiences. Whether it be a completely free product or service offered to one or more individuals or a discounted offer to a variety of people, everybody loves a freebie: use this to your advantage and cultivate a large number of potential leads in the process!

Enact and Promote Referral Programs

If your brand offers products and/or services for sale, then cultivating as many opportunities to sell them as possible is a worthwhile endeavor. Generating new leads and opportunities for such can be done rather easily through affiliate programs. Whether deciding to setup an independent, in-house affiliate or referral program – or utilizing the platforms of many existing networks – can be very useful in maximizing exposure.

Given that a large majority of customers and shoppers trust reviews and opinions about brands conveyed from people they know, a referral program can have a huge impact over time. These individuals will be pinging search engines, social media and even their friends in person about your brand – all of which can send a much larger amount of qualified traffic to your website and its offerings.

Ultimately, a wide variety of lead generation tactics exist for brands, depending on their exact focus. For most, however, the above three examples are great solutions that can generate additional subscriptions and sales. Embrace these and help your brand reach a larger, more robust audience in no time at all!