I’m afraid there’s not a whole lot to say about lead generation techniques, at least that hasn’t already been said a billion times before. In truth, while the digital revolutions of the last few decades have changed the tools we use and the channels we communicate over … the actual science of marketing would require our species, not our technology, to change before it could. This means that lead generation techniques, when discussed in articles online, almost always defaults to the techniques of using the tools, rather than the actual marketing undertones that come with it. Well, that’s because there’s nothing else to say. I Was Wrong: I used to rage against that very thing, wondering why nobody saw the forest for the trees. All of it was using the technology, not plying the humanities and creativity of marketing, which is the real driving mechanism all things said and done. I realized I was being an idiot only after I set out to write this the first time and noticed that if you cover the part I wanted, you’re just left with the same marketing practices that have been in place since before electricity. Well damn, what’s the point of rehashing that? If we don’t know it by now, we’re doomed in this field! Tools: That means, yep, we have to look at the tools we use for this, and how to get the most out of them. What do we have these days? We have the traditional outreach marketing techniques that blindly fish for leads by casting the widest nets possible. These have too high a diminishing return in the post digital world, though, and have become simply annoying antiquities nobody likes having around. But, we also have that internet, and several aspects of that are where it’s at. We have social networks, which are basically the collective subconscious of society, where people think out loud and at each other with minimal discretion or secrecy for the most part. It is over these we can pick up interest from unknown individuals, track their logistics, and auto-engage them over the social networks. We can go a step further, as well, and add them to an auto mailer system, something becoming very popular yet again. Along with this are smart ad and keyword systems which Google and others are now using. This tracks the individual pages and time focused on sections of pages to deduce, on a per navigation bases, what a customer is interested in. This is usually used to just throw ads at them, but the analytics capture would work perfectly for lead creation as well. In fact, additional tools (which help but aren’t required) are being used to great success by many for just that. And of course, we have the big daddy of modern things, SEO. SEO uses patterns of keywords contextually placed in sites, articles and other text formats indexed by a search engine. When users search for those keywords, the SEO density will affect how high the particular page ranks. The idea is to write useful and contextually solid things for these, and this is also a part of content marketing, which is the ultimate of the lead generation techniques at this point.