Lead Generation: Free & Paid Leadgen Strategies & Where to Buy Leads

As a business owner or a performance marketer, you should always be seeking new strategies to optimize and scale your lead generation, whether through organic methods, paid campaigns, or by purchasing leads from lead generation platforms. 

But leads don’t grow on trees – you need to work hard to get them. In other words, whether you’re focusing on organic leads, paid leads, or you’re bringing in high-intent consumers without carrying out marketing campaigns on your own, you need a robust lead acquisition strategy.

And I’ve got some for you across the three main leadgen fronts:

• Lead generation for free from earned media
• Lead generation with paid advertising & affiliate marketing
• Buying leads directly from lead generation websites & platforms

Read on to learn all the ins and outs of lead generation for business, including the best lead sources in 2025 and beyond.

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa can elevate your lead generation strategies.

Option 1. Lead Generation for Free Using Earned Media

First things first: Growing an online presence is an absolute must for every business, even if you’re currently buying customers or relying mostly on paid advertising. Generating leads with your blog, social media marketing, or referral program is much more cost-effective in the long run because you only spend on creating content and enjoy tons of additional benefits.

Developing your own media channels – mainly blog and social media – can establish your company as the go-to place for a specific product, generating leads months and years after the content was published (especially if it’s evergreen content that you occasionally update).

Here are the main organic lead generation sources to tap into:

• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• SEO-driven blogging
• Referral marketing
• Gated content
• Webinars & events

In most industries, you can use each of these channels, ensuring omnichannel marketing coverage for all your ICPs. And if you’re just starting, I’d suggest focusing on the creation of SEO-optimized evergreen content and social media marketing.

SEO-Driven Blogging

If you’ve just started building your online presence, I’d suggest you start with search-optimized blogging. The fact is that it typically takes around half a year for your content to reach its full potential with search engines.

For example, if you’re going to launch your product in 180 days, creating 1-2 blogs a week starting from now will help make your brand more visible when you need it most. Of course, you can always speed it up by building links and having great engagement metrics, but the rule of thumb is that search engines need at least three months to appreciate your content. 

As for the type of content you should focus on, I’d say you should start with ToFu articles – those focused on people unfamiliar with your company and far away emotionally from making a purchase – and gradually, once you’ve gained some footing, add MoFu and BoFu blogs.

Here are the most popular blog content types:

Source: Statista

For anything you write, make sure to research the demand first. Use Ahrefs to research the topic you’re interested in thoroughly to determine the search volume, competitiveness, and more nuanced parameters like traffic distribution by country or mobile versus desktop traffic.

The good thing about evergreen content is that you can easily update it to reflect changes in your offerings, products, or lead generation strategy. For starters, you might not want to be overly salesy, but once you’ve got strong branding, you might be able to make the same blogs more commercial. 

I recommend developing a long-term content plan that covers all essential search intents. In a few years, you’ll have a gigantic niche-specific content library that can hold attention for a long time by smoothly redirecting readers from one blog post to another.

Explore these blog posts to learn more about lead generation through blogging:

• Blog Monetization Guide: How to Make Money from Blogging
• Top Terrific Affiliate Marketing Blogs to Learn From
• How To Build Affiliate Marketing Content That Ranks

Want to speed things up? Generative AI for content creation is at your service.

Social Media Marketing

You don’t have to be an SMM expert to know that social media platforms are always growing, with no deceleration in sight. ROI-wise, 28% of marketers claim Facebook delivers the highest ROI, 22% say it’s Instagram, and 12% – YouTube.

Regardless of the industry, you can find a social media channel that fits you:

LinkedIn	Finance, business loans, real estate, B2B solar
Facebook	Construction, HVAC, home improvement, real estate, mortgage, solar
YouTube	Construction, HVAC, home improvement, real estate, mortgage, solar
Instagram	Construction, HVAC, home improvement, real estate, solar
TikTok	Construction, HVAC, home improvement, real estate, solar
Pinterest	Construction, home improvement, real estate, solar
Nextdoor	Construction, HVAC, contractor business, home improvement, solar

Social media marketing may be your most effective free strategy for increasing exposure and generating leads. If you’re in B2B, you should likely focus on ToFu: it’s hard to imagine an enterprise-level company deciding to buy your software after reading a social media post, but they might get interested enough to research further (ideally, scheduling a call or taking a product demo). 

So let’s turn to statistics one more time: 83% of marketers name increased exposure as the main benefit of social media marketing, 73% – increased traffic, 65% – generated leads, 62% – developed loyal fans, 52%  – improved sales. Sales-wise, social media works better in B2C, though, so I’d recommend you focus on generic (yet data-driven) content there most of the time (unless you’re addressing a knowledgeable audience, like a dedicated Facebook group)

Explore this social media leadgen guide for contractors as an example of an industry-specific social media lead generation strategy.

Email Marketing

From awareness to consideration to conversion, a segmented email sales funnel will allow you to generate more leads. Segmented email campaigns bring 760% more revenue, making it imperative to tailor content to people across different funnel stages.

Source: Statista

Awareness	For this stage, you will need guides, price calculators, and other helpful information that strengthen your relationships while naturally emphasizing the advantages of your product. Beware of hard selling – it will scare away more customers rather than convert them.
Consideration	As strangers become high-intent business leads, you can offer them free webinars, tutorials, testimonials, and other reinforcing content. AMP emails are one of the most effective new lead generation strategies. By transferring the action to the body of an email, AMP emails increase conversion by around 10%.
Conversion	Those who need a final push must receive it through a phone call or another cross-channel strategy. To convert more email leads, provide incentives and explain why your product is the right choice for immediate relief and long-term happiness.

Two Steps To Creating an Effective Email Sales Funnel

Step 1. Map Out the Customer Journey

A visual representation of the sales process will enable you to allocate your email marketing resources effectively. To draw a customer journey map, identify all possible touchpoints and customer actions at these touchpoints.

Step 2. Tap Into Email Lead Sources

From a dedicated landing page to social networks to podcasts, use your online presence to redirect people to your newsletter via strategically placed opt-in forms, such as pop-ups, site covers, embedded forms, exit forms, and side-ins. Avoid unsolicited messages at all costs. 

Last but not least, leverage email marketing automation to send the right messages to the right people at the right time. Email automation is extremely valuable for medium- to large-sized businesses, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) projected to grow at around 10% annually.

Referral Marketing

Did you know 80% of consumers seek personal recommendations before taking action? Moreover, referrals are 18% more loyal and 400% more likely to refer other customers. But that’s only if referrals trust you: only around 61% of people trust their companies.

The keys to referral success are incentives, so make sure your program benefits both referrals and referrers. As for the traffic sources, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are likely the most effective platforms for generating referrals.

Leading social media platforms for referral traffic to e-commerce websites:

Characteristic	Traffic Volume, in million	Traffic Share
Facebook	1,078.74	47.87%
YouTube	551.31	24.46%
Twitter	218.66	9.7%
Reddit	166.3	7.38%
Pinterest	121.78	5.4%
Instagram	68.7	3.05%
LinkedIn	29.37	1.3%
GitHub	4.02	0.18%
StackOverflow	3.94	0.17%
Fetlife	3.1	0.14%
Tumblr	2.9	0.13%
Classmates.com	2.31	0.1%
Hacker News	0.79	0.04%

Do not promote your referral program in every correspondence to avoid looking desperate. Instead, have a clear content plan, focus on referral-prone customers, and ensure your offer is clear, direct, and financially reasonable. A 10% bonus on the referred customer’s purchase should be enough to generate interest.

Gated Content & Webinars

One of the most effective ways to generate and nurture leads is by offering them value for free. So if you have some unique insights to share – statistics, case studies, tests, etc. – you can do it in exchange for their email address or phone number. Likewise, you can conduct free-to-attend online webinars or even live events.

In fact, 45% of marketers believe webinars are the most effective channel in generating ToFu demand. Not to mention, combining online and offline marketing is extremely effective because it shows your online customers that you’re a real business that operates in the field and that they can come and get help in person if needed.

Before I proceed to industry-specific lead generation, allow me to touch on the importance of data in everything you do. A marketing strategy that relies on guesswork and gut feeling is doomed to fail sooner or later, even if you’ve gotten lucky once or twice. So make it data-driven.

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa can bring clarity to your lead generation campaigns.

Industry-Specific Organic Lead Generation Strategies

Finance Lead Generation

In high-stakes niches like finance or insurance, where purchase decisions aren’t made on the spot but require significant nurturing, it’s crucial to create in-depth, data-driven content that addresses the market demand (read: high-volume, low-competition keywords). 

For more generic topics, you can link them to more specific case studies, whitepapers, and other content that effectively solves specific problems rather than merely scratching the surface.

Here are some effective organic lead generation strategies for finance:

• Building trust: Not all financial leads are equal, but they are all looking for a trustworthy party on the other end. So whether blog posts, podcasts, webinars, or eBooks, make sure to double down on content that builds trust: tested and backed by numbers.
• Starting slow: If you’re a small brand, you might want to focus on low-competition keywords that you can realistically rank for. Then, as you’ve established some footing in the game – higher website DR, more backlinks, impressions, clicks, and sales – you can shift towards keywords with higher competition and search volume.
• Keeping leads engaged for a long time: It may take months to research financial products, so you need a comprehensive content marketing strategy to engage and nurture leads across channels, from blog posts to emails to social media, with content that resonates with their current stage in the sales funnel.

Finance is a gigantic industry that encompasses hundreds of niches, and that’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, many lead generation principles remain intact across sub-niches – for example, many of the leadgen tricks you can pull off as a financial advisor, you can also pull off as a mortgage lender. On the other hand, you do need a unique selling proposition (USP) that separates you from other businesses, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here.

Read also: Top 10 Financial Advisor Lead Generation Strategies

Construction Lead Generation

One thing that makes construction lead generation different from many other niches is its hyper-local focus. Most clients search for construction from their state – or their target location – which makes local search optimization campaigns especially effective.

Similarly, the construction industry is seasonal, with a higher volume of leads available during warmer months. With this in mind, you can ramp up content production in spring and summer while creating the bare minimum in winter to maintain visibility.

Here are some effective organic construction lead generation strategies:

• Localized content & SEO
• Seasonal lead generation campaigns
• Strong portfolio that proves your track record

For more details, check out this construction lead generation guide.

Contractor Lead Generation

The contractor market overlaps with many other markets and sub-markets, including real estate, home improvement, HVAC, and plumbing, among others. This overlap sets two general rules for all of them: a local focus and urgency, which makes contractor lead generation location-dependent. 

Whether plumbing, electrical work, or renovations, you only need leads from the established geographic radius, with operating costs increasing proportionally to the distance. On a similar note, clients prefer local contractors for faster response times and lower transportation fees.

For more details, check out this contractor lead generation guide.

HVAC Lead Generation

HVAC lead generation might be one of the most urgent niches you can tap into. Whether it’s a roof leak or furnace malfunction, you’re likely looking for a reliable local service provider that can help you fix it here and now at a reasonable price.

Crafting content for HVAC is pure pleasure because you surely know what you need: well-timed, localized content that spells out your expertise and is built around popular local keywords. To build trust and maximize your lead generation potential, you can create DIY guides, how-to articles, and, if possible, collaborate with local realtors and home inspectors.

For more details, check out this HVAC lead generation guide.

Mortgage Lead Generation

Mortgage lead generation is one of the most competitive high-ticket industries, with almost no impulse purchases and an unparalleled demand for reputation stemming from the significant financial and emotional investment that borrowers make. 

To generate mortgage leads for free, you might want to focus on the chosen group of local borrowers, using long-tail keywords like “first-time home buyer mortgage in [location].” However, until you have developed organic traffic channels, you may need to purchase mortgage leads, which cost between $20 and $200, depending on the type, quality, industry, etc.

For more details, check out this mortgage lead generation guide.

Real Estate Lead Generation

With over 4 million homes sold annually, the U.S. real estate market is characterized by steadily growing demand, high levels of competition, and profitability for both real estate companies and their affiliates. Like in most other high-ticket industries, the sales cycle is long, months to years, and has almost no impulse decisions. 

If I were to choose the most important real estate leadgen factor, I’d say it’s targeting. Since low lead quality and a lack of purchase intent are the primary struggles, you need localized content tailored specifically for your ideal customer, including their city, homeownership status, income level, age, interests, credit history, and other relevant factors.

For more details, check out this real estate lead generation guide.

Home Improvement Lead Generation

Home improvement lead generation is significantly easier than mortgage or real estate lead generation because it has a shorter sales cycle and more leads overall. Obviously, remodeling a kitchen is a more straightforward decision than buying a home.

Here are a few things you can double down on when generating home improvement leads:

• Seasonal demand that peaks in spring and summer
• Demand for DIY content and saving tips
• Before-and-after video content

The rest of the home service lead generation tricks and trends are no different from those in other industries: personalization, AI, partnerships, influencer marketing, social media marketing, data analytics, and omnichannel coverage.

For more details, check out this home improvement lead generation guide.

Business Loan Lead Generation

With well over 20,000 loan brokers in the United States, you need to think outside the box to break through the competition. A lot depends on the niche, though: larger businesses prioritize reputation over impulse decisions, while startups might be looking for the lowest interest rates.

For example, traditional banks often underserve gig economy workers (freelancers, Uber drivers, Etsy sellers, etc.) and early-stage startups, which are then looking for alternative financing solutions like revenue-based financing (RBF), merchant cash advances (MCA), or microloans.

Content-wise, to generate business loan leads for free, I suggest creating loan eligibility quizzes, interest and cash flow calculators, and other interactive assets tailored to the borrower’s needs. Similarly, you can offer free financial health assessments and host webinars.

For more details, check out this business loan lead generation guide.

Solar Lead Generation

Tapping into solar lead generation might be a game-changing decision. Reduced deployment costs and government policies aimed at decarbonizing the U.S. energy sector have made solar one of the most booming industries, projected to increase tenfold by 2050, with a continuous influx of leads into the market. 

Lead generation-wise, since installing solar panels might cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s essential to focus on the ROI – how long it will take until the panels pay off. Likewise, you might want to double down on solar panel efficiency if your panels are in the higher range.

For more details, check out this solar lead generation guide.

Unconventional Lead Generation Strategies

Sometimes you need more than time-tested marketing, especially if you’re a smaller brand trying to outperform bigger players. The good news is that there are quite a few marketing weapons that might help you generate way more leads than a company of your scale and size should.

Here are some unconventional lead generation strategies:

• Voice search optimization: With more users searching by voice, it might be reasonable to optimize your content for smart speakers, virtual assistants, and voice search apps. The optimization itself boils down to using humanlike queries – what’s the best HVAC repair near me – while delivering short, easy-to-digest answers.
• VR and AR: For industries like real estate, virtual tours can be a game-changer. Immersive experience works extremely well in marketing and sales, appealing to leads’ emotions and creating a sense of belonging.

Likewise, you can run your own podcast, conduct webinars and virtual events, and engage customers with any other type of interactive content you can create.

Explore these unconventional lead generation strategies to boost your inbound traffic.

Option 2. Lead Generation Through Paid Advertising and Affiliate Marketing

While organic lead generation remains the most effective long-term customer acquisition strategy, it requires in-depth knowledge and expertise in various content marketing aspects. In contrast, paid ads are more forgiving and easier to automate.

Here’s why you might need paid ads to generate leads:

• You need results near-instantly
• You need purchase-ready leads
• You want to control targeting
• You struggle to generate organic leads due to high competition

Paid advertising may be the best strategy for a quick start, especially if you’re strong enough with nurturing and converting high-intent leads. So while you’re working on your organic channels – remember, it takes at least several months to build momentum with blog posts – paid advertising can keep your business running. No less importantly, aside from sales, you’ll be able to track some actionable marketing data, such as the demographics and psychographics of your leads.

Read also: Paid and free lead sources for financial advisors and home improvement companies.

Search Engine Pay-Per-Click Ads

Search engine ads are an alternative way to win leads for local queries you cannot rank in the top 10, especially in localized home services. Search ads display above organic search results, getting into the spotlight immediately once the search page loads.

For example, if you’re providing local plumbing services, queries like “plumber near me [location]” might be your best bet for search paid ads. Even though some users willingly ignore paid ads, they are still a great lead generation tool in your arsenal.

Read also: The best paid media tools in 2025

Social Media Ads

It’s no secret that social media is growing at breakneck speed, with social media ads being one of the main lead acquisition channels for visual-focused brands. In just 10 years, social media advertising spending has doubled, with no deceleration in sight.

The success of social media ads, as well as other paid ads, largely boils down to effective targeting and setting the right budget. The more precise the targeting and the more reasonable the pricing, the higher the chance the ad will display at the right time to the right user.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn (great for B2B ads) use an auction-based ad system, displaying ads based on the bid amount, ad relevance, and expected engagement. So it’s not only about setting the right price – all other things being equal, the highest bid wins – but also how relevant and engaging your ads are. Likewise, it’s important to have an effective follow-up for clickers.

Speaking of social media marketing ROI, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube deliver the highest return on investment. But then again, TikTok ads can be incredibly effective for some audiences, while LinkedIn ads may work just as well for B2B businesses, and so on.

Display Ads

If you want to display your ads beyond social media, then Google Display Network (GDN) might be your best choice. It uses the same auction-based principle but on a larger scale, spanning millions of partner websites. Display ads are less granular, but they are great for retargeting, are generally more cost-effective, and work well within the pay-per-impression model.

Just like social media ads, display ads are growing, albeit at a slower pace.

Pay-Per-Call Ads

Did you know phone calls convert up to 40 times more leads than web interactions? If you’re not generating call leads, you might be missing out on a large chunk of profits.

“When phone calls convert 30% faster, spend 28% more, and the retention rate is 28% higher, you don’t need to generate as many as you would web leads. A lot of people are used to generating hundreds of thousands of web leads, but you can’t consider phone calls as equal. Calls are more valuable and therefore, you don’t need to generate as many. So businesses are leaving money on the table if they’re just neglecting them altogether.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series on performance marketing automation

And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can set up pay-per-call ads in AdWords, Bing, and on popular social media platforms, connecting purchase-ready leads to your sales representatives or contact settings immediately.

On top of that, equipped with up-to-date call tracking software and technologies like dynamic number insertion (DNI), you can collect customer data while they’re interacting with your IVR system or AI call agents and then distribute it to a matching live operator.

Check out this pay-per-call advertising guide to learn more.

Affiliate Marketing

Under certain circumstances, affiliate marketing might be the riskiest way to generate leads for your business, regardless of the niche and scale. Bigger advertisers might run their affiliate programs independently, while lesser-known companies might join affiliate networks to get exposure.

Read also: Affiliate network vs. your own affiliate program: the hard choice

The main thing, though, is that affiliate marketing requires no effort on your side after you’ve set up the affiliate program, which you also design on your own. For example, if you’re targeting car insurance leads from New York, you can only accept leads from New York IP addresses or phone numbers without paying for irrelevant or low-quality traffic.

No less importantly, with solutions like Phonexa’s Lynx, you can attribute and track all your digital sales to the granular level. Imagine a campaign where you know everything: where your leads are coming from, how they evolve throughout the customer journey, how each of your touchpoints performs, and what you can do to generate and convert more affiliate traffic. 

Lynx does all of that and more, helping mitigate attribution risks and focus on campaigns that drive revenue rather than just clicks or impressions. Having all essential affiliate marketing metrics at a glance, you know what campaign to double down on and what might not be worth your effort.

 

Pay-Per-Call Affiliate Marketing

Of course, you don’t necessarily have to focus on leads – pay-per-call affiliate marketing works like clockwork as well. Unlike paid advertising or social media influencers, you don’t have to spend a dime on it – it’s up to your affiliates to generate inbound phone calls that match your program’s criteria.

Just like with web leads, you can limit what inbound calls are paid, including call source, demographics, and duration. Most businesses only pay for calls that last longer than 120 seconds to prevent fraudulent calls, while some may limit calls from historically less effective traffic channels.

Read also: The ultimate tech sack for an affiliate marketer

Take a product tour to learn how Phonexa ensures visibility into your leadgen campaigns and helps you scale with confidence.

Option 3. Buying Leads from Lead Generation Websites & Platforms

Purchasing leads from lead generators might be the best strategy if you’re not visible enough to generate organic leads, you want to scale, or it’s simply more cost-effective than carrying out marketing campaigns on your own.

You can buy leads from:

• Lead generation companies and lead marketplaces
• Affiliates directly or through affiliate networks
• Data brokers

Lead generation companies typically employ omnichannel lead generation strategies, encompassing the entire spectrum of traffic sources, from content marketing to paid advertising and social media marketing. Many of them also enable paid or free listing, allowing you to present your business in front of potential customers.

Payment-wise, lead generators either charge per lead or – more often –offer subscription-based lead generation plans, where you pay for a specific number of leads delivered monthly to your CRM, call center, or directly to sales reps, or by any other means of communication.

The price per lead varies depending on the lead type, quality, traffic source, age, whether the lead is exclusive or shared, and other parameters:

• Exclusive leads are only sold to one company, with no competition
• Shared leads are sold to several companies that then compete for these leads

For example, live transfer leads – phone calls connected to the company’s call center – may cost over $100 per call, while aged web leads may cost less than $1. So, with over a dozen factors affecting the price of a specific type of lead, it’s hard to generalize.

Your Best Lead Generation Websites & Platforms by Industry

Insurance Lead Generation Website Example

Salesgenie: The World’s Biggest Insurance and Business Lead Database

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
61.6K	15.85	00:08:44	39.46%	41.51%	27.13%	24.24%	4.46%	0.04%	2.2%

Salesgenie is a massive lead generation website that provides access to millions of business leads, including those for home, auto, life, and commercial insurance. Likewise, they can help build marketing campaigns from scratch and track your success with their platform.

As an advertiser, you can either purchase or rent data with Salesgenie. When you buy data, you add it to your own records or database. When you rent data, you borrow it for testing, and if it goes well, you can then purchase the tested segment.

• Leads from over 19.5 million businesses and 255 million consumers
• 300 demographic, 400 firmographic, and 8,000 intent filters
• In-app data access and continuous data verification

Last but not least, you don’t have to commit instantly – instead, you can take a 3-day trial of Salesgenie to get the hang of the platform and see whether it works for your business.

Here are more insurance lead generators to explore: FlatWorld Solutions, Bold Penguin, HBW Leads

Read also: 7 best insurance lead gen platforms you can tap into

Real Estate Lead Generation Website Example

Real Geeks: Hyper-Local Real Estate Leads

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
143.8K	5.89	00:07:01	38.87%	74.79%	8.04%	11.28%	5.02%	0.09%	0.36%

Real Geeks might be the world’s biggest dedicated real estate lead generation website, offering 3 lead generation packages along with proprietary lead generation tools. They don’t sell already generated leads, though, but rather help you run marketing campaigns to generate fresh, high-intent leads from your target locations. 

Depending on the subscription plan, you get access to their core platform, various advertising campaigns (social media ads, Google PPC search ads, etc.), and help from a dedicated support manager. On average, their leadgen campaigns drive a 600% ROI.

Here are more real estate lead generators to explore: Market Leader, Zurple, CINC, Zillow Premier Agent.

Read also: 5 best real estate lead gen platforms you can tap into

Mortgage Lead Generation Website Example

LendingTree: Over 30 Million Potential Borrowers for Your Business

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
4.6M	2.74	00:01:44	49.18%	41.8%	32.67%	15.63%	5.47%	0.13%	1.47%

LendingTree is a loan marketplace and lead generator that connects over 30 million borrowers with lenders across niches, including mortgage refinance, home equity, credit card, auto, and personal loans.

➥ On average, home purchase customers with LendingTree have a credit score over 720 and are seeking loans exceeding $200,000; refinance customers are looking for loans over $225,000 in conforming refinance and $675,000 in jumbo refinance.

As a lender, you get validated lead data from the loan request submitted with LendingTree. Likewise, you can get qualified mortgage phone calls delivered right to your loan officers as an exclusive partner benefit.

Here are more mortgage lead generators to explore: Loanbright, Kaleidico, Experian.

Read also: 9 best mortgage lead generation platforms

Contractor Business Lead Generation Website Example

ConstructConnect: Real-Time Contractor Leads and Lead Bidding Marketplace

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
721.3K	4.59	00:02:53	42.96%	61.79%	32.44%	1.09%	4.36%	0.04%	0.18%

With over 825,000 active commercial construction projects and 2.7 million active contact records, ConstructConnect is one of the biggest contractor lead generators and marketplaces.

Through their Insight Intelligent Leads product – a large database of public and private leads – you can find and track the best project for your business. To identify matching leads faster, you can filter projects by location, type, stage, and other parameters.

Here are more contractor lead generators to explore: Houzz Pro, Porch Pro, Angi Ads (formerly HomeAdvisor), Modernize, CraftJack.

Read also: 19 best lead generation websites for contractors

HVAC Lead Generation Website Example

Billy.com: Quality HVAC and Home Services Leads

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
14.1K	1.20	00:00:18	69%	53.55%	32.58%	0%	6.54%	0.08%	6.28%

Billy.com is a platform that connects service providers with clients seeking home improvement and home services, including HVAC. 

The platform generates leads for HVAC companies that install, maintain, repair, and clean the following equipment: boilers, central air conditioning, ductless air conditioning, ducts and vents, electrical baseboard, furnaces, heat pumps, heating and cooling systems, thermostats, water heaters, and window air conditioning units.

Billy.com offers both shared and exclusive leads:

• Shared HVAC sales leads – $8 to $49 per lead (shared with up to 4 service providers)
• Exclusive HVAC sales leads – $20 to $120 per lead

The actual price per lead depends on the service. Delivery-wise, leads are sent instantly by email or SMS, with all contact details being verified.

Here are more HVAC lead generators to explore: 33 Mile Radius, Home Improvement Leads, Abstrakt Marketing Group.

Read also: Top 10 websites to buy HVAC leads

Solar Lead Generation Website Example

Profitise: Quality Solar Leads at a Reasonable Price

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
2.6K	1.97	00:00:48	46.64%	42.24%	41.42%	0%	6.46%	0.08%	8.59%

Profitise in a solar and insurance affiliate program that connects advertisers and affiliates, allowing you to buy any number of quality solar leads at a fair price. Profitise isn’t a classic lead generator, but it can help you diversify lead acquisition risks by purchasing leads from various affiliates.

Among other things, you can get the lowest possible price per solar or insurance leads, or simply set the maximum price per lead and demographics criteria so you don’t buy mismatching leads.

Here are more solar lead generators to explore: SolarReviews, Clean Energy Experts, Solar Exclusive, RGR Marketing, Modernize.

Read also: 8 best solar lead gen companies to buy exclusive and shared solar leads

Home Improvement Lead Generation Website Example

Houzz: Comprehensive Home Improvement Platform with Dozens of Millions of Leads

Monthly Visits	Page Per Visit	Time On Site	Bounce Rate	Direct Traffic	Organic Search Traffic	Paid Search Traffic	Referral Traffic	Mail Traffic	Social Traffic
10.3M	4.17	00:02:25	59.87%	45.32%	44.13%	4.76%	3.24%	0.14%	1.67%

Houzz is one of the world’s biggest home improvement platforms that connects homeowners and over 3 million service providers and home improvement and renovation professionals. It also provides 3D modeling software, allowing clients to visualize furniture in real-world spaces. 

In terms of home improvement lead generation, you can create a professional profile that showcases your services and previous projects. Then, as long as you’ve filled it with quality videos and enticing descriptions, you may even generate leads for free. 

However, free lead generation with Houzz is quite limited in both volume and quality, so you may need to subscribe to one of their lead generation plans to be featured at the top of search results in your target locations. Likewise, through a paid subscription, you’ll get promoted via sponsored listings, email campaigns, and the instant match feature, as well as access to their CRM tools.

Here are more home improvement lead generators to explore: Porch Pro, BuildZoom, Angi Ads (formerly HomeAdvisor).

Read also: 16 best home improvement and 5 home services platforms to buy leads

How To Realize Your Full Lead Generation Potential

The continuous success of your business not only depends on uninterrupted lead streams but also on how deeply you track your campaigns, how many things you delegate to AI without losing quality, and how quickly you implement the necessary changes and adjustments.

Here are some popular tools you can use to streamline your campaigns:

CRM and Lead Management Platforms	HubSpot Salesforce Zoho CRM Pipedrive Agile CRM Keap
Data Collection and Enrichment	ZoomInfo Cognism Apollo.io Hunter.io Lusha LeadGenius RocketReach
Outreach and Sales Engagement	Salesloft Klenty Saleshandy Outreach Groove RevBoss
Landing Page and Form Builders	Leadpages Unbounce HubSpot OptinMonster WPForms Gravity Forms
Website Visitor Identification	Leadfeeder Salespanel Dealfront
SEO Tools	Ahrefs SEMrush seoClarity
Live Chat and Chatbots	Intercom HubSpot Drift
Advertising	Google Ads Facebook Lead Ads LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
Appointment Scheduling	Calendly

But optimizing campaigns is only half the work – the other half is to learn your leads through and through, including real-time data collection and analytics. From the very first ad display until the lead makes a purchase, there are dozens of interactions to tap into.

So whether you’re an enterprise-level company, multi-location business, performance marketer, or customer service marketplace, you need to know who your customers are, where they are coming from, how their journey evolves, and what you can do to grow traffic and conversions.

And it’s true for both web leads and phone calls. 

This is why we at Phonexa have developed a comprehensive performance marketing ecosystem that synergizes not only web and phone call lead management but also the rest of marketing avenues, like email, social media, and affiliate marketing. We’ve gone so far as to develop eight proprietary products that address specific types of marketing and unite these products into one software suite.

Take a product tour to experience the synergy of Phonexa’s eight proprietary lead management solutions.

LMS Sync: Web Lead Generation Optimization

Part of Phonexa’s all-encompassing performance marketing software suite, LMS Sync might cover your web lead campaigns through and through by tracking, distributing, and analyzing incoming web traffic. You will know who your leads are – demographics, firmographics, and psychographics – where they are coming from, how they behave as they move down your marketing pipeline.

With LMS Sync, you can pave the best journey for every customer while never losing the forest for the trees. All lead insights (from LMS Sync and other Phonexa’s tools) are consolidated in a single dashboard, providing full visibility into lead generation campaigns.

 

No less importantly, you can create custom lead distribution configurations based on the lead’s data and the availability and skills of your sales reps. As a result, all your leads connect to a sales rep who has the highest revenue potential for your business. By the same logic, you can resell your leads while making sure the right business acquires them.

But that’s not all. If your business’s bread and butter are forms, fills, and conversions, you can unlock even more insights with HitMetrix, a user behavior and analytics software that collects and interprets website interactions.

Here are some of the useful data you can get with HitMetrix:

• Top-to-bottom website activity collection, including click rates, bounces, speed-browsing, mouse-outs, and more
• Data visualization that provides a clear picture of website engagement without having to organize data manually
• Heatmapping and session replays so you can track user behavior, spot trends, and identify friction points

 

Call Logic: Call Lead Generation Optimization

What LMS Sync covers for web leads, Call Logic covers for phone calls, analyzing and interpreting incoming business calls in real-time, so you can handle them most effectively. In practice, this means you can obtain actionable insights before the call reaches the sales representative and share this data with the sales or customer support rep who will receive the call. 

One thing that makes Phonexa’s Call Logic unique is its IVR with AI-enabled Call Agents. Unlike traditional IVR, which only issues pre-recorded responses, AI Call Agents can tailor contextualized, industry-specific responses. On the caller’s side, it feels like a real conversation, improving the UX and, ultimately, the conversion rates..

Here are some advantages of AI call agents:

• Personalized interactions to build unique and flexible conversation flows
• Focused conversations, with the ability to limit AI responses to industry-relevant inquiries
• Seamless integration with the IVR builder (adds as a modular block)

 

Book a demo to learn more about AI Call Agents, Call Logic, and how they complement Phonexa’s all-encompassing performance marketing ecosystem.

For businesses that rely heavily on phone calls, you can take it one step further with Cloud PBX, a dedicated cloud phone center that gives you full control over inbound and outbound calls, including features like call recording, call scoring, virtual phone numbers, and more. Most importantly, though, you don’t have to rely on a third party and are always available no matter what.

 

Phonexa’s Predictive Modeling for Unlimited LeadGen Testing

With Phonexa’s predictive modeling software, launching new campaigns or targeting new audiences isn’t a venture anymore but a data-driven expansion where every step is calculated and risks are nullified. Predictive modeling software pairs historical data with analytical outcomes to make an educated guess on which marketing strategies and campaigns are likelier to succeed.

It almost sounds too good to be true, but that’s how things are now. You can run an infinite number of simulations for various campaigns, changing input data until you’ve got the desired outcome. And then you can safely run the winning campaigns and save time on the losers.

 

Unlock Actionable Insights into Your Web and Call Leads with Phonexa

At Phonexa, we’ve identified the number one marketing problem: the burden of switching solutions and tools to achieve favorable marketing outcomes. So we’ve developed a comprehensive eight-in-one performance marketing software suite that covers everything, from web to call to email to social media to referral to affiliate marketing.

➥ Phonexa empowers performance marketers, networks, and brands with intelligent lead and call management and distribution, AI Call tracking and routing, and built-in fraud and compliance capabilities to optimize revenue and reduce operational risk.

“Whenever we see a client using a tooling system that makes them have to do something manual, we try and build a solution for them – that’s how we’ve ended up with eight pieces of software under one roof. Our perfect customers are media buyers, performance marketers, advertisers, carriers – anyone in the affiliate marketing or the lead generation space that’s looking to optimize their journeys, media buying budgets, spend and make sure they are delivering the best service to consumers while also optimizing their ROI at all times.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series on performance marketing automation

Phonexa is THE solution you need, the top-to-bottom funnel coverage that makes your life simpler. Whether you’re a high-scale advertiser, affiliate, or affiliate network, we’ve got it all and then some to realize your marketing potential to the fullest while protecting you from fraud.

 

Here are the eight proprietary solutions you get at a single price (online price calculator):

 

Get your all-in-one performance marketing software suite now, or take a product tour to see how Phonexa works.

Frequently Asked Questions?

What is the difference between IQL, MQL, and SQL?

An information-qualified lead (IQL) is a potential customer who has provided personal information, like an email address or phone number. 

A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) meets your marketing team’s criteria: demographics, psychographics, history of purchases, etc. A sales-qualified lead (SQL) meets your sales team’s criteria, like the level of interest in your product, and is ready for conversion.

Read more about how to qualify business leads effectively.

Where do I get B2B business leads?

There are three principal ways to acquire B2B business leads (and any other leads, for that matter): generate leads using your earned media, paid advertising, or purchase leads from lead generators, marketplaces, or affiliates.

Explore these lead sources if you need more B2B and B2C leads: Belkins, CIENCE, Martal Group, SalesRoads, LeadGeneration.com, ZoomInfo, Cognism, Apollo.io, Lusha, Kaspr.

What are the best lead generation platforms for business loan leads?

Explore these loan lead generation platforms: Salesgenie, LendingTree, Rapid Finance, OnDeck, and Calling Agency. Although there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in lead generation, by researching the mentioned platform, you’ll likely find the leads you need.

What are the best lead generation platforms for financial advisor leads?

Explore these financial advisor lead generation platforms: SmartAsset, Cognism, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, WealthEngine, and Select Advisors Institute. Note that you can buy leads from several platforms at the same time to get the leads you need at a lower price and diversify risks.

Likewise, if you’re in finance and looking for leads (not necessarily financial advisor leads), you might also consider ZoomInfo and Apollo.io.

What are the best lead generation platforms for 401(k) advisor leads?

Explore these platforms for 401(k) advisor lead generation: Judy Diamond Associates, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, SmartAsset, Cognism, and Select Advisors Institute.