Why Do Companies Buy Cheap Leads?

More than 60% of marketing professionals rank lead generation as their biggest challenge. Naturally, brands have many apprehensions regarding generating, buying and selling free business leads.

Many business owners find themselves contemplating how to get leads for free. The logical question most of them are asking is whether it is in their power to generate free leads regularly. Some resort to generating and selling declined leads online, and others consider buying them from quality lead suppliers as the best approach.

If you want to generate leads and make the most of your marketing efforts, you need to put the work in to find the best-performing lead sources and implement appropriate tracking and distribution solutions.

But the secret to regularly bringing in free business leads is understanding what your prospective clients need and tying that knowledge to specific lead generation tactics and approaches.

Let’s explore in more detail whether obtaining free lead lists or buying cheap leads can negatively impact your business and how to generate leads online for free.

How Strategies and Tools To Generate Cheap Leads Work

There’s no denying that the frustration of not generating enough quality leads is real. So how do you generate leads, save resources, and keep other areas of your business under control?

The key to successful lead generation is to capture leads without relying on manual processes. Therefore, every business has a wide array of tools and software to collect information from prospective clients interested in its product or service.

Essentially, these tools utilize advanced technologies and approaches that capture crucial lead data, track prospects’ behaviors, create compelling content strategies, personalize customer experiences, and train and grow functional support teams.

The best way to generate leads is to implement appropriate solutions and automate the process.  LMS Sync — Phonexa’s lead tracking and distribution solution — enables companies to rely on automation to get valuable attribution data, sell products that require on-the-spot lead distribution, and maximize lead generation efforts. 

While there’s no perfect formula that can ensure cheap lead generation, three approaches can give your business a competitive edge as the digital marketing industry continues to evolve. Here are the three best lead generation practices to help you achieve that goal:

• Focus on collecting first-party data: Whether by offering interactive content or delivering helpful information to your target audience, automation allows your business to generate leads online, exchange value with prospective clients mutually, and leverage valuable insights into the lead journey.

• Prioritize website optimization: There’s no denying that lead generation starts on your homepage. A corporate website may play many roles, but its most essential one is operating effectively to get leads for your business. Applying conversion rate optimization is one of the ways to ensure that your website’s design, customer experience (CX), and copy are compelling and effective in capturing high-quality leads.

• Build an efficient tech stack: It’s no secret that building a powerful data-driven tech stack is even more of a challenge than discovering a way and understanding how to get sales leads for free. Every company must ensure the right tools to effectively capture and analyze call and web lead data, deliver more personalized content, automate marketing campaigns, and boost conversion rates.

Why Businesses Buy Cheap Leads

There’s a good reason not to buy or look for a free lead list — the risk lies in the cost and the accuracy of acquired data. While it is not uncommon for companies to buy leads and look for ways to get free business leads online, a much better approach is to utilize organic lead generation strategies.

On top of that, the cheap leads businesses acquire are not always lead data. In most cases, it is just contact information, which means there is probably no intent behind these contacts. Therefore, buying this kind of data offers no benefits like high intent or lower cost per lead.

However, some businesses make money by offering information on high-intent audiences and selling many cheap leads or contact records. For companies looking for MQLs, for example, it makes sense to look for lower intent lead data, which they want to use to nurture contacts themselves, increase their intent, and acquire them at a lower cost per lead.

If you need more leads and are looking for ways to acquire a free leads list, consider contacting high-quality lead suppliers and paying for better lists. 

Here are some of the factors you should pay attention to when buying lead data:

• The number of leads
• The nature of data  (B2B or B2C, for example)
• The type of information (emails, phone numbers, demographics, annual revenue, etc.)
• Data accuracy

Ultimately, every reputable business updates its lead lists regularly and ensures that the data is as accurate as possible. When looking for ways to generate free leads, companies often develop specific searches to find the most targeted prospective clients they can pitch to. On the other hand, buying cheap leads or acquiring free sales leads can potentially backfire.

Will Cheap Leads Negatively Impact Your Business?

It’s imperative to remember that the overall health of your business is of significant importance while in the race to find free leads or generate leads online for a little-to-no cost.

Buying low-quality cheap leads that do not convert can result in hidden costs, damaged sales, and declined trust or brand reputation. Furthermore, your business can face compliance issues if you buy from suppliers who don’t follow GDPR or CCPA.

How To Generate Cheap or Free Leads Online

While finding a way to generate business leads for free can save the money your company would have spent on finding and acquiring those leads, it’s crucial to understand what your audience needs, how to generate your own leads, and maintain the quality of those leads.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the strategies, free lead generation tactics, and approaches that can help you start getting more free leads.

Launch Email Marketing Campaigns

Here’s the first tip on how to get free leads: launch email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to get free leads. Many small and middle-sized businesses naturally rely on cold email marketing, cheap lead generation, and sales outreach to bring in prospective clients. The best way to generate leads through email efforts is to use different types of engaging email content like case studies, ebooks, infographics, etc.

Source: TDInsights 

But the problem with this approach is that too many brands pitch to other businesses or potential customers. Standing out, understanding how to generate leads online that are relevant to your business, and doing it right is the only way your email campaigns can succeed.

The first and most critical step is to build an email list. After that, you can focus on segmenting your audience, grouping subscribers, and personalizing your outreach campaigns. Here are some valuable tips on creating an email list from scratch: 

Remember that it’s essential to track your success as you launch email campaigns. Implementing solutions that drive inbox performance, like Phonexa’s E-Delivery, can help you measure deliverability, refine email lists, get free leads, and split-test your campaigns.

Build Your Local SEO Presence

Every company must strive to stand out in search engines. For that reason, brands need to invest in SEO efforts instead of relying solely on local customers.

A successful strategy for local SEO is crucial for outpacing local competitors, standing out, motivating a local audience, driving more high-quality leads, mapping the customer journey, optimizing your sales funnel, and increasing visibility.

Here’s what you can do to get business leads by investing time and effort in local SEO:

• Conduct keyword research to create engaging and compelling landing pages
• Make sure that every SEO effort leads prospects toward a clear call to action
• Determine your site’s SEO ranking and start building backlink rapport to earn more authority
• Add your company information to relevant business directories
• Optimize your content and create quality articles and landing pages to drive engagement and get leads for free

Higher domain authority ultimately translates into a better online presence, higher rankings, and more free online leads and local audiences.

Use Blogging To Develop a Web Presence

It’s no secret that lead generation helps businesses draw traffic, build trust, visibility, and credibility, and drive all types of leads, including cheap real estate leads and free leads for home-based businesses. As a result, ad spending on leadgen efforts is projected to reach $3.2 billion by the end of 2023.

Driving blog traffic is critical in most lead generation strategies and conversion funnels. The principal goal of blog posts is to turn your website visitors into prospects and, eventually, into long-term clients and brand advocates.

Here’s how investing in blogging can help you bring in business leads free of charge:

• Build trust and develop a relationship with your audience
• Create a loyal customer base
• Boost revenue
• Enhance web visibility
• Increase engagement by sharing blog content on social media
• Offer exclusive content and familiarize prospects with your brand

Leverage Social Media

Today, capturing leads on social media is the new normal. Millions of prospective clients are out there looking for new brand offerings, making it easier for companies to keep in touch with consumers, share news, promote special offers, and market new products.

LinkedIn remains one of the most effective social media channels for B2B leadgen. Regarding B2C lead generation efforts, most brands are looking to bring in leads from Facebook and Instagram due to high community engagement and access to high-intent audiences.

Here are some actionable tips and suggestions regarding ways to get leads on Facebook:

In most cases, the right incentive (typically used in a lead magnet) helps brands bring in leads for free and reach wider audiences. In addition, customer stories and client testimonials can offer businesses the social proof they need to demonstrate brand value.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the top benefits of blogging?

Blogging enables businesses to drive traffic to their websites, generate free sales leads, drive more social media engagement, increase web presence, share company news and exclusive offerings, and more.

Which social networks are best for promotion and getting new business leads for free?

Such platforms as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Quora allow brands to reach wider audiences, build brand awareness, and generate cheap leads.

What are the benefits of utilizing email marketing for cheap lead generation?

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels for driving free leads online. It helps marketers cultivate relationships with prospective clients, increase conversion and retention rates, build credibility, increase sales, and inform leads of the latest promotions, services, and products.

What is the fastest way to achieve a local SEO presence and get free business leads online?

Getting customer reviews, investing in blogging, leveraging social media, and sharing client testimonials on your website and across other marketing channels impact the company’s local presence the most. On top of that, these approaches help marketers reach their audience and get more free business leads.

Schedule a consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts and learn how LMS Sync can help you organize lead information, deliver personalized experiences to high-intent audiences, filter out low-quality leads, and boost your conversion rate.