Are you on the hunt for lead generation tools to help you grow high-quality leads and increase your revenue?
Let’s face it, generating qualified leads is no walk in the park.
You’ve poured your heart and soul into crafting the perfect product or service, but if potential customers aren’t aware you exist, those efforts fall flat. That’s where lead generation tools come in – powerful allies designed to supercharge your sales pipeline.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re nodding your head in recognition. After all, leads are the lifeblood of any successful business.
They’re the bridge between brand awareness and closing the deal. Without a steady flow of qualified leads, your sales funnel dries up faster than a puddle in the desert.
In this article, we dive deep into the world of lead generation tools, exploring the best options for your specific needs and budget.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
💡 Want to identify your lead generation goldmine?
Ruler can seamlessly connect your marketing, sales, and revenue data, to show you exactly which channels are driving the most valuable leads – the ones that convert into paying customers.With this knowledge, you can increase your budget and refine your strategies for the marketing channels that bring in the most qualified leads.
Jump to learn more about Ruler or book a demo to see how it can help drive more quality leads.
Identifying and nurturing potential customers––known as leads––is fundamental to success.
Lead generation tools empower businesses to streamline and amplify this crucial process.
These tools encompass a diverse range of software applications designed to attract, capture, and qualify leads, ultimately converting them into paying customers.
By leveraging various strategies and features, lead generation tools can significantly enhance your ability to:
The world of lead generation can be a bit overwhelming. After all, “lead generation tool” can mean a lot of things to different people. To help you navigate this vast landscape and find the perfect solution for your business, we’ve categorised our top picks into different niches:
Conversion rate optimisation tools are essentially like digital microscopes for your website. They help you see how visitors behave on your site, understand why they take certain actions (or don’t), and identify areas for improvement. This all translates to boosting the percentage of visitors who actually convert, whether that means making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other desired action.
Marketing attribution is the first tool for your arsenal if you’re looking to understand how high-quality leads behave.
While you might be currently tracking clicks, impressions and conversions, marketing attribution allows you to track revenue and attribute it directly to your marketing channels.
This is the best way to prove your digital marketing ROI, increase your ROAS and reduce your CPL and CPA.
Ruler Analytics tracks and records calls, form submissions and live chat sessions from all of your users. Then, when that lead converts into revenue, Ruler will pump all of that data back into your analytics tools.
This means you can see the impact every part of your marketing is having on sales, not leads. Once you find what leads are converting into revenue, you can double down on driving more of the same.
Price: From £199/month
💡 Pro Tip: Book a demo of Ruler now to see how you can link marketing touchpoints back to individual users so you can track full customer journeys.
Chances are, you’re already using Google Analytics to report on your digital marketing. It’s absolutely essential that you use this tool as it gives you a wealth of information about your marketing channels and campaigns.
You can set up goals and conversions in Google Analytics, so you can track meaningful actions taken on your website.
Related: How to calculate and assign a value to a goal in Google Analytics
With detailed insights into where your visitors are coming from and what they do on your site, you’re not only in a position to optimise your landing pages but also your advertising strategy and other parts of your site for better performance.
Remember, you can’t view visitor-level analytics in Google Analytics, but you can use a tool like Ruler to achieve this.
Price: Free
Hotjar isn’t just a lead generation tool, it’s a user behaviour swiss army knife. Imagine being able to see exactly how visitors navigate your website – every click, scroll, and hesitation.
With Hotjar’s session recordings, that’s exactly what you get. Analyse real user behaviour to identify pain points, areas of confusion, and elements that might be hindering conversions.
Heatmaps offer a visual representation of user behaviour, highlighting the most clicked and scrolled areas of your website. This data can expose unexpected user journeys and reveal opportunities to optimise your page layout and calls to action.
Hotjar goes beyond basic analytics by letting you see trends and patterns in user behaviour. This goldmine of insights allows you to tailor your website to perfectly match user expectations, ultimately leading to more qualified leads.
Price: Hotjar offers a free plan with basic features, and paid plans start at $31 per month, making it an accessible tool for businesses of all sizes.
Automation and integration tools are the workhorses of modern lead generation. They handle the repetitive tasks and stitch together different parts of the process, freeing you up to focus on strategy and nurturing qualified leads.
Marketing automation is a useful tool where you can combine your digital marketing and your CRM. Capturing and converting leads is dependent on how well you know your audience. But driving leads with tools like ActiveCampaign can be easy.
ActiveCampaign will track every interaction a user has with your website and then use these as triggers for your email marketing.
This means you can notify your sales team as soon as a lead visits a certain page on your website. You could also automatically follow up with cold leads every few months, or build email campaigns to nurture them back into warm leads.
Price: Free trial is available. Paid plan starts at just $9 per month.
Imagine if you could link up your software so that when a user completes a particular action in one tool, an action in another tool is triggered. Well, that’s exactly what Zapier can do.
Zapier could fit in every single category we shared, it’s so versatile.
It has thousands of integrations for you to connect your data and set up automatic triggers, or zaps.
We use Zapier extensively. One example is when a form converts in Ruler, Zapier can send a notification to your sales team member in Slack alerting them to a new opportunity. You can improve communication and customer service with automation – how great is that?
Price: Free, paid plans start from $20/month
HubSpot Marketing empowers you to create high-converting landing pages and forms, attracting qualified leads with targeted content. But the magic lies in automation.
For example, you can build nurturing workflows that send personalised email sequences based on user behaviour or segment your audience for laser-focused messaging, ensuring every interaction resonates with the recipient’s needs.
With insightful analytics and reporting, you can track campaign performance and optimise your strategy for maximum lead generation impact. HubSpot Marketing Hub doesn’t just generate leads, it cultivates relationships that convert.
Price: HubSpot Marketing offers a tiered pricing structure based on the number of marketing contacts you need to manage.
Marketo stands out as a powerful contender in the lead generation and automation arena.
Marketo empowers you to target the right audience with laser focus. By leveraging its lead scoring capabilities, you can identify high-quality prospects and prioritise your outreach.
Furthermore, Marketo’s marketing automation features streamline the nurturing process.
Automated email campaigns keep your brand top-of-mind, while personalised content journeys educate and engage potential customers. This allows you to nurture leads at scale, fostering trust and building relationships that convert.
Marketo goes beyond simple lead generation. With its built-in analytics, you gain valuable insights into campaign performance. This data empowers you to optimise your strategy and maximise your return on investment.
Price: To get a clear picture of Marketo’s cost for your specific needs, it’s recommended to contact their sales team for a custom quote.
On-page lead generation tools are those that you use on your own website or landing page to capture leads. These tools essentially act like magnets, attracting visitors and converting them into potential customers by collecting their contact information.
Lead capture is obviously an important step of lead generation. You’ve got a user onto your website, so the hard work should be done, right? Wrong.
Small changes to your lead form could drastically change your conversion rates. Manually testing iterations of lead capture forms can be time consuming. But with GetLeadForm, it isn’t!
GetLeadForms has a range of templates and designs to choose from, with each form template utilising best practices that the GetLeadForms team have uncovered through online form conversion-optimization testing. So, you’re already off to a great start!
Their built-in analytics provide a complete picture of how well your forms are performing so you can continue to optimise.
Price: Paid plans start from $29/month
Unbounce is probably the first name to come to mind when thinking about landing page builders. Personalisation is key when it comes to converting web users into leads.
Not only does Unbounce have one of the best drag-and-drop page builders in the game, it also provides plenty of options to allow for on-page personalisation.
You can send users to a highly targeted and personalised landing page using simple targeting. This will help you move your users down the purchasing funnel – ideal!
Price: Prices start from $79/month
Drift is a marketing chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to communicate with website leads, qualify them, and even schedule calls or demos with sales on your behalf.
Say a lead spends 60 seconds viewing a pricing page. They may be struggling to understand different aspects of available plans, or they may want to see the product in action before committing to a purchase.
With Drift, a chat window pops up and asks the lead if the user has any questions. In some cases, the chatbot answers questions, or if it doesn’t know the answer, it can automatically schedule a call with one of your client’s customer service or sales reps.
Drift removes the delays associated with leads filling out forms and waiting for someone to reach out by making the whole process more conversational and real-time.
Price: Free and paid-for plans are both available depending on needs.
Popups are always a contentious issue in online marketing, but when done well can be extremely impactful. Optinmonster has a great popup feature that allows you to implement exit-intent popups.
This means, if a user shows signs of leaving the page, the popup will show up for a final chance at converting a visitor into a lead. Optinmonster is easy to use, and you can even A/B test them to see which works best.
Price: Prices start from $19/month
This is a must-get tool for anyone relying on inbound calls to drive sales. ResponseIQ’s widget, which they claim can be installed in under five minutes, seamlessly connects your site visitor to your sales team in 27 seconds via intelligent callback technology.
They also offer a system in which your sales team is instantly connected to users who submit a form on your website.
Price: Prices start at £49/month
Ahrefs is a great all-rounder when it comes to SEO. From keyword planning to competitor analysis and site exploration, you can look into different facets of technical SEO with this tool.
For every piece of content you write, you’ll want to do some SEO research on it first to understand both how often it’s searched, and how difficult it will be to rank for.
Ahrefs also has a great ‘keyword suggestions’ section, where you can find more targeted keywords to use for SEO writing.
Other key features include a backlinks report, meaning you can identify future opportunities to grow your backlinks, and a technical SEO report which allows you to see any issues with your website that could affect your search rankings.
Price: Plans start at $99/month
If you’re running a WordPress site, then you need to download the Yoast plugin on day one. While it won’t solve all of your SEO problems, it will make sure you cover the basic essentials for every page and post on your website.
Yoast is definitely best for those with limited SEO knowledge. However, it also analyses your content on its readability, which is highly important when considering user experience on your site.
Remember, having a good amount of SEO on a blog will only get you so far if your content is poorly written. Yoast will give you tips on how to improve both readability and SEO with easy fixes you can do right on the page.
Price: Free download in WordPress, advanced plan available at a cost
Good luck choosing between Semrush and Ahrefs. Both are great tools for developing your keyword and SEO strategy. Semrush has similar features to Ahrefs and is well known for its keyword research capabilities. Their site audit tool is great for checking SEO opportunities on your website that could give you some easy wins in rankings.
And the best thing is that it’s very user-friendly meaning your most junior team members will be able to use it and come to the same conclusion as your senior SEO marketers.
Price: Plans start at $99.95/month
Buzzsumo is a great tool that helps you discover the most shared content across social media. You can use it to find the top influencers for a given topic if you’re thinking about using influencer marketing to drive leads.
Or, you can set up an alert for keywords so that any new topic on that subject is sent directly to you.
This is a great way to find relevant content that you can share, or create, with your audience to drive leads. By using content that you know is working, you can jump on trends quickly and hopefully be seen by more people on search or social.
Price: Prices start at $99/month.
Outbound lead generation is not an easy task. Finding relevant contacts who fit your profile is tricky. Getting them to take an interest and convert is even trickier. Here’s a list of some outbound lead generation tools to help make the process of moving a user from zero interest to a sale, a little bit easier.
Personalised video is increasingly becoming more common, particularly in outbound emails to potential leads. Vidyard is an online video platform for business which allows you to increase leads, accelerate your pipeline and delight your customers.
You can embed your videos directly into your emails, view analytics with options to record via your webcam or record your screen.
Price: Free plan and paid plans available
Uplead is a great tool for finding the right emails and contacts for key decision-makers at the companies you sell to. You can search their database, which is extremely precise with its results. Not only can you search the database of over 45+ million contacts, you can also refine your searches by over 16,000 technology points.
So, whether you want to find users who use a CRM like Salesforce, or advertisers on Facebook, you can! This is a great way to grow your lead generation by finding targeted, relevant audiences.
Price: Free, with paid plans available.
If you’re in B2B sales, LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is a great tool for capturing leads thanks to huge amounts of company information in its database.
Alongside receiving lead recommendations and seeing who’s viewed your profile, the Sales Navigator enables you to save your leads directly into your CRM.
Price: Prices start from $64.99/month
Do you know the market you want to target? Growbots will select your prospects from their database of over 200 million contacts.
You can easily get in touch with the right decision-makers and follow up automatically. Growbots also includes testing options so that you can optimise your outbound emails.
Price: You can request a free demo of Growbots. From there, you’ll need to request pricing from their sales team.
That’s our ultimate guide to the best lead generation tools out there. These will help you drive higher-quality traffic to your site and give you the tools you need to convert them into sales.
Remember, marketing attribution is a key lead generation tool to try for a few reasons (we’re not biassed, we promise…).
Firstly, Ruler can help you understand the quality of your current lead generation efforts.
Second, it can help you identify the marketing channels and campaigns that are driving high-quality leads. You know what that means, more revenue and faster growth at a lower cost.
Take the guesswork (and frustration) out of your marketing reports today by booking a demo. Or, learn more about how Ruler works to link your marketing and your revenue with our guide to closed-loop marketing attribution.