April 10, 2025
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Lead gen is a hot topic in today's competitive advertising landscape. Successfully generating high-quality leads is critical for building sales pipelines that lead to business growth.
But how can media companies help advertisers win the lead-gen race to capture high-quality prospects while outpacing other competitors?
Lead-gen strategies and campaigns must stand out from the crowd while being relevant to prospects.
That's where Audience comes in; it is among the best lead generation companies you can find with tools that make it easy to help advertisers grow their sales pipelines through creative strategies like contests, giveaways, surveys, polls, and more. And by activating Audience's tools to generate and qualify leads for advertisers, media companies can generate significant incremental revenue.
Before we get into a list of compelling ideas for lead-gen campaigns and strategies, let's quickly explore the "lead generation" definition.
Essentially, lead gen is the process by which advertisers identify and attract prospective customers for their business with the goal of converting initial interest into sales (or some other goal outcome).
Incentive-based contesting, giveaways, polls, and more are highly effective, creative, and engaging ways to generate more leads while increasing brand visibility.
Audience offers a full suite of tools designed to make lead gen easy, engaging, and appealing to your potential customers. Not only that, but the platform also provides the ability to qualify leads, enhancing your understanding of the audience to ultimately create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns. All of that adds up to more high-quality, qualified leads and a greater chance of conversion!
Check out this list of 10 creative and effective strategies to successfully generate and qualify leads using Audience.
Everyone loves a giveaway — not only does it increase engagement, but it also builds brand affinity. Because giveaways are so universally loved, they are an incredible way to generate new leads and increase visibility for an advertiser.
No matter what you're giving away, Audience has just the right customizable template to set up the activation and capture audience interest. To qualify leads, you can also add survey-style questions within the campaign in the form of bonus entries or as a requirement for entry.
Case in point? Check out our case study about how a credit union successfully achieved its goals of collecting qualified leads, growing its social media audience, and increasing email opt-ins through a well-executed $500 giveaway campaign.
Strategic forms and surveys — often fueled by a giveaway incentive — can help advertisers understand more about potential customers' preferences and purchase intent while gathering other valuable zero-party data. But leave the basic Google Form behind!
Audience helped San Diablo Churros shift from a basic Google Form to an interactive, data-driven survey campaign, which featured a combination of qualifying questions and interactive features to elevate this marketing campaign. And the results were impressive, with more than 1,200 new leads and additional zero-party data points collected.
Like a giveaway, sweepstakes promotions quickly gather new leads for advertisers — especially because the prizes are generally widely desirable. Sweepstakes also open the door to add on strategic survey components since people are often willing to increase their participation for a chance to win big.
In one example, Audience drove incredible results for the Stephen Wade Chrysler dealership in Utah, which wanted to increase its car sales and grow its digital marketing efforts to reach a wider audience.
By combining a standard sweepstakes with a promotion strategy and a strategic survey to qualify leads, the Chrysler dealership was able to not only increase car sales but also grow its online presence and engage with potential customers.
When you tap into prospective consumers' passion points through a poll, you can expect to gain immediate engagement and new leads. Polls also give advertisers a chance to gather valuable insights on their prospects and their opinions and preferences — simply by the nature of the poll itself.
From favorite Netflix shows to favorite foods and beverages, sports teams, summer vacations and activities, and so much more, the sky's the limit when it comes to poll topics. You can get more poll content ideas here.
Quizzes are another way to quickly and easily collect leads and consumer data. Participants willingly share more information when they perceive a quiz to be meaningful and valuable to their interests.
This richer dataset can enable you to gain deeper customer insights into your potential customers' preferences and behaviors while qualifying leads, allowing for more targeted and effective marketing campaigns in the future. Check out quiz ideas here.
Contests come in many forms — from polls to quizzes, user-generated content (UGC), and beyond — and they are inherently fun for participants! Incentives are an extremely effective way to motivate people to participate, too. As such, they can be a great strategy to increase data collection and qualify leads while learning more about consumers.
You can take your surveys, quizzes, and polls to the next level of lead gen and zero-party data gathering when you use conditionals. Conditionals help guide participants to specific questions, sponsors, or a whole new set of questions (only in surveys) depending on their individual answers. It makes the lead gen and data collection process that much more personalized and relevant!
When it comes to lead gen, it's critical to find strategic ways to convert viewers, listeners, and in-store traffic into online subscribers and followers, too. That's where QR (quick response) codes come in! They literally crack the code on this challenge. They've emerged as a versatile marketing tool that advertisers can use to take offline experiences into online engagement, capturing audience information to enrich lead gen efforts.
If you're wondering how to create a QR code and launch a QR code campaign, Audience can help. We know how effectively and efficiently QR codes can transform offline audiences into active digital participants while driving brand loyalty and sales. Our Scan activation tool doesn't just create a QR code. It also generates in-person engagement while increasing conversions, collecting valuable zero-party data, and giving you access to understand your customers better.
All eight of these lead gen strategies use Audience's versatile, best-in-class platform. It has all the functionality and tools for media companies and advertisers to creatively and effectively generate, qualify, and nurture leads to fill the sales pipeline and drive business growth and revenue. For more examples, check out our case studies here.