Lead generation is a challenge for all businesses-to-business (B2B) commerce. While a big budget can help boost inquiries, there are many effective, inexpensive lead generation strategies that can form the backbone of any successful marketing effort.

Here are some strategies to use, whether you are starting from scratch or fine-tuning your current lead generation activity.

Optimize your landing pages and messaging

Before increasing traffic, make sure the road is easy to travel. Take an unbiased look at your landing pages and call-to-action (CTA) statement. If people cannot easily find contact information for your business or simple forms to compete, you are losing them as potential leads.

Many businesses are so eager to promote their products and services they miss the critical part: testing what works for current and future clients. A/B tests can help your test effectiveness. One study showed a mere one-word change reduced conversions over 26 percent.

Create high-quality content

Publishing articles that demonstrate your expertise can boost business reputation and enhance online and social media traffic. Blogs, whitepapers and articles published on your website as well as other well-respected sites show your knowledge, offer potential clients advice and can boost search traffic.

Depending on your industry and speaking skills, short videos or hosted webinars can generate leads by showing you know your stuff.

Encourage online reviews

Your current customers are invaluable sources of potential leads. Encourage them to post an online review of your products or services. Research shows online reviews are trusted and effective. Accordingly, accumulating positive reviews are important for influencing potential customers who find you online.

Make it easy for customers to leave a review via a link or follow-up email. Offering an incentive, such as a discount or entry into a drawing, can improve results.

Social media automation

Each social media channel attracts different audiences and behavior. Once you have determined which sites your potential customers are likely to use, form a strategy to automate your use of social media to maximize its impact.

There are a variety of tools that allow you to schedule posts and monitor their effectiveness. Use them, and test different times or frequencies for tweeting and posting items.

Best practices indicate that posting three times a day is great for Twitter, but only once a day for LinkedIn. If you are worried about having enough to share, sharing content from others works to drive traffic your way too.

Analyze and score website and CTA data

Qualitative information about your leads and their effectiveness is great. However, quantitative data yields important insights into customer behavior on the channels you use for lead generation, particularly if you score your leads.

Lead scoring involves assigning values to attributes on leads, such as demographic information regarding the company, what offer or channel they used, whether they wound up as customers or other aspects. This helps you further refine your marketing efforts.

Most importantly, research shows that lead scoring can trigger a 77 percent increase in return on investment on your lead generation efforts.