In this article, I’m sharing 25 unconventional lead generation ideas for B2B businesses, the kind nobody else is talking about. Not social media. Not cold outreach. Not attend more networking events. The creative, bold, slightly counterintuitive ideas that really fill your pipeline in 2026, with a full breakdown of how to execute each one.

Every lead generation article on the internet starts the same way.

‘Have you tried LinkedIn? What about cold email? Networking events are great! Don’t forget to post consistently on social media!’

Groundbreaking stuff. Truly. You’ve never heard any of that before.

This article is not that article.

I’m going to assume you already know that LinkedIn exists. I’m going to assume you’ve sent a cold email or two in your time. I’m going to assume you’ve stood at a networking event with a lukewarm glass of Pinot Grigio wondering if this is really how businesses get built.

(It isn’t. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be.)

What I want to talk about is the other stuff. The creative stuff. The bold stuff. The slightly ridiculous ideas that, when you actually try them, turn out to work better than anything sensible you’ve ever done.

My motto has always been, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And the corollary to that is if you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. Which, in lead generation terms, is a lot of ignored InMails and a pipeline that looks more optimistic than it is.

I once launched a brand new podcast, zero episodes, zero downloads, zero audience  and went out to find podcast sponsors. Everyone told me I was wasting my time. You need downloads to get sponsors Lilach. That’s just how it works. I made $30,000 in sponsorship revenue in ten days. Zero downloads. (And if you want to know exactly how I did it, I put the whole thing into a free blueprint you can grab it here.)  The rules were wrong, or at least they were wrong for someone willing to ask anyway.

That’s the spirit of this article. Do the opposite. Be bold. Be different. Be the person who sits in the front row when everyone else is quietly shuffling towards the back.

Here are 25 lead generation ideas for 2026 that nobody else is talking about.

1. Send Handwritten Letters (Yes, in 2026)

I know how this sounds. Bear with me.

We live in a world of infinite digital noise. Inboxes are battlegrounds. LinkedIn notifications are ignored on an industrial scale. Everyone is screaming into the same void, and the void has learned to tune it out.

Now imagine your ideal client walks into their office on a Tuesday morning and finds a handwritten envelope on their desk. Not a printed letter in an envelope. An actual handwritten letter, or better yet, something written in calligraphy. Their name. Their company name. In ink.

They will open it. I promise you they will open it. Because in 2026, physical post that looks personal is so rare it has become the curiosity. It breaks pattern in a way that no subject line ever will.

The letter doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be genuine. Tell them specifically why you’re reaching out to them. Reference something real about their business. Make it clear this wasn’t printed in a batch of five hundred. Make it clear a human being wrote it, thought about them, and took the time.

How to do it

• Identify your top 20 dream clients, not a mass list, a considered one
• Write a short, personal, specific letter. Three paragraphs. Why them, what you do, what you’d love to explore together
• If your handwriting is appalling (mine is), hire a calligrapher on Fiverr or Not On The High Street. Genuinely. For $10–20 per letter to a client worth thousands, this is the easiest ROI calculation you’ll ever do
• Include one specific call to action, a phone number, a personal link, a date you’ll follow up
• Follow up digitally a week later and reference the letter

What to avoid

Sending it to a generic Head of Marketing at a PO box. If you can’t personalise it properly, don’t send it. A generic handwritten letter is just expensive junk mail with better penmanship.

2. Engineer Who You Sit Next To

This one is about intention. Most people go to events, conferences, and industry gatherings and let proximity decide their conversations. They sit where there’s a spare seat. They talk to whoever’s standing near the coffee. They leave with a handful of business cards they’ll never follow up and a vague sense that networking is overrated.

I’ve always done the opposite. Before I go to any event, I do my research. Who is speaking? Who is attending? Who do I actually want to meet? I go with a list, not a creepy stalker list, just a considered one and I think deliberately about how to put myself in the right place.

I’ll give you a specific example. Years ago I invested in a networking event in London. And I mean invested, it was expensive enough that I had to be ruthless about justifying it. I only went because it attracted exactly the right people, senior marketing decision-makers at major tech companies. Before I arrived I’d done my homework. I knew who I wanted to be in the room with. I got friendly with the organisers, properly friendly, not transactionally friendly and between that and a bit of strategic seat selection, I ended up sitting opposite the Director of Marketing at Hootsuite, next to the Director of Marketing at Experian, and next to the Adobe Director of Marketing.

Experian and I got on well and agreed to meet, nothing materialised, which happens. The Adobe Director didn’t become a client either, but they invited me to their annual gala event, which turned out to be one of the most spectacular evenings I’ve ever attended. Live music, a surprise pop star performance, the kind of production budget that makes you briefly wonder if you’ve wandered into a different life. All because I sat in the right seat.

And Hootsuite? We got on brilliantly. They became a client. I ended up creating a significant amount of their content through my agency. From one evening, one event, one very deliberate decision about where to sit.

That’s not luck. That’s intention dressed up as socialising.

I sit in the front row at everything. Nobody sits in the front row. This means I’m visible to every speaker, I’m one of the first people they interact with during Q&A, and after the session I’m one of three people already in conversation range rather than fighting through a crowd. I’ve made more valuable connections from front row seats than from any amount of post-event LinkedIn requests.

I also get friendly with event organisers. Not in a transactional way, genuinely. Organisers know everyone, they know who’s looking for what, and they can make introductions that would otherwise take months of cold outreach. Find the right events and yes, sometimes you have to search hard for them and then work them properly. The opportunities don’t fall in your lap. You place yourself in front of them.

How to do it

• Before any event, look at the speaker list and attendee list if available. Identify three to five people you really want to connect with
• Sit in the front row. Always. People notice it, speakers notice it, and it positions you as someone who’s engaged and serious
• During breaks, approach speakers while they’re still near the stage, that window is small and the conversation is warm because you’ve just shared an experience
• Email the organiser beforehand. Tell them you’re attending, mention why you’re excited, and ask if there’s anyone they’d recommend you connect with. Most organisers love doing this
• Follow up with every meaningful connection within 24 hours while the memory is fresh

What to avoid

Treating this as a transaction. The goal is a real conversation, not a pitch. If you turn every introduction into a sales moment you’ll get a reputation for it, and it won’t be a good one.

3. Launch a Micro-Research Report

Everyone is publishing thought leadership content. Blog posts, LinkedIn carousels, podcasts. Most of it says roughly the same things in slightly different fonts.

What almost nobody does is publish original data.

A short research report, even one based on a survey of fifty or a hundred people in your target market, gives you something that no amount of opinion pieces can match, something refreshingly new. A finding nobody else has. A statistic that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the internet because you went and found it.

This works on multiple levels. It gives journalists something to write about (more on that later). It gives your target audience a reason to engage with you that isn’t ‘please buy my thing.’ It positions you as someone who studies your market seriously rather than someone who just talks about it. And it generates leads directly because people have to give you their email to download the full report.

How to do it

• Identify a question your target market is curious about. Not ‘what are the biggest challenges facing B2B marketers?’ (done to death) but something more specific and interesting. ‘How are B2B marketers actually using AI, and what’s not working?’ or ‘What do B2B buyers really think about the vendors who pitch them cold?’
• Run a survey using Typeform or Google Forms. You don’t need hundreds of responses fifty thoughtful ones beats five hundred lazy ones
• Distribute via LinkedIn, your email list, relevant communities, and by asking your network to share it
• Write up the findings as a short, well-designed PDF report (ten to fifteen pages is plenty). Include your most surprising finding on the cover
• Gate it behind an email sign-up. Every download is a lead who’s demonstrated interest in your area of expertise
• Pull out the most interesting stats and write about them separately as social content, press pitches, and blog posts. One survey = six months of content

What to avoid

Making the survey so long that nobody finishes it, or so generic that nobody cares about the findings. Surprising and specific beats comprehensive and dull every time.

4. Sponsor a Brand New Podcast With No Downloads

Here’s the story I mentioned in the intro, because it’s relevant and because I still enjoy how much it annoyed the people who told me it couldn’t be done.

I launched a podcast. It had no episodes. It had no downloads. It had no audience. And I went out and sold sponsorship packages.

Everyone said you can’t do that. Sponsors want downloads. They want proof of audience. They want metrics.

I made $30,000 in ten days.

Here’s what I understood that the conventional wisdom missed, a brand new podcast is not an established media property, it’s a ground-floor opportunity. The right sponsors aren’t paying for existing audience, they’re paying for association, positioning, and access. A well-pitched sponsorship to the right brand at the right moment isn’t to do with the downloads you have. It’s about the audience you’re going to build and the story you’re telling about why that audience is worth reaching.

The same principle applies beyond podcasting. Think about newsletters, events, communities, report series. If you’re building something and you can clearly articulate who it’s for and why those people are valuable to a specific type of sponsor, you don’t need a track record. You need a compelling pitch and the nerve to send it.

How to do it

• Be clear on your audience before you approach anyone. Who specifically will consume this? What do they care about? What do they spend money on? What companies want to reach them?
• Identify five to ten potential sponsors who have a clear business reason to want access to that audience
• Pitch the vision, not the current numbers. ‘We’re building the go-to resource for [specific audience] and we’re looking for a founding sponsor to grow with us’ is a more interesting pitch than apologising for your download count
• Offer founding sponsor rates, lower investment, longer commitment, more prominence. Some brands love being first
• Come with a clear deliverables list, mentions, logo placement, dedicated segments, social posts. Make it easy for them to say yes

What to avoid

Approaching massive brands with huge procurement processes. Go for the mid-sized company with a marketing director who can make a quick decision and who genuinely wants to reach your audience.

5. Build a Dream Client Campaign

Most lead generation is passive. You put content out and hope the right people find it. You run ads and hope the algorithm points them at someone useful. You attend events and hope the right person is there.

A dream client campaign is the opposite. You choose who you want, and you go and get them.

Pick ten companies. Not a hundred. Ten. The ten businesses you would most want to work with right now. Then build a deliberate, multi-touch, multi-channel sequence designed specifically for those ten. Not generic outreach that could have been sent to anyone. A campaign that makes each of those ten companies feel like you’ve been paying attention to them.

Reference something real about their business. Mention a piece of content they published that you read. Comment on a challenge that’s specific to their situation, not their industry in general. Send the handwritten letter from idea one. Connect with three people at the company, not just the decision maker. Be present, be specific, be patient.

How to do it

• Identify your ten dream clients. Be specific, company name, not just companies like X
• Research each one properly. Their recent news, their marketing content, their LinkedIn activity, their job postings (job postings tell you a lot about where a company is investing and what they’re struggling with)
• Build a six-week touchpoint sequence for each, LinkedIn connection request with a personal note, handwritten letter, comment on their content, email referencing something specific, follow-up call
• Connect with multiple people at each company, the decision maker, their manager, a peer. People buy from people, and internal advocates are powerful
• Document everything in a simple spreadsheet so nothing falls through the cracks

What to avoid

Scaling this up and losing the personalisation. The moment it becomes a mail merge, it loses everything that made it work. Ten is intentional. Stick to ten.

6. Create a Competitor Comparison Content Hub

When someone is about to make a B2B purchase, there’s a moment, usually late at night, usually when they’re trying to justify a decision to themselves or their boss where they Google your name vs a competitor’s name.

Most companies leave that Google search to chance. They let review sites and Reddit threads and other people’s content decide what the searcher finds.

You can own that moment instead.

Creating honest, well-researched comparison content, ‘us vs them’ pages, alternative pages, and category comparison guides, captures buyers at the exact moment they’re trying to make a decision. These pages convert extraordinarily well because the person reading them is not casually browsing. They are actively deciding.

How to do it

• Identify your five main competitors and the search terms buyers use to compare you: ‘[Your brand] vs [Competitor]’, ‘alternatives to [Competitor]’, ‘best [category] tools’
• Create dedicated pages for each comparison. Be honest. If a competitor is better at something, acknowledge it and explain who they’re better for. Fake objectivity is transparent and annoying. Real objectivity builds trust
• Structure each page: quick summary, detailed feature comparison, pricing comparison, who each is best for, customer reviews for both
• Optimise these pages for SEO, they’re often lower competition than your main category keywords but capture buyers who are much further along in their decision
• Update them regularly. Outdated comparison pages are worse than no comparison pages

What to avoid

Making it a one-sided attack piece. Buyers are smart enough to know when they’re being sold to and cynical enough to distrust anything that reads like a hit job. Be fair and you’ll be trusted.

7. Host a Dinner, Not a Webinar

Webinars have been done to death. The format has a built-in attention problem, people register and then either don’t show up, or show up and have seventeen other tabs open, or mute it and do their emails while nominally attending.

A dinner is completely different.

Invite eight to twelve of your ideal potential clients to an intimate dinner. No pitch. No slides. A conversation around a topic they care about. Call it a roundtable, a working dinner, a peer group session. The format doesn’t matter as much as the intimacy.

People remember dinners. They don’t remember webinars. And the conversations that happen over food, in a small group of peers, are richer and more honest than anything you’ll get in a webinar chat box. You’ll learn more about what your prospects care about in one dinner than from six months of content analytics.

You also become the person who brought those people together. That’s a very valuable position to be in.

How to do it

• Pick a specific topic that’s relevant to your target audience right now. Not a pitch topic, a challenge they’re actually wrestling with
• Invite ten to twelve people at the right seniority level. Mix of existing clients, prospects, and interesting people from adjacent spaces
• Book a private dining room at a good restaurant. It doesn’t need to be expensive, it needs to feel considered
• Prepare three or four conversation starters but let the discussion lead itself. Your job is to facilitate, not to present
• Follow up personally with every attendee within 48 hours. Reference something specific from the conversation
• Do this quarterly. Build a community around the table

What to avoid

Turning it into a sales presentation with a meal attached. The moment attendees feel like they’ve been tricked into a pitch, you’ve lost them and their word of mouth.

8. Go After Dissatisfied Customers of Your Competitors

Someone who has already decided they need what you offer, already spent money on it, and is currently unhappy with the version they’re getting is the warmest lead you’ll ever find. They don’t need convincing the problem is real. They don’t need educating about why the solution matters. They just need to find a better provider.

There are entire ecosystems of people publicly expressing dissatisfaction with products and services in review platforms like G2 and Trustpilot, in Reddit communities, in LinkedIn comments, in Twitter/X threads. These people are telling you, loudly and publicly, that they’re unhappy and why.

This is an extraordinary lead generation opportunity that most businesses walk straight past.

How to do it

• Set up monitoring for your main competitors on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and relevant Reddit communities. Look specifically for recent negative reviews that mention problems you solve
• On review platforms, you can sometimes identify the reviewer and reach out directly, but do this carefully and genuinely. Lead with acknowledging the problem they described, not with a sales pitch
• On Reddit and public forums, you can respond to threads where someone is asking for alternatives. Be helpful, not promotional. ‘We actually built our product specifically to solve that problem’ is useful. A discount code is not
• Create content specifically targeting those pain points. ‘Frustrated with [Competitor]? Here’s what our customers switched for’ is a legitimate piece of content that will find its own audience
• Use tools like Brand24 or Mention to automate the monitoring so you’re not doing it manually

What to avoid

Being predatory or exploitative about it. People in pain don’t want to be swooped on. Lead with genuine help and the commercial conversation follows naturally.

9. Build a Free Tool or Calculator

Content is everywhere. Tools are not.

A well-built free tool, a calculator, an assessment, a grader, a generator does something that blog posts and white papers can’t. It delivers immediate, personalised value. It’s useful right now, in the moment, for this specific person and their specific situation.

HubSpot built a free website grader and used it to generate millions of leads. A marketing agency built a free ad spend calculator and it became their single biggest source of inbound leads. An HR consultant built a free salary benchmarking tool and it positioned them as the obvious expert in their space.

The tool doesn’t need to be technically complex. It needs to be super useful and relevant to the decision your target buyer is trying to make.

And here’s the bit that makes this a significantly bigger opportunity in 2026 than it was even two years ago, you can build one in an afternoon. Describe what you want to Claude or ChatGPT, tell it who it’s for and what decision it needs to help them make, and it will write the code. No developer. No agency. No four-month project timeline and a budget that makes you wince. An afternoon, a free AI tool, and a clear idea of what your audience really needs. The barrier to entry has essentially disappeared, which means the only reason not to have one is that you haven’t built it yet.

How to do it

• Identify a decision or calculation your target buyer regularly has to make. What number are they trying to work out? What assessment do they wish someone would just do for them?
• Describe it to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to build you a simple web-based version. Be specific about the inputs, the outputs, and what the result should tell the user. You’ll have a working prototype faster than you think
• If you want something more polished, tools like Typeform or Outgrow let you build calculators and assessments without touching code at all
• Put it behind a light lead capture, name and email in exchange for the results. Don’t ask for seventeen fields. Two is enough
• Promote it everywhere. A useful free tool is shareable in a way that blog posts rarely are
• Use the tool’s results to start a conversation. If someone’s website scores 40 out of 100, you have a very specific and very warm opener

What to avoid

Building something that’s only useful if you already want to buy from the company. The tool needs standalone value, not just be a thinly veiled product demo. And don’t overcomplicate it, the best tools solve one specific problem beautifully rather than six problems adequately.

10. Pitch Yourself as a Guest on Your Clients’ Podcasts

Everyone wants to be on big podcasts. Everyone pitches the same twenty shows. The competition for those spots is intense, the audience is broad and hard to convert, and the host has no particular reason to make you look good.

Flip it. Target the podcasts your ideal clients either host or appear on regularly.

If your dream client hosts a podcast, even a small one, getting on that show is worth more than being on a podcast with ten times the audience. Your dream client has now spent an hour in deep conversation with you. They’ve introduced you to their community. They’re associated with you publicly. That’s not a cold lead, that’s a warm relationship.

And before you say ‘but my dream client’s podcast only has 200 listeners’ you are not there for the 200 listeners. You are there for the host.

How to do it

• Identify which of your target prospects host podcasts or have guested on podcasts recently. LinkedIn and Apple Podcasts are your friends here
• Listen to two or three episodes before you pitch. Reference them specifically in your outreach. ‘I listened to your episode with [guest] and your point about [specific thing] really resonated because…’ is a completely different pitch to a generic guest inquiry template
• Pitch a specific topic that’s interesting to their audience, not a topic that promotes your services
• Make it easy to say yes. Include your bio, a list of potential topics, and links to any previous podcast appearances
• After the episode, amplify it as much as you can. Tag the host, share it across channels, write a follow-up article inspired by the conversation. You’re rewarding them for having you on

What to avoid

Using a template pitch that’s been sent to two hundred podcasts. Podcast hosts can smell a template at fifty paces and the delete key is right there.

11. Create Content for Your Clients’ Clients

Here’s a counterintuitive one.

Most B2B content is aimed at your buyers. Which makes sense on the surface. But there’s a different audience who can pull you into deals without you having to do any outreach at all, your clients’ clients.

If you work with marketing agencies, create content that helps their end clients understand marketing better. If you work with accountants, create content that helps their business-owner clients understand financial decisions. If your buyers have buyers of their own, become a resource their buyers trust.

When your client’s client starts asking for you by name, or recommending you to other businesses in their network, you’ve created a pull that no amount of cold outreach could replicate.

How to do it

• Map out who your clients serve and what those people are trying to achieve
• Create content, guides, or resources specifically aimed at that audience but position it as something your clients can share with their clients. ‘Here’s a resource you can send to your customers who keep asking about X’
• Partner with clients to co-create content. They get useful material for their audience, you get access to that audience
• Make the content so useful that the end audience actively seeks out who created it

What to avoid

Creating content that pitches your services directly to your clients’ clients. That’s cannibalising your client’s relationship. The content should serve their clients, not recruit them.

12. Run a Live Audit or Teardown on Social Media

This one generates leads in real time, publicly, while simultaneously demonstrating your expertise in the most credible way possible.

Pick a thing your target clients struggle with, a website, a landing page, a LinkedIn profile, a marketing strategy, a sales deck and do a live teardown of a real example. Not a fake example. A real one, with the owner’s permission ideally, or a public example from a well-known company.

Show your thinking out loud. Be specific. Be useful. Be the person who, in ten minutes of commentary, gives someone more actionable insight than they’d get from a two-hour consultation elsewhere.

The people watching are your ideal clients. They’re not watching for entertainment. They’re watching because they have the same problem and they want to know how you think about it.

How to do it

• Pick your format, LinkedIn Live, a YouTube video, a Twitter/X thread with screenshots, a short recorded Loom
• Choose your subject carefully. It should be something a large chunk of your target audience struggles with and something where your analysis is insightful
• Be specific and honest. Vague positivity (‘this is pretty good overall!’) is useless. Specific observations (‘the headline buries the actual value proposition, here’s how I’d rewrite it’) is what people share
• At the end, offer to do a quick audit for anyone who comments or messages. You’ll be surprised how many take you up on it
• Turn your best audits into recurring content. A weekly teardown series builds an audience that is almost entirely made up of your ideal clients

What to avoid

Being cruel or making the subject of the teardown feel attacked. The goal is insight, not entertainment at someone’s expense. If you can’t be kind and specific simultaneously, pick a different example.

13. Get Into the Inbox Via Someone Else’s Newsletter

You know how hard it is to get someone to subscribe to your newsletter. You’ve lived that uphill battle. You’ve written the landing page, offered the lead magnet, begged your LinkedIn audience, and watched the subscriber count tick up at a pace that makes glaciers look impatient.

Now consider that someone in your space already has the exact audience you want. They’ve already done the work of building the list, earning the trust, and getting the open rate. And they’re looking for interesting things to share with that audience every single week.

Newsletter sponsorships and collaborative content deals are one of the most underused lead generation channels in B2B, largely because people assume it requires a huge budget or a formal partnership. It often requires neither.

Many newsletter operators, especially in the small to mid-sized range would love to feature an interesting piece of content, co-create something with a knowledgeable partner, or run a sponsored section if the topic is relevant to their readers. Reach out and ask.

And since I’m clearly not above a well-timed example, I run a weekly newsletter for 15,000+ business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs, founders, operators, SaaS buyers, consultants, the exact people who actively try and buy tools and services. I work with partners who want high-intent traffic and real demand rather than just a logo in a crowded issue. The copy is written to move people, not just appear in front of them. If that sounds like your audience, you can find out more about partnering here.

Right. Back to the advice.

How to do it

• Identify newsletters your ideal clients read. Ask your existing clients what newsletters they subscribe to. Check Substack, Beehiiv, and ConvertKit for relevant publications
• Read several issues before approaching anyone. Know their voice, their topics, their audience, nothing kills a partnership conversation faster than a pitch that’s clearly never seen the inside of the newsletter it’s pitching
• Approach with a specific idea, not can I advertise with you but I’ve noticed your readers often ask about X, I’ve written a short piece that I think would help them, would you consider featuring it?
• For sponsorships, lead with specific relevance. Why is your product right for their specific audience right now? Vague brand awareness pitches go in the bin. Specific, well-reasoned relevance gets a reply
• Offer exclusivity or a bespoke piece of content for their audience. Make it feel like a collaboration, not a transaction. The best newsletter partnerships don’t feel like ads, they feel like the editor found something useful and wanted to share it

What to avoid

Sending a generic sponsorship inquiry to two hundred newsletters. Pick five or ten that are right for your audience, approach each one as if you’ve actually read it, and you’ll get a response rate that makes the effort very obviously worth it.

14. Create an Onboarding Experience for Prospects

Most businesses treat everyone in the interested but not ready pile the same way, quarterly newsletter, occasional blog post, the odd LinkedIn connection. The prospect sits in a CRM field called nurture and gets nurtured into forgetting you exist.

What if you created a proper experience for someone from the moment they showed interest?

A structured onboarding sequence, not a drip email campaign, an actual experience that helps a prospect understand their problem better, see the landscape of solutions, and arrive at an informed conversation with you. When someone feels helped rather than marketed to, the sales conversation changes completely.

How to do it

• Map the journey from ‘just became aware of us’ to ‘ready to have a proper conversation.’ What does someone need to understand at each stage?
• Create a series of useful touchpoints, a welcome email with your most useful free resource, a short video explaining the problem you solve in a way they haven’t heard before, a case study specific to their industry, a practical guide they can use right now regardless of whether they ever buy from you
• Make each touchpoint feel considered and personal, even if it’s automated. Reference their specific situation if you know it
• At the end of the sequence, invite a conversation, not a sales call, a conversation. ‘Based on what you’ve been exploring, I’d love to ask you a few questions and share some thoughts’ is very different from ‘Book a demo’

What to avoid

Making the onboarding experience five emails that all end with ready to buy yet?  Helpful first. Commercial second. Always.

15. Pitch the Trade Press, Not Just the Big Media

Every business owner fantasises about the Forbes feature or the BBC interview. Fine. Great. Chase that if you want to.

But while you’re chasing it, your ideal clients are reading very specific trade publications that you’ve probably never thought of pitching. Industry magazines, sector newsletters, professional association journals. These publications have small but intensely loyal audiences made up almost entirely of your potential buyers, and they are chronically short of good content.

A feature in a mid-sized industry publication often generates better leads than a mention in a national newspaper, because every reader is relevant.

How to do it

• List every trade publication, association magazine, or industry newsletter that your ideal clients read. Ask your existing clients. Check what publications come up in your sector on Google or Chatgpt
• Study what they publish. What are their recurring topics? What hasn’t been covered recently that you have a strong view on?
• Pitch specific article ideas, not general ‘I’d love to contribute’ requests. Editors are busy. Give them something ready to say yes to
• Offer original research if you have it (see idea three). Trade press love exclusive data
• Build a relationship with the editor over time. Comment on their work, share their articles, engage before you pitch

What to avoid

Submitting the same article you already published on your blog. Trade press editors will check. Give them something original and you’ll get the relationship. Give them repurposed content and you won’t.

16. Build a Content Trap for Mid-Decision Buyers

Most content is aimed at top-of-funnel buyers, people who are just beginning to understand they have a problem. This is where everyone plays.

Mid-decision buyers are different. They already know they have a problem. They’re already comparing options. They’re already trying to build a business case internally. They just need the right information to push them over the line.

Content specifically designed for this moment, comparison guides, implementation guides, ROI calculators, what to ask when evaluating a vendor checklists, captures buyers at the point where they’re most likely to convert and most in need of guidance.

How to do it

• Think about the questions your prospects ask during a sales conversation. What are they trying to figure out? What objections come up repeatedly? What do they need to justify the decision internally?
• Create content that answers those questions completely and honestly. Not a sales pitch dressed up as a guide, an actual guide that helps someone make a good decision, even if that decision isn’t you
• Common formats that work: ‘How to evaluate [your category] vendors’, ‘The questions to ask before buying [your type of product]’, ‘How to build the business case for [your solution]’
• Optimise these for the specific search terms a mid-decision buyer uses: ‘[category] comparison’, ‘best [category] for [specific use case]’, ‘[category] ROI’

What to avoid

Creating a buyer’s guide that miraculously concludes you’re the best option in every single category. People can see through it and it destroys credibility.

17. Use Job Postings as a Lead Intelligence Signal

A company posting a job tells you an extraordinary amount about where they’re investing, what they’re struggling with, and what’s about to change in their business.

A company hiring a Head of Content is about to scale their content operation and probably needs tools, agencies, and platforms to support that. A company hiring a Head of Customer Success is experiencing growth pains. A company hiring five salespeople is about to need a lot more leads.

Job postings are publicly available, real-time intelligence about your prospects’ priorities. Most people walk past this data entirely.

How to do it

• Set up alerts on LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed, and Google Jobs for the job titles that signal buying intent for your product or service
• When a target company posts a relevant role, reach out to the hiring manager or their likely buyer with a specific message that acknowledges what they’re building. ‘I saw you’re hiring a Head of Content, we work with a lot of teams going through that scale-up phase and I had a thought that might be useful’
• Use tools like Bombora or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to layer intent data on top of job posting data, if a company is hiring AND showing research intent signals, that’s a very warm prospect
• Track the job postings of your existing target account list monthly. Changes in hiring patterns often signal changes in budget and priorities

What to avoid

Leading with I see you’re hiring for X, we can help with that. Too transparent and too transactional. Lead with insight or genuine value first.

18. Create a Private Community (and Curate It Carefully)

Running a private, invite-only community for your ideal clients is one of the highest-leverage long-term lead generation strategies available and one of the most underused, because it takes patience.

The key word is private. Not another Facebook group or LinkedIn community open to anyone who clicks join. A curated space where membership feels like an honour, where the people inside are useful to each other, and where the quality of conversation is high enough that people actually show up.

When you’re the person who built that community, you’re not a vendor. You’re a peer. That’s a completely different commercial relationship.

How to do it

• Choose your platform: Slack, Circle, and Discord all work for different types of communities. The platform matters less than the curation
• Start small and selective. Invite fifteen to twenty people who are genuinely at the level you want the community to represent. Better to start with twenty excellent members than two hundred mediocre ones
• Make the value obvious from day one. Regular programming, expert guests, exclusive content, peer conversations that don’t happen anywhere else
• Be present yourself. The founder’s presence signals that this community matters. If you’re invisible, the community will be too
• Let leads come to you. When the community has a reputation, the right people will ask to join. A waiting list is a lead list

What to avoid

Treating the community as a sales channel. The moment members feel they’ve been gathered together to be sold to, they leave and they tell people.

19. Turn Your Proposals Into Content

You spend hours on proposals. Detailed, thoughtful, specific documents laying out exactly how you’d solve a client’s problem. And then the proposal is either accepted or rejected, and either way it disappears into a folder and is never seen again.

There’s an enormous amount of useful content sitting in those proposals. The framing of the problem. The strategic options you laid out. The thinking about what works and why.

Anonymised and reframed, your proposal thinking becomes your best content. Because it’s not theoretical. It’s based on a real problem a real business was facing. That specificity is what makes content actually useful rather than generically educational.

How to do it

• Review your last ten proposals and identify the sections where you articulated the problem most clearly often the diagnosis sections are your best writing
• Anonymise thoroughly. Change the industry, the size, the specifics. What you’re keeping is the thinking, not the client’s details
• Rewrite as a case study format (‘A company facing X was considering three approaches. Here’s how we thought through it and what we’d recommend’) this is more interesting than generic advice because it has a real decision embedded in it
• Publish as blog content, LinkedIn articles, or email newsletter pieces
• This also works as a sales tool, sharing your thinking process publicly before a prospect becomes a prospect shows them what working with you looks like before they’ve committed to anything

What to avoid

Publishing anything that could be identified by the client it came from. If there’s any doubt, change more details or ask permission.

20. Run a Challenge Instead of a Webinar

A five-day challenge, done well, generates more engagement, more leads, and more warm relationships than any webinar you’ll ever run.

The mechanics are simple, participants sign up for a structured five-day experience where each day they’re given a small, achievable task related to your area of expertise. At the end, they’ve made meaningful progress on a real problem and they’ve spent a week associating that progress with you.

The leads you generate from a well-run challenge are extraordinarily warm. They’ve invested time. They’ve seen results. They know what you’re like to learn from. The conversation from a challenge lead is very different from a conversation with someone who downloaded a white paper once.

How to do it

• Choose a specific outcome participants will achieve by the end. ‘Five days to a better LinkedIn profile’ or ‘Five days to a lead generation system’ something concrete and achievable in five short daily steps
• Build a simple container for it: a Facebook Group, a Slack channel, a Circle community, or even just a daily email sequence
• Keep each day’s task small enough that people complete it. The enemy of a challenge is overwhelm
• Be present and active during the challenge. Answer questions. Celebrate completions. Build relationships with individual participants
• At the end, make a clear offer to anyone who wants to go deeper. You’ve spent five days demonstrating your value, this is when the commercial conversation is most natural

What to avoid

Making the challenge a five-day pitch sequence in disguise. The tasks need to be super useful. If participants leave having learned nothing, they’ll remember that more than anything else.

21. Partner With Non-Competing Businesses Targeting the Same Buyer

Your ideal client buys from lots of people who aren’t you. They use an accountant. They use a solicitor. They use a marketing agency, or a PR firm, or an HR consultant. None of those people are competing with you, but all of them are having regular, trusted conversations with the same person you’re trying to reach.

A referral partnership with even one trusted advisor to your ideal client is worth more than most lead generation campaigns you’ll ever run. Because when a trusted advisor recommends you, the introduction comes pre-loaded with credibility.

How to do it

• List every type of business that serves your ideal client but doesn’t compete with you. Be thorough, there are usually more than you’d first think
• Identify specific people in those roles who serve clients at the right level for you. Not just accountants but specific accountancy firms serving the business size you target
• Build the relationship first. Refer to them before you ask for anything. Send them useful content. Introduce them to people in your network. Be useful
• When you formalise a referral arrangement, make it two-way. What can you do for them in return? How can you add value to their clients?
• The best partnerships aren’t transactional, they’re built on mutual respect. Those last for years and compound over time

What to avoid

Approaching every solicitor and accountant in your area with a generic let’s refer to each other pitch. Be selective. Partner with people who serve your type of client and whose recommendation means something.

22. Make Your Onboarding Process Your Sales Pitch

Most businesses put all their effort into selling and then deliver a mediocre onboarding experience. The sale happened, the champagne was metaphorically drunk, and then the client got an automated welcome email and a calendar invite.

Your onboarding process is seen by more people than you think. Clients talk to peers. They describe what it was like to start working with you. If that experience was remarkable, genuinely thoughtful, genuinely personalised, genuinely exciting, they will tell people. If it was forgettable, they’ll forget to mention you when someone asks for a recommendation.

An extraordinary onboarding process generates word-of-mouth leads. And word-of-mouth leads are the highest-converting, lowest-cost, most-loyal leads in existence.

How to do it

• Map your current onboarding process from the moment someone says yes. Write down every touchpoint
• Ask yourself at each step: is this remarkable? Would someone tell a friend about this? Or is it just functional?
• Find the places where a small investment of thought or time creates a disproportionate impression. A personalised welcome video. A handwritten card (there they are again) on day one. A gift that references something specific they mentioned during the sales process
• Create clear milestones and celebrate them. When a client hits their first win, make a thing of it. People remember the moments when their success was acknowledged

What to avoid

Designing an impressive onboarding process and then not delivering it consistently. One memorable experience that’s followed by six months of average service doesn’t generate referrals.

23. Sponsor the Right Small Event, Not the Wrong Big One

Big conference sponsorships are expensive, generic, and often impossible to attribute to anything useful. You pay thousands to put your logo on a lanyard that gets taken off and put in a drawer within minutes of the coffee break.

Small, specific, highly targeted events are a completely different proposition. A fifty-person event entirely made up of your ideal clients, where your sponsorship gets you access, visibility, and conversation, is worth twenty times the logo placement at a conference of five thousand.

How to do it

• Find the small events. Industry association meetings. Sector-specific roundtables. Peer group gatherings. These often don’t have big marketing budgets and will welcome a sponsor who’s relevant
• Negotiate for access, not just visibility. A speaking slot, a hosted dinner, a workshop. Something that puts you in front of people rather than behind a banner
• Choose events where you can meet every attendee personally. If the event is too large for that, it’s probably the wrong event
• Follow up with every person you meet within 48 hours. Reference something specific from your conversation. The sponsorship got you in the room. What you do afterwards determines whether it was worth it

What to avoid

Judging events purely by attendee numbers. Ten of the right people is worth more than a thousand of the wrong ones. Every time.

24. Write a Book (Or a Report Long Enough to Feel Like One)

This one requires the most effort of anything on this list. It also creates a lead generation asset that works for years, positions you in a way that nothing else does, and generates conversations that no cold email ever will.

A book changes how people think about you. Not a blog post. Not a LinkedIn article. A book, or something substantial enough that it takes real commitment to produce and real commitment to consume.

The leads a book generates are extraordinary because the person who has read your book before they contact you is not a cold prospect. They’ve spent hours with your thinking. They’ve already decided they respect it. The conversation starts from a completely different place.

How to do it

• You don’t need a publisher to start. A well-produced self-published book, or even a long-form digital guide significant enough to deserve the term, achieves the positioning benefit without the years it takes to go through traditional publishing
• Pick one specific topic you can write about with more depth and honesty than anyone else in your space. Not a comprehensive overview of your industry, a specific, opinionated take on one important thing
• Use your existing content as raw material. If you’ve been writing and speaking for years, much of a book already exists in some form
• Distribute it strategically. Send physical copies to your dream client list. Give it away to newsletter subscribers. Sell it cheaply enough that price is never a barrier to someone who might be a future client

What to avoid

Writing a book that’s essentially a long brochure for your services. Books that generate leads are books people actually want to read. If it’s not something you’d pick up and read yourself, it won’t generate the leads you’re hoping for.

25. Do the Thing Nobody in Your Industry Does

This is the hardest one to explain and the most important one to understand.

Every industry has its conventions. The way things are done. The expected format, the expected channel, the expected voice, the expected everything. Most businesses follow these conventions without ever questioning them, which is precisely why departing from them is so powerful.

When I sat in the front row, it wasn’t a strategy. It was a choice to be different from the people who were all quietly doing the same thing. When I approached podcast sponsors with no downloads, I was ignoring a convention that everyone had accepted without examining it.

The most memorable thing you can do in any market is the thing nobody else is doing. Not weird for the sake of weird, genuinely useful, genuinely excellent, just done differently. The format people don’t expect in your industry. The channel everyone says doesn’t work. The boldness everyone says is risky.

My rule: if everyone in your industry does X, the question worth asking is what happens if you do the opposite of X?

Sometimes the answer is nothing good. But sometimes the answer is $30,000 in ten days from a podcast nobody had heard of.

How to do it

• List the five things everyone in your industry does for lead generation. What are the conventions?
• For each one, ask: why? Is this really the best approach or is it just the approach everyone does because everyone else does it?
• Identify one convention worth challenging. Test your alternative. Measure the result
• If it doesn’t work, you’ve learned something. If it does, you’ve found a lead generation channel your competitors don’t have
• Be bold. The people who generate the most interesting leads are rarely the ones doing the most sensible things

What to avoid

Being different for the sake of a story rather than for the sake of results. Unconventional only creates leads when the unconventional thing is still useful or valuable to the person receiving it. Weird isn’t a strategy. Bold and useful is.

One Final Thought

The theme running through all twenty-five of these ideas is the same one that’s run through everything I’ve done that worked, be bold, be different, and don’t assume that the rules everyone else is following are the right rules for you.

The handwritten letter works because everyone sends emails. The podcast sponsor pitch worked because everyone waits for downloads. The front row seat worked because everyone heads for the middle.

You don’t need all twenty-five. You need two or three that fit your business, your audience, and your personality, done properly and done consistently. One well-executed unconventional idea beats twenty half-hearted conventional ones.

Pick one. Start today. Report back.

And if you’d like a weekly injection of marketing ideas that are similarly light on the obvious and heavy on the useful, my newsletter is where this kind of thinking lives. You can subscribe here.