The ways that businesses pull in business and acquire traffic is extremely interesting. There are many ways to acquire bottom line business growth, but each of these ways start out of the general principle of either pushing the traffic, or pulling it in. I firmly believe that both ways working together is the best way to optimize your sales and marketing efforts.

The image above gives a great depiction of optimizing lead generation efforts. It references many important points in the pull marketing cycle: Content, traffic, lead scoring and nurturing, analyzing, testing and optimizing to generate the most highly qualified leads.

All of this is important, but what resources minimize waste and optimize your conversions? A great question considering all of the marketing automation, CRM’s, marketing, and design software out there. Many of these resources add to the noise, but a few really offer bang for your buck and separate themselves from the fray.

I am in a continuing search for marketing tools that work without breaking the budget for gadgets and tools that no one really needs.

My list so far:

This list is active and growing, the tools above seem to be consistently useful.

We always appreciate feedback and advice. Please add tools that you use and hopefully we will be able to create a comprehensive list that is useful and doesn’t add unneeded noise to the fray and clamor of all the marketing tools out there.

~ Prospectr Marketing – Lead Generation and Development