5 Lead Generation Campaign Examples for Product and Service-Based Businesses
Mar 04, 2025
What is a Marketing Campaign?
A marketing campaign is a connected series of actions leading to a desired outcome. Campaigns are a strategic, coordinated effort to promote a product, service, or brand across a savvy mix of owned, earned, paid, and borrowed channels. Campaigns can serve various purposes, from increasing brand awareness to driving sales. But when it comes to online and service-based businesses, lead generation campaigns are essential to build an audience of potential clients.
In a sea of marketing same-ness, campaigns build brands.
What is a Lead Generation Marketing Campaign?
A lead generation campaign is designed to attract and capture potential customers' interest, usually measured by opt-ins to an email list, discovery call bookings, or inquiries about a service—not sales. A lead is anyone who expresses interest in your business, whether they download a free resource, register for a webinar, or join the waitlist for your next program.
For online and service-based businesses, leads are not just casual website visitors. They’re people who have actively taken a step toward working with you—meaning the quality of leads matters far more than quantity. Blasting out marketing to a cold audience is a fruitless endeavour. A successful campaign nurtures these leads across multiple brand touch points and moves them through your marketing funnel toward becoming paying clients.
And remember, your lead generation campaigns should be centred around building your email list; nothing else. Building your subscriber database is critically important, and is often overlooked in favour of over-investing in social media. 1 email subscriber is worth 100 social media followers.
What’s the Difference Between Lead Generation Campaigns and Other Types of Campaigns?
While some marketing campaigns focus on generating brand awareness or sales, lead generation campaigns are centred around relationship building. The primary objective of lead generation campaigns is to—you guessed it!—build a database of quality leads. They’re not about making sales, they’re about connecting with your audience and nurturing relationships with them by providing value first (via a lead magnet) to warm them up.
Before you run a lead generation campaign, you need to have existing brand awareness.
Lead generation campaigns are vital for online and service-based businesses; but they’re still useful for product-based brands, too—especially if your time to decision is long.
The running order of your campaigns should be brand awareness campaign (to build an audience) > lead generation campaign (to build a list of qualified leads) > sales campaign (to sell the damn thing).
Create a Desirable Lead Magnet
Your lead magnet is the hero of your lead generation campaign. It needs to toe the line of being genuinely valuable (and not Google-able) without dishing out too much of your expertise for free. You want your lead magnet to whet their appetite for more, leading into your paid offers.
When you’re cooking up an idea for your lead magnet, go beyond the free masterclass or PDF ebook. If this is what your audience will find genuinely useful, go for it—but don’t limit yourself to these tired formats. In January, we ran a mini lead generation campaign sharing a bunch of our proprietary marketing tools over five days. We shared a downloadable Marketing Calendar, a Focus Framework, Wall Art collection, and 10 Tips for Smarter Marketing. These resources are actionable tools they can weave into their marketing flow immediately. And across the five days, we had 303 new subscribers join our list, from existing lead magnets.
Campaign Del Mar's Wall Art Collection
5 Standout Examples of Lead Generation Campaigns for Product and Service-Based Businesses
1. Good Pair Days Unlock Your Palate Quiz
Good Pair Days delivers wine to your door, tailored to your tastebuds. Ever walked into a bottle-o and wished you could pick the perfect drop first time round? Good Pair Days understand that struggle, and created their Wine Tastes Quiz to uncover your palate profile.
Why it works: most of us can relate to feeling overwhelmed by choice when buying vino (and not wanting to be disappointed by a subpar bottle). Good Pair Days identified this customer pain point, and solved it by creating a quiz that recommends the best wines to suit your palate, preferences, and budget. And let’s be real—who can resist a quiz? This a brilliant example of gamification in marketing, and this lead magnet is evergreen.
2. One Roof Unspoken Conference
One Roof is a purpose-built community for women in business to equip them with the connections and skills they need to grow their businesses. Back in 2022, One Roof ran The Unspoken Conference, a week-long digital conference tackling taboo topics. The panel talks covered the important, hard, and impactful conversations that need to be front and centre.
Why it works: The Unspoken Conference was a lead generation event. One Roof members could attend for free, while non-members paid a fee to come along. Ticketing the event for non-members built their database of warm leads, and if they joined One Roof, their ticket price was credited toward their membership fee. And the conference had a hell of a hook by intentionally exploring taboo topics—it wasn’t just another free webinar.
3. Odette & Co Media Insider's Summit
Media Insiders Summit is a digital live event by Odette & Co designed to be a bridge for entrepreneurs to break into the media for the first time. It happens a couple of times per year, and is an opportunity for brands and founders to get an inside scoop about the PR landscape. This lead magnet bucks the trend and comes with a small investment, attracting buyers rather than those just chasing freebies.
Why it works: PR and media can be eye-wateringly expensive, and the industry itself is shrouded in mystery. Odette recognised this, and created the summit to help people learn how to build relationships with journos, craft standout pitches, and understand how the industry operates. All of the campaign creative had a distinct visual identity that was a cousin to Odette & Co’s main brand, which stopped scrolls by breaking from regular programming.
4. Megan Winter's Free 2025 Meta Ads Masterclass
Megan Winter is a marketing strategist and founder of Lume Marketing (she’s also a Marketing Circle member). Prior to launching her new program to learn how to run Meta ads like a pro, ROAS Lab, she ran a lead generation campaign and her Free 2025 Meta Ads Masterclass was the hero.
Why it works: Meta ads are constantly changing, and the paid ads landscape can be cripplingly overwhelming. Megan identified a major pain point in her audience—needing to run high-performing ads without forking out for an expensive ads management retainer. Her ads and masterclass performed exceptionally well because her audience knows who she is and they trust her expertise, which meant she could target them directly with this campaign.
Image via Megan Winter's Instagram.
Cool Wow Collective’s 5-Day Focus Fix
Cool Wow Collective, led by copywriter and digital marketer Rachel Anderson, helps creative entrepreneurs cut through distractions and get laser-focused on what actually moves the needle in their business. As part of her membership drive campaign, The Productivity Illusion, Rachel repurposed an existing lead magnet, The 5-Day Focus Fix—a free challenge designed to help business owners take intentional action on the work that truly matters with a repeatable system.
Why it works: Rather than creating a lead magnet from scratch, Rachel strategically integrated a new resource into a larger campaign. The 5-Day Focus Fix taps into a universal struggle for entrepreneurs—feeling overwhelmed and scattered. Each day, participants receive a short email with a pep talk, a short work-along video, and a simple focus sprint to complete. This structured yet approachable format keeps engagement high, helping participants experience quick wins. By positioning The 5-Day Focus Fix as a stepping stone to The Productivity Illusion membership, Rachel effectively nurtures warm leads, building trust and momentum toward conversion.
Final Thoughts: Lead Generation Is the Lifeblood of Your Business
If you’re serious about growing a sustainable, service-based business, lead generation campaigns should be a key part of your marketing strategy. They allow you to build an audience of high-quality leads who are primed and ready to work with you—without relying on social media’s ever-changing algorithms.
Whether it’s a quiz, a digital event, an exclusive masterclass, or something completely out of the box, the key to a successful lead generation campaign is to offer something genuinely valuable that aligns with your expertise and paid offers. Get creative, test different approaches, and most importantly—track your results so you can refine and improve over time.
Want expert guidance to craft a lead generation campaign that actually works? Join Marketing Circle and get the strategy, support, and community you need to confidently grow your business.
Written By
Mia Fileman
Marketing Strategist
Author
Mia Fileman
Marketing Strategist and Founder
