People have become resistant to any effort to generate leads online. As a result, outbound lead gen has become more difficult while requiring significant expertise and skills. Many modern businesses have adopted inbound lead generation as their primary approach. The strategy has become popular and is now the go-to approach for targeting low-hanging fruit and accelerating the sales cycle.
In this article, we’ll explain to you everything you need to know about inbound lead generation—including the benefits and a step-by-step process to help you get started.
Are you ready?
Let’s get started.
What Is Inbound Marketing Lead Generation?
Inbound Marketing Lead Generation is a way to attract new prospects to your business through customized educational content. Rather than reaching out to potential leads, you’ll target them with content that answers their specific questions.
Having inbound content on your site will help you generate marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) via organic traffic. Visitors will be encouraged to take an action (download an ebook, get a product demo, gain access to a case study, etc.) which will entice them to provide you with their contact details.
Advantages of Inbound Lead Generation
There are many ways to generate new leads and grow your customer base, but due to limited time and the intense competition in your industry, it’s crucial to prioritize lead-generation strategies that will help your company thrive.
Let’s find out why inbound marketing lead generation is such a popular strategy among major B2B corporations around the world.
1. High-Quality Leads
When comparing lead generation techniques for B2B businesses, quality should always come first. A strategy that does not help you find quality leads who are ready to convert should never be prioritized.
Currently, your prospect’s pain points and interest in your offers determine lead quality. These two factors are difficult to ascertain using outbound lead generation techniques. When you use inbound lead generation, the prospect will come to you seeking assistance. They will find your blog post, which answers all their questions and establishes you as an expert in your field. This will encourage them to reach out to you.
This way, there’s no guessing whether r or not your ideal client profile (ICP) fits your customers. Google will send you dozens of qualified prospects if you rank high in the SERPs for the right keywords.
2. Increase Your Reach
Where do we all turn to when we are looking for a solution? Most of us go to search engines, specifically Google.
Over 92% of the search engine market share is controlled by Google, which has 4.3 billion active users. People turn to Google for quick solutions from established experts to overcome the many challenges they face daily.
You can reach tens of thousands of potential buyers through an SEO-based content marketing strategy. Through the use of proper SEO techniques, a single keyword with a high search volume may draw hundreds of potential clients to your website each month.
With inbound marketing, you can both expand your search engine presence and make it more difficult for competitors to dominate you. Your market share will be fairly divided, and you’ll stay on your potential customer’s radar no matter where they go.
3. Affordability and Efficiency
It’s significantly cheaper to generate leads with inbound marketing than with outbound marketing. You won’t face any unexpected or excessive expenses down the line if you use this approach to find new customers.
For example, you need to create high-quality content for an inbound lead generation campaign and optimize it for SEO. Your website must also be improved and you must build more authoritative backlinks to outrank your rivals for keywords. Even before you begin your inbound campaign, you can anticipate and prepare for all of these costs.
The best part is that you can recycle the content you created into other marketing or sales campaigns later on. You may also use it in your social media campaigns or turn it into infographics or videos, among other things. It helps you develop new prospects and keep them as customers for a long time.
4. Sustainability
Inbound lead generation is a game changer if you want to sustainably generate organic visitors to your sales funnel. It can take weeks or even months for a website to be indexed and ranked on Google, but once it does, it can drive a lot of interested leads.
What’s interesting is that organic web pages are here to stay as long as they are SEO-optimized and up-to-date with Google’s latest trends. You can keep your rankings on search engines and capture new leads from a blog post you published many years ago.
Infographics, YouTube videos, audio podcasts, and guest posts are all examples of content that can be used on social media. It’s crucial to be patient when striving for sustainable results because it is impossible to achieve them right away.
Furthermore, even if your inbound lead generation results are sustainable, you should continue creating new content. Google has always preferred active websites and updated pages when it comes to SEO. Make sure to develop a long-term content strategy to keep your customers’ attention.
5. Scalability
There is no limit to the number of inbound leads your business can generate. Creating new infographics, podcast episodes, and videos is just one way to target thousands of keywords in your content. You can engage more prospects across different platforms by regularly publishing new blog posts. You can also make the most of your initial investment by later updating or recycling each piece into a different form.
To scale your content, you won’t have to grow your in-house team or train any newcomers in order to scale up your content creation efforts. You can easily outsource the work to freelancers or third-party agencies to assist with the development of your content. You can easily scale up and down based on your content needs and lead generation objectives.
What Are the Key Elements of Inbound Lead Generation?
While the ultimate goal is increasing lead conversions, the method for attracting new clients to your landing page varies. Inbound marketing aims to capture leads by getting them to come to you instead of reaching out to them.
What do you need to get your first inbound lead generation campaign off the ground?
A Piece of Content
Content is what draws new leads to your company. For example, a blog post ranking on Google, a YouTube video, a tweet, a post on LinkedIn, or something similar would be effective.
An effective content piece must fulfill the following criteria:
- Relevant to the pain points of the reader.
- Easy to digest and engaging.
- Provide an easy, step-by-step solution.
You’ll only convert quality leads with better-performing content pieces.
Landing Page
A landing page is a web page where visitors can locate your lead magnet and engage with it. It includes a headline, marketing text, the lead magnet, a call-to-action, social proof, as well as gorgeous design and visuals to catch the eye of your target audience. Organic traffic refers to people coming to a blog post and then clicking through to a landing page. With social media, you can drive traffic directly to a landing page and receive direct leads by providing your contact details.
Lead Magnet
This is an incentive or bribe to entice people to visit a website. A visitor remains on a website after finding the information they desire when a lead magnet is present. The lead magnet may be part of the initial solution provided to prospects, or it may be an added piece of content that addresses a more advanced issue.
Here are a few examples of lead magnets.
- Webinars
- Ebooks
- Case studies/whitepapers
- Demos
- Discounts
- Free training sessions
When a target lead enters their contact information (usually name and email address) in order to access your special offer, that counts as a conversion.
Call to Action
An immediate action is prompted by a button, link, text, or question of any sort. It is the next step the visitor must take after they have finished reading the page. When it comes to inbound lead generation, your leads may be prompted to do the following: sign up, download, subscribe, start a free trial, register, etc.
An inbound marketing lead generation campaign can be maximized by using the CTA as a fundamental component in your marketing copy. It will make your copy more engaging and guarantee that you are making the most of it.
A Thank You Email
A thank you email is an automated message you send to new subscribers once they sign up for your email list.
Do you really need it? Yes. Many salespeople and marketers consider the thank you email to be an optional component of their sales funnel. In reality, it represents the first real connection you will have with any prospect. It also serves as a reminder for your new leads that they are now part of your email subscriber list.
Creating an Effective Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Strategy
So far, we’ve discussed the advantages of inbound marketing lead generation and the key components required to build your campaign.
It’s time to dive into how you can build a smart inbound lead generation strategy. The good news is your current lead generation strategy and inbound marketing practices have a lot of overlap. Both require a strong brand presence to capture interest and a lot of quality content to nurture new prospects and push them down the funnel.
Let’s begin.
Determine Your Target Audience
You must already know what an ideal customer looks like in terms of demographics, industry, interests, and purchasing preferences if this is not your first time with lead generation. Creating a content strategy tailored to your target audience is critical at this point. You will know which subjects to address, what questions to answer, and what content format to use to maximize engagement.
Knowing your target audience’s preferred channels allows you to focus on the most effective inbound marketing tactics. For example, if you know which social sites your leads are active on, you will be able to dedicate more time and resources to boosting your brand there.
Pick the Right Communication Channels
Where will you publish content to attract new leads? There are many inbound marketing channels you can focus on, depending on your strategy and preferred content. The most popular ones are organic search, social media, email marketing, podcast hosting sites, and direct traffic (from industry websites).
The best inbound marketing approach is one that generates the greatest number of qualified leads. To get you started, here are a few things to consider:
- Organic search can provide hundreds of leads each month at a minimal cost.
- Social media sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter are also terrific for keeping your target audience interested and reaching new audiences.
- Industry podcasts can be an excellent way to engage with others and keep conversations going if you’re a natural speaker who can speak with people. You can invite a new guest with each new episode to cover trending topics and answer important questions.
Still not sure where to start?
You can try multiple mediums at first, and then compare your lead generation results and drop the ones that aren’t working. Keep three to five channels at once so you can redistribute your content or recycle it into different forms.
Curate Tons of Helpful Content
Content is King. No matter how cliche that statement is, it’s the core of your inbound marketing lead generation. The quality of your content matters if you want to leave a positive first impression. When organic visitors land on your website, they expect to get precise, informative answers to their questions. They want an outstanding user experience with comprehensive solutions to help them overcome their daily challenges.
Here are some things that make high-quality content.
Longer educational content provides detailed answers and is preferred over shorter pieces. Google, for example, prefers longer content and ranks it higher because it provides more value. Longer videos perform better on YouTube in terms of analytics, as well.
It’s crucial to keep visitors engaged and eager to read more articles on your site. Improve readability by dividing your write-ups into headings and subheadings, using high-quality images, and keeping paragraphs short.
Additionally, increasing your internal linking structure is a great way to increase rankings and keep visitors on your website for longer. In order to optimize your content for SEO, include low-difficulty keywords and long-tail phrases to increase relevance in the SERPs.
By adhering to these principles when creating content, you will make new leads adore your brand before even seeing your products or services. This makes it simpler for you to send more visitors to your landing page and get more individuals interested in what you have to offer.
Landing Page
A landing page is the living room of your website; it’s where visitors come to gain access to your lead magnet and learn more about your offerings. An excellent landing page keeps leads interested in your product. It makes your potential customers connect with the product and recognises its significance.
What makes a great landing page?
- Have an attention-grabbing page title, headings, and subheadings.
- Generate engaging and captivating web copy.
- Have high-quality videos and images.
- Have strong CTA buttons that encourage visitors to take action.
- Create a unique lead magnet that your visitors just can’t resist.
When a prospect wants to get your freebie, they must first complete a form that captures their contact information. That is why lead magnets are crucial to the lead generation process.
Create Ads for Your Lead Magnet
You’ve researched your target buyers and created loads of content to help you draw them to your business. You also created a landing page and a tempting lead magnet that entices inbound leads to give you their contact information.
What’s next?
Now is the time to promote your free offer and make the most out of your inbound marketing strategy. Every visitor to your website must see your lead magnet and fill out the form to obtain it. The process of promoting your lead magnet doesn’t have to be too complicated or cost you an arm and a leg. You can use PPC lead generation to get more leads to your landing page. Depending on the marketing channel you choose and the content format you create, you can show potential leads what you have to offer and encourage them to convert.
Here are some tips to increase the conversions of your lead magnets:
- Make it possible for all organic visitors to see your lead magnets after reading your content.
- Use social media channels and YouTube informational videos to promote your lead magnets.
- Showcase your landing pages on social media pages and business profiles.
- Create targeted ads on search engines and Facebook.
- Host live events, webinars, and workshops to promote your landing page.
You put a lot of effort into creating an attractive lead magnet that answers their needs. Make the most of it by promoting it repeatedly whenever you can.
Summary
The use of search engines and social media marketing has become more popular as a result of inbound marketing lead generation. Creating excellent content and utilizing it to capture highly-targeted leads at a low cost has become a popular B2B tactic. Understanding the key components of inbound lead generation helps you focus on the right aspects and spend more time improving on what matters in your strategy.
Develop a strong landing page with a lead magnet tailored to address your prospects’ pain points. Then create content to reach your leads where they are and increase your brand reach.
Want to learn more about Inbound lead generation?
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