In this day and age, going out and finding new sales prospects isn't the best way to do things. That so-called "outbound marketing" of cold calls and door-to-door sales has been outdated for years. Now, we do things a little bit differently. We utilize a strategy called inbound marketing.
A well-executed inbound marketing strategy focuses on bringing the customers to you rather than you going out and finding them. This can be done in several ways but is mostly done by pulling customers in with good branding, quality content, and a relatable and trustworthy business personality.
Generating leads with inbound marketing means using tactics and strategies that draw people in and make them actually want to receive information from your company. Let's dive into a few tips to help you increase overall lead generation within your business by taking advantage of inbound marketing strategies.
1. Promote your content marketing with a Resources page.
One of the strongest inbound marketing tactics is content marketing, which is the practice of creating and distributing valuable and educational content about your industry to your customers and potential customers. Content can take on many forms, including blog posts, ebooks, cheat sheets, checklists, webinars, video tutorials, and more.
Utilize multiple types of content, create lead magnets, and host your content on a resources page on your website. You can link to your blog, embed an email sign-up list, share links to landing pages, and more. A resources page is a great catch-all page to boost or promote with social media advertising as well because it gives people even more options to choose from in your content marketing, rather than a specific lead magnet.
2. Use long-tail keywords.
When you're creating new blog content for your website as a part of your content marketing strategy, be sure to focus on long-tail keywords in addition to shorter-tail keywords.
When you're blogging, you always want to create your content around one or a few focus keywords. For example, this blog post's short-tail focus keyword is "inbound marketing strategy" because we're writing about inbound marketing strategy.
Choosing a short-tail keyword is wise to start with because then you know your blog post topic. Next, you need to niche it down a bit more.
This is where you start looking at long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are, obviously, longer. This blog post's long-tail focus keyword is "generating leads with inbound marketing" because, although yes we're writing about inbound marketing strategy, it gets more specific than that.
An inbound marketing strategy blog post can focus on multiple things: content marketing, types of content, pieces of an inbound marketing strategy, etc. This blog post, however, focuses on generating leads using inbound marketing. And that's something that people are actually going to search for in order to find specific, more refined results.
So you want to utilize long-tail keywords to catch more specific searches. Instead of titling a blog post "Inbound Marketing 101," you want to use a much more focused title including your focus long-tail keyword, like "How to Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy From Scratch."
3. Create content that your audience wants to see.
This is where knowing your audience and understanding your buyer persona becomes absolutely essential. If you don't know your customer that well, you're not really going to understand how they want to consume content, and what types of content they want to see from you.
Comprehending your customer's content habits is key to generating more leads with inbound marketing. Nowadays, video marketing is a key strategy for all types of buyers, but that doesn't mean that other types of content can't work. If your people prefer to read, blog posts and ebooks are going to be killer for you. If your audience consists more of visual learners, in addition to video a dynamic infographic may reel them in. If they're audio people, a podcast episode might be your in.
Understand who your audience is, what they want to see from you, and create that content. That's how you're going to generate the most qualified leads for your money/time invested.
4. Use digital advertising.
Content is king, but advertising is how you're going to get your content in front of your audience. Social media is turning into a pay-to-play world, and although we all miss the days when organic content could win out, life simply isn't that simple anymore.
Use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn advertising to promote your content and send traffic to your landing pages. Calculate your lead generation ad budget based on your overall conversion rate as well as how much each customer is worth to your business.
Digital advertising is much cheaper than traditional advertising and has incredible targeting options. You can place a pixel on your website to create a lookalike audience based on the people who already visit your site, you can pick and choose specific interests and demographics to create an audience, and you can add geolocation so that only people within a certain radius will see your ads.
5. Optimize your lead generation forms.
If you want the most amount of leads, you put the least amount of fields into your form. For example, some fields on a landing page only require an email address. This can be optimal for businesses that have a larger target audience because people are more likely to fill out short forms.
However, if you want to generate more qualified leads, you want to add a couple more form fields to help you understand a little bit more about the lead. For example, name, business name (for B2B companies), or zip code can help you to target content more closely related to the new lead.
Forms on landing pages for webinars or content that is further down in your sales funnel can include even more fields to gather more data and information on your lead, as someone is more likely to take longer to fill out a form the more interested he or she is in your business.
If you want to learn more about using an inbound marketing strategy to generate more leads for your business, contact us to get started. We'd love to chat with you about your inbound marketing needs.
Written By: David Carpenter
