KPIs & metrics

Introduction to Inbound Lead Generation

Being in a situation whereby your cold caller interruptions your dinner is a frustrating experience. Before judging that action lets take a look at the whole process.

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Indrė Jankutė-Carmaciu

Apr 20 2020 4 min read

Whatagraph marketing reporting tool

Table of Contents

  • What Is Inbound Lead Generation?
  • Understanding Both Inbound and Outbound Marketing Leads
  • Generating Inbound Leads for Sales: The Effective Strategies
  • Turn Your Blog into a Valuable Resources
  • Create Evergreen Email Signup Content
  • Promote the Best of Your Content on Social Media Platforms
  • Final Note

What Is Inbound Lead Generation?

Simply put, it’s a business marketing technique that can save your organization or business from the annoyance born out of such frustrating interruptions.

Let’s start with understanding both inbound and outbound marketing, and then we’ll cover the most effective techniques to generate inbound leads for sales.

Understanding Both Inbound and Outbound Marketing Leads

When it comes to getting leads quickly, the power of outbound marketing cannot be overlooked. For instance, you sponsored a commercial to run during events like the super bowl.

These ads have a high chance of getting the visibility of your potential customers. Whenever they set their eyes on those ads, a tiny fraction of them feels compelled to purchase your products or services.

Honestly, it’s insanely costly to push your ads directly in front of your target audience or prospects. Of course, the majority of the viewers would expect and enjoy the commercials during the super bowl. Playing these ads at regular intervals would interrupt other games or favorite TV shows. It becomes disruptive and frustrating. That’s simply outbound marketing tactics.

But, instead of pushing these ads in front of your audience before them requesting for it, why not draw their attention with valuable content first?

Whenever they come to you, then you can push your ads to them. Yeah. You can. It’s possible. And that’s inbound marketing. Though it will take some time, once you’ve been able to engage your target audience and gain their trust, generating inbound leads becomes much more comfortable.

Generating Inbound Leads for Sales: The Effective Strategies

Generating sufficient inbound sales leads to make your business marketing campaigns profitable might be a challenging task. And in fact, it’s an uphill battle that you should strive to overcome.

For every marketer, we understand the challenges that come with generating useful inbound leads, and the sense of being overwhelmed by numerous strategies is something every successful marketing team has to undergo.

If you have been battling with the challenges of generating useful inbound leads for some time now, we’ll be revealing the right formula right here in this article. And honestly, it all comes down to getting the essential spots on. Once you can master a few of the strategies we want to reveal here, you’ll attain success at your inbound leads generation:

Turn Your Blog into a Valuable Resources

As contained in Hubspot’s States of Inbound 2018 report, 61% of marketers revealed that blogging remains their most effective inbound marketing strategy while another 61% opined that generating both leads and traffic represents their biggest ongoing challenge.

Meanwhile, in another separate and even more comprehensive reports from Ahrefs, it was revealed that about 91% of all the online-posted content doesn’t get any traffic whatsoever from Google.

From the earlier quoted reports, we can deduce that leads and traffic play significant roles in marketing, and they tend to be the primary concern for all marketers. So, what’s the real cause of not getting traffic from Google?

According to the Ahrefs report, there are underlying reasons that could cause your content not to attract traffic:

Absence of Backlinks:
Backlinks tend to be the most crucial factor in Google’s algorithm, and the lack of links implies that you’re not even going to be visible in the search engine result pages at all.

Insufficient Search Potentials:
If you keep creating irrelevant content, you would be cut off from the search process.

Essentially, for your blog to become a genuine inbound lead generation tool, you need to put in the right strategies to turn it into valuable online resources for your target audience.

Your prospects can be faced with issues relating to business management, work-life balance, purchase decisions, and so forth. So, you need to know the challenges being faced by your target audience and aim to create the best of online content that will perfectly align with their needs.

This is the foundational process of producing content that engages or attracts your target audience. And that’s the kind of content that generates inbound leads for sales.

Create Evergreen Email Signup Content

With your blog pumping out unique and valuable content regularly, you must take a step further and create in-depth and thorough content that offers some of the best insights in your industry. These contents need to be in-depth and high quality with catchy and irresistible headlines.

Ideally, you need to hire competent content writers to write content that evokes emotions and make people want to pay for it. Except you have planned to give it out for free, all that is required of them is to download these content and hand over their email addresses.

Your blog can even contain exit-intent popups to help reel in some email leads and help you grow your mailing list. This is a simple way to further monetize your blog traffic.

Promote the Best of Your Content on Social Media Platforms

Now that you’ve stepped up your inbound lead generating process by producing the right kinds of blog posts and evergreen email contents, the next is to maximize your reach by promoting these contents on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and so forth.

For the best results, it is ideal that you combine both organic and paid social strategies. And of course, the precise approach depends largely on the specific network you are using to advertise.

For instance, it’s quite impossible to generate traffics from Facebook without making payments for ads, whereas Twitter is still a potent tool for reaching a broader audience organically. However, adverts on Twitter are quite affordable, and the ad targeting options on Facebook are on another level.

So, the best thing is to prioritize your paid efforts on Facebook and make effective use of Twitter to extend your reach to a broader audience organically. Furthermore, you can still engage in organic promotion on Facebook through posting your content, engaging with relevant groups and pages, and so forth.

Just keep in mind that you’ll need to make payments for ads to attain your desired reach.

Final Note

Perhaps a succinct approach to inbound leads and effective and proven strategies. Other effective strategies include reaching out to visitors who slip away with remarketing, getting leads with pay per click, tapping audience from other websites, growing your email list, and many more.

Remember, inbound marketing is undoubtedly a viable strategy to generate inbound leads for sales. And it seems to be even more competitive than it has ever been.

Published on Apr 20 2020

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WRITTEN BY

Indrė Jankutė-Carmaciu

Indrė is a copywriter at Whatagraph with extensive experience in search engine optimization and public relations. She holds a degree in International Relations, while her professional background includes different marketing and advertising niches. She manages to merge marketing strategy and public speaking while educating readers on how to automate their businesses.