Inbound lead generation plays a critical role in almost every marketing strategy. If you aren’t familiar with this term, we have got you covered. In this guide, we are going to talk about inbound lead generation in a simple and easy-to-digest way. We have tried to explain even the smallest detail associated with it, giving beginners a chance to thoroughly understand inbound lead generation.
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s dive in and see what we have got here!
What are Inbound Leads?
An inbound lead is referred to as a prospect who establishes contact with you via a particular channel. For instance, such a prospect might have ended up landing on your website after reading or watching a piece of content associated with your product or service.
Here are some of the most popular categories of inbound leads:
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): This type of inbound lead has interacted with your brand by performing actions like signing up for the newsletter, downloading some information, responding to a CTA, etc. These leads aren’t ready to buy your product, which means they need proper nurturing before turning into sales qualified lead.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): It’s a lead, which is showing interest in buying your service or product. Furthermore, such a lead has also met the certain qualifications set by the sales team.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL): An inbound lead belonging to this category has tested a trial version of your product and it is likely to become a paid customer.
There is a wide range of other acronyms that a sales team normally uses to label an inbound lead. However, it’s essential to understand that inbound marketing is a continuous process and it evolves over time. Therefore, to get the best possible outcome, you need to keep yourself updated with the latest advancements and strategies.
What is Inbound Lead Generation?
It’s a process of channeling visitors to your business website and converting them into leads. This involves offering targeted content to prospective customers and persuading them to perform an action. Hence, it’s a two-way relationship that usually ends up in a sale.
This marketing technique is quite popular in a B2B setup and businesses like to research a product and service before getting into any negotiations. The inbound lead generation allows prospects to decide when and how they are going to interact with the sales team.
How Inbound Lead Generation Works?
The process of inbound lead generation is a journey where prospective customers are converted into leads and eventually become customers. In some cases, customers go ahead and start promoting the product.
Here are the major steps to follow when it comes to inbound lead generation:
Grab Attention
This is the first step, which requires attracting attention of the visitors and guiding them to your website. This is done by providing specifically generated content to prospects. The content must offer value to these prospects. In other words, prospects must find a solution to a problem they are currently facing.
While doing so, you must try to answer the questions that come to mind of the visitors or prospects. Hence, it’s imperative to create valuable content that is capable of meeting the needs of prospective customers.
When it comes to valuable content, this might include creating landing pages, guides, infographics, blog posts, whitepapers, videos, etc. Once you've done this, you can use other methods like social media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and similar channels.
Convert Prospects into Leads
This step involves converting prospects into leads. It’s a crucial step, you can’t convert your prospects into leads unless you have their contact information. For instance, you need their personal info like name company size, email address, location, etc.
This information is obtained by using various lead-capturing techniques, including lead magnets, lead capture forms, landing pages, pop-ups, and email captures. However, the prospect will not provide their personal information right away.
On the contrary, they require something in exchange for their personal information. For a successful conversion of such prospects into leads, you must provide them with something equal or greater in value to their information.
For instance, you can ask them to provide their email address in order to sign up for your newsletter. In addition, you can consider offering them a free demo of your service or product in exchange with their phone number, email address, or name.
Once you have obtained the necessary information, the prospects become leads. The next stage relates to classifying these leads into different categories including Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).
On the contrary, the sales team might also disqualify these leads depending on the information they provide and the level of engagement they show. When leads are categorized as sales-qualified leads, they are diverted to sales reps.
Close Deals
Once your prospects have been converted into leads and are classified by the sales team, they now enter your sales funnel. During this step, deals are closed and leads are converted into sales. Here the sales reps connect with the leads with a goal to move them through the sales process.
A few of the leads would be disqualified after the first engagement or an intro call. On the other hand, the remaining leads could turn out to be the real opportunities that are most likely to turn into leads. Once it is evident that leads are ready to convert into sales, the sales team will offer them a demo of their service or product.
Best Techniques for Inbound Lead Generation
If you are looking for visitors to land on your site, these visitors shouldn’t be ordinary ones. You need to connect and engage with people who are likely to show interest in buying your product or service.
To ensure you get a lot of leads, it would be appropriate to follow the best techniques for inbound lead generation. This enhances your chances of converting most of the leads into sales.
Search Engine Optimization
Google is undoubtedly the largest search engine, answering billions of searches each day. So, most of your prospects will come from Google. In order to answer users' queries, Google assigns higher SERP ranks to websites that offer the most relevant answers.
Although creating valuable content is essential for ranking higher on Google, there is something else that you need to do. By doing proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you can rank higher and generate more traffic.
Hence, SEO is one of the best techniques for presenting your marketing content to prospective customers. The process involves mainly optimizing the on-page elements of your content. In addition, you also need recognition by other sites via link building.
SEO is a huge field that covers various aspects of a website. However, for the purpose of this inbound lead generation guide, we will discuss the most prominent ones.
These include:
- Use keywords strategically in your content, including header, title, text, description, and URL.
- Try to answer the people's questions regarding a particular problem they are facing.
- For higher authority, link your content to external sites using a technique called external linking.
- Internally link the most relevant content available on your website to increase engagement.
- Optimize your page in a way to offer the best possible user experience to the visitors. For instance, your website should be equally responsive on both desktop and mobile devices.
These are only a few of the steps that you can perform while optimizing your website. By doing so, you can give yourself a better opportunity to get the site ranked higher and convert more visitors into leads.
Content Marketing
Content marketing holds the central position when it comes to generating inbound leads. You need to offer valuable content that informs, educates, or entertains the visitors. This will help you create a solid impression on the visitors about your business. In addition, it will also help you attract a continuous stream of high-quality leads.
Content marketing involves a variety of options and you can choose those that work best for you. For instance, marketing content includes options like articles, videos, blogs, guides, infographics, reports, or case studies.
Since there is no shortage of content on the internet, you need to create powerful content that is capable of standing out among the rest. Make sure to avoid filler content. On the contrary, your content must offer value to the readers and suggest a real solution to their problem.
Getting visitors is one thing and converting them into leads is another. Therefore, you need to focus on creating the most engaging and high-quality content. In addition, you can also use some tools like pop-ups or lead capture forms.
Social Media Marketing
If most of your audience is on social media, you need to devise a viable and effective marketing plan to attract most of the prospects. However, before going any further, it’s essential to find the right social media platform that meets your marketing needs and is cost-effective too.
If you choose the right social media platform and focus on creating more inbound leads, chances are there that you can end up generating leads that are highly qualified. In most cases, businesses try to engage all social networks at once. This isn’t the right strategy, as you need to choose a platform where most of your ideal customers like to hang out.
Below are a few of the recommendations:
- Instagram is a viable choice if your products are visually appealing.
- LinkedIn tends to be the best option if you are running a B2B company.
- Facebook could serve the purpose well if the audience likes social interactions.
- Twitter works best for a general audience.
- For younger and more fun-loving audiences, TikTok can be a perfect option to consider.
Social media networks already have engaged audiences looking for content to inform and educate them. It’s up to you to customize the content with respect to the platform and audience. This gives them a reason to click the link to your website or landing page.
Taking Advantage of Email Marketing Automation
Almost all of the above-mentioned techniques offer similar results. For instance, when your leads provide their email addresses or other necessary information, you can continuously generate leads that are quite promising.
During normal procedure, you can use CTA to grab the email address of your lead. Apart from this, you can also use opt-in forms to encourage leads to share their contact information. However, this is a time-consuming task and requires some extra effort on the part of your marketing team.
To avoid draining out your resources, you can take advantage of automating your email marketing strategy. This makes the whole process more effective and efficient. This process allows you to create custom email sequences activated with specific actions or triggers. As a result, you can automate your inbound lead generation process.
Email marketing is more than promoting services or goods via email. On the contrary, offering value to the subscribers should be your utmost goal. Your subscribers are offering access to their inboxes, and your content should be worth their time.
So, always try to offer them valuable content. Connecting with the right lead at the right time and with the right message is crucial. It ensures converting more leads into sales.
Best Ways to Manage Inbound Leads
Converting prospects into sales requires proper management of inbound leads. To maximize your ROI, make sure to use the following lead management strategies:
Here are the best strategies for managing inbound leads:
Respond Promptly
This tends to be a critical aspect of almost every inbound marketing strategy. For better outcomes, respond to your inbound leads promptly. It’s essential to maintain their interest at the highest possible level. To stop losing their momentum, try using chatbots or automated email workflows.
Furthermore, acknowledge inquiries and offer your prospects every bit of information they require from you. Connect with the sales reps and ask for updates regarding follow-up conversations. With this, you can continuously keep an eye on the performance of your sales team.
Implement Lead Scoring
To qualify and prioritize leads, you need a perfectly developed lead scoring system. You can assign your leads with particular scores depending on factors like website visits, demographics, email opens, form submissions, or content downloads. By doing so, you can identify the hot leads from the cold ones.
Use a CRM system
It is highly advisable to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. With this system, you can centralize the data, manage sales, and track interactions. Apart from this, CRM also allows you to perform the following tasks in an efficient and cost-effective way:
Capture lead information
- Automate follow-up tasks
- Set reminders
- Analyze performance metrics
Personalization and Segmentation
Make sure to segment your leads depending on factors like company size, location, interests, industry, or buying intention. Also, it would be highly beneficial to personalize your communication based on the type of lead segment. This allows increasing engagement and ensures better conversion with most of the inbound lead generation strategies.
Facilitate Sales and Marketing Teams Collaboration
Enhance alignment and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams. This makes it possible to perform follow-up and seamless interactions between both teams.
Below are some of the most popular alignment tips:
- Share goals between your marketing and sales teams.
- Create strong and clear communication between your teams.
- Every team member should have a clear idea about the buying process and lead qualification.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns
To guide and educate prospects, it is necessary to develop lead nurturing campaigns. This helps leads during their buying journey. Send customized content, targeted emails, and tailored offers depending on the respective interests and preferences of the leads. This strategy also works for an outbound lead generation process.
Track and Analyze Performance
It’s also imperative to monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These include lead conversion rate, engagement metrics, time to contact, and revenue generation. You also need to rely on data analytics when it comes to optimizing strategies, identifying trends, and allocating resources.
Optimize Continuously
Optimize and review your workflows, lead management, and communication processes. Also, your decisions should be based on performance data, feedback, and market dynamics. Furthermore, it is also advised to keep experimenting with various approaches and try new tactics. This will enhance your chances of improving the results over time.
Provide Enough Resources to Your Teams
Your sales and marketing teams need to be equipped with the tools and resources necessary for their improvement. This allows them to professionally engage with inbound leads and convert them into sales.
Final Thoughts
Inbound lead generation is an effective way to attract B2B leads and grow your customer base consistently. Whatever methods you choose will depend on several factors, but proper implementation of an inbound lead generation strategy will drive more and better leads to your business.
