Over the last decade, inbound marketing has proven to be an ideal way of acquiring customers and generating leads to help businesses boost sales. According to Corporate Executive Board, Sales Artillery; 50-70% buyers make a purchase decision after contacting the seller.
Inbound marketing is a data-driven approach that leverages content on a site to attract buyers searching a product or service holistically online. It helps to convert visitors into leads and get you close more deals.
On the other hand, inbound sales help you to identify and connect with your customers with an inbound mindset of building relationships before they are ready to make a purchase decision.
Additionally, sales leads are prospective buyers (individuals and businesses). They are identified through advertising, marketing, social media, referrals, outreach, consultations, product trails, and networks.
Generating enough inbound sales can lead you to make your campaigns profitable. A lead is not converted to a potential prospect until they are qualified to elaborate an interest level and fit to the persona of a possible prospect. Since, 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy, according to Gleanster Research.
Conversions may feel like an uphill battle at times. The reason is, we get a sense of being overwhelmed by several strategies to test if something is being successful or not. If not, then we need to find the untapped flaws which are not to let them bridge the gap.
Successful salespersons have practiced many versions of need satisfaction and solution selling and have mastered the art of placing the right arrow to the target. They know how to do consultative selling. They let customers define the pace of a process, share pain points, and then offer education and advice to build trust and confidence. This makes it safe and easy for a client to buy from them.
Below are the top 10 tips to generate high-quality inbound leads to boost sales.
1. Create email signup content
You can get your blog pumping out high-quality content consistently, and create evergreen pieces of them elaborating the best insights of your industry. Take this step further and get a cutting edge headline with engaging email subjects that people find hard to resist.
Send an email signing up content and make them useful for your audiences with the approach “WIIIFM” (WHAT IS IN IT FOR ME). Ideally, your content should be good enough that people get willing to pay for it. However, let them give the joy of getting it free from you. They just have to download it by handing over their email addresses to you.
2. Use a blog as a valuable resource
According to The State of Inbound Report 2018, more than 60% of marketers believe that blogging is their top priority for inbound marketing while remaining say that generating leads and traffic is still an ongoing challenge for them.
However, another comprehensive study found that more than 90% of online published content gets zero traffic from search engines. The study found two main reasons for that:
- No potential for searches: people were not looking for those pieces of information
- No backlinks: having no backlinks means you will not get indexed in search engine’s algorithms and not be seen in SERPs
Hence, to make your blog mostly genuine for an inbound lead generation, make it a tool that is valuable enough with online resources for your potential prospects. You need to find out their challenges, needs, and pain point to influence their purchase decisions. You should aim to build the best online resource for your customer’s needs.
3. Promote your content on social media
After creating the right type of content for your blog and converting it into an effective email marketing strategy, you have your reach to maximize client base by promoting it across social media platforms.
Get a blend of organic and paid advertising strategies to get the best results with a precise approach depending upon the platform you are willing to advertise on.
Let’s take an example of Facebook vs. Twitter. It is very tough to generate traffic from Facebook without paid ads, whereas Twitter is a reliable option to reach out to a wide array of audiences organically. However, twitter ads are quite expensive, and Facebook’s targeting accuracy is far on another level. In this scenario, it’s better to use twitter to reach a considerable number of audiences organically while prioritizing paid efforts towards Facebook.
4. Pay per click for new customers
Every content-driven strategy offers excellent ways to generate consistent and profitable inbound sales. However, they take time to rip the fruit once planted. It’s a journey of time and patience to getting your content to the rank well in search results.
Also, content-driven inbound strategies are mostly generating leads from those who have a keen interest in your products and services. However, they are not ready to purchase from you yet. Thus, you have to nurture them along the purchase cycle and lead them to buy from you. This is the case with the majority of leads.
Additionally, there is a tiny but highly profitable group of customers who have already decided to get what you are selling. However, they have not just agreed on where they are going to buy it. These are people who buy Google ads the most and make you get your products in front of them at the right moment, with the proper benefit to the buyer and the seller.
5. Remarketing to existing customers
As mentioned above, Google ads are a great way to get the right amount of inbound sales lead from those customers who are ready to buy your product. Keep in mind, and not everyone is going to pay up that exact way to you. There is a possibility of people going cold feet, heading back to the result page, and look for a competitor brand.
Remarketing helps you to reach out to those prospects by keeping them on board with you. As you already have paid for these leads, as soon as they click on your ad and land on the desired page of your brand, you will get to know about their keen interest in you. Give them an offer, a deal, or an extra incentive for coming back to your site and lead them to complete the deal.
6. Tap into audiences from multiple sources
Since you have been used to the industry-leading content publishing and your entire blog page is filled with important stuff to showcase your expertise, now you are ready to reach out online publications and write for them as guest pots.
Guest posts give you extensive exposure to audiences with your same niche and interest. They are the people you need to generate leads from. You can get your brand seen to them; you can take this opportunity to set your brand apart and differentiate your company from competitors and giving them a solid reason to find out more about your company and brand.
7. Multistep forms
Converting your website visitor into fruitful leads is one of the biggest challenges to generate inbound leads you can work with. A consistent medium is needed where you can reach these people out by addressing their needs and guide them to buy from you.
Email marketing is a great way to channelize outreach with consent. It allows you to convert website traffic into email signups that are essential to inbound efforts of any marketing strategy.
Fortunately, if you have got an entire signup content, you still need to overcome the fact that average conversion rates are 2.35% for most online brands, according to Word Stream. Hence you should not be settling for the average. Instead, use multistep forms with boosted page content and a compelling CTA to get your visitor excited about your deals. This will increase conversions by twice and improve the quality of leads that are generated through multistep forms.
8. Participate in industry events
Getting out there and meeting people in the real world of your industry is still the most effective inbound lead generation trick. Participating and speaking up to the events can establish yourself as a leader in your industry, people are ready to pay for listening to some useful and knowledgeable stuff if you are prepared to deliver up to their mark.
Additionally, we are not insisting you to talk to some of the biggest events like International Marketing Forum and Conferences. Speaking at huge marketing conferences is mostly found to be ineffective. Instead, speak at significantly smaller events like TED Talk or Melbourne with 100-200 people is proven to result in high volumes of genuine lead generation.
Concerning a saturated competition pitching for the attention of prospects, pitching is just like trying to promote a book in a book store filled with hundreds of your competition books. You will be forgotten soon unless you have something truly exceptional to convey.
Also, be available to your audience after your talk. Most people assume that speakers don’t entertain audiences after the session. Hence, only a few come up with queries. Face to face talks is a great way to promote inbound leads, take full advantage of it.
9. Automate inbound sales strategies
After getting results from your inbound lead generation strategy, the next step is to automate it as much as you can to handle the traffic. By reducing the manual workload of your broader marketing strategy, you will be able to generate a high number of inbound leads.
Automated webinar strategy is one of the most effective sources to get inbound leads, and fortunately, it is fully automatic. It helps you to capture the leads for you while you can spend your time on other important things, making your strategy productive.
Technical SEO reporting, email marketing strategy, lead segmentation, and social media activities can also be automated along with the whole batch of menial tasks that can slow down your work if done manually, including automating proposals and quotes. This is the thing that you need to automate and see your lead generation results to skyrocket.
10. Automate your sales process
Lastly, after getting inbound lead generations, you can now bring in more customers than you may think to have ever in your pool. Here, the only issue will be how you are going to deal with them all at once?
Here, there are two options for you to deal with them efficiently.
- Build a huge sales team to handle and tackle the crowd
- Automate your sales process from the very first step of getting emails from your customers.
Automation is better than manual dealing as it helps you to manage everything, and above all, it’s incredibly cost-effective.
There are many tools available to automate your sale process and providing you the perfect way to nurture your prospects with your sales processing getting into a minimal or zero manual input. Your sales team only needs to get involved in those responses that are failed on automation or need manual information to close the call. There can be any reason; leads can be dropped outside of your automation process, so a small sales team is still required.
Without an automated strategy, a company can handle the surge of leads. Hence, implanting automation can ease the hassle and enhance overall productivity.
The Bottom Line
Lastly, if you have got a great blog and you are also paying for paid advertising as it is expensive still wondering why it is not bringing enough inbound leads, then let’s take a deep breath, sit back and relax. These things are difficult and take time.
However, if your blog is not successful in generating leads, then there is a possibility that it is underrated. Or, if your paid advertising is not generating leads back, then you may have not putted enough efforts to optimize it. Therefore, if you are tired of implementing the above strategies before and have failed to get results, give another go to them and put the required time and effort to get to the right basics. Also, if you have not tried them, then the time is here to implement them as a part of your inbound leads generation marketing strategy. Good luck!
Author Bio
Amanda Jerelyn is a qualified digital marketer and avid writer. She has a rich working experience on various online essay writer. Currently, she is working as a Content Manager at King Essay.
