An Introduction To Generating Leads With Inbound Marketing
We have all been on the receiving end of annoying calls from telemarketers or door-to-door sales representatives trying to hawk their latest and greatest product. These classic approaches to selling are not only irritating but also tend to take away from the intended customer’s day.
On the other hand, a new approach to marketing called inbound lead generation provides a unique solution to businesses and organizations looking to make such poor sales tactics a thing of the past. Unlike telemarketing or door-to-door sales, which are technically known as outbound techniques in the marketing world, inbound approaches to lead generation focus on drawing customers to products and services via interactions that actually add value to their lives.
Before delving deeper into just what inbound lead generation looks like, we should first define some keywords and phrases.
What are Leads and Lead Generation All About?
By definition, a lead is a person who has indicated some level of interest in your company’s product or service. In the digital era, this interest is typically communicated through website clicks, newsletter signups, and other similar actions.
In turn, lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential customers who have expressed some form of interest in your firm’s product or service into well-paying patrons. Standard methods for effective lead generation include blog posts, employment applications, online content, live events, and much, much more. At the end of the day, lead generation is just another way to warm up potential customers to the idea of purchasing your product or service.
Best of all, inbound lead generation methods can help communicate the nuance of your business better than annoying approaches like telemarketing or door-to-door sales ever could. With lead generation, companies can develop new customers without having to run the risk of utilizing off-putting and out-dated marketing approaches.
Why Does My Company Need Lead Generation?
Think of lead generation in the context of online dating: When a stranger online shows some interest in your profile, whether it be through a swipe or message, the transition from stranger to potential partner feels far more natural. The same can be said about turning interested individuals into paying customers.
As the second stage of the inbound marketing strategy, lead generation plays a vital role in building the customer base of any organization. Without intentional lead generation, there would be little-to-no new visitors to a company’s website, which in turn dramatically limits such an organization’s ability to find new sources of revenue from potential clients.
How Can My Organization Generate Leads?
This is a great question, and we are happy to help. After gaining a strong understanding of the best approaches to inbound marketing, it is essential to be able to put such information into action.
First off, visitors will discover your organization through one of your digital marketing channels, whether it be a website, social media page, or company blog. From here, the visitor will then click on your call-to-action, which can be a button, enticing image, or message that encourages visitors of a website to take some form of action.
After interacting with your specially designed call-to-action, visitors will be redirected to a landing page, which is a special type of web page that is custom-built to capture the information needed to turn a visitor into a lead, typically in exchange for an offer.
Simply put, an offer is some sort of content that will be seen as valuable to your visitor, whether it be a free ebook or an instructional video. When deciding upon what kind of offer to place on your company’s landing page, it is essential to keep a few things in mind. First off, the offer must provide enough value to a visitor that they will be willing to provide their personal information or email address for it. More importantly, taking care to ensure that this offer provides the visitor insight into what your product or service is really about can go a long way towards turning a lead into a well-paying and long-term customer.
In summary, lead generation is a pretty straightforward process. Visitors to your business’s website will click on an enticing call-to-action, which in turn will take them to a landing page. From here, visitors have presented the opportunity to exchange their information for a valuable offer, at which point the visitor to your site turns into a lead.
Why Can’t Leads Just Be Bought?
We understand that in today’s competitive business environment, quickly filling a sales funnel is more important than ever. This fact alone makes the idea of buying leads very, very tempting.
However, we strongly suggest that leads be developed organically through your company’s own digital marketing. We recommend this course of action for many reasons. For example, when you buy leads, the leads you have purchased do not actually know about your business. Instead, they are “opted in” through some other site where they signed up for another product or service, and didn’t actually opt-in to receiving messages from your company.
As such, the message you send to leads that you have purchased will view your emails and other communications as unwanted messages, which can be extremely intrusive. Remember the annoying telemarketing and door-to-door sales tactics we mentioned earlier? Well, buying leads are considered to be a form of digital door-to-door sales tactics and trust us, this is not the way you want to approach lead generation!
Conclusion to How To Use Lead Generation
Now, with your newfound knowledge of the basics of inbound marketing and lead generation, your company can go out there are change the world with their product or service. When starting up your own lead generation approach, keep in mind the importance of enticing visitors with a call-to-action and turning them into leads with a great offer that can’t be passed up.
If you do this and promote your business through a multi-channel digital marketing environment, you just can’t go wrong! Most importantly, when you find an approach to lead generation that works well, stick with it. It may be tempting to optimize your call-to-action or landing page, but perfect is the enemy of good enough, and consistent tweaking of a lead generation process can hurt your numbers in the long run. For more about the course go to Dynamos for the complete step by step training course on Lead Generation
