Using Inbound Marketing to Generate Quality Leads

You may have a healthy quantity of leads, but what’s their quality score? Low-quality leads waste the time of your sales force, result in poor prospect fits for your products and overall cause more trouble than they're worth. Inbound solves this dilemma and supplies you with leads that your sales team will love to work with. Let’s see how!

Not familiar with inbound marketing? Then check out our recent post “What is Inbound Marketing?” >>

Attract the Right Visitors to Your Website

It's not enough to just create content. You need to blog about the right topics to attract better-qualified prospects to your website. When you pick the right subject matter, your blog posts will act as a powerful source for new leads for years to come. Blogging offers you a great ROI, but it takes time to develop good content and see the results from it.

You have several questions you can ask yourself when developing content to attract the right visitor.

• What questions do people ask when they go into your sales funnel?

• Are there common themes that pop up frequently?

• After your customers purchase products or services, did they reach out to customer support for assistance?

All of this information provides valuable insight into what your content needs to answer.

Provide Useful Content

Another way to come up with topic ideas is brainstorming content that's useful for your audience and relates to your products and services. Stay away from talking specifically about your products, as you don't want to bring that up early on in the lead nurturing phase. Instead, talk about how to fix common pain points in your audience, ways to evaluates solutions in your particular market, and other advice.

Develop Content Around the Right Keywords

Keyword volume and other search tools help you select topics based on search term popularity and relevance to your business offerings. Keywords that have sales intent, such as "choosing the best ______ in your product category," help you attract prospects that are getting close to a purchase decision. When you use search engine optimization techniques, your website can appear at the top of the search results, allowing you to funnel people interested in this topic to your site.

Provide Offers to Convert a Visitor to a Lead

You're now attracting prospects to your website through the inbound methodology, but what do you do with them after they're here? Content offers help you push the leads forward through the buyer's journey using premium information that's gated behind a sign-up form. You request a name, email address and other details before you open up access to the piece of content. These offers not only get you access to the lead's contact information, they also help you improve lead quality through segmenting prospects, educating them about product categories and helping them make a decision.

Prospects won't give up their contact information unless you have a particularly enticing incentive, so you need to go beyond blog posts and work with other formats. Here are a few common formats for content offers, and the value they bring to your inbound strategy.

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  Ebooks: This long-form piece of content can help establish your company as the go-to place for a prospect's informational needs. You act as an authority in a particular aspect of your market through a comprehensive ebook. While this format is resource-intensive to produce, it works well when repurposing for other channels. You'll end up with quality leads that are actively engaged with your content and can be segmented by their interests.

• Whitepapers: If you're a technology-centric company, whitepapers offer a valuable tool for presenting in-depth information in a long-form format. Typically, these are longer than a typical article or blog post, but shorter than an ebook. You focus on a narrow subject and give the reader a strong understanding of why it's important. This type of content educates leads and moves them further down the funnel. They gain a better understanding of your solutions and can screen themselves towards the most appropriate one.

• E-courses: Can you teach your prospects useful skills that relate to your products and services? Put this practical knowledge together in an e-course and send it to their inbox. You have the opportunity to send multiple messages to their email throughout the course and have a natural segue to talk about your products at the end of it. Your e-course educates the lead on many basic concepts relating to their purchase, leaving them better educated at the end of it.

• Templates: Templates can take many forms, from a meal planner to a website design. Nearly any market can find a use for this content format, and prospects love to get a time-saving tool for free. If you're not sure what type of template you should offer, take a look at your competitors for inspiration. You can also ask your current customers what they'd like to see. You build up brand awareness and connect with the people that can likely benefit from your services.

Want to attract higher quality sales leads? 

Request a free Inbound Marketing Assessment by clicking the button below! In this 30 minute assessment, we'll take a look at your current marketing techniques and give you suggestions on how you can attract higher quality traffic and leads.