Four Inbound Marketing Tips to Generate Leads for Your Sales Team

By Jeanne Hopkins, 
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Continuum

There’s one word to describe the biggest trend in inbound marketing: customer. While this isn’t exactly a cutting-edge trend – it’s been building for some time – everything you do in business today has to focus on your customer. Consumers and B2B buyers are more demanding than ever, and their top concern – not surprisingly – is themselves, not you or your company.

The beauty of using inbound marketing to generate leads is that it’s neither intrusive nor irrelevant. You start with warm leads, and that jump-starts your qualifying process. Generating inbound leads is a logical progression that combines search engine optimization (SEO), blogging and social media to reach the broadest audience – your audience.

1. Leverage your SEO.

To get the ball rolling, online searchers must be able to easily find you. Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo use complex algorithms to determine which content to display in response to a search.

Your web address, page titles, header tags, alt tags for photos and other images and the text of your content all affect how search engines “see” you. Consistency and freshness produce better results, so focus on a single keyword for each web page or blog article and publish new blog articles and social media posts frequently.  It’s about cadence and consistency. 

2. Contribute to your blog. 

A blog that’s integrated with your website is vital for generating inbound links. It boosts your SEO, and every article is an opportunity to present new content your prospects are searching for. The topics you write about can be varied to address the individual interests of various audience segments, so you’re simultaneously working to attract and engage with prospects at every stage of the buying process.

It’s easy to generate leads directly from your blog, by ending each post with an offer of additional related information called “premium” or “gated” content. To open the gate and redeem your offer, your prospect has to provide some contact information. Now you can start the sales follow-up process.  

3. Create buzz with social media.

Focus on the social sites that are most relevant for your audience, and be sure the content you post on each site fits that culture – lots of visuals and less formality for Facebook, businesslike content for LinkedIn. These posts help you reach a broader audience to build your brand and uncover more leads, and they can improve your SEO.

4. Utilize marketing technology tools.

Because consistency and frequency are so important and you’re producing content for several delivery channels, you’ll want to use a quality marketing management software product to automate the workflow and integrate with your CRM tools.

It will be much easier to track and rate leads and  continue to engage them with content that is relevant and meaningful for them, individually. The ability to provide highly detailed analytics ensures you can accurately measure the performance of your marketing.

Here’s how inbound lead generation works: 

• Step 1: Your prospect initiates contact by clicking on your web address, blog article or other content that appears when they search for a particular keyword or phrase. You’ve attracted them as a visitor.  That’s the magnet part of inbound lead generation.
• Step 2: To convert them into a lead, you need some information about them – at least their name and email address. So you make them an offer – you’ll give them an informative e-book, a discount coupon, something they perceive as valuable enough to part with their contact information.  This is the equitable exchange component of inbound lead generation.
• Step 3: You present your offer on a landing page – a web page designed solely to “sell” your offer, provide a contact form for your visitor to fill out and a “call to action” they click to close the deal – download your e-book, redeem your coupon, etc. The less information you ask for initially, the higher your conversion rate will be but the less valuable the lead may be to your sales team.  This is the part of inbound lead generation that requires balance and regular experimentation.
• Step 4: Now that you have their contact information, you can follow up and begin to build and personalize your relationship – the lead nurturing process. As you further qualify your lead and their level of interest grows, you can use additional offers and forms to obtain more detailed information about their company, buying needs and so on.  This is the nurturing part of inbound lead generation.

Inbound techniques in particular are ideal for providing prospects and existing customers with exactly what they want, when they want it and in the format they prefer. The more you do to tailor your inbound marketing programs to the buyer’s journey – targeting not just audience segments but individuals - the more you can increase lead generation for your sales team and revenue for your company.

Jeanne Hopkins is Senior Vice President & CMO at Continuum Managed IT Services. She has over 20 years of sales and marketing experience and is renowned in data-driven, high-velocity demand creation marketing programs for high-growth SaaS companies. She is co-author of a No. 1 best-selling mobile marketing book on Amazon.com, Go Mobile. Follow her on Twitter @jeannehopkins.