Inbound marketing is one of the best ways to attract and nurture new leads and potential prospects. When executed properly, this permission-based marketing tactic drives relevant traffic to your website, turning visitors into prospective customers and converting leads into sales. This method of attracting qualified traffic to your website is both effective and efficient.
So, how can you get customers to invest in your inbound marketing? It all starts with the creation of compelling content.
The inbound marketing funnel
According to HubSpot there are three distinct steps to inbound marketing lead generation:
Step one: Get found
The production and distribution of informative, engaging content will maximize the number of people you attract to your inbound marketing funnel, which in turn will impact the number of customers who come out of the funnel.
The creation of great content impacts your website in the following ways:
- causing your site to perform better in organic search engine results
- attracting natural backlinks from other websites
- spreading information through social networking and sharing sites
- increasing newsletter subscribers and widening your distribution network
All of these outcomes will help you bring in warm leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers. Getting found is the most important step of the process — you can’t convert visitors into customers if you don’t have any visitors to begin with after all!
Here are three top tactics for getting found online:
Blogging
Companies that blog have been shown to get 55% more leads than those who don’t.
Search engine optimized content
Most customers begin their buying process by searching for product information on Google. Make sure your website is listed prominently on search engine results pages by integrating targeted keywords and properly optimizing your website code.
Content marketing
Once you’ve got the knack of publishing content to your blog, take things one step further and develop a content marketing strategy. Unlike blogging, content marketing isn’t restricted by a medium or platform. A robust content marketing strategy can include viral videos, webinars, white papers, and more.
Step two: Convert
Step two of the inbound marketing funnel kicks into high gear once qualified visitors hit your website. This is the beginning of the lead nurturing process. Well-crafted content, call-to-action buttons, special offers, and targeted landing pages will help you lead potential prospects deeper into the funnel.
Not sure how to nurture leads on your website? Here’s a quick and easy three-step process:
- Build a targeted landing page. Remember all of the content that you created and distributed back in step one? All of this content should have included backlinks to one or more targeted landing pages on your website. This way, when a visitor clicks on this call to action, they’ll be taken directly to a page where this action is fulfilled…after the user subscribes to your email marketing list, of course!
- Stay in touch with email marketing. Email marketing is a great way to nurture long-term relationships with potential prospects and loyal customers. Focused email campaigns that contain relevant content will help establish your company as an industry leader and guide people through the sales process.
- Get personal with marketing automation. Keep the lines of communication open by sending customized marketing messages to your company’s followers. For example, if a visitor downloaded a case study from your site, you might want to send them a series of emails that contains related information. However, if this visitor signed up to participate in a webinar, you might want to change any follow-up communication in order to ensure relevancy.
Step three: Analyze
No inbound marketing campaign is complete until you’ve sat down and reviewed the numbers. Once you’ve started to convert visitors into leads and leads into sales, it’s time to analyze your inbound marketing funnel in order to figure out ways to make the customer attraction and retention process more efficient. This will involve looking at website visitor metrics, leads, conversion rates, sales, and industry benchmarks.
All of this information will help you set and track specific marketing goals that will ultimately have a positive impact on your bottom line.