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What is Inbound Marketing—and How Can You Generate Inbound Leads?

What is Inbound Marketing—and How Can You Generate Inbound Leads?

A good inbound strategy will keep bringing in leads month after month. But what does inbound marketing involve, and how can you maximize your inbound leads?

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What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing describes the strategy of attracting customers to your brand. To put it simply, instead of going out to find your customers, you let them come to you.

Inbound marketing often works by producing content that lures people to your website. But once a prospect has found your brand, you’ll use a range of marketing tactics to move them through the funnel until they become a customer.

It’s a popular B2B lead generation method, because it works well for prospects who want to do their own research instead of being immediately sold to. It gives the buyer more control over if – and how – they engage with a potential supplier.

What is Inbound Lead Generation?

In B2B, the main goal of inbound marketing is to generate leads.

Traditionally, you’d use a lead magnet like gated content or a webinar registration to capture the details of a prospective client. Once you have their details, you can then nurture the lead until they’re ready to buy.

However, visitor identification software makes this step redundant. That’s because tools like Lead Forensics can tell you which companies are viewing your website before they even complete a form and become a lead in your CRM.

How Does Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation Work?

There’s a clear four-stage process for inbound marketing:

  1. Attract people to your brand. Tactics like content marketing, SEO, social media or paid advertising draw in prospects and get them to look at your website.
  2. Convert prospects into leads. Once on your website, you have to offer value to the user and signpost them to take action to share their details and become a warm lead.
  3. Close the sale. When you have the lead, you can nurture them through email marketing until they’re ready to purchase, then use warm calling to close the sale.
  4. Delight your new customers. After they’ve become a customer, you use customer support, referral incentives and collect feedback to make sure they’re satisfied and potentially turn them into brand advocates.

What Are the Benefits of Inbound Lead Gen?

Inbound marketing – and the inbound leads you find as a result – are particularly valuable because by engaging with your content, they’ve already demonstrated they might be a good fit. As a result, you may find higher quality leads through inbound marketing.

Another benefit is that once you’ve built your content resources, it becomes cost effective because you only need to set everything up once, you don’t pay for every click. However, it does require specialist skills and is time consuming to produce, so it can increase costs.

Other benefits of inbound lead generation include:

  • It builds your brand identity and helps to establish your company as an authoritative industry expert.
  • It’s scalable and sustainable. Once it’s up and running, your inbound marketing channels can generate leads with minimal ongoing effort.
  • It’s always-on. That means you could be generating leads when the office is closed.
  • It builds a positive relationship with prospects, because it’s non-intrusive and there when you’re needed.
  • Content engagement is measurable and data-driven, which means you can work on conversion rate optimization or other ways to refine your strategy over time.

What Are the Challenges of Inbound Lead Gen?

One of the biggest challenges of inbound lead generation is that not all leads are equal. You’ll need to score your B2B leads in order to prioritize the most valuable ones.

It’s also a big, long-term investment that can take a while before you start to see results. In fact, inbound marketing can be one of the slowest ways to get leads – but that’s to be expected if you’re building a relationship with prospects. If you need quick sales, it’s not the right strategy for you.

There are other challenges with inbound lead generation, including:

  • Creating content is time-consuming and might require expert input, which can increase costs.
  • Competitors can steal your social media reach or outrank you in search engines and put your inbound marketing in jeopardy.
  • It can be hard to properly attribute sales and measure the ROI of your inbound leads. This makes it hard to justify future investments or get a total view of how this performs against other strategies.
  • You may need to use a range of tools, which can lead to software overload and create data silos.

It’s worth exploring the topic of inbound vs outbound marketing in more detail.

What Are The Main Inbound Lead Gen Tactics?

There are many ways you can generate leads through inbound marketing, but we’ve rounded up the most popular.

Content Marketing

If there’s one thing that really underpins inbound marketing, it’s content.

Be it blogs, webinars, eBooks, whitepapers, video or more, content marketing is the thing that helps you to educate prospects and keep them informed.

The most important thing about content marketing for inbound lead gen is that it needs to be useful—especially if you’re asking someone to exchange their contact for access.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the best ways to attract prospects is to optimize your content so it can be discovered when they search for information online.

If someone’s looking for help, you can demonstrate your expertise by providing trustworthy information that answers their query. And if you consistently appear at the top of search engine results pages, you’ll establish yourself as an authoritative expert in that space.

Social Media

When you share your valuable content on social media, it can reach new audiences and help draw them to your domain. But social media isn’t just a traffic-driving tool; you can use each platform to engage with your audience, build their trust and test what content resonates.

Paid social will amplify your posts to an even wider audience and can be a low-cost way to make more people aware of your content.

Webinars

Another great way to drum up inbound leads is to host webinars and ask people to share their details when they register to attend. If you pick the topics wisely, it gives you a chance to educate and engage your prospects while showcasing your expertise and cementing your authority.

Email Marketing

The inbound marketing and lead generation process is just as much about how you nurture your prospects as how you attract them to your brand. That’s why email marketing is essential.

You should segment your audience based on things like interests, engagement or buyer intent and send personalized content that gives them the right content, at the right time.

You can even set up automated marketing drip campaigns that will nurture leads through a funnel until they’re ready to convert—or use their email engagement to send personalized follow ups.

More Inbound Marketing Tactics

There are many more ways you can do inbound marketing. Some other popular tactics include:

  • Guest blogging or guest appearances on webinars to leverage other brands and their audiences.
  • Collaborations with influencers to tap into their followers.
  • Chatbots that can help website users find what they need in real-time.

How Can You Find More Inbound Leads?

One of the easiest ways to get more inbound leads is to find the companies that visit your website but don’t get added to your CRM because they haven’t completed any data capture forms.

Visitor identification software like Lead Forensics will identify which companies are already engaging with your content and tell you what pages are being viewed. This helps you reach out while your leads are still considering their options and get their attention before your competitors.

Need Help Identifying Your Warm Leads?

Check out our eBook all about how to use buyer intent signals to spot your warm leads and close the sale with warm calling:

eBook: Warm Calling - How to Close More Deals with Buyer Intent

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