“Don’t think of your leads as leads. Instead, think of them as people who are frustrated because understanding and buying your product is too hard. Your job is to make it easy for them to learn your product and get started.”
58% of business leaders consider generating inbound leads as a potential challenge. The ideal marketing strategy starts with finding where your target audience “lives” on the web. Changing buyer needs, evolving buyer behavior, and digital disruptions make it difficult for B2B marketers to track, reach, and engage with prospects. If your website encounters a decline in traffic, and you find yourself struggling with lead generation, you need to review your inbound marketing strategies.
Generating Inbound Leads for Marketing
Are you getting the leads you want? Do your leads convert? If you know what’s stopping you from converting and generating qualified inbound leads, you could remove the barriers. Here are some common inbound lead generation roadblocks that cost marketers millions of dollars:
- Capturing contacts, not leads: Many marketers often consider all contacts as leads. A lead is a person who engages with your brand, whether it’s through setting an appointment, or signing up for a free demo, or interacting with a piece of content. Perhaps you pay for their information, or they provide you with it, through following on social media pages, or opting into a mailing list. You can turn the contacts into leads by implementing strategic nurturing programs.
- Missing meaningful data signals: Ignoring intent data signals can be a big blow to generating inbound leads. Besides collecting data, you must structure and organize data to formulate analytic reports. Intent data can help improve engagement across a multitude of areas, including account-based marketing (ABM) ad targeting, lead generation activities, lead scoring, and sales and account management.
- Not giving out the right message: Based on the buyers’ position in the sales cycle, you need to get in front of them with content that educates and makes them aware of problems they are facing. Engage with them across all touchpoints with more in-depth and resourceful content. Clear communication is the key to adding more inbound leads into the pipeline.
- Designing poor lead scoring methods: Sometimes traditional lead scoring techniques focus on top-of-the-funnel only, which does not align with the complicated buyer journey. The lead scoring method which you design now might not be relevant months later. Sticking to an old lead scoring model which dynamically does not adjust to your modern buyers will produce inaccurate results.
Adding more inbound leads to strengthen your Sales Pipeline
To overcome the challenges and strengthen your sales pipeline with more qualified inbound leads, implement these proven tips.
1. Focus on buyer needs based on intent data: The first step is to identify your target audience segments. Intent data is a big differentiator that allows you to receive a buyer’s unmistakable signals of buying intent, allowing you to get your product in front of them at the right time. When you know the interest of a prospect, you can reach them in the space they are visiting and offer relevant display advertising at that moment. For example, if someone is reading a blog about business visualization tools, it would be the perfect place to display an advertisement for your data modeling solutions. Or, you could engage them with an offer or message tailored to their interests. The possibilities are endless!
2. Keep SEO on point using targeted keywords: Search Engine Optimization holds the key to accelerating inbound lead generation. You must pay attention to: your content, social media marketing, website architecture, conversion rate optimization, backlinks, and technical SEO. If search engines can’t find your website, your business is invisible. If prospects aren’t using the keywords you thought are important, then your message is invisible. Track organic visitor metrics and website traffic to understand what’s working for you and what’s not. Not only on-page SEO, but off-page SEO is also equally pivotal in understanding which sites your users are visiting, what kind of content they are engaging with, and other aspects of online behavior. Once you create a target list, reach out to them with targeted, resourceful, and relevant content.
3. Deploy lead qualification and scoring processes: The quantitative process of lead scoring gives marketers an insight into the buyer’s interest and readiness to proceed towards purchase decisions. To score and qualify prospective leads, you need to analyze primary demographic and behavioral data touchpoints, such as location, age, company size, job designations, browsing history, email open rates, click-through rates, and more. Post analysis, you assign specific values to each attribute and create a formula to calculate the score. The resulting score will determine which leads will engage in order of priority. Marketing automation platforms manage lead scoring to automatically nurture leads by avoiding cold calls, shorten sales cycles, resonate with buyer needs, and integrate with CRM tools.
Fueling Better Lead Generation
Trying to figure out a successful formula to generate inbound leads can be a slippery slope. Generating qualified inbound leads requires a B2B marketer, you must focus on:
- Gaining optimum conversion rates
- Securing targeted prospect lists
- Filling your pipeline with qualified opportunities
- Coordinating marketing automation activities
- Choosing the best lead generation partners
- Figuring out budgetary constraints
- Meeting (or hopefully exceeding) Marketing Qualified (MQL) and Sales Qualified (SQL) industry averages
So, why not stack the odds in your favor by incorporating a heavy dose of content syndication into your lead generation bag of tricks?
Not only will this strategy let you reach potential prospects who may never have been introduced to your products or services; you’ll also reap the rewards of reaching a targeted audience in a considerably shorter period.
Check out these articles to know more about generating inbound leads and accelerating your pipeline.
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