Generating leads for your business is the fuel that keeps your business running, finding new ways to get leads is an essential part of any successful business. However with consumer behaviour changing and more people choosing to tune out of traditional outbound marketing, businesses are looking for new ways to generate leads.
Inbound marketing takes a different approach to lead generation than outbound marketing. Outbound is a more intrusive method, whereas inbound brings your leads to you. This means the cost is greatly reduced and your leads are far more qualified. So if you want to learn how to get more leads that are more qualified and at a lower cost, then read on.
The three pillars of inbound marketing
The way inbound marketing generates leads for your business is based on three pillars. These pillars are blogging, search and social. By utilising these three methods businesses can generate more leads and sales at a much reduced cost.
Nothing in marketing is free. However, inbound marketing, if done correctly, can be done on a much smaller budget, if you are prepared to invest the time. If you cannot spare the time then you may want to consider hiring a good inbound marketing agency. Content marketing is a large part of inbound and you have to be able to create a lot of remarkable content.
This may be a little daunting to you at first and would require your business to change the way it thinks about marketing. I personally believe every business employee should be creating content for the business on a regular basis, no one is more passionate and knowledge about your company than you and your employees.
What is Business Blogging?
Blogging is basically when someone creates content and publishes it on the internet via what is called a blog. Wikipedia has an entry on blogging that gives a detailed explanation of what a blog is.
I will just give you the short answer that is relevant to your needs. Blogging for you is a way for you to communicate, inform, delight, help and educate your customers. By creating a business blog and adding content that answers your customer’s questions you can start to nurture them from being an anonymous user to a lead, to a sale and finally (hopefully) a brand advocate.
With most of your visitors not ready to buy, you need to nurture them into a lead. I bet if you go and check your Google analytics you will see that at least 95% of the visitors to your website in the last month did not buy from you. That is a lot of sales you are missing out on just because your customers where not ready to buy at that moment.
By using the content you have created, you can attract prospects to your website who you can then nurture into leads. If you would like help on how to nurture your leads then why not download our free guide to lead nurturing. Here are some stats that will surprise you about lead nurturing:
- It generates 50% more sales*
- At 33% lower costs*
Generating traffic with search engine optimisation
Now that you have created some great content that answers your customer’s questions you need to make it easy for people to find this great content. If you make sure your content can be easily found by search engines, this content will start to drive relevant prospects to your website.
B2B companies who use blogging to drive traffic from search engines generate 67% more leads. Take a look around your industry and at your competitors. Do they have a business blog? If not then you have a large untapped lead source just waiting to be explored. Even if they do have a blog it doesn’t mean they are doing it correctly.
Every time you write a blog post it creates more opportunities for your customers to find you and you will appear more times in search engines for relevant searches.
How can social media help generate leads?
Now that you have created this great content that is easily found by search engines, you can promote it via websites like Facebook and Twitter.
Social media is not only good for promoting your content it is a really good way to build relationships with prospects and customers. This is what they are designed for, building and maintaining relationships.
According to Hubspot lead conversion rates from social media are 12% higher than from normal sources. Hubspot customers who have 1,000 Twitter followers generate more than 800 visitors a month to their website.
Businesses that are using TV, radio and print to generate leads are seeing a smaller return on investment than ever before. Instead of forcing your products on customers let them come to you. They will be much happier customers because of it.
Now it’s your turn
What challenges do you face when it comes to how to get more leads for your business?
Do you have a business blog? Please let us know how it is performing for you in the comments below.