How to Generate B2B leads through Inbound marketing !

1. Struggling to generate qualified b2b leads?

2. Is your sales team getting frustrated by low quality leads generated by your marketing team?

Dont worry! I am going to show you a step by step procedure of generating the maximum B2B leads using the inbound methodology. But before I proceed to the actual topic, let me answer common questions that bother most people when it comes to inbound marketing. Of course, if you already know the benefits of inbound marketing and have made up your mind to get started, then you can fast forward to the section below.

Why not outbound?

Outbound marketing practices like cold calling, print ads, press releases etc. are fast losing their charm in producing more leads. Not only are these practices becoming more expensive by the day but they also tend to result in a large number of low quality or unqualified leads.

Infact according to a study by HubSpot, only 17% of the marketers feel that outbound practices produce high quality leads for sales. Now, as an inbound marketer I don’t want to sound too salesy. Yes through outbound marketing you can reach a large number of audience. But in an era of content explosion (and easy access to internet), customers have access to an incredible amount of information. And after decades of being hounded by spammy emails, they have now become resistant to any sales message that is remotely pushy. Businesses are doing a thorough research before they invest as much as a penny. Even 31% of outbound marketers rank outbound marketing practices, such as paid advertising, as a top waste of time and resources.

Whether you are a B2B or a B2C organization, content is still king. The more unique content you provide, the more audience you would attract and eventually would generate more leads.

If content is everything, Why not content marketing?

This is a genuine doubt raised by many B2B marketers. Content marketing with the correct strategy works great. I agree. As a matter of fact, when asked if their respective organization uses content marketing, 88% of the respondents said YES! Now that’s a huge number. But will a content marketing campaign truly help you in generating qualified leads?

Content marketing doesn’t include many critical marketing tactics like email marketing, website design etc. You can drive more people to your website for sure, but you may not convert them into leads without a bigger strategy. A 2016 study by content marketing institute even says that only 30% of B2B marketers feel that their organization is effective at content marketing, down from 38% in 2015.

Content Marketing is a part of Inbound Marketing

That’s right! Inbound marketing is the bigger strategy in which content is just one part.

Simply put Inbound marketing = Content + Context

In inbound marketing, content is used at various stages as required. Depending upon the context, i.e attracting, retaining or delighting, content is distributed accordingly.

What about digital marketing?

Many companies over the past decade have happily created a digital marketing campaign with various tactics such as SEO, SEM, social media marketing, e-mail marketing, etc. While these stand-alone tactics are successful to an extent, there are a lot of missed opportunities. There are so many reasons why inbound methodology works better than traditional digital marketing for B2B companies. For instance, you cannot get a detailed analysis report of the whole campaign using the isolated tactics of digital marketing. Without proper segregation, the performance parameters of each tactic can’t be analyzed and corrected conveniently. This results in the spending of a huge amount of money as it is tough to determine which specific tactic works well for a particular type of campaign.

Finally why Inbound?

I love inbound marketing for many reasons. Inbound marketing has more of a persona based approach and results oriented methodology.

Inbound marketing provides a clearcut strategy to generate qualified leads and enables an excellent sales and marketing alignment. HubSpot even says that Inbound organizations are 4 times as likely to rate their marketing strategy as effective. Inbound marketing not only places the right content at the right stage but also gives you a detailed analysis of what’s going wrong or right at each part of the campaign. Now that we have discussed the importance of Inbound marketing in lead generation, let me show you how exactly it’s done step by step.

But before you start this procedure, I would recommend you to come up with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing teams.

The most impressive thing about Inbound marketing that sets it apart from the rest is that it provides an effective marketing and sales alignment or Smarketing.

To learn more about the key essentials of Smarketing, download the ebook now and dive into the hidden strategies.