How to Get Started with Online Lead Generation using Inbound Marketing
Every time a prospect searches online for solutions to problems your business solves, you have an opportunity to capture their attention and acquire a valuable lead. It’s an exciting prospect, but it’s critically important that you lay the groundwork you’ll need to be successful.
To get started, you’ll want to explore and answer these crucial questions thoughtfully:
1. WHOM do you want to attract?
he goal of lead generation is to generate the right traffic to your website, not just more traffic to your website. The
WHAT will attract the right prospects foryour business?right traffic consists of those individuals who fit your company’s buyer persona. To define this target group, you should carefully profile the demographic and behavioral characteristics of your current customers. Prospects who share common traits with this buyer persona are more likely to convert to qualified leads.
Relevant, valuable content is the driving force in drawing in the best, most qualified prospects to your website. For the best results, make sure your content is relevant to your ideal customer, as identified in your buyer persona.
Blogs, social media, and SEO all serve as magnetic fields that pull potential buyers toward your website’s content. Inbound links from other credible sources also drive prospects to your website.
2. WHERE are your prospects?
To effectively attract the best prospects, you must identify the different paths that will lead them to your website. As you develop your lead generation strategy, some questions you might ask yourself to determine this include:
- Which keywords do my potential customers use when searching for solutions to the problems addressed by my business? Is my content optimized for those keyword searches? (This process is known as search engine optimization or SEO).
- Which social media platforms do my prospective customers frequent? For example, is your customer likely to ask for recommendations from members of a local Facebook group?
- What businesses offering similar products or services do my ideal customers follow? Please do some research to explore your competitors’ lead generation methods and strategies, and the types of content they are offering their customers.
3. WHEN does an anonymous website visitor become a lead?
Provide numerous opportunities for your website’s visitors to convert to leads, as well as easily accessible options for direct communication via email, online chat, social media, and telephone.
If you’re new to lead generation efforts like these, you may worry it feels too overbearing or aggressive to have these multiple opportunities to collect an unknown prospect’s contact information. To that, I say, quite simply: Don’t be. By the time an unknown visitor converts into a qualified lead, you have earned their trust and established your expertise and value—and this means you’re well-positioned to ask for this information.
4. WHY is inbound marketing the most effective approach to lead generation?
The inbound marketing methodology is centered on the inherent nature of organic search, which connects buyers to websites that offer content that is highly relevant to their online inquiries. Inbound strategies create the magnetic force necessary to point these motivated buyers in your direction. Your website content draws them in, and your lead nurturing engine keeps them engaged by providing a steady flow of content until they are ready to buy. The analytics produced by inbound marketing automation tools provide actionable data for fine-tuning your lead generation campaign in real time, resulting in higher numbers of sales-qualified leads.
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Interested in learning more about B2C lead generation? This article is an excerpt from Lead Generation: A Complete Guide. Here is an index for the comprehensive article:
- What are the different types of lead generation?
- Why lead generation is important for B2C businesses
- How to get started with lead generation
- Lead generation requires great content
- Techniques to increase the number of qualified leads
- Why you should align offline and online lead generation campaigns
- Measure the results of your lead generation campaigns so you can improve them
- The Bottom Line: Online Lead Generation Captures the Best Leads for your Business!
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If you have additional questions, you can reach out to me directly here to discuss lead generation and making it work for your business.