So, you have a website but are frustrated that leads are just not coming in or your sales are sluggish? Well, it’s time to unleash your inner marketing hero and use inbound marketing techniques to generate leads and improve sales.
When done right, inbound marketing can help you increase brand awareness and generate qualified leads for your business consistently. However, to succeed, you need a plan to follow. Your plan should include generating and converting leads. Let’s look at these two aspects.
The Hero’s Journey to Lead Generation Starts With Inbound Marketing Techniques
At this time, you already know your target audience and buyer persona. Now, it’s time to identify the channels that you can use to get them to your sales funnel. First, you have to determine where the audience hangs out. From there, you have to use relevant channels to get them to your lead funnel. Here are some stages that you must journey through to become an Inbound Marketing Hero.
The Call to Adventure
Yes, everyone knows SEO is important for lead generation. But how many times do you sit to evaluate the SEO of your content? How much on-page optimization have you done on your site?
SEO is one of the best way of generating long term traffic and leads to your business. Ensure that your website is optimized according to Google’s guidelines. Before you post an article on your blog, do research to see which keywords you can incorporate in it. When you post an article on your site, tag it with your target keywords, interlink it with relevant articles on your blog, optimize it with H1, Title and Alt tags and so on.
SEO should be part and parcel of your content team. And don’t forget about building links to your content too.
Meeting With the Mentor
Never forget, your seasoned mentor Email Marketing is not dead and isn’t going to die anytime soon. In fact, email generates 4X more customers than Facebook and Twitter social media. The secret to converting leads through email is to understand what they need and provide the solution. This is where segmentation comes in.
When you generate leads, it is important to segment them based on their interests. This is especially important if you provide multiple products or services. Something important for you to remember; before you ask for sale, get prospects to trust you. Provide helpful content to your email leads to win their trust.
Crossing the Threshold
Social media marketing is more than having a Facebook page or Twitter account and posting content. Remember, your goal is to attract new leads and nurture existing ones. Therefore, you need a strategy to connect with users.
Make sure any content you share is helpful and informative to your target audience. You can also use social media to discover the pains or problems of your market and address them. Remember, prospects are watching you on social media, even if they do not comment on your page. How you relate with prospects on social media can make or break a sale.
The Approach
Content fuels the web and you need to content to generate leads. People are searching for information online and if you have the info they want, they are likely to become leads. Post content on your website frequently. In fact, companies that blog regularly generate 67% more leads than those that do not blog often.
Apart from blogging, create other pieces of content for link baiting purposes. For example, infographics can attract many inbound links from relevant blogs, which can increase your traffic and generate new leads. Be creative with your content. Creating in-depth guides, videos and podcasts are potential content to consider.
The Hero’s Journey is not Complete Until One Converts Leads with Inbound Marketing Techniques
The Reward
To convert leads, you first have to nurture them. The process is simple; get leads to get into your sales funnel through different landing pages, create special content and engage with the leads, and finally ask for a sale.
Nurturing leads is all about getting personal with them. Interact with them through your content, social media, email, webinars or other avenues. Let the prospects know that you care for them and want to solve their problems.
The Elixir
You should now know what your customers struggle with and how to solve the problem. Apart from this, find out the best form of content that will resonate well with them. If you are selling software, a video walkthrough of the software will be more effective in helping prospects learn how to solve various problems.
There is one thing to remember though; trust takes time to build online. Depending on your market or niche, this can mean a few days to even months. Always give before you take people’s money. Give them value; they will trust you and buy when you need them to.
This Hero’s journey is far from complete. You have begun to wield your new strength with Inbound Marketing Techniques. To truly master the art of Inbound Marketing, unravel our scroll on “Optimizing Landing Pages For Lead Generation and Conversion” and always remember, with great power comes…sorry can’t say the rest, copyright issues…but I’m sure you know what I’m about to say.
