Digital Marketing is self-explanatory. It is a digital form of promoting your products and service using digital technologies like digital media, platforms, applications, etc., on digital devices over the internet. However, digital marketing doesn’t guarantee success without proper lead generation.
Proper lead generation – outbound and inbound is essential for successful digital marketing. Furthermore, inbound lead generation costs 50-60% less than outbound and ensures greater lead conversions and customer acquisitions.
So, we have focused on Inbound Lead Generation in this article. By the end, you will have learned to master Digital Marketing for Inbound Lead Generation. Let's do this without further ado.
Mastering digital marketing for inbound lead generation involves the following:
Digital Marketing and inbound lead generation begin with you determining your niche and your target audience. Business niche varies from one business to another. It is the same with your target audience.
Your target audience is a particular set or group of people your product or service aims to capitalize on. For instance, if you have a business that provides Australian virtual phone numbers, your target audience will be businesses and individuals that require Australian phone numbers inside or outside of Australia.
Once you determine your target audiences in your niche, you should focus on solving their pain points. You can accumulate data via research and analytic tools. These data layouts are a foundation for understanding your audience’s pain points. At the same time, data can help you devise strategies to solve your audience's problems.
Understanding Your Target Audience's Journey is also essential in delivering value to your audiences. For instance, if your audiences are beginners, producing and delivering advanced content may be irrelevant. It doesn’t add value to your audience’s journey.
So preparing content for audiences at all levels and guiding them through their journey makes sense. Understanding your target audience's persona and constructing relatable and valuable content is crucial. It helps you captivate your audiences and gradually convert them into your inbound leads and customers.
Creating a robust online presence is necessary at this stage of business evolution. You no more can rely on brick and mortar. Every business must go digital to stay on the radar and compete for audiences.
How do you create a solid online presence? Let us start with the following:
What is a better way for establish your business’s online presence and sales prospecting than creating a website? It is a rhetorical question. Website for your business is where you can start. It delivers your business’s authenticity, credibility, and professionalism to start with.
Your business should have a website where audiences and customers can go for information, research, and even purchases. On top of that, your business website should be interactive, mobile-friendly, professionally designed, intuitive, and informative.
Your customers should have a fantastic user experience while navigating through your website. The rest depends on your branding, content value, and the quality of your products and services.
Creating a website is just a start. As mentioned earlier, every business has a website, and so does your competitor. So just a bland website isn’t going to cut the chase. You should be able to stand out above all your competitors.
How do you do that? Simple, by Optimizing your Website for Search Engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has revolutionized the online presence in the internet world. It determines whether you stay in the limelight or be irrelevant somewhere on the web.
Just think of a time you went to the second page of Google’s search result page. It is infrequent, isn’t it? It is what SEO can do for you. Staying on the first page and at the top.
Let us briefly go through some crucial aspects of SEO.
It is all about keyword plays and on-page optimization within your website. Optimizing your titles, meta descriptions, headers, image Alt-texts, URLs, internal linking, site speed, responsiveness, and content quality come under On-Page SEO Techniques.
These techniques help you make your website user-friendly and deliver high-quality content on related keyword searches. It builds your website’s credibility amongst your audiences and search engines.
Off-page SEO focuses on elevating your website's visibility and trustworthiness. It concentrates on building valuable backlinks from higher and more authoritative websites. Social Media Marketing, local listings, forum posting, and guest posting are some aspects of Off-Page SEO Techniques.
With high-quality backlinks comes greater visibility and credibility. Search engines use these factors to determine your SERP rankings. With well-planned and executed off-page SEO, your website can outperform your competitors.
Keywords are the base of everything in search engine optimization. People enter keywords and hit enter; search engines display relevant pages, links, images, and other content. It is a simple algorithm.
However, you should understand that your website and web pages should have the right keyword placements and density. You can achieve it with proper keyword research and use in your web content.
The technical aspects of SEO include several important tasks, including removing redundancy, using SSL certificates, creating sitemaps, breadcrumb navigation, maintaining links, and more.
These aspects of SEO help you create a reliable and trustworthy site. It is crucial in delivering exceptional user experience and winning over Search Engine algorithms.
Developing a solid online presence doesn’t limit to creating an attractive website and optimizing it for search engines. It is the start, for sure. But you need to take your online presence to the next level. Here, social media comes into play.
Having said that, there are tons on social media, and you cannot dump your resources on all of them. It takes time, money, and effort, so it is essential to be strategic to accomplish your goals.
Why not start by
One of the major social media pain points for inbound lead generation is failing to identify the relevant social media platforms. So you can use Google Analytics or simply ask your audiences which social media they prefer. It is that simple.
Do not stress about your social media selection for your content. At least focus on 3-4 social media content based on your audiences’ preferences.
It can be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, or something else. Prioritize the ones that host most of your audiences. It saves you time, money, and effort. You won't waste your resources on platforms that do not guarantee returns.
The next thing about social media and online presence is devising a solid strategy. You can be very good at content creation, but you can never make the most out of your abilities if you lack strategy.
Planning and strategy are the bases of success in social media. For instance, if you focus on blogs but your audiences prefer video content. Does that sound effective? Of course not. You should be able to stay on the same wavelength with your audiences.
Media strategy isn’t limited to a certain boundary. It includes social media ads, social media marketing, and as well. And to get the maximum engagement from the users, it’s crucial to take note of the time and time zone difference between you and your target audiences. So time management and content scheduling is equally important.
It can be a part of social media strategy; however, let us discuss it separately. It is all about interacting with your fans, followers, or subscribers. These all are your audiences who consume your web content. So it is important to communicate with them regularly.
They give you honest feedback and opinions, helping you create more relatable and valuable content. It is a part of the process. The more you interact with your audience, the more you grow, and so will your business.
Like building social media strategy, developing a content strategy for your website and socials plays a massive role in getting the best out of your time, money, and effort. It also ensures you are not overwhelmed by the fact you have some severe tasks to perform and goals to accomplish.
A suitable way to start is by
You should be well aware of what your objectives are before even starting your content. It should be valuable to your audiences – it goes without saying. At least your content should mitigate or address your audience's pain point.
Inbound lead generation relies on the fact that audiences find whatever they are looking for in your content. Having a clear objective for your content helps you stay relevant, stick to the subject, and deliver the most valuable information to your audience.
You should put out content at regular time intervals. Why? Because your audience expects you to. It is the perfect way of captivating your audience and staying in the limelight. Building a content calendar can help you do so without having to stress and compromise the quality of your content.
Prepare a monthly calendar and work your way through it. It saves you time and gives a heads-up for the next content. You will have enough time to create and deliver valuable content to your audience on time.
As mentioned earlier, asking about your audience's content preference can help you create content that can reach more audiences. However, it is a good idea to produce a mix of content types so that audiences can enjoy variety.
It is a good approach to finding out what types of content attract more audiences and engagements. You can focus on the ones with better engagement rates. Having said that, not every audience like the same type of content, so if you have time and resources, you can invest in all types of content.
Let us start by saying that “Content is King.” Content is what attracts and engages with audiences. High-quality, valuable content defines the stature and authenticity of your online presence.
Let us briefly discuss some types of content for inbound lead generation in the following sections.
Your blog post should cover relevant topics in your niche. A telephony service provider's website blogs should not cover organic foods or insecticides. It is irrelevant and doesn’t portray a good picture to your audience.
Create and post your nice-related articles only on your website. And feature only valuable and relevant guest posts.
Infographics are one of the best and most creative ways to deliver your content. It is easy to understand and doesn’t consume much of your audience’s time. And many audiences relish this type of content since it is informative, creative, and less time-consuming.
Highly relevant infographics put your website on the SERP radar for higher visibility and credibility.
Ebooks & whitepapers aren’t for every content consumer; however, some people who are into it dig down to get their hands on them. They can even provide their email to access the content on ebooks and white papers.
But it is important that your website publish relevant ebooks and whitepapers.
Webinars and video content are possibly the most consumed content on the internet. You can also focus on these types of content to deliver your content. They arguably have the best engagement rates.
You can create and publish interactive content as well on your website. This content should be relevant to your niche and possibly deliver value to your audiences. Quiz and questionnaires, surveys and polls, interactive e-books, etc., can elevate audience engagement on your site.
It all heightens the level of visibility on the web, establishing your web content as the best alternative of all SERP results.
Blogs are one of the best ways to deliver content to your audiences. It takes time and effort to curate a high-quality blog, but it is worthwhile. You can express yourself to the fullest with value in your blog content.
Plus, blogs are suitable for every type of website. Every niche can have blogs on its website. However, blogs should be engaging and provide significance. So, let us learn the basics of creating engaging blog posts in the following sections.
By now, we know you should initiate any content with a clear topic in mind – the same goes for the blog. You should research and cover the hot topics in your niche. Keyword research on those topics is equally important.
Stay on the topic and cover all relevant searches on the web. It accumulates and concentrates audiences on your blog, improving your chances of ranking higher on the SERP.
Once you have researched the hot topics and decided to cover one, you should use appropriate keywords and come up with an engaging blog title. Although blog content matters the most, intriguing titles can be a plus point.
You should support your blog content with relevant images, videos, and multimedia as much as possible. It makes your blog more engaging and interesting for your audiences. A mix of content structure elevates your audience’s interest.
It is a perfect combination to keep your readers interested and enthused about your blog. People tend to come back for more in the future.
Curating content that anyone can understand and get value for is the goal of your content creation. You should keep your sentences short and meaningful. Do not use (over) complex sentence structures. It confuses readers and delivers a negative user experience.
Keep in mind that a school student should read and understand your blog.
Blogs delivering great value is one thing, but if you add some interactive component to it, it becomes excellent. So, why not go for interactive blogs? The following structures will help you create interactive content for your audiences.
Quizzes, surveys, and polls incorporated within your blogs hit differently than regular blogs. Readers get value from the blog whilst enjoying the interactive content. It is all about creating the best possible user experience.
Infographics are informative, attractive, and possibly the fastest way to get information. These types of content are suitable for busy people who don't have much time to go through the whole blog.
Including infographics in the content can take your blog to the next level.
Interactive videos within your blogs are the best you can do when it comes to creating interactive content. Audiences can go through the blog content and enjoy the supporting videos. These videos are interactive and engaging.
Audiences get to customize their selections, and the videos flow accordingly. Possibly the best of all interactive content.
Videos are possibly the best way to deliver your content to your audiences in a short space of time. You can curate informative content or sales videos for your product or service or anything using videos.
Marketing through video tends to capture more audiences’ interest than other formats. It is because of the possibility of doing so much more with a video than with a regular blog. Let us explore some of them briefly.
Like many content creators, you can also opt for explainer videos to produce quality content. You can easily explain and market your business in videos if you create interactive videos; it's the icing on the cake.
Creating videos takes time, a well-crafted plan, dedication, and effort, but the returns are worthwhile. Content engagement and conversion rates are enormous possibilities if your video has what it takes.
Hosting webinars and providing content to an interested group of audiences is one of the most influential and low-cost video marketing. You can share information about your products and service with a proper link to your landing pages.
As people interact in webinars, they visit your pages and check if your words are true. They will purchase whatever you offer if they find it relevant and worth their money.
YouTube has become one of the most prominent video-sharing platforms at present. Billions visit YouTube daily, and you can capitalize on this fact. If you have built up a considerable number of subscribers, you can promote your products/services to them.
YouTube also offers paid ads and marketing offers, which you can target on a particular area or keyword searches.
Now, let us skip to the inbound marketing strategies. Here, we shall learn to implement the four strategies, starting with:
Email marketing is one of the best ways of marketing, and it works well for inbound marketing. The main goal is to build a list of possible leads and customers. It involves getting your audience's email address and consent to email marketing.
It can be accomplished by following these steps:
You must create sign-up forms for collecting email addresses with consent to marketing and newsletters. These forms can be in the form of pop-ups or a new landing page. You can place these sign-up forms as gateways to your content.
People willingly provide you with their emails to access quality content. However, you must create a convincing sign-up form with a clear explanation.
People always want something in return – human nature. It is the same with email sign-ups. You need to offer something in return to the ones willing to give you their email addresses.
You can offer them access to your premium content. They will readily agree to it. Making use of CTA and landing pages during email collection can be fruitful.
Once you start collecting email addresses, you need to start nurturing them. Not everyone will trust initially, which is why nurturing. And you should start segmenting your email list according to the phases of the email holders.
It helps you create and broadcast emails based on their journey. You cannot send the same email to everyone. You could, but it won't be effective.
The CTA in email sign-ups should be followed by landing pages. Landing pages offer you a forum to showcase what they are signing up for. Now, let us see how you can put your landing pages to generate value.
The sole purpose of landing pages is to collect the email addresses of your audiences by offering them value in return. The conversion rates might not be as high as expected, but with some considerations to your landing page, you can at least take it to 50%.
An effective landing page has a conversion rate of at least 50%. The landing pages that usually have less than 100 words have higher conversion rates. Don’t make your pages bulky or ask for a lot of information.
The name and email address are enough. Using white spaces effectively with attractive designs and minimal font should be enough.
How can you make sure you have the right landing pages? Well, why not create multiple pages and put them to the test? The ones that perform better are you opt for. There is no better way to determine which landing pages to use.
Paid Advertisements are effective ways of implementing Inbound Marketing Strategies. Ad campaigns on various platforms allow you to reach targeted audiences. With a proper plan and strategy, you can make good investment returns.
So how do you make the most out of your ad campaigns? Start with
Choose at least 3-4 platforms for your ad campaigns and test which ones perform the best. You can discard the non-performers and invest in performing ones. Testing platforms is the best way of identifying the right platforms for you.
However, you should consider your resources and use them wisely. Select platforms that guarantee you good returns.
Once you have finalized your Ad campaign platforms, you need to create outstanding ads and campaigns. Well-planned and mapped-out ad campaigns can help you reach your target audience quickly and convert effectively.
Lead magnets are a small portion of the whole or complete content, focusing on the solution to your audience’s pain points. These attract leads to consuming your content and offering what you want in return – emails. Let us understand the aspects of lead magnets in the following sections.
Lead magnets are pieces of more extensive content, such as newsletters, ebooks, and whitepapers. These magnets are related to your products and services and deliver information to help audiences with their pain points.
Some lead magnets are free trials, quizzes, reports, statistics, webinars, checklists, templates, tips, guides, ebooks, etc.
Lead magnets should be compelling enough to convince audiences that the content at the end of the magnet is the solution they need to solve their problems. You should determine which portion of your content can allure your audiences to the main content.
Do not give out the main content on the magnet; just a teaser that directs your audience to your desired landing page.
Landing pages can be a good spot to offer lead magnets to your audiences. It is an easy approach since audiences with pain points come to you looking for them. They want solutions to their problems, and you simply provide them through the landing pages.
Once you have completed the tasks in the above-mentioned sections, you need to measure if you are reaching your pre-defined goals. You might require specific measurement metrics and in-depth data analysis related to your ad campaigns, investments, returns, and other factors.
So how do you start measuring and analyzing results? Let us start by
You need to define specific success metrics and associated factors for the measurement. KPIs and realistic goals can help you determine if you succeeded or failed.
KPI helps you in the measurement of success in attaining predefined goals. It can measure successful lead conversion rates or sales made from inbound marketing.
Some KPIs you can track are qualified leads, social media traffic, conversion rates, ROI, organic traffic, time on page & site, customer acquisition cost, etc.
Your Inbound lead generation goals should be realistic, attainable, timely, relevant, and measurable. Never set goals that aren’t achievable. It helps you stay away from disappointments and focus on the achievable ones.
Aim high but not so high that you end up frustrated. Setting realistic goals helps you put your time, resources, and effort in the right places to achieve them efficiently. This way, you progress gradually.
Web traffic and engagement rates are essential factors in measuring and analyzing results. These measurements are quantifiable and can be easily measured using applications like Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free-of-cost application that offers numerous tools to measure your customer’s journey, website traffics, audience engagement, and other factors. It has a straightforward implementation, and you can master it with ease.
Bounce rates and time on site are solid measurement factors to analyze results. Bounce rates show the audiences that landed on your landing pages but soon left without any engagement. It is not a good sign. The visitor didn’t find your page content interesting to spend time on.
Time on site measures the time the visitor spends consuming content on your site. The engagement rates grow high with higher time spent rates. These factors enable you to shape your website to impress your audiences and deliver greater value.
You can use ad campaigns or social media suites (in-app) to analyze your audience engagement on your social media. It enables you to view and understand the engagement spectrum on your social media posts.
Higher engagement rates on your social media greater the chances of website visits, engagement, sales, and revenue generation. You get the idea of which posts are working and which are not.
Conversion rates are essential aspects of digital marketing and inbound lead generation. It is how you determine if your work is generating value. You put effort into a lead generation campaign, and how do you determine if it was a success? Simple, by analyzing the conversion rate.
You should define what percentage of conversion rates moves your margin towards profit. If you calculate your investments and compare them with the returns, you can determine the conversion rates required for success.
You should identify your conversion funnels from the get-go and gradually guide your leads toward purchasing a product or service from you. Understand audiences’ pain points, attract potential leads with content, nurture them to become qualified leads, and finally make them your customers.
Conversion data analysis allows you to understand if your efforts have borne fruits. You can calculate and analyze data with various tools and see if you have met your pre-determined goals.
It is not possible you get everything right from the get-go. It takes time and re-trials to figure out the best and most suitable strategies for optimal results. You must adjust your strategies based on the outcome of your previous efforts.
What better way to do so than
The conversion data analysis presents you with a map of your weakness and opportunities. You need to act upon those presented stats and prospects to make changes to your strategies.
Identifying your weaknesses and working to improve them whilst exploring the presented opportunities is the best way to grow.
Data-driven decision-making is the best way to closure. Always consider your data and analysis while making decisions of any sort. It gives you a clearer view of what you are getting into and what you can expect.
There is always room for improvement. You just need to figure out how you can act upon them. Working on your weakness will help you elevate your level continuously. Weaknesses can never be eliminated entirely but can be reduced to the minimum.
Continuous growth is what we should aim for from the get-go.
The best way to stay relevant and in the limelight in this digital world is to stay ahead of your competitors. You should be able to stand out whilst providing excellent value to your audiences. Below are a few ways you can consider.
Falling behind is not an option. You should be on the same wavelength as the current industry trends. Trends play a massive role in today’s market, so keep up with them. For instance, Tik Tok marketing is on the rise these days. You should also be ready to accept it and incorporate it into your marketing campaigns.
The other way to keep up is by researching your competitors’ strategies and campaigns. Learn how they are progressing, and don’t shy away from using them for your benefit. You can also tweak a little and make better arrangements for greater returns.
Social media have taken over the world for some time now and will keep growing. So do not undermine the power of social media. Keep your business updated on all possible social media. It is a free pass for advertising and promoting your products and services.
You could even hire a social media manager, if possible, to manage your account on the web. Their task will be
Posting at regular intervals of time is mandatory on social media. It keeps you on the radar and increases your visibility & reachability. And your audience also expects you to do so.
Posting content regularly is your aim, but it is better if you engage with comments, mentions, replies, and so on, on your posts. It increases audience engagement, and more importantly, it builds a bond of loyalty.
Your loyal followers will help you with your projects and permanently become a part of your business as your customers.
Social media offers both free and paid advertisements. You can advertise for free in groups, communities, and your own profiles & pages. However, paid advertisements allow you to target a specific audience niche and broadcast your ads in exchange for money.
Social media advertising is an excellent way to reach audiences and increase your brand awareness. You can even make sales and generate leads using social media ads.
A constant improvement rate helps you stay on top of the game. It can be achieved by working on your weaknesses and exploring the opportunities that come along. Below are three ways to continuously improve and adapt to the ever-evolving market.
Audits help you determine if every sector in your business works according to the set plans. Basically, you can find out the status of your implemented prospects. It helps you devise better plans and strategies to implement so that the next audit presents better results.
Reviews, suggestions, and feedback from your customer, audiences, and team members help you understand your weakness better. It is essential to address these issues as soon as possible so that you minimize your weaknesses to the minimum.
Once you address your weaknesses, you can focus on other growth aspects. It is always about adapting and improving the existing system so that you stay on top of the game.
Considering the present-day situations and changes, you should be open to changes. You should focus on getting the best out of all situations. Changes help you adapt to any situation and survive rough times.
It is no different in digital marketing for inbound lead generation. You should stay agile and welcome changes with open arms if it means benefit.
Digital marketing for lead generation is a dynamic and ever-evolving element. And it takes dedication and effort to master it. Understanding Your Target Audience, Developing a Strong Online Presence, delivering Compelling Content, Analyzing Results, and Staying Ahead of the Competition is how you can master it.
Lead generation is a rigorous process, but it is possible. A combination of available resources, knowledge, skills, effort, and dedication can help you achieve your goals.
Stay open to changes; they present opportunities, helping you grow. As mentioned above, it is a continual process, so you should never stop learning and improving in this sector.
Inbound and outbound lead gen differentiate each other by the approach. In inbound lead generation, the prospect (lead) decides the time and place of interaction with you (business). In contrast, you decide the time and place of interaction in outbound lead gen.
2. How can I measure the success of my digital marketing efforts for lead generation?
You can use cost-per-lead to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts for lead generation. Here, you divide the total expenses for accumulating your potential leads by the number of actual leads.
Later, you spend on follow-ups to make sales. You should add up all the expenses and divide them by the number of sales made. It gives you the cost-per-sale.
So, if your cost-per-sale is $175, and you make a sale of $1000. Then you have made a successful lead conversion.
3. How can I stay ahead of my competitors in digital marketing for lead generation?Staying ahead of your competitors in digital marketing for lead generation by considering a few things. You should be an in-depth researcher, follow and keep up with trends, stay open to changes, stay aware of your competitors, and make sure you work smarter and harder than your competitors.
4. Can small businesses effectively compete in digital marketing for lead generation?Of course, small businesses can compete effectively in digital marketing for lead generation. However, it depends on their niche and who they are competing against.
5. How do I balance creating engaging content and optimizing for search engines for lead generation?You can create engaging content by delivering outstanding value in it. You can research and create content in a form that your audiences enjoy consuming. You could mix up content types to keep it interesting. Meanwhile, using proper keywords and supporting multimedia, on-page optimization, and off-page SEO can help you keep search engines on your side.