One of the best, proven techniques for engaging and attracting the right audience is inbound marketing.
In fact, over 50% of marketers consider this strategy their top priority in marketing campaigns.
This strategy is aimed at pulling customers in with relevant and engaging content and can generate thousands of leads per month—when done correctly.
In this article, we’ll delve into inbound marketing, how it works, and how you can use it to your advantage to help you generate leads and increase sales with ease.
What Is a Lead and How Does It Impact Inbound Marketing?
In digital marketing, a lead represents an individual or organization that is interested in your company’s products or services.
These leads range from those just discovering your brand to those on the verge of using your product or service.
Their interest is often generated by marketing activities like subscribing to newsletters, downloading whitepapers, or completing content forms.
You can also identify leads through your inbound marketing efforts, which revolve around attracting potential customers through relevant and helpful content.
This means that, rather than pushing messages out, a successful inbound marketing strategy pulls customers in through tailored content.
When customers find your content instrumental in reaching their goals, they are more likely to share this success with others—which helps you attract more leads.
We’ll take a closer look at how inbound content marketing focuses on generating more leads in the upcoming sections.
The Inbound Marketing Funnel
For generating leads, inbound marketing websites are built on the concept of a lead funnel focused on the buyer. A lead funnel has three distinct stages:
You need to align your website content, web design, and marketing strategies to the requirements of the above funnel.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
Various inbound marketing strategies can create a self-sustaining lead generation loop for your business. Let’s take a look at the three most popular ones.
Attract
Attraction strategies rely on the art of first impressions. It’s about creating content that stands out from your competitors and attracts your ideal customer.
To reach your audience, start by creating blog posts with content they might find helpful.
You can determine which topics would be most useful through keyword research, which identifies what individuals are searching for.
This helps you position your content effectively, making it more likely to reach your target audience and attract your ideal customer.
Engage
Engagement strategies help you build relationships with your audience.
This stage is meant to transform a customer’s initial interest into a commitment to use your services or buy your products.
You can enhance customer engagement by showing potential customers the value your business could give them.
It’s crucial to customize these strategies to match your preferred way of interacting with customers.
For example, if most of your leads come from email marketing, sending your customers personalized emails with special offers might be a good idea to enhance engagement. On the other hand, surprising them with a sales call might not work so well.
If your customers are offered the right tools at the right time, this builds confidence in your brand and makes them more willing to buy your product.
Delight
Delighting customers is about exceeding their expectations and turning their satisfaction into loyalty.
It’s a continuous effort to provide value and enhance their brand experience, even after they’ve made a purchase.
But this step is essential for turning one-time customers into lifelong clients.
These strategies can involve team members becoming advisors and experts who are able to assist customers at any time.
Enhancing engagement could involve deploying timely chatbots and surveys or requesting feedback to show customers their opinions are valued.
Another important aspect of delighting customers is called social media listening.
Your social media followers may use your profiles to give feedback or ask questions and share their experiences.
Responding to these interactions can be a valuable way of showing customers you care, which can encourage them to become loyal followers.
8 Steps to Generate More Leads with Inbound Content Marketing
1. Design a solid content strategy
A content strategy is a plan of action that dictates how you create and use your content. Having a successful content strategy will help you attract and retain new customers.
This strategy should ideally align with your business goals, audience needs, and relevant market trends in your industry.
When you create a content strategy, we recommend starting with your audience’s pain point—or problem they’re looking to solve—preferences, and how they consume information.
You can then tailor your strategy to address these factors and ensure that you’re creating valuable content that resonates with your audience.
You can also follow these steps when creating and maintaining your content strategy:
- Be clear about your goal: You should know why you are creating a content strategy in the first place and the possible outcomes you want to achieve.
- Define your target audience: Knowing your target market gives you a clear vision of the type of content you will create and how to personalize it. You can do this through market research.
- Audit your content: Regularly auditing your content helps you discover gaps and brainstorm fresh content ideas to step up your game. This involves optimizing it for relevant keywords and adding or removing content that may not resonate with your audience.
- Choose the best content type: There are many content options to choose from, depending on the target market. For example, if your audience prefers long-form content and podcasts over videos and social posts, select the formats they enjoy to boost engagement.
2. Optimize for search intent
Understanding why people search for content is as important as knowing what they’re looking for.
By optimizing your content for your audience’s search intent, you ensure that your content not only attracts them but offers the solutions they need.
Whether they want to learn something, find a specific product, or make a purchase, your content should meet those requirements at the right moment.
3. Optimize your content for SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best tools you can use to increase traffic to your content.
Since 27% of searchers click on the first organic link—in other words, not an advertisement or sponsored page—applying on-page SEO is essential.
This involves using elements like keywords, meta tags, alt text, and quality backlinks to improve your visibility in search engines’ results.
Keep in mind, titles and meta descriptions with relevant words are more likely to get clicks, so ensure they’re well-crafted.
When your SEO is strong, your content tends to rank higher in search results, increasing visibility to potential new customers.
4. Create enticing lead magnets
Lead magnets are valuable free resources offered in exchange for contact information.
For example, you might entice a customer to fill out a contact form by offering a free trial or access to an eBook as a reward for signing up.
This provides immediate gratification for the potential customer, which may strengthen their relationship with your brand.
The key is to provide significant value to solve a real problem for your audience, making the exchange a no-brainer for them.
5. Optimize landing pages
Your landing pages are the gateways to your products, services, and offers, so you should design them with conversion in mind.
Remember that these pages should be clear, compelling, and user-friendly, displaying a strong value proposition and minimal distractions.
Each element on your landing page should guide the visitor to take the desired action, whether it’s filling out a form or making a purchase.
Here are a few best practices for creating a winning landing page:
- Keep it simple: Remember, a lead generation page should capture contact details, so keep it simple. Avoid visual clutter and having too many words or phrases that could distract the visitor.
- Personalize the offer: A landing page that appeals to the audience’s emotions and promises to solve their pain points can generate more leads. Be sure to mention these reasons or the benefits of taking the required action. You can also add social proof or testimonials to strengthen your case.
- Highlight the form: The form is the main element on a lead generation landing page, so it should be prominent and capture visitors’ eyes. Keep it short—around 2-3 fields maximum—so visitors have no problem filling it quickly.
- Keep important elements above the fold: The digital fold is the point beyond which customers must scroll to see the rest of the page. Clever marketers keep their forms, CTAs, and other essential elements above this digital fold so people can view them easily.
- Use the scarcity technique: Scarcity is usually a great technique to coerce visitors into sharing their details. For example, the fear of missing out (FOMO) can be a powerful motivator if used correctly (as in the screenshot below). Although lacking in the screenshot, you can also use words like “Hurry”, “Now”, “Limited Stock”, “Limited Time”, etc., to create a sense of urgency.
6. Map content-to-customer journey
Different stages of the customer journey usually require different types of content to keep individuals engaged.
Awareness stage
In this stage of the buyer’s journey, a customer is at the top of the inbound funnel. This is when they become aware of their problem and start considering your product or service as a possible solution.
For example, a customer may be looking for personalized content for their website and may find your personal image-generating services during their search.
When they click on your website, you should have high-quality, informative content ready to help them understand their needs and get answers to any questions.
Internal linking and strategic CTAs to related content are excellent ways to keep up the attraction and encourage the visitors to explore during this phase.
Consideration stage
Once visitors have been engaging with your content for a while, they move to the second stage of the funnel.
During this stage, they should be ready to subscribe to your blog or strengthen their relationship with your brand.
This is called the consideration phase, where potential customers must decide if they want to use your service or not.
At this stage, you may want to provide access to case studies and comparisons that can help show them how your brand outshines competitors.
Decision stage
Lead nurturing is the next step to gradually motivate your visitors to buy from you. This is also the last stage of the inbound marketing funnel, where visitors are converted to customers.
Simplify their decision-making process by continually providing high-quality content, such as testimonials and product demos, to remove their doubts and guide them toward the right choice.
7. Use different content formats
Although you have your target audience in mind, you’ll still need to create diverse content to keep them engaged and attract new customers.
Having a diverse content portfolio also shows that you can cater to various client preferences and consumption habits, which can increase your authority in your field.
Different types of content may include:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Social media posts
You can also experiment with formats and channels to determine what works best for most of your website visitors.
8. Include strong CTAs
Every piece of content should have a purpose and desired action for the reader to take.
Whether it’s subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a guide, or contacting a sales team, clear and compelling calls to action (CTAs) are essential.
They guide your audience on what to do next, helping you transform passive consumption into active engagement.
Take a look at the example below. It uses the following elements of a good CTA to pull customers in:
- Clarity and simplicity: The CTA is clear and straightforward, telling customers exactly what to do. It also emphasizes that the service is free, which can be a strong motivator.
- Prominence: The CTA button stands out due to the contrasting yellow and purple colors. This draws the eye directly to the button, making it a focal point.
- Benefit-driven copy: The text above the CTA, “Bring out the best in your team,” speaks directly to the desired outcome for the visitor. It suggests this platform can improve team performance, which is a compelling benefit that encourages action.
Create the Perfect Inbound Marketing Campaign with Hyperise
Personalization is one of the best inbound and content marketing strategies available today.
Unlike other marketing tactics, personalization appeals to your ideal customer and shows them that you care about their loyalty to your brand.
This creates a strong relationship that can benefit sales, traffic, and lead generation.
If you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to creating these inbound marketing campaigns, check out Hyperise.
About the Author
Ian Naylor, Co-Founder of Hyperise
Ian has been building online businesses for over 20 years, starting in 1999 with an online car import company. Since then, he has launched multiple businesses, including price comparison tools and MarTech SaaS solutions, over the past decade. He then founded Hyperise in 2019.
He is now passionate about helping sales and marketing teams worldwide to double their outreach engagement using hyper-personalization.
Ian’s companies have been mentioned in the Business Insider Entrepreneur 50 and made it into the Top 50 Most Creative Companies in England.
Additionally, one of his businesses, AppInstitute, was identified as having huge growth potential by earning a spot in the Creative Class of 2015 by NMB, CQ, and PWC.
From IT code cutting through to business development, Ian uses his strategic mindset to build businesses that thrive.
In his spare time, Ian likes to make all kinds of things, from soapboxes to buildings and the occasional batch of baked goods.
Follow Ian on Twitter and LinkedIn.