Source: Freepik
For your business to grow and thrive, you need to generate a steady stream of inbound leads. However, lead generation can be a huge challenge for sales and marketing teams.
In fact, over 61% of marketers say that generating high-quality leads is their biggest challenge.
Luckily, with the right inbound lead-generation strategies, you can nurture leads into becoming paying customers.
In this article, we’ll guide you through the inbound lead generation process, share some top strategies, and cover five tools for you to use.
What Is Inbound Lead Generation?
Inbound lead generation is a marketing strategy that attracts leads to drive new business.
Unlike outbound lead generation, which reaches out to customers, inbound lead generation is when prospects come to you. This means your prospects initiate the conversation and allow you to send them marketing material.
For your inbound lead generation to work, you need to create a valuable offer—like a lead magnet—that your ideal customer can’t resist.
They’ll then trade you their contact details for your lead magnet by filling in an opt-in form, for example.
Here’s an example of a lead magnet from the Sales Evangelist. They’re offering their prospects a free e-book to download in exchange for their email address:
Source: Freepik
Keep in mind that lead magnets are the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other inbound strategies that you can use to get leads to come to you. We’ll discuss these later in this article.
Inbound Vs. Outbound Leads: What’s the Difference?
The main difference between inbound and outbound leads is that the latter are generated from outbound marketing tactics—like cold calling and emailing—while the former is driven by inbound marketing.
They’re both important types of leads for your business, and it’s a good idea to work on generating a balance of inbound and outbound leads.
What Are the Different Types of Inbound Leads?
Any lead that comes into your pipeline voluntarily is an inbound lead.
However, not all inbound leads are the same. Here are the two most important ones you need moving through your sales funnel:
➡️ Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
A marketing-qualified lead is a prospect who has shown interest in what you have to offer.
This interest is displayed by engaging with any of your marketing assets. These are people who are curious about the solution you offer but are not yet ready to commit.
➡️ Sales qualified leads (SQLs)
A sales-qualified lead is one that has passed the curiosity stage and is ready to be sold to.
Your sales team can initiate a conversation with SQLs and have a high chance of converting them into customers.
What Is an Inbound Lead Generation Strategy?
To generate quality leads, you need to design an effective lead-generation strategy.
This is a plan you’ll follow to create a lead-generation campaign that produces results. A few factors to consider as you design your lead generation strategy include:
🎯 Your ideal customer profile (ICP)
You need to know who your ideal inbound leads are. What are their characteristics and demographics? This is called your ideal customer profile (ICP), which is an important first step in developing an inbound marketing strategy.
Defining your ICP will involve doing customer research and then building personas around information such as:
- Age.
- Location.
- Job title.
- Company size.
- Online behavior.
🏆 Your business goals
Another important aspect of effective marketing strategies is setting objectives. If you don’t know what you’re working towards, you won’t be able to measure your progress.
Be sure to set clear, tangible goals.
For example, you could say you want to attract 10 inbound leads per day over the next six months using social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.
This can help you tailor your marketing efforts towards reaching these goals, making your strategies more effective.
💻 The marketing channels you’ll use
Your strategy needs to cover which channels you’ll use to attract inbound leads. To determine which channels you’re going to maximize, you’ll need to use the insights you gained in your customer research.
Some marketing channels to consider include:
- Social media platforms.
- Email.
- Your website and landing pages.
- Paid advertising.
- A blog.
- Video marketing.
- Influencer marketing.
- Search engine optimization (SEO).
For example, if you’re ICPs are senior managers at large enterprises, you may want to use LinkedIn as your main marketing channel, as this is where your target audience naturally spends their time online.
Inbound Lead Generation Strategies That Work in 2024
Ready to fill your pipeline with quality leads? Here are our top lead-generation tactics you can leverage:
1. Try website personalization
Your website is an integral part of your inbound lead generation process. As a result, you need to optimize it to improve your conversion rates. One of the best ways to do this is to personalize your website.
Website personalization involves providing personalized experiences to everyone who visits your website.
While this may sound complex, all you need to get website personalization right is a platform like Hyperise.
With the Hyperise toolkit, you can personalize your website’s text, images, and calls to action (CTAs) without having to write a single line of code.
These tailored experiences are an excellent way of grabbing attention and building trust with your leads.
Bouqs, an eCommerce flower company, uses website personalization effectively. Their site is set up to capture customers searching for hyper-specific keywords like “flowers for sale,” where they’ll then land on a personalized page:
Source: Bouqs
2. Create great content
Content marketing is vital to generating inbound leads. Content is how prospects find you and start to engage with your brand, so it needs to be high-quality.
A blog, for example, gives you the perfect platform to create valuable content to attract customers, keep them engaged, and build trust.
Blogging is also an excellent way to drive visibility online. You can use SEO best practices within your blog articles to rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is critical to your success, as research shows that SEO is the top lead source for B2B brands.
You could also consider creating other types of content to complement your blogging efforts. Examples include:
- Video.
- Webinars.
- Podcasts.
- Infographics.
Here are some steps to follow to create your content. Good content:
- Provides value: Your content should educate, inform, entertain, and solve problems for your audience. The more practical and helpful your content is, the more valuable it becomes to your prospects.
- Is original: Your competitors are likely using content marketing as part of their inbound strategy. To stand out from the competition, you need to develop content unlike anything else available online. You can do this by providing a fresh angle on familiar topics or exploring new ideas and trends.
- Uses strong CTAs: For content marketing to be effective, it should always lead your audience to the next step. Your ICP won’t know what to do next without a clear call to action. Guide your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, share your content, or make a purchase with a strong CTA.
- Is relevant: Your content needs to be relevant to what your ICP is searching for, also known as search intent. If we look at the example of senior managers again, you’d want to create content around topics they’d likely be interested in reading (or watching).
- Uses a consistent tone of voice: You need to use your brand’s tone of voice consistently across all your content and marketing channels. This helps drive brand awareness and provides and helps prospects remember you.
The more you get to know your ICP, the better you can tailor your content to their specific needs and interests, leading to higher engagement and more inbound leads.
3. Leverage social media platforms
With close to 5 billion monthly active users, social media is an excellent place to attract inbound leads.
Similarly to content marketing strategies, to generate leads with social media marketing, you need to focus on providing value to your audience.
You’ll also have to know the platforms your ICP spends time on so you can target them there.
For example, LinkedIn and Twitter are excellent for B2B marketing and lead generation.
Here are some tips for getting inbound lead generation on social media platforms right:
- Vary your content: Ensure you post a good mix of content on social media to ensure users don’t become bored. While it’s important to stick to consistent branding, you can vary the types of content you post, including blog posts, videos, infographics, and reports.
- Engage regularly: Actively engage your social media audience by responding to comments, participating in conversations, and handling any feedback you get. Engagement can increase your visibility on social media platforms while also building credibility.
- Build a community: Whether through groups, hashtags, or interactive content, your goal on social media should be to build a community around your brand. Communities can foster brand loyalty and drive word-of-mouth lead generation.
Don’t forget to use analytics tools to track and analyze your performance on social media.
For example, analyzing the types of posts that are performing well gives you an indication of the content you should plan to publish more often.
Most social media platforms have built-in analytics dashboards that you can access to make data-driven decisions.
4. Harness the power of interactive content
Another inbound lead generation strategy you should consider is using interactive content. Examples include:
- Polls.
- Surveys.
- Videos.
- Interactive infographics.
The primary goal of interactive content is to involve your audience actively rather than passively consuming information. Your goal should be to create content that follows the best practices we outlined earlier but that also requires user input.
This interactive infographic from GumGum is an excellent example of how attention-grabbing your content can be:
5. Use paid advertising and retargeting
To speed up your inbound marketing efforts, you can use paid advertising and retargeting to put your brand and content in front of the right audience. Let’s take a closer look at these two marketing tactics
👉 Paid advertising
This is when you pay a platform—like Facebook or Google—to display your content. This marketing tactic allows you to target a highly specific audience rather than hoping your ICP will see your content organically.
Here’s a good example of a Facebook paid ad by PartnerStack. By integrating awards from G2 into their design, they quickly showcase their credibility as a brand to attract new clients:
Source: Zapier
👉 Retargeting
Also known as remarketing, retargeting is another type of advertising that you pay for but has a slightly different purpose.
Retargeting ads target users who have previously visited your website but didn’t convert. You can use ads that remind and encourage people to return to your website to complete an action.
Here’s an example of a retargeting ad that directs users who have previously visited Airbnb’s website to return to the site and make a booking:
Source: Mayple
6. Offer product demos
Nothing builds trust more than trying out a product. That’s why offering product demos is a great way to drive leads down your funnel.
Potential customers can sign up to join your email list to try out your product. You’ve then got their email address, which you can use to send them marketing content. And you’re building a relationship with your prospect before your sales team contacts them to convert.
7. Host value-packed webinars
In B2B markets, educating your customers is essential for building a relationship with them. Webinars play a significant role in this as they’re both educational and interactive. They help you demonstrate your expertise and engage directly with your prospects.
Here are our top tips for businesses who want to use webinars to attract inbound leads:
- Choose a topic carefully: The key here is to be strategic about the topics you present. Ensure they’re topics your ICP is passionate about and willing to sign up for.
- Select the right platform: Choose a webinar platform that is user-friendly for your audience. If they have difficulties navigating a new platform, they may leave your webinar before it is complete. Popular options include Zoom, GoToWebinar, and Webex.
- Promote your webinar effectively: Ensure you use all your marketing channels to promote your webinar. You want as many people as possible to attend so that you can grow your pipeline of inbound leads. You can promote your upcoming webinar on social media, via email marketing, on your website, or using paid advertising.
- Make it interactive: We’ve spoken about how important interactive content is. Ensure your webinar is interactive by incorporating polls, surveys, and Q&A sessions.
5 Inbound Lead Generation Tools to Try
Now that we’ve shared some top inbound lead generation techniques you can use to grow your business let’s look at some tools that can help you get it right:
1. Hyperise
Personalized images are an excellent way of grabbing attention and boosting conversions.
Image personalization tools like Hyperise can help you create tailored experiences for each lead at every stage of your lead generation funnel.
With hyper-personalization being a powerful ingredient for conversions, you can’t leave Hyperise out of your toolbox.
2. Survey Anyplace
Creating interactive content like quizzes, polls, and surveys is super easy with a tool like Survey Anyplace.
You can also use Survey Anyplace as a data collection tool to help you analyze your target audience and build data-driven campaigns.
3. Optinmonster
Optinmonster is a powerful lead generation tool that offers features for collecting contact information.
Examples include pop-ups, lightboxes, lead capture forms, campaign builders, and an analytics dashboard.
4. Unbounce
An inbound lead generation strategy is incomplete without a landing page. Unbounce is one of the best landing page builders you can use when generating leads for your business.
5. Intercom
When your website visitors want to initiate a conversation with you, there’s no easier way than doing so through live chat.
Intercom provides some of the best chat features you’ll need to interact with your website visitors and convert them into leads.
The Best Inbound Lead Generation Strategy of All
Inbound lead generation is an essential marketing activity if you want to grow and scale your business. The strategies we’ve outlined above are an excellent place to start.
However, the best lead generation tactic is to use hyper-personalization across all your marketing channels. Personalization makes prospects feel like you truly care about them rather than treating them as just another consumer.
Making your prospects feel special is also the best way to nurture them as they journey through your sales funnel toward conversion. This is also the ideal tactic to get leads to come to you.
We’ve designed our toolkit to help you personalize text, CTAs, GIFs, videos, and so much more. Our features will help you personalize your marketing material in just a few clicks, making this a simple strategy to get right.
Visit our website to get a free Hyperise demo. You’ll see first-hand how powerful personalization can be for inbound lead generation.