Mauricio Romero
If you already consider Inbound Marketing as a good methodology for generating leads you should know what tactics or activities you need start doing to make a successful strategy. This will help to do it yourself or hire an agency that can help you with the work.
If haven’t decide yet, I recommend you to read the blog about strategies.
Inbound marketing is a proven methodology that generates leads and help them to go forward in their decision process to solve a problem and buy a solution. You are going to attract all the potential buyers that are looking for your solution.
This potential buyers are people who are aware of a problem and are active to buy a solution. They are doing a research on how they can solve the problem, what solutions they need, what is the result and what providers are up to the task.
Here are the main activities that will help you attract and follow up these potential buyers:
1 Get found in Search Engines
You can attract new leads through a lot of sources like networking, prospecting, social media and advertising, but the most effective is through search results. This source of traffic represents more than 60% of the leads that will get into your sales funnel. This is why you should consider it as the most important source and where you should prioritize most of the efforts, time and budget.
So how can you generate leads through this source?
The principle is easy. Leads are asking questions to a search engine like Google. This search engine looks for answers around the internet. The answers are inside all kind of websites. The search engines index and classify the content to make a recommendation in a page with 10 results.
So what you need to do is answer all the questions your leads have with content.
A) Content
Each question should have an answer in your digital assets. This content can take a lot of shapes. The most common is to have an article inside a webpage or blog. But it also can exist in the shape of video, podcast, infographics, white papers or any other creative form.
You need to concentrate on generate value to your lead by explaining him how they can solve their issue. You should address the answer in the most helpful and unbiased possible way.
Explaining a solution is not easy or fast. The lead will start a journey of content and decisions. They will consume the content in one or several sessions depending on how important and urgent is to solve their issue. So you need to be prepared to make the content in several materials.
This journey in the Inbound methodology is called the buyer’s journey. It mainly answers three main questions that the leads need to make a decision:
- Why do they need your solution or what does it solves?
- What is the result or outcome?
- Why you?
This 3 questions are answered in any sales process, but if they started their research online, the leads want to do it anonymously and at their own pace. This is why they are not ready to talk to a sales rep immediately.
In a sales process between 30 to 200 questions are answered. So expect to do a lot of content.
The search engines will decide who has the best answer and if they find thousands of good answers they will decide by selecting the website that has more answers around the selected topic. This is why you need to make a great website with lots of pages. A good website have more than two hundred pages. And they become really important when they have more than two thousands.
This amount of content can’t be done from one day to another. You need to start doing at least 3 new contents per week if you want to get the search engine’s attention.
Also content is very important because will help the Inbound strategy even though the first source of contact of the leads is not online. Content will help the lead decide if your solution is the right fit for their problem, the result they are looking for and if you are able to deliver.
All the content you make needs to be promoted on all your media channels like social media, email lists and chatbots. This will expand the reach and awareness of your solution.
B) Blog
Blogging is a great tool if you want to classify a lot of content. If you put two thousand articles in a regular website the navigation and user experience would not be the greatest. This is why a business blog is very important. Most of the visitors of a website arrive first to a blog and then visit the regular pages like home, about us, service pages, etc...
C) Topic clusters
A topic cluster is a website page with a long content format. This means is a big and long page of content where you address the problem, result and solution that a lead is facing.
This is another way of organizing lots of answers inside a website page. This topic cluster pages should expand the content to the blogs, and the blogs that only answer one question should link to this topic cluster also called pillar page.
This pages also are very useful for users, leads and search engines.
C) Optimized website and SEO
People search for answers in a lot of forms. You can also design frequent asked question pages, resource pages and learning center sections of your website. You need to understand what preferences your audience have. This is why you need to make available the content in a lot of sections, classes and formats.
This complexity should be organized for the users and the search engines so they can find the content they are looking for. For the search engines you do this with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And for the users with a great user experience (UX) making a great user interface (UI) inside your website and apps.
Take this in mind when you decide what kind of content and how to make it available to your audience.
2 Make offers and convert your visitors into leads
If you attracted strangers to your digital content the challenge is to convert them into real people with a name and email at least. If you don’t make this tactic as part of your strategy you will end up with a lot of data like visits, searches, likes, shares, reach, clics and impressions, but no real leads, just lots of numbers.
So how do you make people give you their name and email?
The answer again is content. To be more accurate “Content offers”. This content offers are a larger piece of content where you explain in a deeper way how you solve their problem.
This offers are trade or exchanged in a voluntary way in a landing page.
Call to actions
To get your leads to the landing page you will need a call to action button. This is how you make your offer stand from the rest of the information you are providing.
Here is our Call to Action so you can see an example.
Landing pages
A landing page is a page that has a form where people exchange their information for the offer. Clic on this other Call to action to get directly to a landing page.
3 Nurture your leads
Most of the people that fill in a form in your website are not ready to talk to you. They don’t know you or trust you. They need time to evaluate if they want to talk to someone in your team. This is why you make nurturing campaigns.
A nurturing campaign is a series of communications that you can make through email or social media. In this emails you want the lead to engage each time a little bit more with your solution. Helping him go forward with the decision making process.
If you make a good strategy with the methodology in mind, the emails should be about helping them decide. Follow the buyer’s journey. Each interaction is an opportunity to generate value and be useful. If the lead is serious you will develop a relationship and your company or sales rep will become familiar.
Only after generating this trust you will able to open a one on one conversation. If you skip this step is going to be a cold call, and cold calls are the most intrusive and awkward conversations you might have between a lead and a sales rep.
Another goal of the nurturing campaign is to get context on the main concern and issue of the lead. Because you really don’t know exactly what is their issue, and a solution can solve several issues, you need to discover it.
In the communication you send links to more content addressing issues, problems you solve, results or how you do it. When they click on them and consume more content you should have the technology to track the visit to your website. You can discover what issues they are having and change the content to a more targeted issue.
Automate your communication
When they visit several pages of your website, download any content, fill up a form or take any kind of action you believe is important you can see if they are getting engaged with your solution.
Each time they take action with your tracking system you can trigger specific notifications and campaigns. You can do all of this automatically.
This marketing automation is another tactic that helps marketing and sales teams to perform with excellence their tasks.
4 Follow up your leads
When the lead has enough interaction with your content is time to pass the lead to a sales rep if the lead has not contact you yet. With all the information on how the lead has performed their research, the sales rep can make a very good and significant first call with context on how to help lead solve the problem with your solution.
The lead should understand at this point a lot of how you can help him. So this will speed up the sales process.
The goal of all this activities are to educate your lead, help him advance in their buying decision and help the sales rep to evaluate the lead’s needs. Is a win win process where both parties find if they are a good fit for each other.
So you know our process and hope you can apply it to your strategy. As an agency we can help you implement all this strategies and tactics faster in your business. Learn more with the B2B lead generation guide, or if you are ready call us and you can have a free consultation where we can give you more ideas on how to get more leads.
