6 Proven Ways to Improve Inbound Lead Generation

The proven way to advance the inquiries of your business customers through the online creation of content and campaigns is called inbound lead generation.

The strategy thrives on the philosophy of – Build it and they will come.

According to HubSpot, 63% of marketers identify driving traffic and lead generation to be prime challenges.

For improving your inbound lead generation endeavors and making them work optimally, you need to work on strategies to make your brand more discoverable online. Marketers can improve inbound lead generation by the creation of SEO-friendly content, promoting user-generated content on social media platforms, and by using relevant content to engage users.

In a knowledge economy, inbound methods of lead generation concentrate on providing value and information to the customers.

By providing high-quality, relevant information tailored to the pain-points of the prospects, at each stage of their buying cycles, marketers can ensure that ongoing communication is established to nurture the leads down the sales funnel.

This ultimately leads to optimized sales conversions.

According to a report by Financesonline.com, the B2B enterprises with mature lead generation processes are able to generate 133% more revenue compared to the average enterprises.

Let’s have a look at some of the methods that you can use to improve your inbound lead generation endeavors and make them hassle-free:

1. Proper Evaluation and Allocation of Resources

Time and human resource management lie at the core of all B2B lead generation endeavors.

According to a report by Spiralytics, 61% of marketers accede that lack of staff members, funds and time are the primary constraints to their lead generation efforts.

To ensure that time and human resources don’t limit your lead generation campaigns you can employ the following techniques:

• Invest in good marketing automation tools that have options to optimize the bottom-lines associated with your lead generation endeavors.

• Be more mindful about how you use your time; brainstorming on the best ideas for optimization of time can help in building guidelines to improve productivity and can save some valuable time wasted on the lesser important meetings.

• Evaluate and properly define the roles and responsibilities of each of your team members; once you set clear expectations, it helps optimize team productivity and widens the scope for innovation.

2. Showcase Your Value and Culture

Your audience likes to know more about your values and culture before they will ever consider your solutions. If the executives of your company are directly involved in marketing and PR communications, it showcases a transparent and trustworthy culture.

The more your prospects will trust you, the more likely they will be to invest in your products or services, and the better it will be for your branding endeavors.

Everyone within a company is the flag bearer of its culture. Thinking of innovative ways to allow your company culture and values to talk, can boost your bottom-lines like no other trick.

Consider weaving your content strategy around your participation in events, conferences, or something as small as participating in extracurriculars.

Leaders can also host webinars and meetings to fuel their lead generation efforts by speaking directly to the potential and existing customers.

3. Create SEO-friendly Content

Creating SEO-friendly content can complement your standard lead generation proceedings by driving brand awareness and by expanding the organic reach of your website.

Beyond the standard keyword research and optimization, content marketers should also prioritize user search intent in their content strategy. Also, geo-targeting and focusing on local SEO strategy can boost your content game for web discoverability.

Read more on How to Incorporate Geofencing in B2B Content Strategy

Using the following steps will keep your content strategy and SEO aligned for maximizing the web discoverability:

1. Frequently Audit Your Website
2. Optimizing Your On-Page SEO
3. Performing Keyword Analysis
4. Competitive Benchmarking
5. Focusing on an Agile Content Strategy
6. Strengthening Your Backlinking Strategy

4. Promoting User-Generated Content on Social Media

The creation and promotion of user-generated content (UGC) is an impeccable way for marketers to increase the probability of sales conversions by generating high-quality leads. This automatically occurs once the pieces of content created by users are shared and recommended by the users themselves.

User-Generated-Content (UGC) has higher credibility than many other forms of content and can do wonders for improving your inbound lead generation endeavors. It’s content created by the users, for the users and a crucial branding asset popularized by your prospects and fans.

In order to promote the user-generated-content on social media, marketers can use the following steps:

• Encouraging the reviews and running the referral programs (consider incentivizing your prospects & customers if required)

• Run Hashtag Contests

• Promote Video Content

• Engage Users through Gamification

• Work on Special Content Strategy for Holiday Seasons

5. Stick to a Highly Personalized Content Strategy

When it comes to content marketing, context is the king. Personalization isn’t enough, you need to speak to the prospects and customers in languages that are individually tailored to suit their specific stages in the buying cycles.

In order to deploy a highly-personalized content strategy to scale-up your lead generation endeavors, you can consider the following techniques:

• Adopt a data-driven approach, prioritize intent-data and use the demographic, firmographic, technographic, psychographic, and other vital data points as and when feasible.

• Consider creating content specific to the specific stages in the buying cycles of the prospects.

• Stick to an intelligent and dynamic content strategy.

• Base on content strategy on predictive insights to create a seamless, omnichannel experience for your customers.

• Use AI and ML algorithms to generate predictive insights, for market basket analysis, market segmentation, and clustering.

Read more on 15 Tips to Strengthen Your Content Development Strategy

6. Bridging the Inter-Departmental Silos

Your lead generation strategy will always be primarily executed by marketing and sales teams and also to an extent by your customer success teams. You should ensure that there exist no silos among these departments to bring your lead generation endeavors to full fruition.

Additionally, the involvement of executive teams and top leadership sets an ideal example for the rest of the departments to approach lead generation with more rigor and conviction.

The process of attracting and converting high-quality leads requires the sales and marketing teams to work in perfect alignment amongst themselves, and with other teams as well.

Read more on 5 Essentials of B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment

Let’s Wrap Up

Improving your inbound lead generation strategy is an attainable goal if you plan, implement, test-run, measure, and optimize the six methods described above. These strategies will help you get more organic traffic on your website and eventually optimize your website conversion rates.

Creating more compelling down-the-funnel offers and attractive landing pages act as icing on the cake to convert your inbound leads to sales opportunities.

Valasys Media is a well-renowned name in helping B2B clients with an array of services including lead generation, lead nurturing, account-based marketing, list building services, contact discovery services, content syndication services, event promotion, appointment setting, business intelligence, and CRM services to help them improve their lead generation endeavors and business bottom-lines.