Over the years, the buying process of consumers has changed, meaning that marketers need to keep up with trends in order to reach targets and successfully grow their business.
In this guide to lead generation, generating business the inbound way, you can learn how to attract new customers and build your business.
Nowadays, more and more people are heading to the internet to purchase a product/service, or at least make a decision on it. More than four billion people use the internet, and with this going up 7% each year, it’s clear to see where your efforts should be focused on.
If this doesn’t motivate you enough, here are some more stats: 54% of the population use the internet, 66% of the population use mobile phones, and 43% of the population use social media. These figures are huge! Think of the potential your business has.
Lead generation is the way in which you attract prospects and get them interested in your company’s services or products. There are many variants when it comes to lead generation, with some strategies being more effective than others. As you read on, you’ll discover which methods will be best for your business and which might deserve to be missed.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is one of the most praised and successful forms of lead generation. Search engine optimisation (SEO) has the biggest impact on lead generation, as an increasing amount of users are heading to their search engines to discover more about various products.
Essentially, they’re already making a purchase decision before even coming into contact with your sales team. Organic search leads have a close rate nearly 15 times higher than outbound marketing leads, so it’s clear to see what you should probably be focusing on.
We’ve recently made a great guide, which is all about generating business the inbound way and understanding the fundamentals of lead generation. You can access this free guide by clicking on the banner at the top of this blog – we can guarantee it will help you with your efforts and get you on the right track to success.
Don’t forget that you’ll need to design your own lead generation strategy, as one size certainly does not fit all. Great content ideas include vouchers and free content such as e-books.
Outbound Marketing
Before the rise of the internet, outbound marketing was relied on extremely heavily and would make or break the success of a business. However, now that more personalised and less-intrusive forms of marketing are accessible, outbound marketing has taken a step back.
The ROI from outbound marketing is far lower than from inbound marketing – and there’s a pretty obvious reason for this. Outbound tactics, such as cold calling, involve calling (interrupting) prospects who have no interest in your business nor were expecting your call. The close rate for something like this is extremely small and proves just why it’s so important to warm leads up before selling.
Once the ball is rolling, it’s important to monitor the success of your campaign so that you can figure out the strengths and weaknesses that can be improved.
To do this, you will need to set realistic targets that you want to hit with your lead generation efforts. You’ll need to revise your goals if your traffic volume and conversion rates can’t support the number of leads you’ve set as a target. The quality of your leads also plays a huge part here, as high-quality leads are far more likely to convert than a huge quantity of weak leads.
Developing a solid lead generation strategy will help you to build up trust and capture your buyers’ interest as they start to educate themselves. This is a win-win, as they’ll be seeing you in a positive light when they are finally ready to buy!
It’s normal to feel a bit overwhelmed when it comes to lead generation, especially when there are loads of modern approaches to keep on top of. However, without leads, your business will not succeed.