How inbound marketing helps generate leads
To convert your prospects into customers, it is crucial that your brand has a successful marketing strategy. Utilizing inbound marketing tactics is an effective way to generate leads. While it is also beneficial to employ outbound tactics alongside an integrated inbound marketing strategy, inbound tactics will guide your prospects through their respective buying journeys with engaging content online and thereby drive sales growth.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy focused on cultivating a loyal audience across your online media channels. By creating content that draws your target audience to your website and social media feeds, you have the opportunity to engage with prospects as they travel along their buying journeys, building trust in real time as they decide whether it is the right time for them to buy. Because of the personal nature this strategy takes, rather than the more general nature of traditional marketing methods, inbound marketing campaigns provide more opportunities to pre-qualify leads for your company.
Start by creating valuable information
Pre-qualifying prospects starts by providing value to your target audience. By posting on social media, for example, you can have a dialogue directly with prospective customers. By directly answering questions they pose related to your products or services, you can encourage buyers to make an informed purchase more imminently. Along the way, others following your social media feeds will see the helpful and engaging conversation, which helps build your brand’s reputation over time.
Some other examples of effective inbound marketing tactics include:
- Publishing a native article in a highly regarded industry newsletter to keep your audience informed of your company’s solutions for their biggest challenges
- Hosting a webinar to educate your audience about industry trends or the latest in process applications
- Creating an engaging case study video with a customer to showcase your capabilities and expertise
Track engagement and leads
A major benefit of deploying an inbound marketing strategy is that audience engagement can be directly monitored in real time. By using the tracking functions of the software used to deploy various digital marketing tactics, you have immediate access to campaign analytics. This means that with some time and attention, leads can be pre-qualified for your company’s sales team which can lead to a more solid sales pipeline.
In addition to lead generation opportunities resulting from inbound marketing tactics, new opportunities are created for tracking a prospect’s engagement with your brand, such as an analysis of:
- Impressions, click-through rates, and leads from sponsored native content
- Contact information (leads) from registrants attending a webinar or other virtual event
- Followers, reactions, comments, and overall impressions generated from social media posts
Enhance your marketing strategy
Cultivating a loyal audience over time through an inbound marketing strategy is most successful when traditional marketing strategies are also being employed. Speak with a Sosland Publishing media expert today to craft your next marketing strategy.