Inbound leads are the leads who have shown interest in your brand. Here, the likeliness of their conversion is relatively high when compared to an outbound lead.
Did you know that 85% of customers do online research before buying a product?
Well, it is no surprise that digital marketing is blooming, since we all started working from home and the growth of online businesses has evolved exponentially. If you are one of such online businesses, looking for a way to create a successful lead generation strategy, this article covers the significance of inbound marketing and strategies to effectively handle inbound leads.
Table of Contents
- What Are Inbound Leads?
- Inbound Marketing Strategy
- Significance and Values of Inbound Marketing
- Effective Ways to Generate Inbound Leads
What Are Inbound Leads?
Before moving on, let’s explore the definition of inbound leads. Any lead or customer approaching a company for its product or service through a marketing or CTA medium is called an inbound lead.
To put it in simple terms, inbound leads are customers taking the initiative or showing interest to buy a company’s product or use its services. Inbound leads are more likely to convert prospects into leads than outbound leads where the company reaches out to attract customers and advertise their products or services.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound lead generation is a marketing strategy involving content creation that revolves around spreading your business to the target audience. Generating organic traffic to your website is only possible when you follow SEO-based content marketing, high-quality blogs, effective guides, and blogs that describe your business in a deeper way. According to statistics, 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month.
Here are some inbound marketing statistics to motivate you:
- Content marketing alone can bring up to 3 times more leads than conventional methods.
- 68% of marketers have reported that social media marketing has helped them generate more leads.
- 49% of marketers stated that optimizing images and videos is an effective strategy for visual search engine optimization.
- Leads generated through SEO (inbound marketing) have a closing rate of 14%, whereas outbound marketing has a 1.7% closing rate.
If people find your content useful, they can automatically convert from prospects to leads, and then eventually to trusted customers. The content you deliver must offer value and be unique in a way that people are left with no choice but to trust you with your business.
Significance and Values of Inbound Marketing
Let’s accept it, any person running a business usually feels energized and motivated when a customer shows interest in purchasing their products or services. Leads obtained from inbound marketing have a greater impact on your business.
- By providing what the customer expects from your business, you can retain them into trusted and loyal customers.
- A customer who has taken the first step is more likely to advertise your business and bring more leads.
- On average, inbound marketing costs 61% less than outbound marketing, according to Gitnux statistics.
- An inbound marketing strategy never interrupts the target audience or forces them to use products and services.
- Marketers don’t have to take the rough path, involving cold calls and cold e-mails, which is a major process of the outbound marketing strategy.
- When it comes to Return on Investment (ROI), inbound marketing has a higher rate of returns when compared to outbound. An effective inbound marketing strategy can rise your ROI up as far as 1270%.
All it takes is staying relevant to the business trends, optimizing content for SEO, providing help to users in the form of guides, tutorials, and blogs, and explaining the highlights of your business. Inbound leads have higher chances of converting into regular customers, and as a business, the solutions you offer to a customer’s problem are essential to retaining them.
Effective Ways to Generate Inbound Leads
- One of the prime ways to generate inbound leads is through content marketing. It is essential that you have your own website to showcase your business.
- Explain the benefits of why someone would be interested in your brand, and how it stands out from the rest of your competitors in the form of blogs.
- You can expand your content marketing platform in the form of videos, social media posts, blog posts, podcasts, and multiple forms of online content.
- Consistency is key. Providing SEO-rich content on a regular basis, your website starts to grow organically, eventually towards inbound lead generation.
- It is important to create unavoidable CTAs (call-to-actions) at the end of your website homepage, and at the end of your blog posts. Some examples include subscriptions to e-mail newsletters, free resources, and product guides.
- Social media marketing is extremely effective as these platforms enable customers to directly deal with your business without having to attend phone calls or fill out forms.
- According to HubSpot statistics, 65% of marketers use Instagram to promote their content through social media. Social media influencers have a great impact on 50% of millennials buying a product.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
The primary difference between inbound and outbound leads is the way a customer reaches out to a business and vice versa. When a customer approaches a business to use their product or service, it is called an inbound lead. In contrast, outbound leads are generated when a company proactively reaches out to draw customers.
2. What is a good website conversion rate for a startup company or business?
At the initial stages, a conversion rate of 2-5% is considered an achievement for most online businesses. Top landing pages have proved to produce a conversion rate of 11.45%. It is better to try and hit a conversion rate of 10% as a business goal or motive.
3. Which is the most effective way to carry out inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing involves multiple mediums to communicate or advertise your business. Some of them include content marketing, creating videos, high-quality blog posts, and podcasts. An effective marketing strategy is to keep your audience engaged with your brand through email newsletters, free resources, and CTAs.
4. How do you effectively handle inbound leads?
There are various definitions and strategies when it comes to lead management. However, we can boil it down to four main stages, namely:
– Lead capture – Gain information about the leads using tools.
– Lead scoring- Method or way of assigning perceived values to leads.
– Lead nurturing- Process of developing relationships with prospects till they buy.
– Evaluating leads -Investigating leads and reporting the process.
Related Articles:
- Inbound Lead Generation Strategies – 5 Unique Tips You Must Know
- How To Increase Leads – 5 Tips and Tricks
- Sales and Marketing Funnel – 5 Unique Differences
Ready to Create Inbound Leads?
It’s easier said than done. We have covered a lot on inbound leads and inbound marketing in this article. It is how you choose to move your business forward and steer the ship, using the best practices and marketing strategies, that determines if you come out on top.
No matter how far you go in the marketing world, it is always important to value leads and better handle them towards conversion. If you want to learn more about marketing and appointment settings, contact us to take your business to the next level.
Illustrations – Storyset
