Inbound Marketing Insights

If you use the internet for marketing purposes, which all companies now do, you need to begin to incorporate inbound marketing into your overall digital strategy. While outbound marketing focuses on traditional methods of marketing such as buying ads, buying email lists, or other related marketing efforts, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content for your website, blog, and other digital assets. This will help to get you found by the right visitors, who will ideally convert into leads and customers for your brand.

The use of inbound marketing is proven to be very effective when the content provided is useful and interesting to the people reading the content. It's all about creating the right content, at the right place, and at the right time to give users the opportunity to connect with your brand and turn into a lead for your sales team.  Inbound marketing that is done correctly will allow you to attract visitors who you can convert into customers in the future through a series of strategic digital marketing tactics including: landing pages, email marketing, marketing automation, dynamic web content, social media marketing, and more. Generally, inbound marketing takes more effort to establish as you're developing an organic strategy that will grow with you and your business overtime. The results, however, are well worth the time and effort. 

There are a variety of ways you can utilize inbound marketing to enhance your digital marketing and dramatically increase your organic lead generation. Quality and helpful content will attract visitors to your website, blog, or other digital resources. However, you must still convert your visitors into qualified leads, email list signups, membership site subscribers, or more.

Here are the top 4 ways to truly propel your inbound marketing and lead conversion efforts.

1. Use effective call to actions: A call to action is essentially a button on your website that tells people what to do. For example, if you have an ebook that you would like people to download, you will put a button on your website that says, "Download the Ebook." From there, the visitor clearly knows what the next action is, and you are taking them to the next phase of the lead conversion process.
2. Implement landing pages: This is probably the biggest issue we see with companies starting with inbound marketing. There is often a perception that people do not want to fill out a form to get your premium content. But, on average, we see a 35% - 60% conversion rate on landing pages from visitor to lead. Most marketers and business owners would agree that they would rather have even just 35% of the visitors turn into leads through a form instead of 0% of visitors turn into leads because you give away all of your content for free.
3. Get valid and sufficient information from your visitors: On your landing pages, it's important that you capture the most relevant information about your leads. There are a variety of factors that go into this, and the fields you need to capture vary based on your offer, industry, etc. Just remember to think of each form as it's own entity, and think of the form from the individual's perspective filling it out online (i.e. how many fields would they generally be willing to fill out, what information do you already have from them that you don't need to capture again, etc.). If you're using a tool like HubSpot, you can use "smart forms" that allow you to hide any questions that the user has already answered. This allows you to convert at a higher rate, and also capture more information from them as they move through the lead funnel.
4. Ensure thank you pages & follow up emails are used effectively: Once someone converts on your form, you want to make it really simple for them to actually receive the content they just submitted their contact information to download. For example, with the ebook we mentioned above, the best practice would be to send them to a thank you page that allows them to click and access the PDF of the ebook. Also, just in case they miss that page, or want to save the ebook to read later, it's best practice to send an immediate follow up email that also includes the link to the PDF. In both of these instances, you always want to give them another place to convert, in order to move them further through the marketing and sales funnel. For example, you can include a link for them to request a demo, schedule a meeting, watch a video, and more.

As you can see, there truly is a science to inbound marketing and lead conversion. When done right, the results can be exponential for your business saving you time, saving you money, and turning your marketing department into a more strategic and revenue-driving part of your company.

To see an example of the type of results you can expect to see from inbound marketing, check out our 2015 inbound marketing deliverables infographic to see the dramatic results you can see from implementing a holistic inbound strategy. (Click the image to the right to expand the infographic.)

If you're interested in learning more, I invite you to schedule a complimentary 30-minute inbound marketing consultation with a member of our team.