Inbound marketing is by far one of the best effective ways to generate B2B leads. When you have people who come to you about your product or service, it’s easier for you to get them to make a purchase and move forward in the buyer journey. What can you do in order to successfully market using inbound marketing?
Instead of depending on one strategy to feed you leads, it’s important that you use strategies and make them work together. Making sure all of your B2B lead-generation strategies are working together means you’re going to be getting the most bang for your buck.
Here are four steps:
- Create High-Quality Content
Creating high-quality content that’s helpful to your potential lead is going to allow you to get the best results and highest opt-in rates. High-quality content is content that’s going to help your readers in some way. Whether you’re giving them a tip, showing them how to do something, or satisfying their curiosity, all of these things are a form of helpful content. This is where partnering with B2B marketing agencies makes perfect sense so you can focus on bigger picture efforts and let experts do what they specialize in. This will ensure your sales and marketing content communicates the right message, at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
When you’re creating your content, make sure you don’t only create textual content. There are many forms of content that you can create in order to keep your visitors engaged. Look into creating graphs, charts, and infographics that bring your article’s point home. Infographics are likelier to go viral than an article that only has text, so taking time to make an infographic every once in a while is a great idea.
- Create Content for Each Stage in the Buyer Journey
High-quality content isn’t enough. You need to speak to buyers at every stage of the journey. Leveraging personalize content is vital to serve up, for instance, content geared towards a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or bottom of the funnel content to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL.) Additionally, you cal tailor website content or landing page content based on a website visitors location, lead status, lifecycle stage, device type or particular list segmentation.
Refining your process of handing off leads to your sales team starts with aligning on the internal definitions of MQL vs SQL and how these lifecycle stages are defined internally between your marketing and sales teams. Having clear sales and marketing alignment will ensure the right message is delivered at each respective deal stage.
Different deal stages and lifecycle stages call for different content, because people are asking different questions and thinking different thoughts at each stage. Know where your buyers are and what they’re going to be asking and thinking and your content can be very powerful at helping your potential customers make decisions to buy.
Your content creation team should always be working with the marketing and sales team in order to find out where any missing content might be. If there’s missing content that needs to be created in order to help the buyer through the journey, this can cause serious problems and decrease the conversation rate you could be getting.
- Optimize Your Content for Mobile
Very few people view content on a desktop computer these days. Most people view content on their mobile phones, iPads, and other mobile devices. Another reason that you want to optimize your content for mobile is that Google favors sites that are fast and optimized for mobile. If your site isn’t optimized when people visit it, they’re going to leave quickly and find a site that they can view on their mobile devices without straining.
One thing, for example, to consider for mobile optimization is scrolling instead of pagination, as scrolling is more organic on a mobile device than multiple pages. However, when your specific content calls for pagination no matter what, you can still optimize for mobile by incorporating page-swiping instead of link-clicking in order to move to another page.
- Know How to Promote Your Content
If you have great content, you need to make sure you’re promoting it so that people actually read it. One of the ways you can promote your content is through social media. Not all social media is created equal and B2B lead scoring can vary a lot; it won’t all help you get quality B2B leads the same way.
The best place to get B2B leads on social media is LinkedIn. There are groups, social sharing, general networking, and more that can help you get eyes on your blog’s content. LinkedIn is the best place to find decision-makers and create relationships. You can use your content in order to create a great B2B-generation machine if you stay consistent and continue to build your network.
Email marketing has stood the test of time for businesses that want to continue bringing in leads. While B2B lead generation is much more difficult to generate through email marketing than B2C leads, it’s still possible, and you can even use email marketing to promote the content that you write on your blog in order to bring more people to your site and create more B2B leads.