Grow Your Business With an Inbound Marketing Strategy Part 2

  

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In our last post we talked about some of the strategic development ideas to gain website traffic with inbound marketing and today we're going to extend the planning process with some strategies for online lead generation and lead nurturing.

Online lead generation is probably one of the most overlooked areas of opportunity for most small and mid-sized businesses because your initial ideas for your website had nothing to do with actually generating online leads. Don't feel bad! We we're all in the same boat, we bought the idea that we should have a website which is true, what we didn't really understand was how powerful that tool could be at generating business for us...and by the way we're still learning! To generate internet leads should be one of the high priority goals of your inbound marketing initiative, so what's the best way to go about it? How do you create an online lead generation program that will transform your website into a lead gen machine?

Developing an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Generate Internet Leads

Online lead generation relates to two inbound marketing elements:

1. Landing Page Development and Creation- A landing page is a special type of web page specifically designed to provide your company with a conversion or lead. It's a page that invites your visitor to begin an online relationship with your company by offering something of value to your prospect, something that will help them with their buying process and decision. It could be a whitepaper or ebook download, an invitation for a free trial, an offer of a free subscription to an information newsletter, but whatever the offer is you need to think of your prospects need for a solution NOT your company's need for a sale. A landing page will only successfully serve you with leads if the information you're giving your prospect helps them either directly resolve their problem, or gives them sound information that will help them with their information gathering. You can think of it a bit like a dating process, you don't ask someone to marry you on the first date (well not usually anyway!) you begin getting to know each other. This same process of relationship building applies in the virtual world as well, so create a landing page offer that's kind of like a first date. By the way, your goal is not marriage, it's a second date!
2. Lead Nurturing- Ahhhh! The first date went well, now what? This is what is referred to as lead nurturing, it's the getting to know you better part of your virtual relationship. In the online world this means supporting your prospect in their buying process...not your selling process! You need to understand that most of us don't want to be touched by your sales team until we're ready, just like a first kiss, the timing has to be right! So, what information are they going to find valuable along the way to solving their problem? You know your product and why your customers love you, and you hopefully have a really thorough understanding of your target audiences general buying process. Online lead nurturing is about trickling the right information at the right time to mirror the real world experience. What happens in the real world? You gain more information about a prospect, so in the virtual world, each new conversion should generate new information for your company that allows you to elevate the 'score' of the lead so that when the scoring system you have in place reaches a certain threshold...bingo, off to the sales team for the final closing process. 

 10 Questions to Answer to Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Generate Internet Leads

Landing Page Development and Creation:

1. What are the key points of 'pain' your prospects have?
2. What are the different offers you can make that give them valuable insight, information or tips to help them make a decision about the solution they will ultimately select?
3. What will your target audience view as a really compelling offer?

Lead Nurturing:

1. What is the real world process that your prospects go through in their buying decision process?
2. What information can you support them with in a stepped manner along the way in their buy process?
3. Are there different people that will become involved with the buy as their buying process moves forward?
4. What are the needs of these new personas?
5. What information will allow you to better qualify and score a lead?
6. How will you 'step' your information gathering during the nurturing process so that you can score the lead?
7. What 'score' does a lead have to achieve before being sales ready?

 Again, our post here isn't an exhaustive list but it's a really good starting point to your strategy development for online lead generation. We've now gone through a process to gain website traffic and also to generate internet leads, next we'll discuss some of the different ways you can tie these together to fully capitalize on the synergy of inbound marketing. As we've said before, the big step is to get started, we hope this helps your company...get started.

We're at the edge of the future!

Try our 2 minute quiz to find out your inbound marketing score! It's fun and will give you some good insight.