Inbound Marketing tactics you can use to generate tons of leads
Inbound marketing is the art of driving traffic and engagement on the back of great content. Better the content quality, better the number of leads you generate.
Content can be in the form of articles, blog posts, or eBooks, or any other content format you can think of.
Many might think with so much content being churned out, to compete with others on the back of content marketing alone is going to be a truly arduous task. They also feel that producing content at such scale can also be expensive too.
Make no mistake. The content landscape is quickly changing.
Content marketing is changing with behemoth companies pouring in all the resources they can into creating more and more content, with new insights, cutting-edge research, and professional production.
Top-quality content is the norm everywhere.
Creating much better content is the only way to compete with established players.
By pitching free valuable content to people, you’re creating a need among readers. As a result, they come to you in hordes. Great content builds engagement. Don’t use the opportunity to try and sell to them immediately. Instead, wait a bit. And get them to subscribe to newsletters where you nurture them and use the opportunity to pitch to them.
The goal? Gain the trust of a customer and turn that into a long-term relationship.
This way, when they’re ready to purchase, your product comes to their mind.
You sell without selling.
Needless to say, this is a long game that mandates a lot of patience.
1. Grow your email list
Don’t be blindsided by naysayers. Email is alive and thriving. There’s so much you can do with email. For starters, every $1 you spend gets you $40 in return with email marketing. The ROI with email is huge.
A blog, presence on social media, podcasts are great, but I have always felt that the biggest value lies in your email list.
It’s easy to generate leads. Just add sign up forms on your site and you have a lead magnet to make it worthwhile for visitors to give you their email ids. That’s it.
No one wants to be bombarded with sales pitches. Add value with your email marketing campaigns.
By sending a mix of helpful tips, interesting content, you will also get a wide berth with other emails. That’s where you can promote products.
After all, all that you’re doing is offering up solutions that prospects are interested in.
2. Build a high-quality blog
Next— to meet your lead generation goals, you cannot simply do without a blog.
It’s true that there are hundreds of thousands of blogs with millions of posts pushed out every day. It seems a puzzle but you can still attract leads with content marketing.
Alex Turnbull turned around his startup at a time when they were running out of cash and things didn’t look so great for them. They were terrified of the future. This is when blogging came to their rescue.
By getting serious about content marketing they realized where they were wrong.
To do this the first thing they did was get hold of content marketers and ask them where they went wrong.
By finding their unique angle while no one else was doing it, they were able to turn things around
The Groove team realized that their target audience was going through challenges that they at Groove were themselves going through. So team Groove decided to share their challenges with running a SaaS company and put on an ambitious target that reflected in their blog’s tagline that said “A SaaS Startup’s Journey to $100,000 in Monthly Revenue.”
It was a watershed moment and a bold move. A SaaS content marketing gamble that eventually paid off. They got the first 1000 subscribers in 24 hours, followed by 5000 in a month. And very soon they crossed 250k in visitors and 5 million USD in revenue.
With market research, great unique angles for their blog and unprecedented risk—Groove was no longer a fledgling startup. They were a spectacular success now.
More people began joining in droves and liked the product enough to stay around and become customers.
3. Start a podcast
It might not be immediately evident how a podcast can help you. But truth be told over 40% of Americans listen to podcasts. They have podcasts running in their daily lives as background to their commute, when walking their dogs and when doing chores.
A podcast is a good way to generate leads.
With a popular podcast, you can get readers to subscribe to your course, get leads for your business and generate a lot of money.
As the podcast grows you gather a community of like-minded individuals, people who want to succeed, people who need training products and courses.
Finding a unique angle and producing podcasts is your best way to generate leads and signups. Promote them wherever you can.
For SEO Journal podcasts are a lead magnet and a link magnet. Their podcasting page has over 20000 backlinks. It’s a great way to generate tons of traffic and links to your site.
Just like podcasts, another popular form of content is webinars.
4. Create content upgrades
A content upgrade is an extension of your blog post. It’s something that functions as an accessory to your core blog post and as such holds the potential to drive more leads.
Let’s say you wrote a post on the ultimate guide to outreach.
A template for outreach or swipe files are helpful and relevant content upgrades that people beg you for. With content upgrades, Brian Dean from Backlinko boosted conversions by over 785% in one day.
Offering “free blog updates” is a vague value proposition. Instead of offering readers something intangible, create a resource unique to each post and give that away for free. You can also turn your blog posts into high-quality landing pages with a landing page software to make the proposition seem even more valuable. That’s what Brian Dean does.
To generate leads, all Brian did was create and offer a free checklist at the bottom of his post on 200 Ranking Factors.
And conversions shot up.
5. Rope in influencers to create content
Content marketing isn’t limited to your blog. Your social media feed is also a place where you can post quality content.
You can use influencers to post pictures of your product, to run contests, and to create and post unboxing videos or full-fledged product reviews. Influencer marketing is great for eCommerce sites.
Influencer marketing gives you ready access to thousands of their followers and generates new followers, added word-of-mouth, and engagement. Phazon raised $2 million by roping in influencers.
Involving influencers in your inbound marketing strategy will get you leads.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing is the best kind of marketing in place. With just great content and zero marketing budget, you can generate thousands of leads to your business. That means more money in your pocket.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
