Before inbound marketing had hit its stride, getting leads was a major challenge. Often, businesses would employ busy sales teams to develop special techniques and tactics in order to make a sale and gain a competitive advantage in the market. Still, those that found success with these outbound marketing strategies quickly found that the costs of attending events, conducting surveys, and making cold calls seemed to consume much of the revenue. These challenges lead to major changes in their marketing strategies. They reasoned that if they could become a lead magnet and bring the leads to themselves, they could literally cut out the high costs of a sales team and increase their revenue at the same time. By ensuring that their online content was designed to meet the needs of their site visitors and be specific to their stage in the buyers journey, they could attract all the leads they needed to keep their business growing strong.
What Is a Lead Magnet?
By focusing your efforts on aligning your online content with the demands of the public, your business will naturally draw people in. In effect, by becoming a lead magnet, it allows you to attract certain people that meet your buyer persona, a desired profile you’ve created for your ideal customer.
Rather than making a blanket sales pitch to a mixed group of people who may qualify as a potential customer or not, inbound marketing is a much more effective approach; create high quality content that always benefits the prospect, thus naturally pulling them to your site, and then keeping them hungry for more. Next, you work to convert them into contacts where you can gather specific information to be stored in your database. This data is then used to educate them and nurture them into a paying lead. By attracting leads in this way, you build up a useful database of those who meet the criteria and meet your customer profile.Search Engine Optimization and BlogsSearch engine optimization (SEO) is designed to attract visitors to your site through blogs. This is mostly done through keyword manipulation strategies. It is important that you have a solid grasp on the difference between short-tailed and long-tailed keywords. Long tailed keywords tend to be more descriptive and can either be a phrase or a string of several words together. You also need to have a good understanding of how page titles and images on your page actually work in the system. One of the most important ways to generate leads is by creating content that users are actually searching for. If you have strategically placed your Calls to Action links throughout the site, you have positioned your business where people can find and read the relative content, which in turn will whet their appetite for more. For example, they can be allowed access to Premium Content if they fill out an online form. They will then provide you with the information you request in order to get more useful information. At this point, you can begin nurturing them with more specialized content as you work to turn them into a lead.
Rather than making a blanket sales pitch to a mixed group of people who may qualify as a potential customer or not, inbound marketing is a much more effective approach; create high quality content that always benefits the prospect, thus naturally pulling them to your site, and then keeping them hungry for more. Next, you work to convert them into contacts where you can gather specific information to be stored in your database. This data is then used to educate them and nurture them into a paying lead. By attracting leads in this way, you build up a useful database of those who meet the criteria and meet your customer profile.Search Engine Optimization and BlogsSearch engine optimization (SEO) is designed to attract visitors to your site through blogs. This is mostly done through keyword manipulation strategies. It is important that you have a solid grasp on the difference between short-tailed and long-tailed keywords. Long tailed keywords tend to be more descriptive and can either be a phrase or a string of several words together. You also need to have a good understanding of how page titles and images on your page actually work in the system. One of the most important ways to generate leads is by creating content that users are actually searching for. If you have strategically placed your Calls to Action links throughout the site, you have positioned your business where people can find and read the relative content, which in turn will whet their appetite for more. For example, they can be allowed access to Premium Content if they fill out an online form. They will then provide you with the information you request in order to get more useful information. At this point, you can begin nurturing them with more specialized content as you work to turn them into a lead.
For those businesses wishing to break away from the excessive costs of maintaining an outbound marketing sales team, the idea of developing in inbound strategy can be quite appealing. They can minimize costs by using blogs that are optimized with Calls to Action that guide visitors through the process of becoming leads
SEO Consultant Roger Bryan