Inbound Lead Generation: How to Grow Revenue in 2020

If you are going to generate new leads and grow revenue in the age of modern marketing tactics, you must change your way of thinking or fade into the days of outbound marketing.

Outbound marketing once offered the best strategies for lead generation, but these strategies require a larger investment and interrupt the consumer.

In fact, they are downright expensive, and you may not get as many leads as you want to cover your advertising costs in the long run. For this reason, inbound leads offer a cost-friendly, audience-focused approach that relies on engagement and content.

How Inbound Marketing Generates Leads

To create the perfect inbound lead campaign, you must have high-quality, original content that solves for the prospect's challenges. Content formats can be blogs, articles, emails, videos, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, or unique online experiences.

Since the digital content landscape is now incredibly competitive, marketers have to go above and beyond to engage with audiences and produce new, relevant content that people will value more than what's already out there.

Inbound Marketing

To put it simply, inbound marketing is an indirect lead generation strategy. You're not advertising directly to your targeted audience in any digital medium with outright commercial intent.

In this way, your audiences come to you. To successfully carry out this strategy, you don't want to hard-sell with your content. It's more about lead nurturing, education, entertainment, and trust.

Important, you're helping prospects by offering useful content that answers their questions directly and succinctly - without any strings. Then offering additional relevant content packaged in the form a downloadable, top of funnel offer.

Efficient Lead Generation

Inbound leads require a lot of patience because it's a longer game, but if you play the game correctly and build up your content, there is no stopping the amount of leads you can generate without investing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The best marketing strategies combine inbound and outbound leads to cover all of your bases. Without both lead generation strategies, you leave may leave potential customers behind, but some marketing teams are successful simply because they created ingenious inbound content marketing campaigns.

Quick Comparison: Inbound vs Outbound Leads

Example Outbound Lead Generation Campaign

• You pay for a Facebook advertising campaign that sends ads to your targeted audience. They click on your sale to purchase products as your ads pop up in their timeline and Instagram feeds.
• Your company pays $500,000 for a primetime TV commercial spot that promotes your latest sale and your website. Customers go to your website, and you generate some leads with a high cost.
• Your call center makes cold calls to find clients and sell them on your products and services.
• You buy email marketing lists with customers who have never signed up for your products. You send them to drip email campaigns to capture their interest and get sign-ups for your campaign.

Example Inbound Lead Generation Campaign

• Your website gets a new blog where you can publish original content about ideas, tutorials, and new products but with an educational or entertaining tone.
• You use social media to publish videos educating your audience on your industry and how to use your products to solve problems. Customers see your videos and click through to links that you slip into your content.
• You send educational content and links to your webinars through email marketing campaigns. Customers sign up to attend your webinars and learn more about your products.

Lead Generation Tactics to Grow Revenue

These are some of the top ways that companies are using inbound strategies to bring in more engaged audiences who naturally want to buy products because they enjoy your content and trust your quality based on your authority in the industry.

1. Start an Email Subscription List

The best way to bring in low-cost leads is to start an email subscription campaign. There was a period when marketers did not consider email a modern strategy, but in 2018, the Marketer Email Tracker 2018 report showed that there was an estimated £32 for every £1 spent on email marketing campaigns.

Even if you have a Facebook or YouTube channel with a large following, the most valuable marketing asset is a link to your email sign-up. Once you start populating an email list, you have a direct line to your customers, especially if they have email on their phones.

This is why the best inbound strategies focus on:

• Adding opt-in forms to your website
• Changing your Facebook business page button to a sign-up link
• Creating a search marketing campaign in Google with a landing page that has a sign-up form

To enhance these campaigns and almost guarantee a sign-up, you should offer an incentive, such as a downloadable guide or e-book, free webinar, free online course, or a considerable discount on a new product.

Once you start building your list, you need to plan out your email content accordingly. No one wants to see spam, and your email list will quickly dwindle if customers feel like you take advantage of this direct line.

Need some inspiration on what type of emails people like? Take a look at ReallyGoodEmails.com to find all kinds of email content ranging from welcome series to educational to sales.

2. Build an Incendiary Blog

Blogging is the best way to publish content on your website without any real cost but time. However, marketers have to be smart about the design of the blog as much as the content. You also want to create a unique angle that will capture your audience's attention and never let go.

To build an incendiary blog with the best content, marketers need to:

• Conduct market search and learn what their competitors are doing as well as what the best blogs are publishing on the internet
• Discover a unique angle that draws customers right to their content
• Build out incredibly blog content with long-form content, videos, and unique images

The best way to create a blog is to find a gap in your market that isn't being served and market your blog content through your social media changes.

3. Optimize Your Best Landing Pages with Better Content

Do people frequently land on your website and bounce off? If you have high traffic to several pages on your website but they also have high bounce rates, then it could be that your website does not have any engaging content on those pages. Most customers conduct a ton of research before they decide on a product.

Inbound marketing thrives on educating customers and showing them that you care more about their satisfaction than selling them on something they may not want.

To optimize landing pages, marketers should look at the following:

• What's the first thing customers see?
• Is it a hard sell message?
• Is it relevant to your most popular searches?
• Is it relevant for today's audience or is your content outdated?
• Do your landing pages load on mobile? 
• How easy is it to navigate to other links? 
• Where do your links send customers on mobile?
• Do you have any unique educational experiences on your landing pages?
  For example, your website sells high-quality beauty products that are free of parabens and other chemicals.
• Do you share your ingredients list? 
• Do you talk about how your products compare to others? 
• Why should customers trust your products?

Finally, you also want to study  conversion rate optimization factors to enhance your website and increase your leads exponentially.