For more effective quality leads, inbound marketing provides better sources for lead generation than outbound.
Why? Inbound prospects, by definition, choose themselves as leads.
They’ve gone through the awareness stage of the buyer journey. They’ve identified a business problem or opportunity. After researching available options in the marketplace, they’ve identified your company’s solution as a potential solution.
With an inbound lead generation strategy that operates and scales smoothly, their interest has greater potential to translate into revenue.
What is Inbound Lead Generation?
Inbound leads are prospects who reach out to a company to learn more, rather than being proactively pitched on a vendor’s value proposition. Inbound lead generation is the process of attracting and capturing interested prospects as efficiently as possible when they are ready to learn more about your company’s solutions. A strong inbound lead generation funnel typically has a compelling, easy-to-understand web experience, with the goal of getting the right visitors to your website.
Consumers and business buyers alike want convenience, value, and connection with the brands they engage with. Inbound prospects already have organic interest in your brand: they’ve browsed your website, searched product reviews, joined your community, and engaged with your LinkedIn posts. They know who you are and have an idea on how you can help them.
Your chances of converting, retaining, and getting referrals with inbound leads are good if handled correctly. Optimizing your inbound strategy can yield considerably higher return on investment than outbound lead generation efforts.
Understanding Outbound vs. Inbound Lead Generation
Outbound marketing was once labeled “interruption marketing,” while inbound marketing was referred to as “permission-based marketing.”
Outbound marketing pushes a brand’s message via advertising, cold calling, and email campaigns. Compared to inbound marketing, outbound is harder to predict. Calls and emails could bring in a new sale, but they could also be ignored, unwelcome, or sent to spam.
Relying on one marketing lead approach means your business is only going to scale as fast as that single strand allows. Most companies mix both inbound and outbound campaigns when developing their go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
Types of Leads
Someone showing interest in a company and signs of purchase intent can be considered a lead. But what does purchase intent mean? That’s where sales and marketing alignment, lead qualification, and scoring tactics come in.
While every business has a unique spin on lead classification, here are some helpful, general definitions:
- Marketing engaged lead: Any prospect who interacts with a company through a marketing channel.
- Marketing qualified lead (MQL): A prospect whose actions suggest they are ready for sales engagement.
- Sales generated lead: A prospect identified through (outbound) sales-driven activities.
- Sales accepted lead: A prospect qualified by a sales development representative (SDR) or account executive (AE) via a marketing campaign.
- Sales qualified lead (SQL): A qualified lead who’s been nurtured and linked to a potential business opportunity.
- Service qualified lead: A prospect who’s expressed interest in becoming a paying customer to your support team and has been referred to sales.
Whether or not you adopt these specific definitions and terms, it’s important that your teams are in agreement on what terms mean.
Where Most Businesses Struggle with Inbound
Inbound marketing pays off in the long run, because it provides higher quality leads for sales compared to outbound marketing tactics.
Retaining unconverted leads comes at no cost, but obsessing over adding more prospects to the funnel can undermine your nurture efforts. Here are some other problems you can run into if you don’t have a solid inbound strategy:
Unfit Leads
Unfortunately there is often an outdated focus on quantity over quality in sales. The priority is typically generating more leads, then converting them — in that order.
But generating leads that aren’t a good fit for your company’s solution can ruin the sales process. Poor-fit leads aren’t prospects, just noisy data points that either inflate or deflate metrics within your sales funnel strategy. And they can create disruption between sales and marketing.
The concept of BANT (budget, authority, need, timing) is somewhat antiquated within today’s sales communities. But the central tenant holds true: A good-fit prospect should have use for your product or service, have long-term goals for its use, and be able to afford it.
Implementing a qualifying and scoring system for prospects will prevent unfit leads from coming through. This is where sales funnel awareness is important.
Unclaimed Leads
Think about it: You drive visitors to your company website. They’ve raised their hand, through your web form, asking to speak with a rep. This picture-perfect image of a lead can quickly turn disastrous if sales doesn’t follow up — or does so slowly, or poorly.
Most marketers can relate to the frustration of losing leads and potential ROI because the sales team decides to play a game of “not it” when they should be following up.
Stepping up and taking responsibility for inbound leads is important — but planned delegation is more reliable. This can be done by dedicating an inbound lead qualification function to your sales organization. However, handling leads isn’t like an assembly line production, sharing responsibilities between sales and marketing requires the implementation of a lead routing plan.
Why bother taking the time to develop and implement streamlined systems for getting the right leads to the right person for the right follow up? Because speed is valuable.
Slow Response Times
It may be hard for sales folks to hear, but response time matters a great deal. The vast majority of leads are converted by the first responder.
But speed isn’t just about beating the competition. Conversion rates are much higher if you can get back to a lead within five minutes. However, you don’t have to be that fast to be successful. Most consumers expect to hear back within an hour at least, or a day at most.
How to Attract and Convert Better Inbound Leads
One of the more common solutions to improving lead quality and boosting revenue is to spend more on inbound lead generation. But a budget increase without objectives is a potentially expensive recipe for disaster.
Instead, focus on real actions that sales and marketing can take to (1) pull in more of the right leads and (2) move more of those leads to revenue.
Lay the Groundwork with Research
Who should your inbound lead generation campaign be directed at and how will it land? These are two of the most important questions to ask before delving into the production of valuable content.
Answer the first question — the who — by building personas.
Create a buyer persona that details all the characteristics of your ideal buyer, such as their job title and pain points. Use personas to create content that speaks to the kind of inbound lead you want to attract.
For example, ZoomInfo’s lead generation tools can identify potential decision-makers at companies you’d like to win. You can build personas around that information to make sure they’re realistic and accurate.
We can answer the second question — the how — with search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a huge topic, but we’ll sum it up by saying it’s a research mechanism for figuring out what kinds of wording businesses and buyers in your industry are using, then cleverly deploying those phrases throughout your website so that search engines show it to the right people.
Go All Out With Inbound Content
Let’s tackle one of the biggest, most powerful channels for inbound lead generation: content marketing.
Blogging
Content creation requires a delicate balance between quantity and quality.
Creating broad, vague content like “How to Close More Sales” casts a wide net, but it doesn’t ensure quality leads. “How B2G Marketing Campaigns Impact Q2 Sales” is probably too niche. More balanced targeting would look like “Marketing Campaign Ideas for Q2 Sales.”
But how do you know where to make content improvements? Trust your personas,, rely on SEO, and read what others in your industry are publishing to understand where you can carve out a niche and fill the gap.
A website visitor tracking software for your website will show you exactly what content a potential prospect is looking at and for how long. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, are useful to learn what content is being read, which keywords are being sought out, and how long each visitor stays on each page.
Podcasting
Podcast listening is at an all-time high, with 90 million people listening any given week. Your leads are there.
Search if anything already exists in your space in your podcast player. If so, listen and see what you can do better. Interview-style shows are very popular and require little tech to start. Connect with industry thought leaders and your own department heads to create education content on current trends, lessons learned, and future predictions.
While this is primarily a brand awareness tactic, most playback platforms will give you space to link back to your website or landing page to drive inbound traffic.
YouTube
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, after Google. Double your SEO efforts by spinning up a channel and applying your keyword research to video descriptions, titles, captions, and tags.
It’s a little more resource-intensive to produce consistent video content. However, it’s become popular to record a podcast session and post it to YouTube, which can make this content channel much more approachable. Eventually, you may want to branch out into demonstrations or partner collaborations. Again, learn what your competitors are doing here.
Be sure to include links to your website or lead magnet pages in video descriptions to drive traffic. Use YouTube’s analytics to understand who’s viewing your videos and what they engage with most so you can keep tweaking your strategy.
Note: Are you also feeling the post-pandemic social media marketing and webinar fatigue? It’s real — and it’s why we didn’t dive into inbound content distribution channels here. You’ve likely already read a lot about finding success in these areas, and if they’re already working for you don’t stop what you’re doing. But if you’re starting from scratch, or starting over, focusing on the above channels may help your brand stand out and protect your team from burnout.
Craft a Community
Community is the new kid on the organic marketing channel block.
Communities are forums where people collaborate and commiserate on a specific topic — like building software or running HR teams. They discuss ideas, problems, and solutions around specific products — like GitHub’s developer platform or BambooHR for HR management.
Communities can live on purpose-built platforms or on Discord and Slack. Businesses can, very delicately, operate in ones that have naturally grown around their offering or industry.
To help your community thrive, make members feel it’s a safe space for sharing value, not for making or receiving unsolicited sales pitches.
Create a Referral Program
What do you trust more: a paid ad or a recommendation from an industry colleague?
Most of the time, people trust referrals from others. Leads from referrals have a higher chance of being qualified since they’ve already been “vetted” by a current or former customer.
To build self-sustaining, word-of-mouth traffic, lean on a referral marketing program that assigns referral codes, tracks their usage, and doles out the rewards you’ve set.
Always Consider the Magnet & Capture
An essential ingredient for any inbound lead generation tactic is the call to action (CTA) that moves prospects through the funnel and converts visitors into leads.
For many inbound marketing resources — blog posts, YouTube videos, community memberships — that next step is known as a lead magnet. It’s an eBook, free trial, template, or anything else a lead may want. It sits behind a lead-capture form, which asks for contact details in exchange for access.
If you have the resources, create lead magnet and lead capture touchpoints at various places along the buyer’s journey. Some people may be ready for a specific feature demo, others may just want a high-level industry study.
One of the easiest ways to quickly set up is to use landing page marketing software that gates a free resource behind a form. These platforms can integrate with your sales stack to drop leads into your flow.
Align Sales and Marketing with SLAs
One of the first internal steps businesses can take to generate inbound leads is getting teams on the same page. Foster alignment between sales and marketing by creating a service level agreement (or SLA) that lays out who does what, when.
Businesses need to agree on what good leads look like, both from a process and results perspective. The SLAs coordinate lead-to-revenue management responsibilities and processes, with shared KPIs between teams, depending on where a prospect is in their customer journey.
Without an SLA, potential revenue will always be out of reach. Conversely, with both sales and marketing working from the same playbook, opportunities to generate more ROI from inbound leads become easier to identify and act on.
Develop a Lead Qualification and Scoring Process
Getting valuable leads requires a strong lead qualifying and scoring process.
Lead qualification involves measuring and predicting the value a lead has for purchasing your product or service. Lead scoring is the process of assigning a value to a lead using criteria created by sales and marketing teams. Leads are given a score based on interest and readiness to buy.
Traditionally, both scoring and qualifying possible leads requires information like:
- Location
- Industry
- Relevance
- Company size
- Buyer personas
- Needs
- Purchasing power
- Engagement behavior
Each data point may weigh differently in terms of importance and correlation to close. Lead scoring software saves teams considerable time sourcing, sifting, and weighting lead data, and even manages leads with customizable scoring models and instant segmentation.
Third-party data can supplement this lead data. Sales intelligence contextualizes the above traditional firmographics to deliver insights about the sales-readiness of a lead, including real-time updates on:
- Organizational reporting structure
- Product launches
- Funding rounds
- Budgets
- Year-to-year growth
- Company initiatives
- Personnel moves
- Installed or removed technologies
- Surges in online consumption of relevant topics/keywords
Build Out Organized Lead Routing
It’s important for every brand to conduct sales funnel mapping to define what each stage means for them and define who is responsible for each stage.
Lead routing is the process of appointing and distributing incoming leads to an appropriate resource on the sales team. Who that resource is could depend on a number of variables. For instance, inbound sales reps could specialize in qualifying a particular type of prospect based on how the lead qualified, their firmographic and demographic information, and more.
During distribution, it’s important to clearly outline the responsibilities between sales and marketing from that point forward.
For example, does the sales organization want all marketing communication cut off while a lead is being worked by reps? Or do they want specific “air coverage” (brand awareness) campaigns executed in an effort to reinforce the value of the company’s solution?
CRMs can be set up to auto-assign leads to reps with the premise that they are qualified for a purchase. A data orchestration platform can go above and beyond to make sure the newest data about the hottest leads lands in the right place at the right time.
Giving a more qualified lead to sales professionals boosts sales productivity and gives them ample time to execute sales pitches, outreach tactics, and selling tasks.
Related reading: Lead Scoring & Routing: How to Drive Real Sales & Marketing Alignment
Generate Quality Responses, Quickly
How a lead enters the pipeline should define outreach. Speed is one thing — that will be determined by the processes and automations qualifying and accurately routing leads.
But the quality of a response is up to the salesperson who receives the lead.
Sales teams should get context around the leads in their queue to build personalized, value-adding relationships. Context includes what channel they came from, form information, and chats with support.
Sales should also have access to fresh enrichment materials like content, one-sheets, and scripts that help them work effectively and efficiently.
Don’t overlook the follow-up schedule. Deals are won and lost in this arena. Sales leads should work with their teams to develop plans and implement to-do list and reminder tooling that improve follow-up rates.
Are You Ready for the Future of Inbound Lead Gen?
It’s time to say goodbye to unfit, unclaimed leads and slow response times.
The future of inbound lead generation is all about crafting an attract-and-convert strategy that hinges on informed research, targeted content, community and referral building, sales–marketing alignment, smart scoring and routing, and quick but quality sales responses.
Invest in the above tactics and tools to prepare your revenue teams for successful inbound lead gen.