You own a professional services company and you want it to grow. But you don’t know how to drive prospects to your website. You know you need to fill the top of your sales funnel with a continual supply of qualified leads, but you’re not sure how.
How to drive prospects to your website!
- 64% want to drive website traffic and generate leads,
- And 53% plan to commit more than half of their entire budget to meeting these goals.
Yet, the same survey says 80% of these efforts are only somewhat effective.
That’s a lot of money (and time) to spend on strategies that produce at best mediocre results. Leading us to ask:
- how are so many marketers getting it wrong?
- What can marketers do to achieve stronger results?
- And Finally, what are the inbound marketing best practices. How will these help you generate a higher volume of high-quality business leads?
Inbound Marketing Works, Period
Effectively implemented, inbound marketing strategies work better than traditional, outbound strategies, and they are better at generating leads. Consider these takeaways from Hubspot’s The State of Inbound 2020 report:
- 73% of surveyed companies reported that inbound is the primary marketing approach
- 74% of respondents said “converting contacts to leads” was their highest priority
- 81% of companies which rely on inbound marketing considered themselves effective. Compared to only 18% of those for whom outbound is the primary strategy.
- 59% of marketers said inbound strategies provide the best leads. Contrasting with only 17% said their best leads were from outbound practices.
How to Generate Leads with Inbound
The formula for generating leads with inbound marketing is simple and straightforward. You create great content that your prospective leads needs. Then use that content to attract them to a landing page. The goal is always to capture their contact information in exchange for the content.
4 Way to Drive Prospects To Your Website
There are many inbound strategies to help your business generate more quality leads. Here are 4 Marketing activities you can do today to generate more and better leads with inbound marketing:
1. Develop an On-Page SEO Strategy
On-page SEO tells the search engines what your page is about and helps them make sure you are showing up in the right search. Specifically, you need to optimize each page’s URL, title, header tags, image alt tags and content.
These items don’t in themselves change your ranking, but they help let Google and the other search engines understand what your have to offer. Your URL is the address that people use to get to your site.
It can feel like the search engines make it hard to rank, spending some extra time on optimizing your website pages benefit you.
Because more people will find your website. Not just any people, but people interested in your products and service. So you’ll increase online traffic and generate more leads.
2. Create an Off-Page SEO Strategy
Off-page SEO has to do with the links to your site from other websites. In general, the more relevant inbound links your site has, the higher it will rank in searches. Because search engines view inbound links as other businesses casting a “vote” for your business. A vote they cast because they’ve found the content on your site to be valuable.
Of course, not every vote is of equal value. The more authoritative the link, the higher your rankings will be. For example, if you have a real estate business and Zillow or Trulia links to your site, Google and other search engines will assume your content has high value. Then they will reward you with higher rankings.
3. Frequent Blogging
Blogging will both improve your site’s SEO and attract new leads for your business. Search engines like websites that post valuable content. And they like websites which are continually updating their content.
Blogging achieves both these goals.
Every time you post a new blog, you create a new, page for search engines to crawl and index. The more frequently you blog (and the more valuable your blog content), the more search engines will reward you. According to Hubspot, companies which blog 16 times a month, for example, get 3 ½ times more traffic than those which blog 4 or fewer times a month.
Blogging is also among the most effective ways of generating new leads. For example, B2C businesses which blog 11 or more times a month will get 4 times more new leads than those that blog 5 or fewer times a month.
You need to have both quantity to attract the visitors and quality to keep them.
4. Leverage Social Media
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is one of the most effective ways of driving visitors to your website. It works because people who use these sites are there for more than social reasons.
For example, more than 60% of both Facebook and Twitter users say they go there for “news about events and issues outside the realm of friends and family.” And 74% of Facebook users say they use the site for “professional purposes.” You want to be in front of those 74%.
People frequently use social media sites to help them find products and services that will help them solve problems. Posting valuable content on these sites helps you drive people to landing pages on your website. Once they are there, you can convert interested visitors into leads for you products and services.
Plan Your Lead Generation Strategy
You can’t achieve your primary business objectives without an effective lead generation strategy. And you can’t generate leads without a solid inbound marketing plan. Fortunately, there is help available to you. Speaking with an expert in inbound marketing, lead generation and content marketing can help you achieve your goals.
To learn more about the ways our SEO, social media, web design, web audit and PPC services can help you boost sales and grow your business, contact us today.
Book Your Free Consultation Today
Founder & CEO of ThinkFlame, Shelly Patrick, trains individuals and companies to understand how their marketing affects their sales conversation and how to integrate marketing into their yearly plans for consistent growth.