7 Steps To Inbound Marketing Lead Generation

As a new business, or even existing planning is key to success. By planning you are ensuring that your company has direction, and knows what it is trying to achieve and more importantly how you are going to achieve it. The planning of how you are going to generate leads however is one in which is forgotten. In this article we will look at how inbound marketing is linked to the 7 steps of lead generation.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead Generation is the process of how you can attract your audience to become paying customers be that currently or in the future. The process of lead generation is very straightforward when following specific steps. The planning of lead generation is integral to a business as well.

What Are The 7 Steps?

The 7 steps form the basis of how you should create that journey of starting to convert leads. Broken into 7 steps you can see in the most basic form the process in which you need to implement.

Plan

When it comes to success a plan is always going to be needed. And in this case a content plan. A content plan will detail how you are going to reach your audience, and also by what means. In this phase you will also brainstorm content ideas to see if they fit with what you are trying to achieve. 

Prior to this however you need to do some in depth market research. Building customer personas is a way to understand who your customers are but also how they purchase products. Knowing this information will only further enhance your content plan, and help to ensure that it is as tailored as possible. 

Create

The second step in this lead generation process is to then start creating content. Content can come in many forms such as videos, blogging, webinars, e-books and even podcasts. Choosing which methods you are going to use will be particularly important to your success. 

For example if you have a large proportion of your target audience who are under 30 they may be particularly respondent to videos, so this is the avenue you should choose. And if your products solve a particular issue then a blog may be a good way to explain this further. Whatever method you decide to choose you need to ensure that it matches your customers.

Distribute

Now your content has been created you now need to figure out how you can distribute this to your audience. There are multiple ways in which you can do this, all of which will usually involve either email marketing or social media. Email marketing is a great way to reach your audience if you have already got a database. Sending out a monthly or bi-weekly email is a great way to increase engagement. 

Social Media has transformed the way in which people digest and see content. Using social media is a great way to promote your various content streams, and ensure your followers never miss out. The best ways to do this are usually via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. But again, this will be dependent on your audience.

Capture

With the content that you produce, you should always be pointing them towards a place where they can find more, or leave details. This is the first step in the lead generation process. Converting your visitors into leads. 

CTA’s or Call To Action are a great way to do this. This could be directing visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, or sign up to a webinar. Regardless of how you do it, make sure it’s prominent. Another great way to capture your audience is to ensure you have a specifically designed landing page. This page can also house your CTA’s and prompts visitors to sign up to your services.

Analyse

Once you have traffic coming into your website you need to analyse specific areas. Firstly, you need to look at what pages are attracting the most clicks. This could be a piece of content or a specific page on your site. From this you need to analyse why is this, and how you can ensure that this continues. 

Secondly you need to look at your impressions and also search ranking. This is closely linked to SEO and how high you appear on the search engine. The higher up you are means more of your audience see your content or site, as well as are more likely to click on it. 

Analysis is a big part of marketing to ensure that your efforts are working, and are effective for your business.

Cultivate

Once you have completed all of the steps above you need to ensure that you keep this going, and cultivating as many potential leads as possible. The data capture you have completed previously will help to keep this process working. But in order to do this you need to venture into email marketing and remarketing. 

The cultivate process is used to inform your customers more about your business and its services to push them through the sales funnel. But also to ensure that they remember who you are, and come to you when they are ready to purchase.

Convert

Conversion is the last part of this journey, and some would say is the most important from a business perspective. This is where all of the hard work previously will mean that leads are then turned into paying customers. This is where the real hardwork does begin however. 

The process of creating a positive customer experience and journey is going to be key to overall success. You want to ensure that these customers are going to return, but also feel they are getting good value for money.

To Conclude

As you can see using inbound marketing really does help to create a successful 7 steps to lead generation. Lead generation is key to business success, and ensuring that you are able to continue generating revenue for your business. If anything, a plan of how you are going to generate leads is also one of the most important business processes.

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