Marketing strategy: online lead generation & inbound marketing

Today, more and more B2B companies, whether large corporations, very small businesses or mid-sized companies, are implementing marketing strategies focused on inbound marketing and online lead generation. Indeed, these strategies have proven themselves in the companies that implement them. They require significant setup time, but the results achieved are often a source of revenue and profit for the company.

As with any major marketing strategy, it is important to set objectives before implementing your lead generation marketing strategy and making the right decisions. If your objectives are aligned with your lead generation marketing strategy, it is time to get started!

Did you know that the concept of “lead generation” actually hides other equally important terms? Inbound marketing and marketing automation, or even content strategy. If you work in B2B, these terms are probably familiar to you, and that is normal. They are all linked to one another.

In this article, you will discover the definition of a marketing lead, lead generation, inbound marketing, marketing automation, and content strategy, as well as what they consist of. You will also learn the steps to follow to optimize your lead generation marketing strategy, along with our tips & advice for generating leads effectively.

the concepts of leads, prospects and customers

You hear them every day in your company or in articles you read on the web, but do you know the difference between a lead, a prospect or a customer? The question may seem simple and yet it is not always easy to answer, as the difference between these concepts is sometimes minimal. To help you better understand these concepts, here are our definitions: 

• A lead is a sales contact about whom you have little information. They do not necessarily have a problem, but are interested in your service out of simple curiosity or to gather information. The only information usually obtained is the last name, first name and email address. You can start qualifying a contact as a lead as soon as you know that contact’s email address. The goal will be to support them through a nurturing campaign and turn them into a prospect, then into a customer.

• A prospect is a lead who is sufficiently qualified for you to contact them in order to offer your sales offers. Compared with a lead, you know more information about the contact, such as their phone number, the company they work for, and their concrete needs. If you have qualified a lead as a prospect, it means you have identified a problem they have for which you have the answer through your products/services. The goal is to turn them into a customer by showing them that your solution is the answer to their problem.

• A customer is a person who has used your product. They are convinced by your solution and are likely to become an ambassador and advocate for your brand and product. The goal is to build loyalty so that they continue to use your products or even purchase an additional service from your company.

A lead is therefore a potential customer. Generating leads effectively is one of the main challenges for B2B companies. It is indeed much more relevant and effective to bring the lead to the company rather than win them over through traditional methods of emails and prospecting. This is what is called inbound marketing.

Generate leads through inbound marketing

As we told you in the previous paragraph, continuously generating leads via inbound marketing has become the main marketing strategy for B2B companies, to such an extent that the return on investment can be a significant source of revenue and profit. Inbound marketing also has other advantages of its own. For example, you will save time and gain efficiency by improving your company’s processes. You will also be able to focus on higher value-added tasks. But what is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the set of techniques aimed at attracting the customer to your product and/or service. It is about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. In particular, it makes it possible to target the audience you want to reach  This concept is opposed to outbound marketing. To implement an inbound marketing strategy, it is important to understand the concepts that make it up, namely marketing automation, content marketing and lead scoring.

Marketing automation is the set of techniques aimed at automating time-consuming, low-value-added tasks so you can focus on and capitalize on high-value-added tasks. This notably involves sending a message to a prospect according to the behavior they adopt toward your brand. Each action they take makes it possible to assign them a score in order to know the prospect’s potential as well as their position in the sales cycle. You can then  send them the right message at the right time. This is what is called lead scoring.

The content strategy, for its part, consists of creating relevant, high-quality content that addresses your prospects’ problems. The goal of creating content is to position your brand in your field and support an expert image within it. For example, if you are a software publisher, it is very likely that you will share content related to the field you are in. In this way, you create an expert image for yourself and your prospects will be more inclined to trust you.

Respect for data

Like any marketing strategy based on data, compliance with GDPR rules and standards has been mandatory since May 25, 2018. To do this, we advise you to put a process in place to be completely transparent with your customers and prospects. 

Likewise, many tools are available on the web to help you implement lead generation strategies via inbound marketing. Make sure that these tools also comply with GDPR. Otherwise, if you use these tools yourself, you may be called out on the subject. Therefore, take the necessary precautions. 

How to generate leads online?

You understand now: generating leads must be one of your main marketing objectives. Lead generation is a process that is divided into several stages:

• Qualifying your target audience
• Mastering the buying journey
• optimizing your website
• Implementing a content strategy
• obtaining data

Qualifying your target audience

Implementing a good lead generation strategy begins above all with analyzing your target audience and the audience you want to reach. To help you qualify your target, you can determine their environment, family situation, age, gender, needs, fears, etc…

All these qualifications are part of the persona creation process. A marketing persona is the fictional representation of your ideal customer. Whether they are behavioral or demographic criteria, you must describe them as precisely as possible. The more precise your description is, the more able you will be to generate qualified leads. In itself, studying your persona will allow you to define what a qualified lead is in your strategy and thus understand their expectations regarding your product or service. If you want to create your persona, we are sharing our persona kit with you. You will also get advice and tips to create the persona that is most representative of your sector.

I download my persona kit

Thanks to a well-mastered buying journey

After defining your persona, let us now move on to mastering the buying journey. Very important in an inbound marketing strategy, mastering the buying journey will, in the long term, allow you to optimize the communication you want to establish in your strategy. In inbound marketing, one of the most important principles is to send the right message at the right time and to the right person. By mastering your buying journey, you will be able to optimize your strategy. The buying journey is divided into three stages: the discovery phase, the evaluation phase, and the decision phase. 

As a reminder, the discovery phase is when your lead discovers a problem. They therefore begin to look for information about their problem. The identification phase begins as soon as your lead has understood their problem and is now looking for a suitable solution. The decision phase, for its part, begins when the lead must decide which solution to choose among those that best meet their expectations. 

Thanks to your marketing persona, you have been able to identify the expectations of your potential prospects. In your prospect’s buying journey, your leads’ expectations may differ depending on the phase they are in. The more time you spend sending the right message at the right time and to the right person, the more you optimize your chances of generating leads online. 

Thanks to an optimized website

Beyond creating a persona specific to your company as well as an optimal buying journey for your marketing strategy, you must also offer your prospects a practical website designed for them. A poorly optimized website can clearly damage your image and ruin all your previous work.

Your website is like the storefront of your shop: it must reflect your image and your professionalism, your values as well as your credibility. Update your site by thinking about its design, ergonomics, ease of use and above all keeping its content up to date. Everything on your website must be designed and imagined to capture the attention of its users as much as possible: impactful videos and images, high-quality press articles, optimized website response time, etc…

Thanks to a content strategy

The content strategy is the logical continuation of the lead generation process. It complements the inbound marketing strategy as well as marketing automation. The objective is to distribute rich, high-quality content to your persona in order to make them understand that you are an expert in your field. As a result, when your persona has questions regarding your field, they will naturally come to you.

Offering high value-added content is a formidable way to generate leads. Now, you will be able to use your premium content to encourage leads to provide you with their data. For example, if you have created a white paper on a topic in your field, you will be able to exchange this content for data via contact forms. In this way, your lead enters into a “give and take” exchange. Your lead becomes a prospect.

If you would like to learn more about the subject, we have written a complete guide on content strategy.

Also read: Content strategy: complete guide to success

Which techniques should you use to generate leads

You now know the entire process to put in place to generate leads online. Now, in your marketing strategy, you need to implement different methods and techniques to generate leads. 

Offer free content in exchange for information

As we explained before, it is important in your lead acquisition strategy to offer free content that is accessible to your target audience  for the reasons we mentioned previously. In exchange for this free content, you can ask for information about your target audience: last name, first name, email address, etc. There are many ways to offer free content to your audience. The white paper, for example, is one of them. You can also demonstrate your expertise in the form of blog articles that you have taken care to develop and write. Use all the means you consider effective to demonstrate your expertise and thus obtain data.

Also read: Content creation – what is it?

The principle of the landing page

Having a high-performing website is an important step in generating leads online. Now it is time to tell you about the principle of the landing page. This is a page that contains all the graphic elements of your site: the logo, the color, etc. This page is only accessible via a CTA (call to action) directly linked to your marketing actions.

This page brings a lead or a prospect to a single specific offer that you provide. It must be clear, concise and precise enough for your prospect to understand the added value of your offer, for example by adding a CTA for downloading a white paper. The objective of this page is multiple. On the one hand, if your lead responds positively to your offer or your product, that means this lead is qualified and that the interest they have in you is justified. You will therefore be able to bring them into a nurturing and lead scoring campaign. On the other hand, if your lead leaves the landing page, then they were either not qualified enough, or they did not match your persona.

Well-optimized landing pages designed according to your personas are a lead generation factor that should not be underestimated.

Distribute your content

To make yourself known to your audience, it is important to distribute all your content across all the communication channels available to you. This can be on social networks, on search engines, via newsletters or via advertising. On social networks, encourage your close contacts and your followers to read your articles and share them. In your newsletters, encourage your audience to click on your CTAs and engage your leads.

To help you stay organized, it may be useful to plan your content in an editorial calendar. This gives you an overall plan for your communication over a week, a month, or even a year depending on your strategy.

Use search engine features

To increase the visibility of your website, you can use the features of the search engine on which it is indexed. For example, it may be interesting in your strategy to create Adwords campaigns if you are on Google. The advantage of these campaigns is that you can obtain results almost instantly. It is a wise choice if you want to obtain qualified leads quickly.

Google Adword works via a keyword bidding system. You can choose to bid automatically or manually. You can choose the number of keywords you want to position yourself on. Take the time to think carefully about keywords. This is a decisive step in generating qualified leads via Google Ads. Also take the time to exclude parasitic words. For example, if you want to bid on the word webmarketing, keep in mind that this term is vague. Google does not distinguish between the word you are positioned on and your core business. This is why on the word webmarketing, you can rank on Ads for queries such as “Job in webmarketing”.

One important point not to overlook: you will be competing with several of your competitors on the same keywords. It is therefore possible that some keywords will rise very quickly in price. Pay attention to this, otherwise you may be surprised by the budget you are going to spend.

Use marketing automation

Finally, we can only advise you to integrate marketing automation into your lead generation strategy. As we told you earlier, it is  linked to inbound marketing and content creation. A good marketing automation tool combined with a well-thought-out content strategy can truly allow you to significantly increase your leads. Automating the most time-consuming tasks makes it possible to capitalize on higher value-added tasks and therefore increase productivity.

You now have all the information you need to implement an effective marketing strategy to generate leads online. Now it is up to you!