Inbound vs Outbound: Top Lead Generation Strategies

 

Lead generation is the process of attracting audiences that have shown interest in your products/services, guiding them through the buyer’s journey to the end of the sales funnel—in short, converting them into sales.

In today’s competitive digital marketing landscape, capturing your target audience’s attention is a matter of using the right approach. There are two sides to a lead generation process: inbound and outbound. Both are equally important in any sales process.

 

Inbound vs Outbound: What’s the Difference?

Inbound lead generation is a strategic approach to lead customers to your brand and help them reach a buying decision organically. It happens when you create valuable content that appeals to your target audience that provides a solution to their problems. When done successfully, this content should establish a relationship that eventually results in a sale.

This strategy has surged in popularity in the past few years because it aligns with consumers’ preferences. As they avoid aggressive upsells, they prefer to discover information themselves and control how and when they will engage with a business. Below are some examples of inbound lead generation strategies.

 

7 Top Inbound Lead Generation Strategies

• Content Marketing

Content marketing is how you drive prospects to your site—with quality, relevant, and consistent content, you can engage and nurture them, convert them into leads, and eventually into sales. The key to successful content is to provide solutions to their problem. It should educate, inspire, even entertain your visitors.

• Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a practice that optimizes your site’s pages and increases their rankings in the organic search results. It can complement your lead generation efforts by raising brand awareness and ensuring that your business is visible where your target audiences are searching.

• Pay-Per-Click

PPC works as an inbound marketing strategy because it targets users actively searching for your products/services. With PPC, you can bid specific keywords that can help you secure top placements in the search engine results pages (SERPs).  PPC can maximize your potential to drive traffic and boost conversions when integrated with organic efforts.

• Website Design

 

 

In lead generation, you should not only look into your site’s content but its design as well. All the more important when it comes to landing pages, as this serves as your website’s frontline. With the insights derived from your buyer persona, you should optimize your site to deliver a seamless experience that actively converts visitors into qualified leads.

• Social Media Marketing

 

Most digital marketers agree that social media is the way to go when it comes to lead generation. Besides access to billions of active users, they offer some of the most effective tools to generate and track leads. Use these platforms to engage with your audience, drive site traffic, and initiate the lead generation process.

• Email Marketing

What your content and social media marketing strategies cannot achieve, you can carry out using email marketing. This is a great way to deliver news, blog posts, promos, etc., to your contact list of leads who have signed up for your newsletters.

• Retargeting Ads

 

Retargeting is a form of lead generation in which users are targeted based on their activity online. Let’s put that into context: using cookies on your site, you can track when someone visits your site and leaves without buying. You can send targeted ads to them on other sites to lure them back and potentially convert them into customers with retargeting. The key is to redirect them to a landing page that adds value to them.

Outbound Lead Generation Strategies

With inbound marketing, you are sitting ducks waiting for your target customers when they are ready to connect. But, there’s a bit of a problem: using inbound marketing, you are not initiating to reach out—this is where outbound marketing comes in.

Whereas inbound strategies rely on customers approaching your business, outbound lead generation tactics focus on marketing efforts involving reaching out to people that match your target audience profile. It effectively gets your business in front of users you know will benefit from your products/services.

• Cold Calls & Emails

Whatever your take on these approaches, the truth is cold calls and emails still work as much as any other lead generation strategy. Data shows that businesses can get an average of 15.22% to 28.46% open rates with cold emails. Meanwhile, Hubspot research found that approximately 69% of buyers are happy to answer calls from vendors.

• Online Communities

By online communities, we mean Facebook groups, forums, and any other channels with a group of people with shared interests. Here, you can reach out to a community of engaged users, provide value, and build relationships. That way, it will be easier to sell and get them to purchase.

• Content Syndication

Content syndication is the process of distributing your content online through cold callis or cold emails. It’s a way to reach your target audience and, in return, create brand awareness, build brand authority, and boost content ROI. It can also mean republishing the same piece of content such as whitepapers, articles, infographics, etc.

These outbound lead generation strategies don’t get enough credit as they deserve. But, when done correctly, it can be some of the most cost-effective ways to generate leads. Targeting and personalization are critical to separating yourself from the low-value spammy messages people get every day. You should personalize your message in ways that resonate with your prospects to get them to respond.

Instead of promoting your business flat-out, provide value first. For example, whenever someone in your community posts a problem, offer valuable tips. This way, you can build trust and relationships—we can’t stress enough just how vital these are in sales.

Conclusion

 

The investment in inbound and outbound marketing can truly deliver a positive ROI when targeting audiences that can benefit from the products/services you offer. Using the strategies above, you can add value, which in return will generate more qualified leads, an increased ROI, all of which can help you reach your sales goals.

Ready to get started? Contact us today at Createmoto. We have up-to-date tactics that can help you generate more leads.