Your Complete Guide to Understanding Lead Marketing

When it comes to building a customer base, businesses have several options. They can advertise, hire salespeople, locate their business in a high-traffic area, attend trade shows, and use inbound lead generation.

If you were with me up until the last point, I understand. We’ve all known about and employed the other methods, but you may not have tried inbound lead generation. Yet.

A not-so-well-kept secret: inbound lead generation works — when the machinery behind it can actually handle what it delivers.

Inbound marketing drives leads and conversions, but only when the lead-handling system and the marketing-to-sales handoff can convert what arrives. Most companies already generate enough leads; the problem is what happens to those leads after they come in. How long until first contact? How many never get a second touch? Where does the handoff to sales drop them?

This guide covers lead generation strategies, how to revive cold leads, and how to address sales funnel clogs — and where fixing the handling comes before funding the channels.

Lead Generation (Lead Gen) as an Objective

Companies use inbound lead generation to accomplish several goals. Here are four of the most common.

Increasing revenue.

Generating leads, driving conversion rates, and bringing on new customers is one of the best uses of lead generation. By designing a structured process, marketers can identify and qualify high-quality leads before sales even speaks to or emails them. By nurturing prospects this way, the leads are warm, and the sales cycle is shorter. This means the company gets to enjoy more customers, and more revenue, sooner than with a traditional, lengthier sales cycle.

Creating awareness.

It benefits a company when a wide audience knows who they are and recognizes their brand. Marketers can use inbound campaigns to drive branding initiatives. By being able to target your audience, you can share messaging and engage with them more easily than you could by using traditional branding channels. Another benefit: it’s far less expensive than old-school branding campaigns.

Gathering feedback.

Another objective of lead generation is gathering intelligence that’s valuable to the way you gain customers and do business. When potential clients respond to your inbound lead marketing efforts on your website or via social media, it gives you significant insight into what your buyer wants. The more respondents you get, the easier it is to spot trends that can drive your marketing decisions.

Strategies for Generating Leads

If you commit to an inbound lead strategy, there are five key pieces you need to fit into it to make certain it thrives.

Email marketing.

Opted-in audiences use well-designed emails to get to know your brand and start building a relationship with your company. Informative newsletters, blog posts, and content offers are smart pieces to share via email. Nurturing leads by engaging them with cleverly crafted email campaigns — which means leaving the hard sell out of them — warms them up, builds trust, and helps them start seeing your company as a credible resource.

A social media strategy.

By finding out which social media channels your targeted buyers use, you can reach them in ways you can’t with any other marketing effort. Social media channels reach far beyond your usual, known audience. Just one post with an enticing piece of valuable content can travel to thousands of people who never heard of your brand before. Social media posts can drive traffic to your website, to your content, to your landing pages, and be the catalyst that turns prospects into leads.

Content marketing.

It’s been said a million times, but it’s still true: content is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. Helpful content that solves your buyer’s pain points and addresses questions that plague them is worth its weight in gold. Relevant, consistent content like blogs helps your audience learn more about your brand, your company’s knowledge, and what you can do for them — all without the hard sell. Building the relationship through content marketing is critical in driving conversions and moving leads through your sales funnel.

Search engine optimization (SEO).

All that good content you’re creating needs to be optimized. This means using keywords in the content that search engines pick up. When they crawl your website, search engines use the words in your content to index your site. Then, when someone runs a search for those words, your website will come up, ideally toward the top. While content marketing is effective, SEO makes it a complete powerhouse that increases leads and conversions.

A user-friendly website (conversion-rate optimization).

A clunky, slow-to-load, text-heavy website will have your prospects clicking away faster than you can say “where’d everybody go?” Just like your content, your website should be optimized with keywords that make it easy to find during an online search. Using graphics and clear headers to tell your story, along with clear calls to action to help visitors know which step to take next, are all parts of a website that converts visitors into leads.

Re-Energizing “Cold” Leads

Even with a high-performing inbound marketing strategy, there will be some leads that go cold. This refers to those leads that stop moving toward doing business with you. Yes, it’s frustrating. The good news: there are actions you can take to draw them back into your funnel. You need focus, patience, and creativity.

Determine why the lead didn’t close.

When you’re looking at your cold leads list — which you can pull from your customer relationship management software — review each one individually. As you review, see if you can start seeing trends. Segment them into sections based on what you see.

Review where they fell out of your sales funnel.

Where were they in your sales pipeline when they went cold? Do most of the leads you lose go cold at the beginning of the process? Or do they make it to the decision stage? Once you identify where, you can start looking for the why. Is your content weak at the point they’re going cold? Were they contacted by a salesperson when they should have been? Was there no clear path to the next action you wanted them to take? When you figure it out, address it immediately to prevent future leads from suffering the same fate.

Create a lead-saving campaign.

Saving cold leads isn’t as difficult as you think when you use inbound lead marketing. Create a rich, compelling piece of content like a case study and try re-engaging them through email marketing. Also, work with the sales team to make sure they’re following up on requests for demos and consultations quickly and effectively. Even if you only save a small percentage of your cold leads, it’s worth the effort, because it helps you avoid losing future leads.

How to Address Your Sales Funnel Clogs

If you’re noticing that your inbound leads seem hot until they get to a certain stage of the buyer’s journey, and then they screech to a halt, you’re not alone. Many companies across various industries, especially the ones with long sales cycles, struggle with clogs in their sales funnels. As with cold leads, you need to identify exactly where the clogs are happening before you can fix them. Employ one or more of these remedies.

Work with a partner who knows both sides.

If you’re handling your inbound lead marketing solely in-house, it may be time to bring in some outside perspective. The diagnosis usually shows that the constraint isn’t top-of-funnel volume — it’s what happens to the leads after they arrive. Lead handling, response time, qualification, follow-up cadence, and the marketing-to-sales handoff are systems problems, and fixing them is often faster and more contained than the marketing campaign work the company originally budgeted for. A partner who can diagnose the handling and run the marketing — rather than handing you off between two vendors who blame each other — is the difference between a quick, scoped fix and months of misaligned work.

Align your marketing messaging.

You might think you’ve nailed the content and branding message that will reach and engage your audience, but the slowdowns within your funnel may be telling you different. Look at your entire content marketing plan to make sure you’re giving your prospects enough content to nurture them and help build trust. Also, look at the type of information you’re sending. Is every piece well-timed to where the leads are at each stage of the buyer’s journey? For example, if you only have top-of-the-funnel content, your leads may not understand what step they need to take next. On the other hand, if you’re short on middle-of-the-funnel content, you may be turning the leads off by moving to end-of-funnel messaging too soon. By taking stock of your messaging, you can see if there’s a content breakdown causing the clog and make revisions to correct it.

Start at ground zero — with your clients.

Problems with your funnel can be addressed by going to the source of your company’s success: your happy customers. The term “straight from the horse’s mouth” applies here. Survey and interview several of your clients to see why they do business with your company. What pain points do you solve for them? What need does your product or service address? Maybe, over time, your lead marketing has drifted away from these, or maybe the reasons your customers do business with you has changed over time. By getting back to the basics of what is already working, you’ll be able to correct the problems hindering your funnel from flowing freely.

Reconfigure your standards for conversion.

This sounds counter-intuitive, because shouldn’t you want all the leads and conversions you can get? Not always. Not if they aren’t true high-quality leads. Allowing leads into your funnel who aren’t ready to buy can clog your funnel. As much as it may pain you, set up your marketing initiative to weed these non-leads out. If you’ve been sharing all of your content with barely-there forms, add more required fields. This empowers you to identify true leads that need nurturing and to filter out ones that aren’t viable earlier in the process. By increasing the required form fields that must be filled in before accessing your content, you cut down on the number of contacts that can end up clogging your funnel.

Fix the Handling Before Funding the Channels

Here’s the standard sequencing we recommend when the diagnosis shows that lead volume isn’t the constraint — lead handling is:

1. Fix lead handling and the marketing-to-sales handoff first. Routing, response time, qualification, follow-up cadence, ownership, and a CRM whose data can be trusted. This is usually a matter of weeks, not quarters.
2. Then re-point the existing marketing spend at a funnel that can actually convert it — before adding any new budget.
3. Then invest in channel growth and the long-term strategy — content, SEO, demand generation — on top of a system that converts what it receives.

Steps 1 and 2 are the quick win. They produce measurable revenue movement early, from spend you’ve already committed, which earns the credibility and the runway to do the slower strategic work in step 3.

You came for more leads. What the diagnosis usually shows is that the leads you already generate aren’t being converted — and fixing that makes every dollar already committed to marketing work harder, without asking for a larger budget.

Learn more about connecting your data and growing your pipeline.

Get Started

Inbound lead marketing is a powerful tool that can increase leads and conversions, decrease the sales cycle, and directly impact your company’s bottom line. For it to be successful, you need to set your objective, decide on your lead generation strategy, commit to using content to nurture your leads, attempt to save cold leads, and watch out for clogs in your sales funnel.

The constraint is usually not “not enough leads” — it’s what happens to the leads after they arrive. Schedule an intro call to walk through where your funnel is actually slowing down, and the Growth Assessment will show you exactly where to start.

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