Inbound lead generation: what is it and how to win at it?

Imagine a world where customers come to you, drawn in by engaging content and seamless experiences. That’s the magic of inbound lead generation. Say goodbye to cold calls and intrusive ads; instead, attract high-quality leads by offering exactly what your audience wants. It’s all about providing value and building relationships, turning curious visitors into loyal customers. Let’s dive in.

What’s inbound lead generation?

Inbound lead generation means using content and experiences to attract people, or leads, to your brand. The idea is to produce what your ideal customer wants and make it easy for them to find it. Learn what it is in under a minute in our video.

Implementing a robust lead generation strategy comes with a number of benefits – let’s break some of them down.

Boosted sales and revenue

A lead generation strategy attracts high-quality leads who are more likely to convert into customers. By targeting the right audience with relevant content, you can drive more prospects through the sales funnel, resulting in higher sales and increased revenue.

Cost-effectiveness

Inbound lead generation methods such as content marketing and SEO, are often more cost-effective than traditional outbound methods like cold calling and advertising. By attracting leads organically, you can reduce marketing costs while reaching a large and relevant audience.

Enhanced brand authority

Producing high-quality content that addresses your audience’s pain points helps establish your brand as an industry thought leader. This builds trust with potential customers, making them more likely to choose your products or services over competitors.

Higher conversion rates

Nurturing leads with relevant and timely content throughout their buyer journey results in higher conversion rates. Inbound lead generation focuses on providing value and addressing the specific needs of leads, which increases the likelihood of them making a purchase.

Outbound lead generation is the traditional approach, where businesses reach out to potential customers directly – typically through cold calling, cold emailing, direct mail, advertising and trade shows. Generally, outbound marketing strategies are more intrusive and expensive than inbound marketing strategies.

Of all these, there is one particular outbound method most have outgrown – cold calling. Who needs that kind of interruption, when people can research their next purchase from the palm of their hand?

This is how inbound lead gen works, giving people control and choice over making contact and the content they consume. It focuses on providing value, building relationships – and meeting customers where they are.

Is inbound replacing outbound lead generation?

Not quite, both have their own merits. In the B2B sales process, in-person outreach and direct communication are essential for closing deals. In reality, the most successful marketing strategies often involve a combination of inbound and human outbound tactics. Let’s face it, large accounts need a bit of silver service from time to time – you shouldn’t automate your most important business relationships.

The best content for inbound lead generation is content that provides real value – and shares data that shows if it’s working. Using digital content is a must for marketers if they want to track, analyze and improve an inbound lead gen strategy. You’ll do well to also position your brand as an authority in your industry – a thought leader.

Inbound lead gen for tech businesses

Product-led growth marketing places the product as the north star, driving acquisition, activation and retention. Marketing for this type of business means prioritizing seamless online experiences to get people to use, subscribe, and share easily. Inbound lead generation is the perfect partner.

Answers to problems, guides, explainers, how-tos, ebooks and thought leadership all work as product-led inbound content. By providing content that high-intent prospects need, businesses can demonstrate the value of their product and encourage self-driven exploration.

Inbound content marketing for lead generation has a user-first approach and awareness of content design. Content is tailored to address user pain points to reach people with the right content at the right time.

A carefully considered B2B content marketing strategy provides the framework for any business starting an inbound motion.

Modern inbound content

Marketers now have the ideas, tools and platforms to create a conveyor-belt system of engaged leads, primed and ready for sales professionals to start a direct conversation with.

An increasing emphasis on personalized content, user experience, and data analytics has refined inbound lead management into smoothly served content experiences. Once you’ve hooked leads with digital reports, white papers, or guides, you can automate some seriously convenient, highly relevant content sends.

It’s wise to remember that the more interactive content you present to people, the more engagement you invite from them. More engagement data means your marketing will be more relevant and well-timed. Here’s exactly why interactive content is king, in case you weren’t aware.

Interactive content and advanced CRM systems enable laser-targeted and deeply personalized lead generation. By enhancing customer journeys with personalized content at convenient touchpoints, to encourage higher conversion rates.

Turtl’s Personalization Engine can scale deep personalization in minutes, meaning teams can easily reach more leads in the nurture stream. It’s simply down to how you segment leads and set up content workflows – and a super efficient way to accelerate your sales pipeline.

Follow these steps to attract, capture, and convert more leads into customers.

You’ll need to provide content for each stage of the lead magnet funnel. You can choose various content types, for different stages, topics, and audiences.

1. Use behavioral data to define your target audience and buyer personas
2. Attract prospects with inbound content marketing
3. Offer industry-leading lead magnets
4. Use frictionless forms and clear CTAS
5. Follow up with lead nurturing
6. Use lead scoring models to score and qualify inbound leads
7. Handoff to sales
8. Analyse performance and for improvement opportunities

Want to win more leads from digital content? Watch our lead-gen webinar for ideas that work.

Creating effective inbound lead generation strategies is all about delivering real value and engaging your audience in a meaningful way.

Start by getting to know your target audience inside and out – what are their pain points, what do they need, and what kind of content do they enjoy? With this insight, you can create high-quality, relevant content like blogs, ebooks, and webinars that address their needs and highlight your expertise.

Make sure your content is easily discoverable by optimizing it for search engines with smart SEO practices. Leverage social media to amplify your reach and engage directly with your prospects. Offer lead magnets like free trials, demos, or downloadable resources to capture contact information. Keep your forms simple and user-friendly to make it easy for people to convert. Think about using a lead generation tool to simplify the process.

Creating dynamic, interactive content is especially effective in capturing and retaining your audience’s attention. Interactive content like quizzes, polls, calculators, and infographics can engage users and also provide valuable insights into their preferences and behaviors. This type of content encourages active participation, making the experience more memorable and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

When Lexus switched from using PDF to Turtl’s interactive documents for their online brochures, they reaped the benefit of 80 times more journeys to one of their key pages, showing just how important interactivity and engagement is in encouraging inbound leads further down the funnel. 

Click to read Lexus + Turtl | Case Study

Inbound lead management means guiding the flow of leads through your funnel and out the other side. From the first touchpoint to the final conversation, the aim is to ensure the right leads don’t slip through the net. Capturing intent, personalizing content, and optimizing streams with data will help you manage leads more effectively for better revenue outcomes.

Picture this: you create an expensive, resource-heavy piece of content. You publish it and leads start flooding in from your website, social media, and other channels. Now that you’ve got them, the hard part begins.

Scoring, qualifying, nurturing, and closing are the heavy lifting of inbound lead generation. In the past, this process was exclusively manual but thanks to martech, it’s now much easier to identify and convert hot leads or automate their journey through the funnel. 

Turtl shows content engagement signals in Turtl Analytics that flag high-intent readers, making it easy to segment audiences and prioritize follow-up. If you integrate Turtl with systems like Hubspot or Marketo, you can automate nurture workflows when leads complete actions on your lead scoring model e.g. reading content for a long time, or sharing it.

The ability to easily identify and nurture leads is crucial to inbound lead gen success. Relying on metrics like downloads from a lead gen PDF, means teams take far longer to qualify inbound leads.