You’ve experienced this before. You sit down to watch a movie or any other night time relaxing activity, and the phone rings. Someone on the other end butchers your name and then starts to lay down the most robotic sales pitch ever to be uttered in the western world.
This is the worst. I don’t know who is buying their product, but we know no one is enjoying the experience. Not the telemarketer and certainly not the one being marketed to.
Is there a better option?
There has to be a way to attract people and more specifically, strangers, to come to your site, store, or wherever else you sell your products and services, without having to be obnoxious and intrusive.
Nobody likes their day interrupted by sales calls or bad marketing, but everyone enjoys finding the right product at the right time. Everyone like to solve their problem or have it solved in as simple a process as possible.
How do we get from obnoxious to valuable and timely? How do we make our customers seek us?
The answer is lead generation through inbound marketing
As mentioned before, you want your leads to be warm. You want people to be seeking information. You want to be the one to provide that provides that information and answers those questions. Even if the answer may end with them not needing you for this particular problem.
Who will they turn to next time? Will it be the telemarketer or the loud TV commercial interrupting their shows? It could be, the world is not a perfect place, but as the one who provided value and information, you are much more likely to get the sale and develop the relationship that keeps them coming back.
So what is lead generation?
According to Hubspot
“Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into leads”
Well, what is a lead?
A lead is someone who has shown interest in your business. Somehow, whether they visited your site, asked you a question on social, or walked into your store and asked, “how much?” they are a lead. Someone who could potentially buy.
With inbound marketing, the goal is to get this type of lead. Not just a phone number to call or an email to drop a message to. You want someone who has at least heard your name in a positive light. And interact with your business in some way. It’s the interaction that acts as the invitation for a follow-up.
What does inbound lead generation look like?
Imaging you fill out a survey about Rug Care (because you really love rugs) and a little while later someone reaches out to you with an ebook on how to care for your rug (that you love enough to take a survey about) and this ebook solves some problem you had with your rug.
Now take it a step further. You need a professional service performed on that rug. Who do you call? I’ll bet it’s going to be the company who has provided you with information in the past and solved an issue.
How do we get started?
You get started by developing buyer personas, creating content using keywords and social media, converting those strangers into leads, and then closing the deal. After you make the sale, the goal should be to convert that customer into a promoter. Delight the customer to the point they want to come back and bring others into the fold.
After all, why do all this work just to make a one time sale? That sounds almost as bad as interrupting someone’s dinner to tell them about how much money you could save them on their credit card payments.
There are some great articles on Hubspot as well as some great tools. Another resource is inbound.org. If you really want to dig in and learn all you can about inbound marketing these are two solid places to start.
Keep watching our blog for more information on the topics mentioned in this post. Buyer personas, content creation, where do you advertise and who do you target (because we want to avoid being spammy and intrusive), and more.
If you don’t have tons of time to learn all this but want to put inbound methodologies to work for your business, give us a call or send us a message. We’d love to help you get leads coming in so you need less cold calls going out.
