The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

After wrapping up four days in Boston at the INBOUND conference, our team left filled with tips and tricks, insights and inspiration – all aimed to make us better inbound marketers and even better teachers of the strategies that so many companies are utilizing to connect online with their customers, best prospects, and biggest fans. Plus, you can check out a great recap on all the keynotes here! 

The search for qualified, sales-ready leads is a challenge to almost all sales organizations and as technology continues to advance and all of our lives (and our prospects lives) become busier, the need to uncover and nurture qualified leads becomes increasingly more important.

Inbound marketing is your ticket to not only being part of the dialogue but having the ability to start conversations with your top prospects and your best clients. This is done by publishing online content through your website and blog, and providing ways for visitors to qualify themselves. Creating content and generating leads are at the core of a successful inbound marketing program and we help businesses every day develop and execute successful inbound strategies. However, you too can start implementing a plan that will help you get found online, fill your lead funnel, and find new customers. 

You’ve been working hard at your inbound marketing program… consistently writing interesting and informative blog posts, optimizing with keywords, promoting through your social media pages, and driving new traffic to your website. But the leads aren’t rolling in like you hoped they would and you just can’t figure out why. What could be the problem?  

The primary focus of your inbound marketing strategy should be to get your business found by new visitors, and then convert them into qualified sales-ready leads. One of the primary places to do this is on a company blog. There are many other additional benefits such as developing thought leadership and providing value to current clients, but at the end of the day it’s lead generation that makes inbound marketing such an irresistible and powerful tool.  

When you think of what characteristics make a successful company, marketing campaign or team there are certain traits and factors that help to sort out the best and worst, the winners from the losers. This is true with inbound marketing and lead generation programs as well. 

While you can easily measure site traffic, Twitter followers, and how you rank for keywords on Google, it’s a little more challenging to measure what I contend is one of the most important benefits of inbound marketing – thought leadership.

When I discuss inbound marketing with new clients and prospects they tend to focus on tangible items such as search engine optimization (SEO), keyword rankings and the effect that blogging has on generating leads and building their contact database. This is natural considering that inbound marketing projects sometimes get funded from monies reallocated from SEO consultants, email marketers and social media firms. These tangible results (or promise of results) make it easier for a CFO or Controller to sign off on, rather than the possibility of intangibles such as thought leadership.