Make it rain! How to increase inbound leads
Last week, I met with the CEO of an exciting SaaS company to discuss fractional marketing leadership for his organization. I was exploring their current pains and challenges when we got on the subject of inbound leads. As a marketer, I need to know the value of an inbound lead to top line revenue, so I started investigating.
“How many inbound leads do you get every month?” Answer: Don’t know. “How many of your inbound leads convert to closed deals?” Answer: Don’t know. I wasn’t surprised and it’s not unusual. It just needs to be fixed.
Then, the CEO fired back a question of his own. With light-bulb moment enthusiasm, he asked… “If we currently have 50 inbound leads a month, how would you get us 1000?”
In other words... make it rain! Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to do just that. I’m happy to help.
You’ve got 2 choices to lift inbound. Pay for it or wait for it.
The off-the-cuff challenge posed to me was: Lift inbound from 50 to 1000 per month. Let’s also assume he meant as fast as possible (he actually meant last week.)
No problem. Here we go. You’ve got 2 choices. Pay for it or wait for it. Others call it paid, earned and owned. But let’s be honest. Earned is usually paid media partnerships, paid PR work, or a slow organic road to word of mouth.
Pay for it. Your fastest path to inbound.
You want inbound leads NOW? Pay for them.
SEM: PPC and Display Ads
An obvious channel is PPC which can be effective on search, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and dozens of other options. All you have to do is…
Determine the best digital ad channel for your product/service, identify your targets and keywords. Write the copy. Design the graphics. Create the offers. Build the landing pages. Fund the ads. Press go and watch qualified leads roll in.
I’m a fan of paid ads done right. But be careful. You can waste a lot of money with a bad strategy and poor execution. Powerful, competitive pay per click (PPC) keywords can cost hundreds per click. Poorly managed campaigns with weak strategies can cost you BIG BUCKS. Did you really choose the right keywords? Are your ads attracting the most qualified, in-market buyers? Is the offer right? Are they clicking on the ad, but not converting on the landing page? (Did you even build a landing page?) The last thing you want is to pour your paid ad budget down the drain.
It’s worth the investment to hire a good SEM firm to set up your campaigns, continuously test, optimize, monitor and manage your ads and spend. At the time of this writing, expect to pay $2k-$5k for those management services on top of ad spend - which should be thousands per month. This investment should save you from wasting at least that much if you don’t know what you’re doing.
My friends in the SEM space tell me paid ads are no longer a 90 day wait-and-see-game where many thousands can be wasted while your ad account is optimized on a myriad of confusing factors. Done right from the get go, you’ll know if a campaign is working in a fast two weeks! This means you can build fast, test fast and see results nearly instantly. And if you fail fast, you can stop the bleeding and adjust quickly.
Media Outlets
Beyond SEM, you’ve got plenty of choices for paid channels. Media outlets, associations, and large thought leaders in your space offer lead buying programs. Look for the most relevant watering holes for your target market and explore your options.
Usually, you can request or download a media kit with pricing from organizations that offer lead gen partnerships. Programs typically include some type of on-site advertising, coupled with sponsored content, and a sponsored email promotion to their proprietary house list. Sometimes, the organization will promote a webinar to their database. And everything has a price tag.
The challenge with the strategy is that the lead may have forgotten who you are by the time you get the list. Leads that come to you through media partnerships may be much colder than an inbound lead from your own SEM or website.
Intent Marketing
In case you’ve missed it, there’s a sea of vendors offering buyer intel based on intent data. They monitor the search habits for millions of business IP addresses and can tell you who’s “in-market” for a particular product or service. The gist of the strategy is… you hire the intent marketing firm and they figure out who’s in-market for your keywords. Then, they send an email to potential buyers, filtered for your targeted industry, market, and persona criteria.
The email offers those targeted prospects a piece of content which triggers a conversion when they download it. You then get a list of everyone who took the bait. It’s a great concept that works for some products/services.
Once you get your paid machine going, it all comes down to how many can you afford to buy? You want 1000 per month NOW? Get your wallet out.
Wait for it. Owned channels and word of mouth.
Sure, you can buy leads. But wouldn’t it be better for buyers to come to you in droves because you’re the bomb? That can happen if you flat out OWN your space, provide a great product, and a memorable customer experience so that your brand dominates the landscape and mind-share when buyers are in-market.
Owned Channels
It’s beyond obvious to discuss your website and social channels as your source for inbound leads. But, many companies struggle to do it well… because it’s hard work! And digital channels are rarely an instant fix for a sluggish pipeline. So, the pursuit of the quick fix can be a constant bandaid over broken owned channels. But you MUST invest NOW to see the inbound fruit you want in the future. You need to build an online factory that will ultimately deliver a steady flow of inbound.
Initially, if you’ve got serious missed opportunities with inbound, simply applying some best practices to what you’ve got will make it rain inbound leads. Such as… good email practices where there were none before. Or, adjusting key conversion points on your website and landing pages. Or creating exciting new offers. But, ultimately, a good inbound machine on your digital properties will become the new norm. Your inbound practices should stabilize into a reliable, forecastable fountainhead of inbound leads with substantive value to your organization.
Here’s a list of channels your marketing team can use to lift inbound. Some are more important than others.
Website(s)
Online chat
eCommerce platforms
Blog
eBooks
Email lists
Media room
Social channels
Email signatures
Recorded messages on phone systems
Managing all of those channels to create lift for inbound leads is the responsibility of your marketing team and each channel has its own hill to conquer, maintain and protect. Your flagship channel though, is your company website.
Search Position
Admit it. You know you want to be at the top. Gaining the number 1 search position (SERP) for multiple high-value keywords is pure gold to your inbound marketing. Here’s why. For every organic gain you make, you lift your own potential for inbound leads AND simultaneously shut out the competition. You get traffic for FREE while forcing others to pay for it through expensive paid campaigns.
Your marketing team is responsible for your SERP. This means good strategies for capturing high-value keywords that drive traffic and inbound leads. The more you own, the less you have to pay for with paid tactics. Did you catch that? SEO gains are like money in the bank.
Conversions
Once you’ve got traffic, get conversions. Your contact page needs to be sharp, well-tested and high-performing. Add live chat and do it well. SaaS companies should offer demos, free trials. Offer no-risk guarantees. And useful gated content. Do anything and everything to capture those visitors as leads. And test, test, test your conversion strategies.
You’d be surprised how changing your conversion strategies can make it rain leads! I’ve personally lifted inbound conversions in a single month by 40% by moving a “request info” button from the bottom of a page to the top. That was a happy client.
Content Marketing
Content marketing essentially drives everything about inbound. “King” is not a cliche… it’s truth. You should be developing content for multiple measurable end goals: SEO, sales, and levers that move the inbound needle.
When content strategies are designed for search position - and they should be - keep in mind It takes months to impact SEO. The rain may come, but not quickly. Measure it through good SEO tools.
When content is designed to support sales - and it should be - that’s not inbound. It’s sales enablement. Measure it with increased closed deals and increased velocity.
And here’s the one you’re waiting for: content designed to drive inbound leads. A common example of using content for an inbound lever is an ebook.
Example of How to Use Content to Lift Inbound Leads
Create ebooks with information your customer is hungry to have. You may have to create several before you find a rainmaker. Once you have your ebook, the magic can happen.
Now you need a CAMPAIGN - or several - to promote the ebook. You’ll need blogs, emails, email signatures, announcements on the website, landing pages, social promos. You can even use videos from sales team members or even your CEO. The sales team should send the content to all the prospects they’re nurturing. And don’t forget press releases.
Then, measure, measure measure. Did the campaign produce inbound results? You can do all that work and hit a home run… or strike out. If you miss the target, step back, learn why, adjust and iterate. If you gain inbound leads, start working to make sure they move along your pipeline and convert to closed business. Otherwise, all the effort could still be for nothing!
Still, be patient and plan ahead. Expect good content strategies and campaigns to take up to 6 weeks (or more) to produce - which is half of a quarter! That’s why you have to plan NOW for what you want from inbound next quarter and next year.
Word of Mouth Inbound
What could be more beautiful than one happy customer telling a friend or colleague to use your company… and they do? Word of mouth referrals are critically important in your inbound marketing. Problem is, you can’t control it.
But, you can affect word of mouth growth with referral programs promoted by your marketing department and sales team. Turn happy customers into your best advocates with targeted, measurable, forecastable intent.
To make that happen, naturally, you’ll need to know who your happy customers are. Sounds obvious, but some companies don’t. One reason is… customers are busy. They don’t have time to fill out your marketing surveys. That’s why it’s hard marketing work to identify brand advocates and leverage them. But a word of mouth referral is powerful and worth the effort.
Owned channels are a company asset
Once you have your website producing conversions and content engines humming, all your owned channels fall into place. You’ll have emails to send, offers to add to your email signatures, press releases for your media room, videos that tell stories… it’s a beautiful, holistic, multi-channel marketing beauty.
And the best part? You own it all. And if you’re looking to sell… your marketing processes and content counts as a company asset.
Plan to invest
Depending on industry, high growth companies consistently invest a healthy 7-9% of gross revenue in marketing spend. For me, this means balanced and responsible marketing practices for both Pay for It and Wait For It strategies, programs and tactics. It takes an experienced marketing leader to navigate the options, focus on priorities and keep top line revenue in the front windshield.
If your organization has immature marketing practices, you’ll need to invest in maturity. If your digital channels are weak and unmanaged with unclear performance or metrics, you’ll need to get these critical digital properties working FOR you as a company asset. If your content is aimless, turn it off until you can find a leader who can create resources that move the needle. If you want paid leads that payoff, work with a marketing leader who can identify lead gen opportunities and maximize every penny.
Make it Rain
While the CEO who challenged me probably just threw out a number, what he was saying was “I want serious impact to my inbound leads.” The shortest path to success is paid and which can be delivering results within a couple of weeks with the right playbook. But, it’s an expensive stop-gap tactic that shouldn’t replace the hard work of strengthening owned channels and developing earned.