20 years ago I did something at my creative agency without totally knowing what it was at the time. I created an inbound pipeline that would feed us leads for 2 decades. That’s 2 decades of 0 outreach, 0 networking, 0 cold calls, only a handful of email newsletters, and surprisingly almost 0 blogging. Yes, we benefited from word-of-mouth, but most of our leads were from people that had never heard of us before. In fact, we had so many inbound leads, we were constantly struggling to get proposals out the door fast enough.
I didn’t know at the time that this was pretty unique. Most service-based businesses spend a good amount of time. effort, and cash: networking, upselling, running paid ads, and cold calling/emailing.
Now, before I get too deep into this, I’d like to say: don’t do what we did. Don’t go all-in on one lead gen channel. It’s not wise. Whenever inbound leads slowed down for a period at my agency, we weren’t well-equipped to handle it. We had to learn “the hard way” that it’s good to have more than one source of leads. (Luckily, we’ve gotten better at diversifying our strategies in recent years.)
So all this is simply to say: I’ve got a pretty darn effective system for generating inbound leads. In fact, it’s why I started Diviner: To help businesses develop their own inbound lead generating machines. It’s a gift that can keep giving for decades.
Pssst! There’s a secret bonus to consider when improving your inbound strategies. It will make your outbound a whole lot easier too.
Ok. Let’s get into it and let’s start with the basics.
What is an Inbound Lead?
Inbound leads tend to share these common characteristics.
1. Inbound Leads Self-Initiated Contact: Inbound leads typically initiate contact with a company. They search for something in Google or ask Siri or use some other app or form of inquiry and end up on your website.
2. Inbound Leads Are More Informed: These leads are curious. They are looking for solutions. They’ve perused your website and others like it.
3. Inbound Leads Are More likely to Convert: Inbound leads are generally going to convert more often and at a higher rate than outbound leads. This is because they generally already know what they want.
Inbound Versus Outbound Methods
An Outbound methodology involves getting out there and actively engaging with your fellow humans. In other words, to get an outbound lead you are knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending emails, etc.
Inbound methods are more about the subtle art of attraction. It’s about making your services desireable and available to those who are searching for them.
Outbound, by it’s very nature, is always active. If you don’t act, you don’t get leads.
Inbound requires upfront effort, but these efforts can passively generate leads over a long period of time. In fact, there were years at my agency where we never did anything you would call marketing because we had more leads then we could handle. (Again, not advisable. But possible.)
Outbound is Fast. Inbound is Slow.
When developing an inbound lead system, you need to have patience. An inbound strategy is an investment strategy that starts slow and compounds over time. If you need leads now, bookmark this article for later and go hunt down some customers. I’ll be here when you get back.
What is Involved in Generating Inbound Leads?
Inbound optimization is all about being:
1. Easy to Find
2. Easy to Understand
3. Attractive to Your Audience
Seems simple right? But there are many methods for accomplishing this. And much of what you see promoted online under the guise of inbound marketing is actually just content marketing: A terrifying marketing strategy which involves churning out an obscene amount of content in regular intervals across dozens of media channels on a tight schedule. Content Marketing focuses too much on content volume and generally contributes to the inshitification of our online worlds. Let’s not do that. Let’s do something better.
Let’s do passive inbound lead generation. How about that?
In order to be “easy to find, easy to understand, and attractive to your audience” we can focus on some important things.
Namely: branding, positioning, services, online presence, and SEO.
Start High Level
OK, everybody else, let’s keep going. With inbound lead gen, you should always start high level. You need to re-evaluate your your brand strategy and positioning. Don’t go out and hire an SEO company before you do this! SEO companies will optimize for anything (including the wrong thing). You may get more traffic, but you may not get more leads. This is why starting “high level” is important.
Brand Strategy is the Highest Level
Brand strategy is based on 3 things: who your business is, who your audience is, and how you present yourself to that audience. In other words, it’s about being attractive to the right people. But these 3 things need to be carefully balanced. If you lean to far into any one of them and neglect the others, you will fail.
I’ll also mention that brand strategy is an evolving process. You don’t need to nail it first try. It should evolve over time. I recomend reviewing your brand strategy at least twice a year. Companies change and evolve. Your brand strategy should evolve with it.
Brand Strategy Questions You Need to be Able to Answer Compellingly
There’s a million and one brand strategy frameworks to work from. The most important thing is that you are able to clearly and uniquely communicate answers to questions like these.
What are Your Core Values?
Who Is Your Audience?
What Problems Do You Solve?
What Makes You Different From Your Competitors?
Why should a customer/client choose you over someone else?
Why do you do what you do?
How do you do what you do?
Sit down with your executive team twice a year to answer these questions.
A Page for Every Primary Service
You need a dedicated page for every service you offer. These will be landing pages that can bring in leads. No, I don’t think your business is too unique or edge-case to do this. Your competitors do it. You can do it too. Your homepage should not be the only doorway to your business.
But it does take strategy to do it right.
Service Positioning & Keyword Research
Once you have done some brand level work it’s time to go a level deeper.
We need to position your services. And for our purposes, we can just focus on primary or standalone services.
Primary Versus Dependent Services
Dependent services or “add-ons” that enhance the value of other services (but can’t be bought on their own) are usually not a primary target for leads.
For example: Let’s say you build websites and offer web hosting. Do you ever offer web hosting to clients when you don’t build their websites? If the answer is yes, then that’s a primary service we want leads for. If hosting is a dependant service that is only offered when a client buys web design, then we don’t need to focus on it right now.
Keyword Research and Service Validation
This is where keyword research is important. Are people looking for the services you offer? Do you need to adjust your service mix? Use your favorite keyword research tool or use the best keyword research tool (Google) to see what terms people commonly use to find services like the ones you offer. Look at what your competitors are doing.
Focus on the Problems Your Services Solve
Try to answers these questions for each of your services.
What are 3 benifits to using this service?
What are 3 things that are unique about this service compared to other similar services?
A helpful reminder here is to think about the problems your customers are trying to solve and remember they are looking for language that speaks to their problems. Avoid using using branded language or industry terminology that may confuse your audience.
Optimize Each Service Page
Once you have your service uniques and benefits, you can create your pages (or optimize the ones you have). Each service needs a target keyword with associated traffic and it needs to be optimized for your target keyword. If you don’t want to DIY the SEO, this is when you hire a firm.
Conversion Optimization
The last thing to consider is conversion optimization. You need to make sure that your website converts. This means generally 2 things.
- Great User Experience
- Build Trust
There’s plenty of articles out there on user experience. I don’t need to write another one. Just make your website easy to navigate and understand.
Building trust comes usually conmes down to work examples and testimonials. Document your projects. Make them seem amazing and get a testimonial from every client you work with who hasn’t threated you with litigation. Even the grumpy ones will usually throw you a bone. Just do it!
Chapter 2: Content Hubs
As I mentioned before, my agency never really blogged (maybe once or twice a year) and yet 99% of articles about growing inbound go on-and-on about blogging. The thing is, Google doesn’t care that much about blogging. It cares about valuable pages that meet users needs. Blogging is one way to do that, but I think that people get way too focused on quantity over quality. Google cares more about quality.
Focus on the problems your customers have and write super-helpful, in-depth resources. Create multi-page resources. Google loves this. Find a relevant topic with good traffic and create a hub page with sub-pages exploring sub-topics. You’re already an expert in your field. Write about what you do and how you help clients. Spend weeks or months on this. Make it great. It will pay off.
Is that it?
That’s the bones of it. But it’s a lot of work and it should be ongoing. You need to build systems that can scale so you can constantly be doing these activities. Don’t let your service pages get out of date. When you add new services add them to your website. Optimize them. Get more testimonials, get more reviews, add more case studdies.
Don’t expect results over night
If you need leeds tomorrow, go out and network or buy some ads. Inbound lead generation, while arguably the most profitable way to get new clients takes time. SEO optimizations can take months to show results. Set aside time every week to work on these inbound efforts and you will be rewarded 10-fold.