Leading the Way: What You Need to Generate Leads Looking online will reveal where one third of US consumers spend at least 3 hours every day.1 Additionally, more than three fourths of all US adults are online.2 As the world continues to shift from offline activities to online, businesses will find most of their fresh leads through the Internet and inbound marketing. This shift shows how much the Internet has changed the way people interact with others and with businesses. TwinEngine Powered by The H Agency www.twinengine.com 1990-2013 TwinEngine. All Rights Reserved.
Looking online will reveal where one third of US consumers spend at least 3 hours every day. 1 Additionally, more than three fourths of all US adults are online. 2 As the world continues to shift from offline activities to online, businesses will find most of their fresh leads through the Internet and inbound marketing. This shift shows how much the Internet has changed the way people interact with others and with businesses. Marketers are learning how to handle this change by gravitating towards inbound marketing strategies. Increases in inbound marketing tactics include bigger budgets for social media, virtual events, and search engine marketing. TwinEngine Powered by The H Agency www.twinengine.com 1990-2013 TwinEngine. All Rights Reserved. 2
To create a more cost-effective marketing strategy, move resources to support inbound marketing techniques. Outbound marketing no longer draws in new prospects the way that inbound marketing does. A budget shift towards search engine optimization, is imperative to your business being found online. Worldwide, 88,000,000,000 searches a month are conducted on Google, but 75% of searchers never look beyond the first page of results. 3 According to a study by Market Share, 57% of Internet users search the web every day. If your business is not well ranked, you are missing the opportunity to be found. Another inbound marketing tactic that drives traffic and increases leads is blogging. B2C companies who maintain fully-optimized blogs generate 88% more leads per month than B2C companies who do not blog. Similarly, B2B companies who blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not. 4 Not only does blogging draw prospects attention, it also draws the attention of search engines. Each new blog post becomes a page that the search engines can index under specific topics, which becomes another result opportunity when a prospect searches for that topic. The more indexed pages that lead to your business, the better. TwinEngine Powered by The H Agency www.twinengine.com 1990-2013 TwinEngine. All Rights Reserved. 3
With 93% of US adult Internet users on Facebook, and with almost two thirds of US Internet users regularly using a social network, social media accounts for businesses are a necessity. 5 B2B and B2C businesses use Facebook accounts to acquire new customers; companies that use a Twitter account generate double the amount of leads per month than those who do not have an account. 4 Marketers spending 6 hours a week using and engaging their business social media saw 52% more leads than those who did not. 6 These numbers reveal the importance of social media in the inbound marketing strategy. The content on your business website should be engaging and educational but should not stop there. To generate leads, websites need call-to-action buttons that link directly to valuable offers. After prospects have accepted and downloaded your offer, the next step is to implement a lead nurturing campaign. Nurtured leads typically produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities (compared to non-nurtured leads), according to a DemandGen report. TwinEngine Powered by The H Agency www.twinengine.com 1990-2013 TwinEngine. All Rights Reserved. 4
Lead nurturing campaigns must be immediate. Research by MIT and InsideSales.com shows that 78% of sales that started with a web inquiry go to the company who responds first. Although most leads are not ready to make a purchase decision right away, immediate acknowledgement of their interest and further contact builds relationships that convert leads into sales. Lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns are often subsets of larger marketing strategies. Where exactly do these campaigns fit in? Email winnie@twinengine.com or call 504-522-6300 to develop a marketing strategy that includes a lead generation campaign designed specifically for your business. CITATIONS 1 (The Media Audit, Oct 2010) 2 (Blogher, April 2011; Pew Research, May 2010; US Census Bureau, May 2011) 3 (Search Engine Land, Feb 2010, & marketshare.hitslink.com, Oct 2010) 4 (State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report, HubSpot, 2010) 5 (Blogher, April 2011) 6 (Social Media Examiner, 2011) TwinEngine Powered by The H Agency www.twinengine.com 1990-2013 TwinEngine. All Rights Reserved. 5