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A beginner's guide to generating more inbound leads. This is a generating guide for more call bells. Let's quickly define the difference between outbound and inbound. Outbound is more of a traditional sales model. Some people call it the push based marketing method. Outbound activities, phone calls, emails, door to door sales, just getting people's attention by putting yourself out there. Inbound marketing is all based on creating original content and then having people come to you. That could be in the form of blog posts or articles or videos on YouTube, social media posts, advertisements, anything that really brings people into the door, into your marketing funnel. So is inbound more scalable? I think inbound is a lot more scalable because it doesn't require as much of the human element. You don't have to have people making the call, sending the emails, create content, put it out there on channels, and then have people come to you. But it does take a lot more time. It's more of an initial investment. So you really have to figure out how you can invest into your content creation, your videos, writing your copy, your social, and so on. One of the greatest advantages of inbound leads is that typically speaking, they're a lot cheaper because people find you. When people come to you, the chances of them converting are drastically higher because they made a choice. They said, I'm going to reach out to this company because I'm interested in this product. And I think the reason why they convert so much more is because they made that choice as opposed to a salesperson making a choice of outbound contacting them. Here's a method of generating more inbound leads. Probably seen those pop ups that are like, hey, put in your email, get on our newsletter. And a lot of times you'll just instantly click the X because those can be annoying page takeovers or the mobile pop ups on a website. But here's a tip, people don't really like the full screen pop ups. Pop ups do work. It's better to do something a little bit more subtle so maybe that's a bar on the bottom dialogue that's in the corner that can help increase conversions. And also it just builds goodwill so people don't get annoyed. And then another tip is add a little deal sweetener. They'll just say, oh, sign up for our newsletter and then that's it. It would be better to say something like sign up for our newsletter and you'll get this free ebook when you sign up. A little deal sweetener. Incentivizes people to put their email in so it could be a free product, a discount, give them something to incentivize them to sign up. Provide content, provide valuable content that people love, that makes them want to fill out a form and make them want to connect with you. Now, once you have a list of inbound leads in the form of emails, you might think, oh okay, jump in there hard sell. Just send them a whole bunch of emails. Buy our thing, buy our thing, buy our thing. It's like, no, slow down, slow down. It's a step wise process. You want to continue providing value. Email marketing is an art. You don't want to just go in there guns blazing with a whole bunch of buy now links. Provide educational content, provide entertainment content. Bring them into your culture. Build that goodwill. Prove that you're worthy to be in their inbox. You know what, we just got a download right now. We got an ebook download right now. Maybe you already gave an ebook when they signed up, but continue providing resources. Here's a little quick tip on how to create an inbound marketing plan in one day. So the first thing you want to do is you want to have a long form blog post written. You want to have a two to 30 word blog post that addresses every single aspect of your ideal customers pain points and the problems that they want to solve. They'll get that blog post written. Find a good writer. It could be someone internally. It could be an outsourced service. You can use something like fiverr. Find someone that has a writing talent. So step one is to write that long form content. Step two is to take that blog post and to create an ebook out of it. Very easy to do that through simple software like Google Slides, PowerPoint, or even Microsoft Word. Step three is to create a landing page that has a ton of value, a ton of information, maybe even a video, and then a form where people can download that ebook. Step five is to take that ebook to figure out other ways to parse it on your blog, on social media. Put it, chop it up, parse it, put it onto all your social channels, schedule posts to happen within the next couple of weeks and ultimately distribute that awesome, awesome asset. So I think that's a really quick way to get your inbound marketing strategy activated today. Remember, when people opt in or when people fill out a form on your website, they're creating a relationship with you that's based on trust. They trust that if they put their information, they are going to receive something back in return. Don't forget that people have your trust. Now if you break that trust by over emailing them, over spamming them, over contacting them, you're going to lose and you're going to undo all the goodness that you did with your inbound marketing strategy. So be mindful of people's privacy. So right now we're going to go over call to actions. This is the basic building block in any online marketing strategy. But it's really important to understand, especially for inbound marketing. Calls to action are my second favorite thing to cowbell. Cowbell. He loves cowbell. It's all about your call to action. Download now sign up make Purchase, get Newsletter the options are limitless figure out the one that works for you. People like to be given a path of value. They like to see that if they consume some piece of content that there's an option to move to the next step. Leave them down the funnel to a place where they can click a call to action button. Signing up, making a purchase. The call to action button is extremely important. So if you're thinking of a call to action as some kind of pop up on your website, you can do that. But it can be used in so many other places. A great strategy is to make a custom landing page the final destination. All these sources, whether that's your email newsletter or social media, those assets should have links that go to your landing page. On that landing page is a final sell. Put a video on there. Videos convert the best out of any format under that video. That's where you put your call to action. Have that landing page as that kind of central place. Make sure to get people aware of that landing page. You have your content on social media on somewhere like Instagram. Since you can't put links into the captions on Instagram, you would say, hey, link in Bio, just click that link and then you can go and learn more on your email newsletter. You just at the bottom. After they've finished reading their content, say, hey, click this link to learn more. Slowly warming them up to the final sale at the top of the funnel. It's just content that's nurturing them, getting them to like your brand a little bit warmer. You're saying, hey, click this link, learn even more. And then once they've clicked that link, that goes to a landing page. And then that landing page is hot. It's very hot. And that's where the call to action is. To get them to convert. That is music to my ears. I think it's important to in your Instagram post to say click Link and Bio, and then to have your Bio link go to whatever campaign you're trying to promote on Twitter. You can just put that link directly in the tweet or create it as a thread. So your first tweet can just be like, hey, original content, we're just helping you out. But then make a threaded tweet where there's a little button where you can reply to your original tweet, making it a thread. And then that's where you kind of go in with the harder sell, saying, hey, click this link to learn more. That sends them to their landing page on somewhere like Facebook. You can warm them up with the original content and the main post, but then in the comments section, that's where you would put the link to your landing page with the call to action. So it's all about just kind of slowly warming them up. Don't go in guns blazing at first. Prove that you're giving them value and then go in for the ass. People can tell if you're trying to sell them. It's important to be aware of that and build trust as much as you can before you go right in and ask for the sell. It's a subtle art of selling without selling, selling without selling. It's also important to remember to not be stagnant. Let's say you just kind of did all the strategies. Why am I holding this? We don't know why. It's important to also keep the variety going. So if you just do that same thing again and again, people start to notice that. So create more original content, switch up the call to action, create new landing pages, make new videos. It's important to keep the train moving because that way people will stay engaged. So I think one of the great residual benefits of inbound marketing is that you can parlay it into earned media and to paid media. So the difference between paid media and earned media is earned media is when people on their own accord put positive things at you on the internet. That could be a tweet, it could be a Facebook post, it could be a product review on you. Paid media is when you take your content and you sponsor it. So Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, it's just putting dollars behind it. I think the best marketers figure out a way to sort of balance between earned media and paid media and always focus on pushing content out there in the world that delights, engages and converts people. It's always good to maximize that organic reach as much as possible. So you can do that through search engine optimization. How do you get that earned media? Earned media you really can't plan for. So here's a really good example of earned media. Wendy's recently put out a post where they asked people to like a tweet or bringing back their spicy chicken nuggets. And I think they got over 2 million likes. So obviously there was a great amount of demand that they learned about discovered from the engagement. As a result, it really was a whole entire marketing plan and a marketing strategy for them. There was a ton of earned media pre buyers for their products. So as you create original content that will kind of stimulate the earned media potential, you can't force it. Fast food chain already had a lot of followers. So it's easy to just say, hey, like this thing, tons of people are going to like it. But if you have six followers on Twitter, it's a lot harder to get that earned media. So it's really important when you're small to reach out to your early adopters. Encourage them to start generating that earned media. Give people access or information. Sort of a free upgrade to kind of stimulate earned media. The best earned media has to be organic though. I think that's the key. Early adopters are a unique type of people there's not that many of them out there. Try to capture social proof and to get testimonials. Once people see other people doing things, then they feel inspired to do the same thing. So try to listen to the feedback of your early adopters and change and pivot whatever it is that you're doing so that you can really try to make them happy. And then capture those stories so that you can promote and stimulate more stories which will ultimately bring up your brand and that will get you money in the bank. Inbound leads can be generated through organic distribution or through paid distribution. Generating inbound leads does have a cost associated with it. First you have to generate original content that starts attracting the leads. But if you're just starting out, you might need advertising, paid media to boost your exposure and to get more people to look at your content. The Holy Grail is not leaning on the paid content as much, making the content so that people really want to share it and really want to watch it. When you achieve that, then you don't have to rely on the paid advertising as much. That just compounds and through network effects. The more that that content is shared, the more and more inbound leads you will get. Important to look at your data data can be your best friend in this whole process because you can figure out ways to optimize to AV, test different things, landing pages, emails, social posts, CTAs and then kind of figure out what's working and what's not working. Double down on the most effective things. Don't forget that if you look at the data too prematurely, it might be misleading. Sometimes it takes repetition, continuity, and a true commitment to put your content out there, whether it's LinkedIn posts or YouTube videos. Stay consistent, stay focused, and keep putting your stuff out there. So that's our overview of how to generate inbound leads. It's worth mentioning our company Dub.com has a great suite of tools to create videos and also create video landing pages with call to Actions on them. Dub created landing pages make it really easy to add call to Actions to increase your conversions and get more sales. Check that out Dub.com with Calville All. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more videos and we'll see you next time.