New customers are the lifeblood of any business. From small businesses to large firms, the only way to generate income is with paying customers. Attracting new clients not only helps your bottom line, but also drives growth and leads to new ideas and endeavors for your business. This article outlines three inbound marketing strategies to help drive new customers to your business.
Maintaining Your Website
One of the easiest mistakes you can make as a business owner is to let the small things slide. Whether you’re maintaining website content or keeping up with social media, there are more things to do in a day than most business owners can handle. A quick look at your website can show if you have been paying attention to the copy, pages, and any broken links. Not paying attention to technical problems costs you money. Customers who can’t find content are going to look elsewhere. Technical glitches can include:
- 404 pages
- Broken links
- Slow site speed
- Inaccurate links
- Content being hijacked by bots
- Content being linked elsewhere without you knowing
Website visitors will leave your website and quickly divert attention (and dollars) elsewhere if it is not well organized, free of 404 errors and broken links, and up to speed. Screaming Frog SEO allows you to scan your website to look for problems that may cause conversion rates to dip. Take advantage of their program and use it regularly if you rely on a healthy site to drive commerce to you.
Review Your Keyword Usage
Keywords are key to success in the online world. If your competitors are ranking higher than you, check keyword utilization throughout your website and blog. Look at how you utilize keywords, because when done well, they will drive traffic to your site. If you want to optimize your site to rank for keywords, check out your top competitors, for a start. A few other notes to keep in mind regarding keywords:
- Check where backlinks are coming from. A strong backlink profile will result in higher organic rankings in search engines
- Compile backlinks from competitors to see how they’re performing
- Draft new strategies around building keywords into your site using competitor profiles
- Develop a backlink building strategy
Develop Your Content Marketing
It is hard to do B2B lead generation without solid content marketing. Content marketing is what fuels engagement and growth.
Blogging
The most common form of content marketing is to have a blog that you regularly update. Consistency is key. Anything from guest posts to vlogs to your own blog posts help build your content marketing foundation. Tell your story to build relationships, and be sure to include the keywords that matter to your business to attract new people to the site. Take time to mention products or services in posts, but use subtle language and avoid making content feel too ‘pitchy.’ Customers can be scared off by overt pitches to buy products or purchase packages too soon. Build trust first if you want customers to buy later.
Create Lead Magnets
The adage about leading a horse to water is truer than ever in a massively competitive online marketplace. Customers can’t ‘drink the water’ if they are not led there, but will not purchase something if it the pitch is too overt. What’s a business owner to do?
First, start with free resources (at least up front). Everyone loves getting something for nothing. Lead magnets offer a free resource in exchange for some minor information, and are a great way to build connections and deliver value. Better yet, you will be able get potential customer’s email addresses, names, and phone numbers. If the customer thinks there is value, they will provide you with information. To attract and present value to customers:
- Use blogs to promote lead magnets
- Explore the use of widgets in website sidebars
- Follow up with email campaigns targeted at customers who signed up
- Send a free trial offer or discount code for signing up to grow conversions
Social Media
Developing your presence online is time consuming, but you have to trust that people will start to watch and read your content if you post consistently. It does not matter if no one likes your content at first, just keep posting. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are the most heavily utilized social media platforms, so begin with 2 of them and commit to 3 posts a day, 5 days a week. Be sure to incorporate keywords and thematically tie the content from your weekly blog post to your social media posts so that there is consistency in keywords, imagery, and content across platforms.
One way to drive more traffic is to find small ways to engage your audience. This can be accomplished through quizzes, questions, polls, and stories about customers and their experiences working with your business. Make sure your social media posts appear as a feed somewhere on your website, and that social media icons are easy to click on.
Whatever way you choose to go about B2B lead generation, it will be hard work, and it’s worth it. Try some new tactics like the ones mentioned above if what you’ve tried has not yet worked.
Bottom line: if people love what they read and can easily navigate your site, they are more likely to bookmark your page and come back. Driving customer growth and development is crucial to your business. Loyal customers are more likely to share positive experiences and help build up a healthy referral network, which will make your inbound marketing efforts gain traction and generate leads that much more easily.