As a business of any size, expanding your customer base and getting the word out about your brand are two of the most important factors to your company’s survival as well as its growth. This is why marketing your brand is of such utmost importance. When it comes to marketing, there are two main types: outbound and inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing is the more traditional form of marketing, in which businesses pay a lot of money for air time on the radio or TV to push their products. Inbound marketing is all about generating leads by providing visitors to your website with something of value. Inbound marketing is by far the most affordable option for most businesses, and also the most effective. The following are a few different lead generation techniques that every inbound marketing strategy should have:

Creating Web Traffic
You can’t generate leads for your company without traffic to your website. The main tactic for doing so is through the creation of an SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. SEO involves the use of specific keywords throughout the different pages of your website in order to increase your search ranking on sites such as Google and Yahoo. When most people do a search, they tend to go to the first few sites that are listed in the search directory. They rarely ever go to the second page of results. This means that increasing your site’s ranking for specific keywords that relate to your company, brand, products and services, is incredibly important if you want to get more web traffic – and obviously, you can’t generate leads without traffic.

Another excellent way to create more web traffic is through the use of social media. By establishing yourself on social media, you can connect directly to your customer base. By providing incentives, such as promotions for your brand, you can entice followers to use links to visit your webpage. Followers that are impressed will even share links with their social friends, thereby helping to increase traffic to your page.

Using Content Marketing
One of the most successful lead generation techniques is the use of content marketing. This involves creating content that is informative or helpful to the reader. Many businesses choose to provide content in the form of a blog, which is one of the most successful ways to do it. Producing high quality content is very important. In fact, you’re wasting the traffic you have created if you are putting up content that has no value to readers. Remember that the end goal isn’t to create traffic to your site – it’s to generate leads from that traffic. Part of that is enticing them with content that is valuable and informative so that readers will become interested in you as a brand. You should also create a strong call-to-action at the end of each piece of content that entices readers to follow a link or to contact you for more information. Another excellent lead generation technique to use in conjunction with your content is to provide a link that leads to a landing page, where you can offer readers a free e-book or products in return for signing up to an email list. This is why it’s important that your readers enjoy your content. Most won’t finish a blog if it’s of no value, which means they’ll never even get to the call-to-action, much less want to follow your link.

Using Video
Video can be created in the form of how-to guides, or they can be video testimonials about your products or services. People who surf the web are much more inclined to watch a quick 2 to 3-minute video then they are to read a wall of text. Not to mention that videos tend to provide a site with a much more professional quality. Anyone can throw up a blog, but a well-produced video is another matter.

Tracking Your Progress
You aren’t going to know whether your lead generation techniques are working for your company unless you are analyzing the numbers during your marketing campaign. There are a number of analytics tools available for use online that will let you analyze important stats such as how many clicks your webpage is getting, what links are generating the most clicks, what your bounce rate is (which is the term used for how many visitors leave your webpage immediately), how many clicks are actually converted into leads and more. By keeping track of these numbers, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy on the fly, thereby not wasting any of your company’s resources.

Successful inbound marketing is all about using the right lead generation techniques. One won't just work either, you need to use a combination of SEO, blog content, video, landing pages and analytics tools to be successful.