How to Get More Inbound Leads: 9 Ways to Generate High-Quality Leads

When it comes to growing your business, generating high-quality leads is the name of the game.

But not all leads are created equal. Some are genuinely interested in your products or services, while others might only be in the early stages of learning about their challenges and the solutions available to them. 

This difference is the reason why lead scoring, which you can learn more about in our blog HubSpot Lead Scoring 101: A Guide for Beginners, is so important. 

Before we even get to lead scoring, however, it’s first critical to have a strategy in place that brings your business leads. That’s why Inbound lead generation, a strategy that brings leads to you through valuable and relevant content, is critical for the growth of your business.

So, if you’re ready to attract leads who are genuinely interested in what you offer, this blog is for you. We’re going to walk through everything you need to know about Inbound leads and the best tactics to generate them.

What is an Inbound Lead?

An Inbound lead is someone who shows interest in your product or service by engaging with your Inbound Marketing efforts. Unlike outbound leads - where you reach out to prospects through methods like cold calls or ads - Inbound leads come to you.

These individuals are often highly motivated because they’ve actively sought out your business or engaged with your content.

Inbound leads fall into two main categories:

1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): These leads have shown interest by engaging with your marketing efforts but aren’t quite ready to make a purchase. Think of someone downloading your eBook or attending a webinar.
2. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): These leads have taken actions that indicate they’re ready to talk to sales - like requesting a demo or pricing information.

By understanding the difference, you can align your marketing and sales efforts to nurture each lead effectively.

Inbound Leads are Generated Through Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is all about attracting leads by creating valuable, relevant, and engaging content. It focuses on meeting prospects where they are, addressing their needs and pain points, and guiding them toward your business organically.

To do this successfully, you’ll need to understand the Inbound Marketing funnel (which involves the three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration and decision) and the Inbound Lead Generation Process.

There are four key stages of the Inbound Lead Generation, which target these stages of the buyer’s journey.

1. Attract: Draw in your ideal buyer personas with helpful content such as blog posts, social media, and SEO, this targets those in the awareness stage of their buyer’s journey.
2. Engage: Build relationships with leads by offering solutions through webinars, gated content, and lead magnets. This targets those in the consideration stage of their buyer’s journey.
3. Close: Turn leads into customers with personalized offers, nurturing emails, and consultations, targeting those in the decision stage of their buyer’s journey.
4. Delight: Keep customers engaged after the sale with ongoing support, loyalty programs, and exclusive updates. This helps with your customer retention and referral efforts.

9 Tactics to Help Your Business Get More Inbound Leads

1 - Use Content Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Site

High-quality content builds trust with your buyer personas and establishes your brand as an authority in not just your industry, but on your core topic areas. Most importantly, content marketing is the key driver of organic traffic to your website, which is the first step in generating leads.

Here are a few things you can do to enhance your content marketing strategy:

• Focus on evergreen content. Articles like “How-To Guides” and “Industry Trends” stay relevant and continue to attract traffic over time.
• Use video marketing to demonstrate products, share customer success stories, or simplify complex topics. Videos are highly engaging and shareable.
• Create content that speaks to your buyer personas in all stages of their buyer’s journey.
• Optimize content with strategic internal linking to guide readers toward other resources and keep them on your site longer.
• Repurpose content across formats. Turn blogs into infographics, videos, or podcasts to reach a wider audience and maximize your efforts.

2 - Make SEO a Core Piece of Your Content Marketing Strategy

The content your business creates is only as good as the search engine optimization (SEO) strategy behind it. SEO ensures your content gets found by the right people at the right time. Here are a few tips:

• Conduct keyword research to identify terms your target audience searches for. Focus on long-tail keywords to attract high-intent users.
• Focus on buyer persona-specific keywords. Tailor your content around search terms your ideal customers use. This ensures your content addresses their pain points and helps them find solutions.
• Optimize content with structured data to improve how it appears in search engine results, such as rich snippets for FAQs or reviews.
• Regularly update your blog posts to keep them fresh and relevant, which search engines favour.
• Build a backlink strategy. Reach out to reputable sites in your niche for guest posting opportunities or collaborative projects. High-quality backlinks can drive traffic and enhance your domain authority.
• Create pillar pages and supporting content. Build comprehensive pillar pages that cover broad topics in your industry, supported by blog posts, FAQs, or case studies that dive deeper into subtopics. This strategy boosts your topical authority and positions your brand as a go-to resource.

Interested in learning more about topical authority? Check out our blog, What is Topical Authority in Your SEO Strategy and How to Build It.

3 - Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation

Once you have consistent organic traffic coming to your website, it will become your company’s most powerful tool for attracting and converting Inbound leads. It's now time to optimize your website for lead generation.

• Create clear calls-to-action (CTAs) on every page. Each CTA should guide visitors toward the next logical step, like downloading a guide, signing up for a webinar, or requesting a demo.
• Offer valuable lead magnets like eBooks, templates, or free tools to incentivize visitors to share their contact information.
• Ensure your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly since most users access content on their phones.

4 - Leverage Social Media

Social media platforms, while typically not as successful as B2C, are still an important channel for B2B businesses when it comes to promoting your content and engaging with potential leads. There are a few things you can do to enhance your social media lead generation efforts, including:

• Use polls, quizzes, and surveys to interact with your audience and gain insights into their preferences.
• Post at optimal times when your audience is most active, using scheduling tools - like the one inside HubSpot - to streamline the process.
• Consider collaborating with influencers or industry experts to amplify your reach and credibility.

5 - Build Out Interactive Tools

Interactive tools can be an incredible way of generating leads for your business. Why? Because instead of passively reading a blog, your audience gets to actively engage with your brand, whether through a calculator that shows ROI or a quiz that helps them find the perfect solution.

Not only do these tools provide instant gratification, but they also give you valuable insights into what your audience needs. Think about offers such as:

• Calculators: Create tools that help users calculate ROI, savings, or potential costs.
• Quizzes: Offer assessments that match users to products or services based on their needs.
• Chatbots: Use AI-driven bots to answer common questions, qualify leads, and direct them to the right resources.

6 - Use Email Marketing to Nurture Leads

Email marketing is an effective tactic for nurturing leads and keeping your brand top-of-mind. It allows you to deliver personalized messages directly to your audience, guiding them through their buyer’s journey.

Email automation takes this a step further by enabling you to send timely, relevant content based on user behaviour, such as following up after a form submission. If you’re doing this in HubSpot, you can learn how to set up workflows in our blog - What are HubSpot Workflows (and How to Build Them).

• Segment your email lists based on behaviour, demographics, or interests for highly personalized campaigns.
• Create automated drip campaigns that nurture leads with relevant content over time.
• Include clear CTAs in your emails to guide readers to take specific actions, like registering for a webinar or downloading a case study.

7 - Host Webinars and Live Events

Webinars and virtual events provide an interactive way to educate your audience, demonstrate your expertise, and connect directly with potential leads. Unlike traditional content, these live or recorded sessions offer real-time engagement opportunities through Q&As and discussions.

When tailored to address your audience's specific challenges, webinars build trust and credibility while showcasing your products or services as solutions. They’re also an excellent way to capture contact information for follow-ups, making them a highly effective Inbound lead generation tool.

• Choose topics that solve pressing problems for your audience or highlight how your product delivers value.
• Promote your events across multiple channels, including email, social media, and your website.
• Offer exclusive resources or discounts to attendees as a thank-you for participating.

8 - Invest in Paid Search Campaigns

While Inbound Marketing focuses on organic strategies, paid advertising can provide a quicker influx of leads, especially for new businesses or campaigns. Platforms like Google Ads and social media ads enable precise targeting, allowing you to reach the right audience with tailored messaging.

Unlike traditional outbound ads, Inbound-focused paid campaigns should offer value upfront, such as promoting a free resource or webinar. With proper optimization, paid advertising becomes a complementary tactic that amplifies your Inbound efforts and generates high-quality leads.

• Run retargeting ads to re-engage visitors who didn’t convert on their first visit.
• Use geo-targeted ads to attract leads in specific regions if your business operates locally.
• Optimize your landing pages to match ad copy and provide a seamless user experience.

9 - Monitor and Improve Your Inbound Strategy With Analytics

Inbound lead generation isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it” strategy, it requires ongoing analysis and optimization. By regularly reviewing your performance metrics, you can identify what’s working and what isn’t, ensuring you focus your efforts where they deliver the best results.

Tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and CRM platforms can provide valuable insights into visitor behaviour, conversion rates, and lead quality. By continuously refining your approach based on data, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are helping you better achieve your company’s growth goals.

• Use platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce to track traffic, engagement, and conversion rates.
• Set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success, such as the number of new leads, MQLs, and SQLs.
• Regularly review your data to refine strategies, eliminate low-performing tactics, and double down on what works.

Implementing these strategies can transform your Inbound lead generation efforts, but it can also be overwhelming to tackle alone. That’s where we come in. The SummitBound team specializes in helping businesses optimize their inbound marketing strategies to generate high-quality leads and drive business growth.

Ready to take your Inbound lead generation to the next level? Contact us today!