How to generate leads online

For many companies, trade shows and cold calling no longer suffice to drive the right leads and sales opportunities in a scalable way. Here are some tips for how to generate leads online.

(1) Define your target audience and buyer group and their needs

Buyer personas help marketing teams and writers better frame content, pitches, workflows, lead acquisition questions and scripts around the potential client. Learn how to create buyer personas. From there, it's vital to define a value proposition around their needs.

• Define buyer personas and needs
• Create value proposition in relation to buyer personas

(2) Set up your measurement process and tools

Analytics and measurement of inbound marketing efforts are critical to understanding ROI and selecting the right tactics on future efforts. We use Hubspot in combination with Google Analytics to track, measure and define our strategic efforts. It's important to not be fixated on vanity marketing metrics and focus marketing initiatives on tracking hard data points that relate to business impact.

Here are some examples:

• Leads generated by month (compared to previous periods)
• Leads and sales qualified leads generated by channel (such as PPC, search, social media)
• Landing page conversion rates (from prospect to lead)
• Lead to SQL conversion rate
• Opportunties by marketing channel

(3) Set up your lead acquisition technology

Lead management technology can be vital to ensure that leads don't fall through the cracks.  Again, we use Hubspot for this. It's vital to use the knowledge and insights from your buyer personas to define the right questions and data points to collect as leads are acquired.

• Set up lead management technology
• Define forms and questions
• Integrate Hubspot (or another acuisition tool) with your website (We also recommend using Hubspot COS)

(4) Use a data-driven, Inbound marketing approach

The stats on Inbound Marketing are impressive. We strongly believe that Inbound Marketing is more scalable and effective than outbound efforts. Learn more about Inbound vs Outbound. Inbound marketing focuses on creating great content and conversion points that attract, educate and inform prospects to generate sales leads and opportunities.

54% more leads are generated by inbound tactics than traditional paid marketing. – HubSpot State of Inbound, 2014

(5) Learn from your results. Test, measure and evolve your practice.

Measurement should be at all stages of your marketing process--from the beginning and through each iteration. By measuring and learning from past efforts, you can improve your conversion rates and lead quality. An agile approach to marketing simply works better. Aligning marketing and sales efforts are vital to the process of tracking ROI.