Online lead generation can come through many avenues. Inbound Marketing is when you attract leads and prospects to you. These kinds of leads typically are more valuable because they are looking for your product or service and they have a higher likelihood of buying from you.
Here at Buzzoodle we use blogging for lead generation. By writing articles in a very particular way you can attract leads to your blog and it can be formatted in a special way to make the call to action more noticeable as well as automatically optimize for search engines.
When you look at other companies talking about Inbound Marketing they primarily talk about three avenues. Blogging, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. Social media has grown in importance over the last few years. While it has been a hot trend for longer, the way social media is now increasing traffic as well as improving search cannot be ignored. If you look at Google+ you will see that it feeds visibility into the top 10 on search for many people now. When you are doing SEO you may take many months trying to get that kind of visibility.
Now does that mean social media for lead generation is better? Not yet – but you should do it too. There are a couple of reasons I still believe that Social Media is less valuable as a lead generation too.
- Most people on social media sites are not in buy mode – they are having fun or promoting themselves.
- SEO and Blogging eventually build up a solid asset – your social media accounts also can grow in strength but are built on a shakier foundation and cannot be sold to someone else typically.
- Some social sites are not visible to Google which limits the SEO value of backlinks in those sites.
But if you do take the time to cultivate a great group of people following you and you do not promote yourself so heavily that you turn people off, you will find that social media for lead generation can work for any industry.