Inbound Lead Generation 2024: The Only Ultimate Guide You Need

Olivia Milton 08 Aug 2024

The way B2B companies generate leads in 2024 is incomparable to how it used to be just a couple of years ago. In other words, those strategies that did wonders in the past simply aren’t that effective now.

Primarily, this is due to the unprecedented shift in the balance of power in the buying process. Like it or not, nowadays, the buyers are in full control.

They have the ability and preference to research products and solutions on their own, dictating when and how they would like to engage with sales teams, and businesses have to fall in line.

Outbound sales and marketing strategies like unsolicited emails and cold calls have shown a steady decline in ROI, whereas, inbound tactics have become fully aligned with the new realities.

Instead of interrupting modern buyers, inbound ensures that they are greeted with valuable assistance throughout their self-guided buyer journey, usually in the form of diverse content like blog articles, peer reviews, interactive demos, webinars, videos, and the list goes on.

inbound lead generation: tools and mechanics

In this article, we’ll explore how to make the most of your inbound strategy to effectively attract, engage, and convert potential buyers into long-term customers while respecting their preferences.

What is B2B inbound lead generation?

First things first, let’s cover the basics: What is inbound lead generation?

Inbound lead generation refers to the process of attracting potential buyers and converting them into leads with targeted marketing content and campaigns, eventually drawing them into the sales funnel.

Unlike outbound sales and marketing, inbound focuses on leads coming to the company, not the other way around.

With numerous inbound strategies like content, SEO, social media, webinars, etc., companies lay out a trail of valuable assistance that guides potential customers throughout their buyer journey, which can often be simplified into three common stages:

b2b inbound lead generation process

While doing so, businesses build a strong online presence to ensure they are easily discovered by interested prospects through search engines and social media, so that when they are ready to make a purchase—their product is on the buyers’ radar.

Throughout this ‘trail’, businesses will often offer a fair exchange—their valuable content like eBooks and webinars for buyers’ contact information, which then allows companies to further nurture them with their consent.

As a result of focusing on providing value over selling, inbound marketing not only draws in potential customers but also builds trust and a positive brand perception among your audience.

Inbound vs outbound lead generation

Even though inbound is undoubtedly the best way to connect with your audience in 2024, to effectively and consistently generate leads, companies ought to have both inbound and outbound lead generation strategies, ideally—interconnected, that is, working together in fusion.

At their core, outbound is a proactive and disruptive lead generation method, whereas, inbound is a slower but steadier strategy to generate leads while playing by the rules of buyers.

Inbound is quite easy to scale in our digital-centered world compared to traditional outbound like cold emails and cold calls (there’s only so much you can bombard your audience with!).

And if we’re talking long-term—it also becomes a much more cost-effective way to generate leads, because once buyers are ready to talk to sales, they are warmed up and have a positive perception of your brand.

The inbound marketing lead generation process

The inbound B2B lead generation process begins with the marketing team formulating a clear strategy that outlines the content for each stage of the buyer journey, channels used to distribute it, and tactics to help buyers progress towards a purchase.

Marketing teams need to have a crystal clear understanding of their buyers’ journey: what type of content they consume, what are their main common pain points, and how they think and behave at each stage from awareness to decision-making.

Only then can companies effectively segment their audience to create personalized and highly relevant content that will entice potential customers to take an interest in your company.

While inbound is predominantly a marketing process, the most successful companies ensure a solid alignment with sales teams (especially, with sales development teams), who have first-hand expertise in the target audience—who they are, how to attract them, and which leads convert best.

Once a potential customer shows signs of interest, for example, by filling out a contact form to access one of your content pieces or attending a webinar, they become a new inbound lead for your business.

There are two main types of B2B inbound leads:

MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): a prospect who has engaged with your marketing content and shown interest but is not yet ready to interact directly with your sales team.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): a prospect who has demonstrated a clear intent to purchase and is ready for direct engagement with your sales team.

How inbound generates leads

Let’s put theory into practice and take a look at how the inbound lead generation engine works with a simple yet common example:

inbound marketing lead generation process

Creating your inbound lead generation strategy

When it comes to crafting your inbound strategy, things may seem overwhelming at first glance, but, the truth is—once you set the right processes in place, it becomes an automated, evergreen lead generation engine.

Now, let’s go through the step-by-step process that will help you create a powerful inbound lead generation strategy:

Diversify your lead magnets

When it comes to inbound lead magnets, in other words, ways to attract your audience, content is king.

Most modern buyer journeys start with a potential customer going online and googling something relevant to their business pain point or opportunity. This is where informative and valuable content pieces in the form of blog articles, how-to guides, or eBooks are the gateway to your company’s website.

Leaning back to the 3 main stages of the B2B buyer journey, marketing teams have to ensure that the content they produce is aligned with each separate stage.

So, for instance, there should be a mix of educational content on broad industry-related topics for awareness, more specialized solution-oriented content for consideration, and product-centered content like feature comparison articles for the decision stage.

Taking it a step further, it’s a common practice for B2B companies to ‘gate’ long-form content like eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies, where interested readers would have to fill in their name and email to gain access. If the information you provide is of value, this would be a fair exchange in the eyes of your website visitors.

Additionally, with the rise of video content throughout our everyday lives, B2B teams should supplement their content strategy with video tutorials, short-form how-to videos, and webinars to diversify their reach.

But why stop there? Lead magnets are about finding ways to provide genuine value to your potential customers, and that could be virtually anything your creative brains can think of — online industry-related calculators, quizzes, podcast libraries, email signature generators, and so on.

For example, one of our favorite (and top-performing) lead magnets here at Reply.io is our extensive email template library which provides everyone with free, battle-tested templates to improve their business outreach. And while they aren’t gated and accessible to everyone out there, they allow us to provide value to our target audience while building our brand awareness, so it seems like a win-win to us!

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Boost your visibility

Creating valuable and engaging content is just half the battle. Making sure it’s visible and accessible to your audience is just as important.

This is why it’s imperative to leverage the power of SEO (search engine optimization), which refers to the various strategies that ensure your content links get those prime top positions in Google search results.

Think about the last time you googled something, you probably checked out the first, second, and perhaps third links that Google presented for your search query. Well, SEO (coupled with quality content) is the absolute best way to ensure your company gets those top positions when your target audience searches for their business queries.

SEO involves having a keyword strategy – focusing on including strategic keywords in your text, headings, meta tags, and landing pages that Google prioritizes when deciding who gets what spot in the search results. Once again, this is only the case in the context of quality content, so don’t expect SEO to do its magic if you’re producing irrelevant and unhelpful content.

SEO also refers to your linking strategy, that is, the internal and external links you use in your content. Strategic link-building cooperation with other reputable industry sites will boost your domain authority (and increase brand awareness), once again, making it easier for potential buyers to come across your website.

On the topic of co-marketing initiatives, B2B marketing teams also invest their resources in content partnerships like blog exchanges and influencer marketing to further grow their brand reach and establish thought leadership within their industry.

Last but not least, social media is a powerful distribution channel to share your content, engage with your audience, and provide value that has the potential to generate high-intent leads. Social selling on LinkedIn is one of the best, non-intrusive ways for B2B companies to enhance their inbound strategy, but social media is also a great place for interactive posts, posting helpful resources, and running ads.

Lead scoring

If you’ve put thought into creating valuable, diverse, and most importantly relevant lead magnets, and supplemented them with SEO and extra distribution channels to ensure they are visible to your audience, chances are—your website will start receiving a substantial amount of traffic.

But one thing to keep in mind is that, with inbound, far from every person who reads your content, registers for your webinar, or uses one of your free online tools is in fact a potential buyer who falls into your ideal customer profile.

So, the next step in your inbound lead generation strategy is to qualify your inbound leads.

Lead qualification is the process of separating leads into those who have the potential to eventually make a purchase and those who don’t.

The best way to do this is lead scoring.

By designing a framework of assigning scores to your leads based on their demographics and company information, as well as their specific actions taken (website visit, content download, webinar attendance, etc.), companies can have an objective idea of which leads to prioritize with nurturing efforts.

For instance, leads that download a gated piece of content may be assigned +2 points, leads that attend a product-related webinar — +5 points, and perhaps, once a lead reaches 10 points, they are ready for your sales team to reach out and begin their sales nurturing to see if there’s a fit.

With AI taking strides in the B2B space, there are now ways to completely automate your lead scoring and qualification process with predictive analytics. While there are some dedicated tools designed specifically for this task, there are other neat ways to get this done on autopilot, and one of them is with an AI Chatbot integrated into your website.

By scraping data from your website visitors and answering their queries, an AI Chatbot can score the purchase-readiness of your inbound leads to determine whether they are an MQL or an SQL, giving insights to your sales and marketing teams on how to best engage them (more on that in the next point).

Chat Smarter, Close Faster

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Lead nurturing

Your diverse SEO-powered lead magnets attracted potential customers to your website, you’ve qualified them based on their demographics and behavior, and now it’s time to effectively nurture those who’ve shown interest in your solution.

Considering this is still part of your inbound strategy, the main objective stays the same — to provide value and assistance throughout their buyer journey, not push for the sale.

Once again, this is where an AI Chatbot can do wonders for your business!

Trained on your company’s knowledge base and common queries asked, your AI Chatbot has more than enough to effectively provide personalized assistance to your website visitors 24/7, ensuring that potential leads receive a positive experience with your company and get their questions answered right away.

Another battle-tested B2B lead nurturing method is creating effective inbound email marketing campaigns with relevant content that further provides value to your leads through their buyer journey.

After segmenting inbound leads into separate buyer personas, based on common criteria like behavior, industry, and stage in the buyer journey, marketing teams are enabled to deliver highly relevant and tailored drip content that matches your leads’ preferences.

Supplementing that with automated behavioral triggers for the most common actions like downloading an eBook or attending a webinar will ensure your inbound emails are always right on time, providing a top-quality brand experience and moving your leads further down the sales funnel.

Leads who have shown strong interest can be engaged with a more direct inbound qualification email to get the ball rolling right away.

Sales and marketing fusion

As previously mentioned, inbound lead generation produces the best results when sales and marketing teams are in sync, with unified goals and KPIs.

Ensuring that both these customer-facing teams are working towards the same objectives and sharing crucial information back and forth will ensure that the business is continuously creating the most optimal inbound magnets, content, CTAs, emails, and so on.

Ongoing sales feedback from their communications, meetings, and demos will give marketing teams invaluable insights into how their target customers think and behave, what they are most often looking for in a product, and why they make or don’t make a purchase. Marketing teams can use this information to create the most relevant content pieces, webinars, social media posts, etc. to optimize their inbound efforts.

Vice versa, marketing teams can help sales teams better understand and ‘close’ prospects with insights from their inbound campaigns — which types of customers respond to what type of content, and why.

Automation and optimization

In B2B business in 2024, automation is everything. It will literally determine how successful you are in an increasingly competitive environment, how effectively you can reach your audience, and ultimately — how much revenue your sales and marketing efforts will generate.

Inbound lead generation is no different, and it’s crucial to gear up with the necessary tools to make sure your efforts pay off. For instance, your business could use:

an AI writing tool like WriterSonic to help you with generating quality and diverse content;
a social media management tool like Hootsuite for scheduling, improving, and analyzing your SMM efforts;
a dedicated outreach tool like Reply.io to generate and engage inbound leads with automated email or multichannel campaigns;
an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to help you find the most in-demand keywords and other content elements to secure top search results;
a CRM tool of your choice to keep a detailed record of your sales funnel and ensure data flow across teams.

The exact tools you will need will solely depend on the types of inbound lead generation strategies you will use, but one word of advice is to go for the more consolidated software out there that covers several different processes to avoid oversaturating your tool stack.

For instance, businesses that use Reply.io can effectively generate and engage inbound leads with multichannel, AI-powered outreach campaigns, qualify and nurture inbound leads with a trainable AI Chatbot, and optimize campaign performance with powerful analytics features.

On top of that, Reply.io offers numerous features specifically designed for lead generation agencies to leverage the full power of AI and automation for their clients.

Catch Leads on Autopilot

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Generate leads with the power of inbound

Businesses deciding whether to invest their resources in inbound should keep in mind that it’s the most aligned with modern buyers lead generation method out there.

Not only does inbound offer a non-intrusive way to attract and engage with potential customers but it also builds your brand awareness and credibility in the process, which is a crucial element of longevity in B2B.

So take the time to evaluate your current lead generation strategies and consider how you could further refine them to ensure that once your potential customers get ready to make a purchase — your product will be on their list of options.

At the end of the day, mastering inbound lead generation goes far beyond 2024, it’s the future of B2B, given the increasingly digital and buyer-controlled nature of the market.