Growing your inbound leads is necessary for a B2B business to be successful and profitable over time. Inbound lead generation refers to the process of creating ‘owned’ content on your website that attracts visitors and converts them into leads. Once you have leads, you can then nurture them into sales opportunities and close them over time.

So how do you increase your number of inbound leads? Here are our top tips.

Develop a buyer persona

If you don’t understand your audience, your marketing may end up completely off message. Connecting with your audience is key for increasing your number of inbound leads. The struggle most companies have with driving inbound leads is being able to deepen audience engagement. One way to get around this is by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your client. It embodies their thoughts, feelings, and goals. This information is used as a guide for your team to better pinpoint who you’re trying to communicate with, paying special attention to what motivates them to buy.

Create more content

Having enough content is vital for your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Your content must be relevant to your audience and include keywords that will draw people in. If your content isn’t very good, your visitor bounce rate will be higher. The point of your website content is to drive people to your site, keep them there and convert them into leads. Having an active blog and creating a diverse variety of content will help drive more traffic to your website. By utilizing your buyer personas when brainstorming content topic ideas you will end up creating content that is of interest to your main customer base.

Promote your content

You’ve worked hard to create your content, so don’t neglect showing it off! Don’t let your blog posts sit idle on your site, waiting for someone to find them. Social media is highly effective in gaining visibility for your company. The more people who are aware of your company, the more leads you’re likely to snag. The more places and more often you share your content the more likely people will be to engage with that content. Don’t waste an opportunity by leaving your content unshared!

Improve your call-to-actions

Your call-to-action (CTA) is arguably one of the most important pieces to the puzzle when trying to generate inbound leads. This is the part that encourages people to act, rather than just observe. Make sure that the message of what you’re offering through your call-to-action is clear. Rather than simply saying “Download now”, be more specific and tell your audience exactly what benefits they would be gaining by downloading. Whether your call to action is on your website or in an email, use colors that contrast and make your CTA pop! You don’t want your message to be lost in the noise, so be sure to make it stand out. You should also include a call to action on every blog post and on the most relevant pages of your site to really drive it home.

Don’t become discouraged

Whatever you do, don’t become discouraged when chasing after inbound leads. Results will not happen overnight. The process takes time to build but as long as you create a solid foundation for attracting leads your hard work will ultimately pay off.

About Lauren Usrey: Lauren is a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a marketing communications intern at Swyft. She supports clients with social media, blogging and tech PR activities. Swyft has offices in Austin, Denver and Houston and provides digital marketing and PR services for tech companies seeking rapid, sustained growth. Some of the services provided include content marketing, social media strategy and ad buys, email marketing, and media relations.