An incoming lead from your website is like an unexpected gift. Here’s how inbound marketing can generate leads and increase sales.

First things first. What exactly is “inbound marketing”?

Inbound marketing is a strategy that attracts visitors to your website, converts those visitors into leads, and then nurtures those leads into becoming delighted customers.

Turning Strangers into Visitors

Attracting visitors requires “bait”—like blog articles that address a problem or question your potential customer has.

For example, a problem for a nonprofit development director is, how do I acquire more donors?

Or a business owner may wonder, what social media platforms should I be on?

Turning Visitors into Leads

We use social media, email marketing, and search engine optimization to make our blog articles “findable.” Once that business owner or development director discovers our article, we offer more in-depth information on the topic… such as an ebook that requires they fill out a contact form to obtain.

And voila! A visitor becomes a lead.

Turning Leads into Customers

via GIPHY

Not every lead is sales-ready. We nurture the ones that aren’t by sending them additional information that continues to addresses the problem that originally brought them to our site.

Those that continue to engage with our content may progress from the Awareness Stage to the Consideration Stage to the Decision Stage and become customers.

The Buyer’s Journey

Not every lead becomes a customer. But no matter where someone is in the Buyer’s Journey, inbound marketing allows you to interact with them each step of the way: by offering valuable content that will help them make a decision.

The end-goal of any marketing you do—including inbound—is to create and keep a customer. Inbound marketing is an effective means of doing exactly that.