Inbound Lead Generation: What It Is, How It Works & How to Get It Right

Let’s explore what inbound lead gen means and how the concept works. We’ll also give you some B2B lead generation tips to identify and attract leads and keep them engaged at each step of the process.

What is an inbound lead?

A lead is a potential customer who shows an interest in your product or service. An inbound lead is someone who demonstrates this by engaging with the content on your inbound marketing channels.  

For example, they might become aware of your company by reading your blog and then initiate contact with your business by signing up for your newsletter or requesting a demo.

These leads are already familiar with your brand and are interested in what you have to offer. They’re high-value leads who are closer to conversion than cold leads. Inbound leads are especially useful in B2B lead generation due to B2B’s longer sales cycles.

There’s more than one type of inbound lead:

• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) have responded to your content but aren’t ready to engage with the sales team yet.

• Sales-qualified leads (SQLs) have shown intent to purchase by reaching out to the sales team, who qualify the leads according to their budget and decision-making authority.

• Product-qualified leads (PQLs) have tested your product or service with a free trial, freemium version, or demo, and they’re ready to become paying customers.

Inbound vs outbound lead generation: The key differences

Let’s start with a quick inbound lead generation definition. It means attracting inbound leads with targeted content that appeals to a certain type of prospect and nudges them to take action. Your marketing team comes up with a strategy and distributes content across your channels.

Inbound leads then discover the content—and when they’re ready, they make contact with your company. They’re in control of how and when the interaction takes place. It works so well for B2B because these prospects like to conduct their own research before engaging with sales reps.

In outbound lead generation, however, it’s the company that initiates contact with the prospect. You’ll do this by putting your sales and marketing messages in front of people who you think will be interested in the product. You’re in control of how and when you reach them.

Many businesses choose to use a combination of the two strategies, generating inbound leads for long-term relationships and outbound ones for faster results.

Here’s a handy table to explain outbound vs. inbound lead generation:

How to generate inbound leads

Although every business will have its own way of doing things, there’s a tried-and-true process for generating inbound leads. You just need to follow the steps below:

1. Attract

The first stage involves making your brand more visible by creating a strong online presence across your marketing channels. Your aim is to provide engaging content and optimize your website so that B2B prospects can find you organically via search engines (and social media).

These people are at the start of the buyer’s journey, looking for interesting content that provides value in terms of solving their problems and answering their questions. They’ll want to see blog articles with how-to guides and infographics, plus landing pages, videos, and whitepapers.

However, you don’t want to attract just anybody. To generate high-quality leads, you have to target people who are likely to be genuinely interested in your products and services. This involves knowing your ideal audience and creating content to draw them in.

You’re looking for leads who match your buyer personas and your specific Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs). In other words, those with characteristics and needs that are a good fit for your offering. You can use behavioral data to monitor engagement with your content and adjust as needed.

2. Engage

The next stage of inbound marketing lead generation is to engage your prospects and turn them into warm leads. To target them effectively, you’ll need information from them—such as their name, email address, location, and details about their business.

Typically, people need a little encouragement to hand over this valuable data. You can do this by offering them something equally valuable in exchange. For example, they could provide their contact details in order to access your exclusive gated content.

Once someone does this, they officially become an inbound lead. You can use their information to engage them further through targeted lead nurturing activities, sending personalized content and offers based on their interests and behavior.

If you can show that (a) you understand their pain points and (b) your product can solve them, these leads will move gradually closer to a purchasing decision. It’s your job to guide them through this journey with educational and entertaining content.

It’s important to figure out the level of purchase intent so that you can concentrate on the hottest leads. Marketers should score each lead, assigning points for different responses, such as requesting a demo or clicking through to your site from social media. The highest-scoring leads are ready to move to the next part of the sales funnel.

It’s even possible to reengage with past customers. Check out our Playbook on how to engage visitors returning to your website to learn how.

3. Close

You’ve worked on lead qualification during the engagement stage. When you classify a lead as sales-qualified—meaning that they match your ICP and rank highly in the lead scoring process—it’s time to hand them over to the sales reps.

The sales team is responsible for nudging warm leads over the finish line and getting them to make a purchase. They’ll use their expertise and powers of persuasion combined with the information gathered by the marketing team in the earlier stages.

This stage involves continuing to engage the leads to turn them into opportunities and move them through the sales process. Sales reps will provide personalized consultations, demonstrate the product or service, and discuss any queries or objections—and hopefully close the deal.

Not every lead will get this far, even if they appear to be a perfect target. Sometimes, the sales team will disqualify a lead after an introductory call, in which it becomes clear that the lead isn’t as interested as they first seemed.

4. Delight

Even when the deal is closed and the lead has become a paying customer, that’s not the end of the process. You don’t want this purchase to be the only one they ever make or for them to cancel their subscription a few weeks down the road. It’s essential that you do everything possible to delight them and strengthen the new relationship.

The “delight” stage can involve input from the marketing, sales, and customer success teams. You’ll need to follow up with each customer after a purchase to thank them for their custom and to make sure they’re happy with the product or service.

This includes personalized onboarding for subscription services and robust product support. It’s also important to collect feedback from customers. This makes them feel like you value their opinions, and helps you gather information to improve your offering.

Marketers should continue to reach out to customers with engaging content. The longer the relationship goes on, the more you’ll learn about their needs and preferences and the more you can tailor the messaging with personalized emails and dynamic web content.

Farther down the line, you can stay in touch (not too frequently!) to see if they need anything else from you. This is an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell and tell them about exciting offers, such as loyalty schemes or corporate events.

The idea is not only to encourage more purchases but also to inspire customers to become advocates and promoters. These are the people who will happily recommend your business to others, which is free marketing for you!

Effective elements of an inbound lead generation strategy

An inbound lead gen strategy is made up of multiple parts. Let’s take a look at how to generate inbound sales leads with a mix of content and an optimized website experience:

Traditional content marketing

Traditional content marketing is still at the heart of a successful inbound lead gen strategy. You’ll need to create a continuous stream of engaging content to attract prospects to your website and keep them informed and entertained.

The higher the quality of your content, the better the quality of your leads. All your content has to provide genuine value to the prospect—solving a problem, meeting a need, or offering a unique perspective on a topic. It must also demonstrate the value of your product or service.

So, what types of content should you include? 

Blogs remain popular, allowing you to write about various industry-related topics that prospects might be searching for—while subtly promoting your own product in a non-pushy way. How-to guides and glossaries are useful for prospects, too.

Guest blogging, where your articles are published on other sites or where you publish blogs from guest authors on your site, is a great way to vary your content and demonstrate authority. It all helps to create a good impression of your business and its network.

You should aim to produce content for various stages of the buyer’s journey. For instance, prospects in the awareness stage should see general content covering industry topics, while product comparison articles are helpful for those who are on the cusp of making a purchase decision.

Don’t forget lead magnet content, designed to encourage prospects to give you their contact details in return for something valuable. This might be a white paper, an eBook, an industry report, or a free template. The signup forms for these should always be short and simple.

By combining lead magnet content with website visitor tracking, you can identify open opportunities visiting your website and personalize your outreach strategy.

Company newsletters are great lead magnets, as long as the copy is engaging and doesn’t only serve to toot your own horn. You can also send out educational content by email during the lead nurturing stage.

Multimedia content

There’s a growing appetite for multimedia content from businesses, as prospects are keen to consume content in a variety of formats. Video marketing is a great way to engage visitors to your website, whether it’s product demos or explainers that answer common questions. 

For example, Dealfront Stream provides a library of videos that include interviews with experts and entrepreneurs who share their sales and marketing skills with you. 

You can also use video to introduce key people in your company and show what happens behind the scenes. For instance, you could have the founder talk about their vision and values. You might also ask existing customers to provide a short video testimonial. This helps you build trust.

In 2024, short-form video and live-streaming video were among the marketing formats that earned the highest return on investment (ROI). But they’re by no means the only multimedia content you should use. Podcasts are hugely popular—by 2029, there are expected to be over 110 million podcast listeners in the US alone.

Webinars are also an opportunity to engage prospects. Choose a topic based on something your target audience is searching for online, and either host the webinar yourself or invite a guest speaker. 

Those who attend can download resources, participate in polls and surveys during the event, and join a Q&A afterward (giving you a chance to assess their pain points).

You’ll be able to get insights into participant engagement by monitoring how long they spent attending an event and whether they responded to the content. As with engagement data from traditional content, the marketing team can use the results to optimize their multimedia strategy.

Remember to include a few interactive elements, such as quizzes and calculators on your website and on social media, and enable prospects to share them with others.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of B2B inbound lead generation. As we mentioned earlier, B2B prospects prefer to carry out extensive research online before deciding to make a purchase—so you have to make sure your presence is easily discoverable.

To do that, you need an optimized website that appeals to both visitors and search engines. The likes of Google and Bing rank websites according to various criteria, and this governs the order in which they appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If your site is listed among the top results when a potential customer searches for a phrase or topic online, you’ll generate more organic traffic. Consistently high SERP rankings also help you to build credibility and trust, positioning you as an industry authority. This is crucial when selling to other businesses.

You’ll need to optimize your content for search intent, making sure it answers prospects’ questions so that the website pops up in their search. Conduct keyword research to find out what search terms people are using, especially those used by key decision-makers in businesses.

You can then make a list of target keywords and scatter them strategically in your content, including in page titles and headers, body text, URLs, meta descriptions, and alt text. But avoid keyword stuffing, which comes off as unnatural. Long-form, in-depth content tends to perform best.

Optimizing the technical elements of your website is equally important, as visitors won’t stay for long without a smooth experience. Consider the design and layout for easy navigation, and make sure all pages are quick to load and optimized for mobile users. 

That way, prospects will spend longer exploring your site, and they’ll be more likely to convert in the long run.

Finally, link-building is another way to win the hearts of the search engines. Include internal links to relevant content within your site, plus external links to authoritative websites.

Check out this conversation between Sanjana Murali, Product Marketing Manager at Dealfront, and Manoj Palanikumar, Co-Founder and Director of Strategy at TripleDart Digital, for more examples of how to get B2B SEO right.

Social media

Most of your potential customers use social media—you just need to figure out which platforms are best suited to your particular industry and target audience. For instance, businesses marketing to younger people might use TikTok or Instagram.

For many B2B companies, though, it’s all about LinkedIn. Here, you can target specific businesses by industry type, company size, or location. According to Statista, LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform among B2B marketers, with 86% of them using it.

Whichever platform your audience is on, you want to make sure you are adding content that provides value to their feed. Posts should be engaging and easy to access. Try posting a snippet from your blog and a link that encourages clicks through to your landing page or website. 

While click-throughs are useful, don’t forget about creating zero-click content. When you produce content with no expectation of clicks through to your website, you are still building community with your audience and keeping your brand fresh in their mind.

Don’t forget, social media is very visual, so consider turning a blog post into a colorful infographic or using a carousel of images. These are particularly effective for yielding higher engagement rates for LinkedIn posts.

Interactive content is always a winner, so run a poll or a quiz—the answers will reveal valuable data about the prospect. You can also participate in topical discussions and encourage your own employees to share your content and post about your company culture. Always respond quickly to comments and direct messages.

Social media advertising can also be a way to promote your content, but you’ll have to pay for this. It’s important to monitor prospects’ activities and engagement with posts and paid ads to find new topics for content and ensure you’re targeting the right segments.

Supercharge your inbound lead generation with Dealfront’s help

Inbound lead generation is essential for B2B marketers, helping you to focus on warm leads with genuine interest and letting leads interact with you at their convenience. It’s a key part of building long-term relationships with prospects who go on to become loyal customers.

There are various lead generation companies providing software for the inbound approach, but the Dealfront platform gives you a complete set of tools in one place—all designed for the B2B market.

Thanks to a B2B contact database that’s fully compliant with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), you can discover companies that match your ICP and find the contact details for key decision-makers. The Connect tool qualifies your targets and gives insights into their operations, while Target identifies similar companies.

Meanwhile, the Leadfeeder tracker tells you who’s visiting your website and lets you filter and segment them. You can monitor the activities of your target accounts and look out for signals of buying intent—and get notifications when trigger events occur.

The Promote tool delivers programmatic display ads to your target companies’ IP addresses, while Datacare enables you to maintain accurate company data. Dealfront also offers multiple integrations with your favorite tools, helping sales and marketing teams work together for maximum success.