The Lead Generation System

How to build an inbound marketing sales funnel for lead generation

Step 1: Attract people in your niche market to go to your website to engage them, to create trust, to create brand recognition, and to build your online audience for Google and Facebook remarketing.

Remarketing is done by adding both a Google and a Facebook tracking pixel to your website. Then, every person who visits your website is automatically added to your Google and Facebook remarketing audiences so you can advertise to them over and over. You then use Google and Facebook remarketing advertising to keep placing your ads in front of your audience to promote your new blog posts, to convert them into subscribers to your opt-in email list, to get them to register for and attend your free webinar, to get them to contact you through your online “contact us” lead generation form, and if you have an ecommerce website, to buy your products.

Building a large and highly targeted remarketing audience is how you create a successful online lead generation program.

Tactics you can use to attract highly targeted traffic to go to your website include:

Write and add at least one new blog post or new free content item to your blog every week. Over time this will help you get a steady volume of free traffic from the search engines. It will also help to make your website and blog the Wikipedia for your industry, which is a very good thing for generating leads and new customers. To get more free traffic from the search engines, make sure to add important search terms people in your niche market search for in your blog titles, and your HTML title tag and description meta-tags (on page search engine optimization).

Sign-up for http://triberr.com which is a free service you can use to help promote your new blog posts and where you can find great content from other people in your industry or niche market to share on social media.

• With Facebook advertising promote your blog posts on Facebook using highly targeted interest based audiences, your “Website Custom Audience” (this is your Facebook retargeting list), your Facebook Fans list, your Facebook custom audience created by uploading your in-house email list of opt-in subscribers, and your 1% Facebook Lookalike audiences. Avoid trying to generate immediate leads and sales with Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is a tool to drive highly targeted traffic to your website to begin your relationship and get those people on your remarketing audience lists. It is with remarketing that over time you nurture those people and they become leads and customers.

Think of Facebook advertising this way: just like with dating, you do not propose to the other person 1-minute into your first date. With Facebook advertising you should not try to immediately hard-sell a new person by sending them to your sales based landing page. They do not know who you are, they do not know your company, they do not trust you, and they will almost never contact you as a lead or buy from you the first time they visit your website. Just like with going on dates and marriage, you need to first go on many dates over time before you propose and get married. You first need to build a relationship and trust. It's the same thing with Internet marketing. A person may need to go to your website 5..10..20..50 times before they finally trust you enough to contact you as a lead and/or buy from you. If you try to hard sell them immediately the first time they visit your website, you will turn them off and they may never return to your website. The secret to being successful with online marketing and lead generation is to make your website and blog a magnet to your niche market by every week providing new and valuable FREE information and resources for them. This is how you build trust and show you are an expert in your field and industry. That is why you want to write and post at least one new blog post each week.

• Google AdWords advertising. Consider using both pay-per-click search advertising and display advertising. Understand that you should not be focused on generating immediate leads with Google display advertising as display advertising (banner ads) work best for getting people into the top of your sales funnel. That is why Google display advertising costs so much less per click than Google pay-per-click search advertising. It takes time to nurture and convert people who click on banner ads into leads and customers.

If you are doing very targeted Google AdWords pay-per-click search advertising, then you can send those people directly to a sales-based landing page, an opt-in page for your email list, a contact us form, or to a registration page for your free webinar. People who conduct a search on Google are generally much more motivated to take immediate action.

Just as with Facebook advertising, Google AdWords display advertising is a tool to drive targeted traffic to your website to begin your relationship and get those people on your remarketing audience list. It is with Google AdWords remarketing and Facebook remarketing that you over time convert your website visitors into leads and customers.

• Post a link to every new blog post you write on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ the personal Facebook pages of you and all of your employees, and other popular content sharing sites like Reddit, Digg, etc. Also, it is very likely that the majority of your employees have at least one social media account. Ask them to help your company by adding links to your new blog posts in their social media accounts. This helps spread the word and drive traffic to your website for free.
• Paid promotion of your blog posts on LinkedIn. This can get a bit expensive as their minimum click charge is $2 per click. However, if you sell big-ticket B2B items that have a large profit margin, you should definitely test LinkedIn advertising. It may work fantastic for you.
• Paid promotion of your blog posts on Twitter.
• Promote your blog posts to your opt-in email list.
• Create helpful videos and post them to your Youtube channel and promote them with Google AdWords for Video.
• Find businesses that have opt-in email lists of people in your niche market and contact the business owner to see if you can pay to place an ad in their next email post to their subscribers.
• Use paid blog promotion services (called Content Syndication Networks) to have your blog posts promoted on targeted websites that your niche market visits. A few content syndication networks to consider are Outbrain.com, Zemanta.com, Simplereach.com, Multivu.com, and Taboola.com.

Step 2: Use Google and Facebook remarketing ads and your email list to nurture, re-engage, and convert your past website visitors into leads and customers.

You do this by promoting your new blog posts to your remarketing lists and to your email list to get your past website visitors to come back to your website and read your new content. This is how you build trust and brand recognition.

You also create remarketing ads to attract past website visitors to go to your landing pages to subscribe to your opt-in email list by offering them your free ebook, white paper, etc., in exchange for them subscribing to your email list.

And, create remarketing ads that send people to your landing page(s) to persuade them to contact you as a lead by completing your contact form or by calling you.

Some people may convert and become a lead and a paying customer after only engaging with your website and content a couple of times. This is a very small percentage but it does happen. But the majority of people will need to visit your website several times before they will convert and become a lead and then a customer. Some will never convert. This is just the nature of people and the reality of Internet marketing.