5 Ways to Drive Inbound Leads

Generating inbound leads is a fundamental goal of any B2B business. Inbound marketing — the practice of attracting visitors to your website to nurture them into leads — increases your pool of customers and yields an attractive ROI. When stacked against paid ads, stats show inbound marketing generates triple the leads for every dollar spent. 

Inbound lead gen touches nearly every aspect of modern digital marketing. Brand marketing, social media, virtual events, webinars — each are an element that can contribute to inbound marketing and help organizations meet their goals.

The takeaway? And how to drive inbound leads? If you’re not practicing inbound marketing, it’s time to start.

But how do you begin? What strategies are most effective and where should you focus to attract as many leads as possible?

Read on to discover how to generate inbound leads with five highly effective inbound marketing strategies.

 1. Optimize Your Content Strategy for Effective Inbound Lead Generation

Identifying this content is a matter of regularly reviewing content performance. Often, this can be done through tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush and others.

But not all content holds the same value. A static webpage, like a blog, can only tell how long a person visited, how much they read and if they went anywhere on your website after hitting your landing page.

Engaging content, like content hubs and webinars, can tell you what visitors are actively engaging with, what they’re looking for and provide them the opportunity to talk directly with you. For example, content hubs — like those powered by ON24 Engagement Hub — can provide insights into the popular content types and topics that generate the most engagement.

Webinars can take engagement insights even further. Attendees can talk directly to sales representatives via chat, download resources and participate in polls and surveys during the event. Webinar producers can also see how long visitors attend an event and how often they engage with the content and messaging.

With this information in hand, marketers can use these insights to optimize their content strategy around topics and formats that drive measurable results.

See engagement data in action. Check out how you can achieve more with ON24.

2. Host Webinars to Attract Inbound Leads

Blogging is one of the most widely used content types for attracting inbound leads. However, if you want to broaden your reach and enhance your inbound lead generation efforts, you should consider webinar hosting.

Hosting informative webinars is a cost-effective way to establish yourself as an industry expert and can help you reach a broader audience.

Webinars can help you capture, nurture and convert leads effectively – in fact, data shows that 20-40% of webinar attendees enter the sales pipeline as qualified leads.

An interesting topic will attract audiences with a knowledgeable host or panel. But more importantly, this virtual event can allow your team to engage directly with participants for upwards of an hour.

Think about that for a moment: in an hour, you can capture audience attention, directly learn their pain points — whether through chat, polling, or Q&A — provide meaningful, relevant content and measure their overall interest in your solution with engagement data.

Your marketing and sales teams can easily take action with this engagement data in hand. Marketing can easily segment and nurture based on activity. Sales can seamlessly continue the conversation based on an attendee’s participation.

The options are limitless.

3. Launch Engaging Social Media Campaigns

Another powerful way to generate inbound leads is through social media marketing. It’s an effective channel for building brand recognition, establishing trust, and attracting meaningful relationships. Perhaps that’s why 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation.

However, to effectively gain inbound leads from social media marketing, you must plan ahead. Simply sharing blog posts and events on social media is not enough.

Instead, social media strategy should be based on engagement and sharing your brand’s positioning on given topics. This means having your subject matter experts participate in conversations and encouraging employees to share more about your company’s culture and values.

This often means keeping a bead on industry trends and personalities for inbound marketers. With a firm grasp of industry changes, you can identify the content you want to share, set up a content calendar, and schedule your social posts.

It’s essential to monitor the results of your social media efforts, whether they be employee advocacy, multi-media or a drive behind a particular campaign.

Another thing to remember is that not all social platforms are the same. Effective inbound marketing lead generation requires tailoring your content accordingly. Every platform attracts different types of users looking for a different content experience, which you should carefully consider.

For instance, the audience’s expectations of TikTok videos differ significantly from those of YouTube. Likewise, audiences on Facebook have very different expectations of how they’ll interact with a business than they would on LinkedIn.

However, you don’t need to create different content for every platform. Consider repurposing existing content for use across various channels.

For example, you could break up a long-form seminar or a how-to video created for YouTube into multiple bite-sized content experiences for platforms like TikTok or Instagram.

If you’re keen to accelerate your lead generation strategy and think about getting inbound leads quickly, social media is one of the fastest ways to see improvements.

 4. Enhance SEO Strategies to Boost Inbound Marketing Leads

If you want to generate inbound leads, you’ll also need to devote a lot of time to implementing strong search engine optimization. SEO (search engine optimization)  is the practice of optimizing your website and content so it will rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO is essential for inbound marketing and with a 14.6% lead close rate, can drive some serious ROI. Without good SEO in place, you may lose out on opportunities to connect with audiences interested in what you offer. 

Some of the fundamental SEO practices include:

• • Optimizing website loading speed
  • Keyword research
  • Incorporating relevant keywords into your pages and content
  • Making it easier for search engines to read and understand your website
  • Optimizing images for accessibility and loading speed
  • Attracting links from other websites

 Incorporate Google’s E.E.A.T Principles

Google is the standard search engine for audiences. So, what kind of content performs well on Google?

Generally, the search engine prioritizes content meeting the EEAT (shorthand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) principle. Google’s aim is to ensure that its users can rely on the content they click on being trustworthy. To do this, Google encourages publishers to follow its EEAT guidelines.

This often means publishing in-depth, long-form content that is engaging, clear and informative. However, this isn’t the crux of what EEAT is about. It all comes down to the following:

• • Demonstrating Experience: Demonstrating experience of the subject matter could be achieved through sharing first-hand accounts, including relevant experience in author bios, or incorporating reviews from real-life customers.
  • Showcasing Expertise: It’s important that the content creator has relevant credentials that make them qualified to talk about the topic. Adding expert sources for any claims you make can also help showcase expertise.
  • Building Authoritativeness: Earning backlinks from other sites is one of the most important ways to show that you’re a recognized authority on the subject. Authority can also be built by increasing the amount of content you’ve published around a specific subject.
  • Establishing Trustworthiness: Trust can be established by keeping content accurate and up-to-date, publishing easy-to-access contact details and data usage policies, and showcasing trust signals such as industry publications you’ve appeared in.

Google wants to provide its users with the most relevant and reliable information, meaning comprehensive, high-quality content that adheres to EEAT principles is more likely to get you inbound leads over time. Another benefit of creating high-quality content is that more people are likely to link to it, which is highly advantageous from an SEO perspective.

5. Fine-Tune Your Website Design To Encourage Conversions

Getting someone to your website is one thing, but you need to ensure your site and its content are easy to understand and navigate. 42% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality, with potential leads ending up looking for better solutions elsewhere.

To avoid this, work with your web development team or agency to optimize your site’s layout, navigability and readability for both search engines and humans.

There are many ways you can drive traffic to your website and turn that traffic into inbound marketing leads. If you’re unsure where to start optimizing your website, ask yourself a few questions. These can be:

• • Can visitors easily navigate the site?
  • Is your contact page easily accessible?
  • Can your visitors easily navigate to product/solution pages accessible from every page on the website?
  • Is your content easy to read?

If not, devote some time and resources to revamping elements of your website. A best practice is to implement an A/B testing regime to find what works best for your audience.

Additional Strategies and Emerging Trends for Inbound Lead Generation

Inbound lead gen strategies progress as quickly as the tools and platforms that facilitate them. If you’re wondering how to increase inbound leads in 2025, here are some key emerging trends to explore:

• • AI lead nurturing: AI-powered tools and chatbots can engage with audiences directly, providing answers to questions, offering personalized content recommendations, and sending automated follow-up emails. This allows for 24/7 lead nurturing and a better experience for potential inbound leads.
  • Intent targeting: Inbound lead gen is becoming more advanced with the rise of intent-based marketing. By focusing on intent signals, you can create content and campaigns that match your target audience’s interests and needs, attracting highly relevant leads inbound to your sales pipeline.
  • Interactive experiences: Interactive experiences are naturally more engaging as they involve some degree of participation. Utilizing interactive features in your webinars and blog posts (e.g. Q&A sessions or online calculators) offers more value to your audience, gives you points to follow-up on, and creates a more memorable experience.