Marketers today spend too much of time on outbound lead generation instead of good old inbound. You present your company or product openly, then wait and hope that someone will respond or get in touch. Basically, you’re leaving the work to them – and in a lot of cases, leads won’t find their way to you on their own.

Why not make the most of what you’ve got and bring people to you instead? Inbound marketing can be tonnes more efficient, if you do it right. Just show leads that you’ve got something to offer, showing them the door to your website, then sit back and watch them rock all the way up into a sale.

But what are the top 3 tactics for inbound lead generation? Well…

1) Keep content focused on the tippy-top of your industry

What we mean is to make sure whatever content you’re posting is at the forefront of what’s happening in your industry. You don’t, for example, want to be blogging about news that was big a couple years ago. Keep your content fresh, and make sure what you’re posting rivals what your competition is saying, too.

Almost like your own business newscast, you want to get on top of new strategies, tactics, and software that’s relevant to what you’re doing – be informative, give people value.

2) Be in all the right places

Where you’re posting content does matter. In fact, it’s good to have content that’s available on a variety of different channels – for example, writing a blog, twitter posts, and creating YouTube videos.

The key to inbound marketing is bringing people from outside into your website, getting them to look not because they’ve seen an advert, but because they want your content (which will lead them to intrigue about your product). Have a presence wherever is popular, with relevant content, and you’ll have more successful results.

3) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The first thing anyone is going to do when they’re trying to find out about your product, is that they’re going to search the internet. But how can you make sure you’re what they see? To use Google AdWords and make sure you’re top, it can cost up to around $55 per click – which, if you’re hoping to see a high response rate, could cost you pretty dearly.

With SEO, you can get the same kind of results without paying quite so much money on the whole. Plugins such as Yoast, for example, take a one-time payment (because they have, after all, a product) which will help you be seen as the top of Google searches for blog posts and pages without such a hefty price.

4) Keep landing pages strong!

Once your leads get to your website, they need to know where to go. By having a strong landing page, you can make sure that your inbound leads don’t get lost and end up leaving your site. A dynamic, engaging landing page from each different channel should help avoid this problem.

It can be hard to see much of a difference between inbound and outbound lead generation. Both are equally rewarding, but using inbound methods can help your contacts feel more like finding and researching your company was more of their idea. And that means you can build a stronger relationship with them, too.