These days it’s all about inbound marketing, not telemarketing. What's inbound marketing? Great question. In a nutshell, it's the science of creating content that attracts, converts, and closes prospects so they can become happy customers -- and then spread the word about how great you are to their contacts.

I just found this great overview piece on the process. It's from the folks at Elegant Themes and I think they did such a good job explaining the process, that I'm posting it here for you to read ...

Can you believe we’re still getting calls from telemarketers? If I happen to accidentally answer, I hang up when they’re mid-sentence and I say out loud, usually to nobody, “Has that ever worked?” It’s hard enough to get business from cold emails. I’m baffled at how anyone has ever had success calling someone during dinner time or on a sunny Saturday and actually kept them on the phone long enough to make them pay for something.

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Inbound marketing focuses on lead generation. Your potential customers, clients, or brand ambassadors come to you. Yes, they’re influenced, inspired and even nudged toward the decision you want them to make, but they make the moves.

An Overview of Leads and Lead Generation

A lead is someone who has shown interest in your company by providing you with their information, usually their email address, so you can get in touch with them again. Lead generation aims to catch more of this information – more leads – so you can eventually turn them into customers. Lead generation should be one of your business’ top goals.

Inbound marketing factors into this because you’re not going to the customer and saying, “Hey, pay attention to me, a business you’ve never heard of.” Instead, content attracts people to your business, and from there you can point them in the direction of the lead, like signing up for a newsletter or unlocking a coupon code.

The Lead Generation Process

Here’s how the lead generation process works step-by-step:

1. A person finds your business. They may see your Instagram Story, read a blog post or find your website in a Google search.
2. They follow your call-to-action (CTA), which is messaging that encourages them to take the next step. Your Instagram Story may direct them to swipe up, for example. The CTA has to have a compelling reason for taking the next step.
3. The CTA will bring the person to a landing page, which is where you’ll offer something in exchange for their information. The offer has to be valuable enough so that the person will be willing to give up their email address.

You’ll have to build the lead generation process backwards. Start by creating the landing page with the offer and collection form, then create a CTA that will get people to click over to it. Then, you’ll add that CTA to your already-existing content or you’ll develop new content that points to the landing page. You’re going to use a number of channels and strategies to drive people to the landing page so you can begin collecting leads.

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