So how do you compete with the competition and get more qualified traffic coming to your website?

1. Focus on Inbound

Inbound Marketing is designed to help you attract visitors in your target market, generate leads, convert those leads into customers and then keep those customers delighted for years to come. And the key to this effective inbound strategy is the ability to create and deliver valuable content that people want — and need — to read. You want to develop content that is useful and interesting enough to attract and keep attention, but also worthwhile for those visitors to share with their friends, or link to on their own blog. Here are some ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

• Free offers, like downloads of eBooks or whitepapers
• Infographics, that are relevant, trendy, and easily shareable
• How-to articles that are relevant to your keywords
• Contests or promotions, like “Sign up today, and get 10% off your 1st purchase”
• Online video tutorials
• Social media posting, to promote a new product, or give teasers about upcoming product launches
• Publish guest posts on your blog
• Spend time on improving your SEO
• Host Webinars, and post recorded versions of live Webinars on your site for easy download
• Publish strong calls-to-action on all blog posts and within content throughout your site

2. Amp Up Your AdWords Strategy

Pay Per Click ads obviously require a financial investment, but the return on that investment depends on how well your paid-ad strategy is working.

If your competitors’ ads are ranking higher than yours, it’s time to figure out why. Spyfu.com allows you to download your competitors’ most profitable keywords and ads for paid search. Search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google: including every keyword they’ve bought on AdWords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 9 years. This gives you the insight and ability to bid on the same keywords, or find and choose more relevant keywords that might give you the upper hand.

We’ve put together a pretty good resource that explains Adwords in-depth, and may help you to improve your PPC ROI.

3. Add in Social Paid Ads Too

If you have available budget, most Social Media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram) offer paid advertising options as well. You may find that Social advertising gets you additional traffic that you may not otherwise receive: for example, you might find a younger demographic on Instagram, that you may not have been able to target via Adwords PPC or other offers.

4. Start a Loyalty Program

The best feedback comes in the form of a referral, as you’ll know that a customer will not recommend your business to a friend or colleague if you weren’t doing a great job. Developing a loyalty program is a strategic way to use customers or potential customers already in your target audience to source out additional prospects.

Per Influitive, a great B2B referral software program, people are 4x more likely to buy a product when it’s referred to them by a friend. By creating a formal B2B referral program, sales and marketing teams can expect to increase revenue, shorten deal lengths and spend more of their time on leads that are much more likely to convert:

Consistently engaging your best customers through an advocate marketing program will nurture your relationship with them and reward them for supporting your brand. Think of it as a private community for your top users. Once your advocates feel valued and connected to your company, they’ll be ready to submit high-quality referrals.

5. Run a Contest or Design a Quiz

Running a contest or publishing a quiz are surefire ways to increase your overall traffic. And out of that traffic spike are names and contact information that you can add to your lead database and begin the process of nuturing.

SurveyMonkey’s FluidReview makes it easy to build branded online contests that can integrate into your website or stand alone, and collect and manage entries with interactive entry forms. They even let you evaluate and rank entries, and can help you clearly publish contest guidelines and rules.

As for quizzes, we’re all familiar with the Buzzfeed ones that run up and down our social media feeds! They’re attractive, they’re fun, they add value and promote social sharing, and apparently 82% of people seeing one in their newsfeed will try it out, and finish it to completion. Fyrebox will let you create a quiz for free with their B2B solution, so you can test out the effectiveness for your lead gen right away.

6. Paid Content Marketing

Paid content distribution can help you boost your content reach, if you have the budget for it. Platforms like Taboola will help you reach more people & drive traffic by getting your content recommended on premium publisher sites, like CNN, Business Insider and the Weather Network. You’d typically opt to share content that provides value to readers, such as press releases, downloadable offers, blog posts, video blogs, etc.

7. Nuture Your Leads

Once you have more targeted traffic making its way to your site due to your Inbound and AdWords or other paid advertising efforts, then you’ll need to rein the focus in on nuturing those leads, so that you can separate out those in the early stages vs. those leads that are ready to make a purchase.

Marketing automation can be a huge help with lead nuturing, as a typical lead nuturing campaign will involve sending a series of automated emails after a lead has completed a specific task on your website. For example, if a visitor has downloaded one of your offers, like a free eBook, then after a certain period of time you would send them a follow-up email. This follow-up email could contain anything from an additional offer for another eBook, or new calls-to-action that would lead them to request a demo or download a free trial version of your software, for example, taking them further down the sales funnel.

Whatever the offer, their action will lead you to take the next steps: continue to further nuture an early-stage lead, or pass purchase-stage leads off to the sales team to close the deal. Lead nuturing will enable your sales and marketing teams to really spend more valuable time working a smaller group of leads who show a higher chance of actually converting their interest into a sale.

To learn more about the Inbound Sales process and how it may help your organization transform its sales tactics, download our free guide: Buyers Speak Out: How Sales Needs to Evolve.