No matter how good their link building campaign is, webmasters and site owners always want it to get better. In our experience, they’re rarely satisfied with their strategies. Talking to them, one thing that always comes up is how getting links is more difficult now than ever. And yet, they’re needed as much as they ever were. So, what can you do about that? Well, you can change the way you think about building links. Today, we’re talking about how lead generation tactics can boost your link building results.
How is Lead Generation Similar to Link Building?
The point of any business marketing strategy is to get sales. And there’s nothing weird about that. However, we must do a bit more than just focusing on the end goal. That alone won’t achieve much. Researches have shown that pretty much every customer needs up to eight touchpoints before making a purchase. Therefore, if you focus exclusively on sales, you’re missing all the extra steps that lead your customer to buy.
What you need to do as a marketer is to add some kind of secondary metric. Its’ purpose is to bridge the gap between a stranger and a buyer. And this is where the notion of a lead comes about. So, lead is a contact which we consider our possible future customer.
Luckily, a journey to becoming a lead from a stranger is much shorter and a lot more predictable than getting to a buyer from a stranger. An even better thing is that once you turn a visitor into a lead, you can reach them in a more meaningful way. This is the time in which you can boost engagement with tactical local email marketing.
How is This Connected to Link Building?
The main thing in link building is getting links, similarly to how we want sales in marketing. However, focusing on the final goal get us to the same point here as well. It’s just as limiting with link building as it is with marketing.
As it turns out, not many link builders go beyond sending one personalized email these days. After the first one, people turn to automated follow-ups. And that’s where they’re all wrong. What we want to say is that if you connect lead generation with link building in this phase, you’ll get much better results.
We already explained how potential customers need more than just one touchpoint. So, think about all those bloggers, publishers, and editors in the same way. They may also need something beyond an email. Thinking even further, these people may not be the proper decision-makers within the site you’re targeting.
As you can see, there’s a bit more to getting high-quality backlinks in 2021 than it was before. However, that’s perfectly fine as your result s will keep growing the more leads you acquire.
How to Add Lead Generation to your Link Building Tactics
Define your leads before creating content
If you’re familiar with B2B marketing, you’ll know that this is called outcomes-focused data strategy. It essentially means that you need to know exactly what your goal is before you start developing the strategy of achieving it. Unfortunately, this concept is rarely applied to link building.
Usually, the process consists of two things:
- The content team creates what they think is a great asset.
- The outreach team finds out who the website owners that may be interested in that asset are, and they start the outreach.
The problem here is that both teams are working in isolation. So, what you should do is incorporate these essential B2B link building tactics. Basically, you’ll be turning the process we just talked about around.
- The outreach team does prospect research, and they learn what’s attracting links on a specific topic. Then, they show these insights to the content team.
- The content team then creates something better than what already exists on that topic.
- The outreach team delivers the content to the contacts they previously identified.
The idea is to let your link building research guide the content creation process. This way, you’ll end up with a highly successful campaign that delivers links, even without the active outreach.
Organize your Linking Leads
As you might expect, different leads will need a different number of touchpoints to link. So, you should incorporate a lead nurturing process into your tactics. B2B marketers usually warm up their leads before closing to a sale. Similarly to that, in link building, you’ll get more links if you reach out to your leads more often and remind them of your asset.
This is where using an outreach tool helps a lot. It will handle some of the lead nurturing for you by saving all the emails you sent and updating the email status and dates. However, we at Link Department can tell you from experience that you shouldn’t stop there. Creating a detailed profile for each lead and reaching out on social media are also smart ideas.
Diversify your touchpoints
An email is still the most effective link building outreach method. And even follow-up emails can create a whole new opportunity for you because they show that you’re interested to share your asset. However, there are other ways to reach out. And these certainly increase your chances of hearing back.
Here, we’re talking about things like Twitter follows, DM-ing, LinkedIn messages, commenting on their personal site, or tagging them on social media. All these things can help you get noticed. So, feel free to be out there when it can help your request to get through.
A link building process is a form of art
Safe links are the ones we can’t control. And this turns link building process into a form of art if we can say it that way. Although lead generation tactics can boost your link building results, you’ll have to do a lot before reaching your end goal. So, don’t be afraid to up your link building game with tactics you can borrow from lead generation.