Inbound Marketing at its core is centred on driving more traffic to your website via content creation, social media amplification and converting these visitors into quality leads.  

This is the major differentiator versus pure play marketing automation solutions that focus on sweating the existing database of leads through the funnel into customers, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, many a business has been built on that model.

Getting into the merits of pure marketing automation versus inbound marketing is for a different blog post entirely - and by the way the HubSpot platform covers it all amazingly for organisations of any size.

However, unless those leads generated by inbound marketing close into revenue generating customers then your inbound marketing ROI is exactly 0.  Not where any marketer wants to be when they sit down for their monthly sales and marketing meeting.  

Companies have to focus on how to close customers with inbound marketing to demonstrate maximum ROI.

Here are 8 considerations to help you do that:

1. Attract the right traffic
   
   Spend some time on your buyer personas to ensure everything you publish is of interest to those personas.  Everything.  This is critical.  Well qualified traffic is your goal here.
   
   
2. Convert quality leads
   
   Again, tied back to your personas, creat offers that your perfect customer would want to download.  If you’re selling ice you probably don’t want an Eskimo downloading your brochure.  
   
   Map your content offers to the personas buyers’ journey so you can identify leads who are further along their sales process and therefore may convert to customers quicker.
   
   
3. Know your MQL from your SLQ
   
   Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are early stage leads, not ready to speak to a sales guy yet and have probably downloaded something very educational from your site.  
   
   Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are the leads who have converted on contact us, demo request, free trial, anyone who has shown signals that they are in evaluation and decision mode.
   
   
4. Set rules for MQLs and SQLs
   
   MQLs are nurtured until they reconvert on Middle of the Funnel (webinar etc.) or Bottom of the Funnel (free trial, contact sales etc.) content after which they are passed over to the sales guys.  
   
   This way you don’t annoy the prospect by engaging too early and you provide your sales team with better qualified leads.
   
   
5. Connect Sales & Marketing teams
   
   Too many organisations have a sales and marketing team that don’t know each other, don’t mix, get paid on different metrics and generally are not aligned in any way.  
   
   Marketing should be feeding sales with well qualified leads and sales in turn should be closing those into customers and reinforcing the marketing team’s contribution to the top line revenue number.  
   
   Closed Loop Reporting is a major reason organisations use platforms such as HubSpot - it allows them to connect a tweet to booked revenue!
   
   
6. Nurture the MQLs
   
   Look up Nurture in the dictionary, you’ll get a variation of this, "care for and protect (someone or something) while they are growing".  
   
   Stop blasting your email list with 'Buy My Product', 'Special Offer', 'Look How Great We Are' type emails, that the quickest way to get into thier unsubscribe folder.  
   
   Help your leads grow, keep providing great content to these leads regularly, help them solve their problems, continuously educate and add value.  You want them to look forward to getting your monthly email.  
   
   The timing may not be right now to consider your product/service but someday it will and if you have been providing valuable insight and content then you are going to be rewarded for it.
   
   
7. Trust sales to follow up with the SQLs
   
   Sales guys only want to close deals and the quicker the better.  If your company has a sales process in place with tracking of leads and opportunities through a CRM system even better.  If you don’t have a CRM, take a look at HubSpot’s, it’s a great system and it’s free...
   
   
8. Don’t forget about your customers
   
   Closing a customer is often the easy part, keeping them as long term customers should be the priority.  The longer they stay customers the more profitable they become!

Inbound Marketing can help you dramatically grow your website traffic and subsequently your inbound lead flow.  But this is one half of the story.

Generating revenue from those leads separates organisations who think they do inbound marketing from those who have inbound marketing engines constantly driving growth for the business.