When setting up your inbound marketing funnel, it can be easy to get caught up in the process of creating a campaign, qualifying leads, and creating content to push leads through.

While all of these are important aspects, new marketers can sometimes get too focused on these parts of the process rather than focusing on how the funnel operates as an encompassing entity. This can prove dangerous for businesses who fail to move beyond this narrow field of vision.

In truth, while inbound requires a thorough funnel to qualify leads, without lead generation the inbound funnel becomes stagnant.

Focusing on the Funnel

Inbound marketing is all about the marketing funnel, but for newcomers, it can be overwhelming. It’s not uncommon for those new to inbound to hash out campaign after campaign, paying painstaking attention to the buyer’s journey at each stage.

However, while campaigns are important, most people make the mistakes of focusing their upfront efforts on too many campaigns. Instead, your marketing efforts should be focused primarily on the top of the funnel, as this is where lead generation occurs. Without leads to generate, there are no leads to nurture.

This goal of lead generation is that a business can benefit from building an audience. A key tenant of content marketing is understanding the audience you are writing to and knowing your content tilt. Creating this niche for yourself allows you an audience that will continue to consume your content, and therefore, promises a steady visitation. From there, it’s a matter of converting this audience into leads. When you can do so consistently, your lead generation is considered “steady.”

Making Your Marketing Funnel Scalable

The key to any business growth is scalability. But how do you translate a marketing funnel to meet scalability needs? The first requirement is to look solely at the numbers. If you are struggling to bring in 1,500 web visitors per month and are only converting that traffic to leads at a rate of 3%, the outlook for company growth is not promising.

When faced with this kind of issue, it is important to make changes to your funnel, albeit one at a time. Again, your concern should be primarily on your traffic generation, or how to increase that visitation from 1,500. If nothing else, an increase in site traffic to something around 5,000 monthly with a steady lead rate of 3% can still have a great impact on your top-of-funnel leads from 45 a month to 150 a month.

But how do you increase this traffic to such a rate? Again, your focus should be content. Experimenting with your content tilt, increasing your content amount, and changing how you promote your content can all contribute to higher traffic.

Maintain Consistent Conversion Rates

Another important factor to a scalable marketing funnel? Maintaining consistent conversion rates. This means following best practices and business experience when it comes to your landing pages, forms, and offers. If your visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 5% and your lead-to-customer conversion rate is 1%, then it’s vital that those rates don’t change negatively. Ideally, these rates would even improve to allow for continued growth.

However, consistent rates allow you to account for the amount of lead generation you can expect in a month. And in turn, how many of those leads you can anticipate moving into the sales funnel. Through maintenance of your buyer’s journey content and feedback from your sales team, you can ensure your content is working in the way it should.

Keeping Up With the Content

For businesses seeing inbound success, it is tempting to lapse in your efforts or change direction due to comfortable growth. However, this can be incredibly damaging to your lead income. In order for your lead income to be consistent, content must also be consistent.

Again, we return to the issue of scalability. Knowing that content is the basis of lead generation, it’s important to maintain that generation to maintain results. But how do you do that without your content growing stale? It’s a matter of knowing your audience so that you can take a leading approach in content creation. Ideally, as you grow it should be simple for your business to put processes in place to make you a content machine. Taking the step to keep up with your content ensures your business is able to continue to grow with ease.

With the slow-to-start methods of inbound marketing, it may seem difficult to grow a business using this strategy alone. However, the power of inbound marketing to generate leads is a powerful tool for a business looking to grow. The key to continued success with inbound is to nourish this lead income to ensure your marketing funnel is working to full effect.