According to the Business Dictionary, a qualified prospect is a "potential customer...who has the financial resources (and the desire) to purchase a service or product." The ability to attract qualified customers, as opposed to "unqualified" customers (or people who, in all likelihood, are not interested in purchasing whatever you are selling), represents the major difference between a successful inbound marketing strategy and one that fails to attract the right customers responsible for increasing your inbound marketing ROI.

Reasons why your current inbound marketing strategy may not be attracting consumers interested in buying your product or service include trying to reach too many people instead of targeting your marketing approach to a specific demographic; failing to differentiate your product from other similar products with innovative marketing projects and having website content that is poorly written and outdated.

5 Inbound Marketing Techniques for Attracting More Qualified Clients

1. Hire a consumer psychologist to develop a profile of consumers that should be targeted by your inbound marketing strategy. A consumer psychologist is qualified to predict consumer responses and to explain why consumers react more positively to "game plans" created by your site's marketing department.

2. The foundation of all viable inbound marketing techniques is content. Gone are the days where site owners slapped content together with a mountain of keywords and amateurish sentences in one big block of unreadable content. To increase your search engine rankings and attract paying customers, you will need to publish polished, tight content in the form of blogs, articles, whitepapers, infographics and relevant videos. 

3. While any inbound marketing plan has a high probability of failing unless it takes advantage of Twitter and Facebook to reach a consumer niche, many plans forget that LinkedIn is the biggest business network on the Internet, with over 200 million members currently registered with the site.

4. Don't just throw your inbound marketing plan into the fire and expect it to keep burning, because it won't. Test and retest your call-to-action and landing pages as well as marketing emails and bounce rates of your website to determine whether your inbound marketing strategy is actually working. A great way to find out what works best is the "A/B" test, which pits two different landing pages, emails, etc. against each other. Remember that everything relevant to attracting qualified customers is a work in progress, not a permanently completed project.

5. Nothing alienates qualified customers than seeing the same inbound marketing strategies everytime they visit your site. Who wants to read content they've already read or see videos they've already seen? Dynamic websites that regularly update and engage consumers are successful, shared websites providing consistent increases with inbound marketing ROI.

The Bottom Line

Bad email marketing strategies can also turn off qualified prospects--permanently. For example, do you know how many emails people get with the subject line "FREE STUFF!" or "BUY NOW--50% OFF!", or even worse, the spammy "READ THIS!". Probably billions, considering over seven billion people live on the Earth today. Don't neglect an email's subject line by simply typing something in all caps and degrading it further by sticking a long line of exclamation points behind it. Instead, refine your email subject line by making it less "in your face" and more respectful. Something like "This time it's on us" or "Do you want to be pampered?" will elicit more responses than yelling at an email subscriber.

For every qualified prospect you reach, just remember there are hundreds more qualified prospects just waiting for your inbound marketing strategy to connect with them, intrigue them and convince them that they cannot live without your product or service.