Deep Dives
The Ins and Outs of Inbound Marketing
Think about your company’s sales. Do sales come through social media ads? Do salespeople reach out to leads? Do purchases happen in person or online?
When we think of sales, we need to consider the marketing. Properly executed inbound marketing is 10 times more effective for lead conversion than outbound. But, what marketing strategies are considered inbound?
Are you in or are you out?
Outbound marketing focuses on pushing messages out with hopes of bringing people in. This includes traditional media ads, direct mailouts, trade shows, email blasts and cold calling. Outbound marketing is difficult to measure and track. You’re left to guesstimate your ROI.
Inbound marketing brings people into your business with hopes of turning them into a customer. This includes content marketing, SEO, and social media. Inbound marketing is measurable, meaning ROI is determined based on effort.
Let’s explore the inner workings of inbound marketing.
Caring for your customers.
A fundamental shift in sales – that’s how we would describe inbound marketing. Instead of fighting to close the deal, inbound’s method consists of attracting, converting, closing and delighting people. It puts the focus on the customer and the problem they need solving.
It’s simply doing business in a human and helpful way.
Let us explain.
You start attracting prospects by creating relevant content. Consider the question or problem your ideal customer would type in Google. Your content should answer the question and solve their problem.
Start by creating blog posts, content offers and social media for your ideal customer. It has to provide value for them without being too sales-focused.
SEO plays a leading role in this phase. The content you write should be optimized with specific keywords and phrases related to your products or services. Companies that consistently blog get 55% more website visitors than websites that don’t. Those companies are showing up in their prospect’s Google search through keyword research.
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Turning leads into customers.
Once you show up, it’s time to connect with your prospects. Engage with your audience in the way that you’d like to be interacted with. When you speak to someone on the phone, focus on solutions, not products. It makes people feel like they aren’t being pushed into a sale.
Once you attract the right visitors to your website, convert them into leads by getting their contact information through a landing page. The content you give them in return has to be valuable to them.
Engaging content includes lead flows, lead management, email marketing and marketing automation. This phase of inbound is where customers are made.
Messaging matters.
When they become customers, your job isn’t done. A business relationship shouldn’t end after a sale. The final phase of inbound marketing is delighting. Making sure that your customers are happy, satisfied and supported.
You can delight a customer by following up with them after purchase to make sure everything is working and their problems have been solved. Other ways to delight are chatbots to assist with support, surveys and discounts through email marketing to encourage future purchases.
When it comes to social media, always answer your direct messages. There is nothing worse than having someone ask a question and never receiving an answer back. If that happens, you’re waving a perfectly good lead goodbye. They reached out to you with a question and ghosting is not the answer.
Social media is about engagement. This shows that you’re listening and care about customers and their experience with your company.
Speak to your ideal clients.
What type of person is your business trying to attract? In order to bring them in, you need to get to know them. Creating buyer personas is one of the first steps in creating an inbound marketing strategy.
These personas encompass the needs, goals and behaviours of your real and ideal clients. In order to determine your personas, review your current business data. Speak to your customers and ask about their companies. Ask about the problems they had and why they chose your business as a solution. Consider their buying habits.
Reflect on this information and build out your personas. Buyer personas shouldn’t be fictional characters based on assumptions. Assumptions cause inaccurate information, which results in your content not targeting the correct people.
Talk numbers to me.
Inbound marketing relates to people’s buying behaviours.
90% of consumers find custom content useful and 78% believe that organizations who provide this type of content are interested in building lasting relationships. On the other hand, 84% of 25 to 34-year-olds have left their favourite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising.
47% of internet users use an ad-blocker today. These people are not interested in being sold to. When they want something, they expect to be able to find you, access information they need to qualify your business and eventually decide on their own to purchase from you.
The consumer has an incredible amount of power nowadays. Use this power, don’t fight it.
So, are you in?
Are you ready to show up in the right places, for the right people, at the right time? Let’s chat about what inbound marketing strategies would be best for your business.
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