What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the process of attracting, converting, closing and serving customers. It is the vision of you helping people – in action. ‘Inbound’ means drawing people in and communicating with them in a way that suits them best.
Today, most companies combine outbound marketing playbooks with a good dose of inbound, but many have room for improvements.
Art or Science?
In today’s world, the art of inbound marketing has become sophisticated science. A science to learn and invest in.
Forecasts are, that companies’ investment in inbound marketing will boom in 2020 and beyond.
As customers have raised their expectations thanks to outstanding inbound efforts by other companies, it is now of paramount important to not be left behind and build your expertise in inbound marketing as well.
Benefits from Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing and marketing automation have delivered excellent results:
- Email marketing brings an average ROI of £38 on every £1 spent (Direct Marketing Association study).
- 54% more leads are generated by inbound tactics than traditional paid marketing.
- $20K is the average companies save per year by investing more in inbound marketing vs. outbound.
(References: Gartner, Forrester, Hubspot State of Inbound 2015, Jupiter, Annuitas Group)
- Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months.
- Relevant emails drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails.
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
- Companies with excellent lead nurturing programs generate 50% more qualified leads at 33% less cost. – (Forrester Study)
Our 4-Step Inbound Marketing Framework
Impressive results, right?! Are you achieving them? If not yet, we can help you work through the steps of our inbound marketing framework: attract, convert, close and serve to deliver inbound excellence.
© Copyright CloudAnalysts.com 2020
Attract
By offering information timely and in a format that helps your target market learn more about the problems you address, through blogs, webinars, social media posts and through SEO work, you’ll attract potential prospects into your world.
Remember how 70% of a buyer’s research is done before they talk to a sales person and how nearly 60% of people today prefer to not talk to a Sales person at all.
This means that your Marketing use the same messages as Sales. And the two disciplines must align. Traditionally, Marketing is longer term-focused, has rules and a vision, while Sales team is opportunistic, has short term goals and realise that every opportunity is different.
So, you must implement a Sales Enablement Strategy to get Sales and Marketing to work together. Sales Enablement is the process, content and technology that empower sales team to sell efficiency, at a higher velocity. It belongs to .. eh Marketing as that team focuses on prospects before they talk to Sales. Let them be in charge, but let’s make sure they team up with Sales. And let’s rename the two of them ‘the Revenue Team’ which has Revenues-centric goals.
Learn more about it here:
Convert
By offering a consistently branded set of information and guided problem solving, prospects may exchange their email address to learn more about the solutions you offer.
Inbound tools to build include landing pages with calls-to-action and forms as well as retargeting advertisements.
Close
Closing sales in an inbound marketing context means supporting the sales effort with personalised engagement programs including both email and SMS, and increasingly personalised to 1:1 journeys.
Service
Delighting customers with inbound marketing should not stop when they sign the deal, but the same branded message and care is to permeate the service delivery, to make up-sell, and on-sell a natural part of the picture.
Continue to build customers’ knowledge with blogs, webinars, a customer help knowledge base or community, and of course excellent omni-channel case management.
Your Opportunity
You probably have improving your inbound marketing in your growth plan.
Perhaps to sort customer data issues, better integration, more intelligent marketing, building out analytics, reporting, or optimising ROI.
With Sales Enablement, you’ll need to set your revenue goal and focus on your target buyer, who is most likely to buy from you. How to get more sales than last year? Easy. It’s not by working harder, smarter, be more productive, but it’s to maximise your time with people more likely to buy and minimise your time with others.
You need a Content Strategy to help Inbound Marketing and Sales Enabblement Strategy to work. Or to put it in to one CEO’s own words: “If anyone in this target market has a problem, I want them to think of us.”
Most likely, your Sales team already produces content but don’t call it content. Sales people hear the questions in the field.
This is not just to delight your existing customers. It’s also to influence the prospects at the top of your funnel.
Choosing Your Inbound Marketing Partner
As expert digital marketing consultants we help you find your ideal future customers in the wide pool of strangers and bring them all they way to loyal customers.
Through sophisticated Salesforce Pardot or Marketing Cloud digital marketing platform configurations.
And not just this. You’ll need a vision of what those additional sales will help you do, a ‘state of affairs’ you want to bring into existence, a state that will motivate your team. Then, you’ll need to set some short term goals to celebrate as well as some long term goals both – metric outcomes you can measure.
What sort of goals?
The main goal of the Marketing Team should be to generate Leads that the Sales team can close into customers.
We help you get there.
Inbound Marketing Consultants
As inbound marketing consultants, we think of ourselves as transformation agents, while our assistance can range from strategic or technical to tactical marketing.
STRATEGIC
- Developing an integrated Inbound Sales/Marketing Automation Strategy & Plan – see our strategic marketing services
- Creating User Personas & Change Management
TECHNICAL
- Collecting detailed ‘User Stories’.
- Marketing Cloud or Salesforce Pardot Config (including migration from Oracle, Dotdigital, Mailchimp, Hubspot ao)
- Form Design for Email Marketing.
- Lead Scoring/Grading.
- Training in ongoing platform usage, reporting & analytics, automation rules and advanced features.
TO MARKETING EXPERT
- Buyer Personas Development & Buyer Insight Maps.
- Designing Nurturing Marketing Campaigns.
- (Re-)Design your Landing Pages according to ‘Best Practices’.
- Content Marketing Development & Management.
We focus on marketing automation platforms as fundamental technology for marketers today.
We help organisations tie all aspects of their digital marketing together into one digital marketing program:
- Content marketing,
- Social marketing,
- Influencer marketing,
- Email strategy, with autoresponders, dynamic content and personalisation,
- Omni-channel (SMS) communication,
- Personalised landing pages,
- Customer reviews,
- Other online strategy.
We help organisations realise their sales & marketing objectives through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Pardot marketing automation platform, in combination with other digital marketing tools, techniques and workflows.
— CloudAnalysts
Did we get you thinking?
Thinking
.. about a new email marketing platform? Challenged by existing marketing automation roadblocks?
Let us help you
..select and configure a platform, applying our Best Practices and helping you design your lead nurturing processes; digital marketing asset creation; and passion for your success.
Take action
Your next step is to start a conversation with us, as a first step towards your improved digital marketing success.
