Going Inbound to Grow

Consumers are doing more and more research online to help them make informed purchase decisions. Today, companies that don’t have a healthy, robust digital presence won’t be able to tell their stories effectively and efficiently. In the branding and marketing world, there are two approaches to building awareness for your products and services.

Traditionally, companies have relied on outbound marketing techniques to build brand awareness and increase revenue. Products and services are promoted through continued advertising, promotions, public relations, and sales. At its core, outbound marketing is seller-centric, often using techniques such as cold calling, SPAM emails, and advertising.

However, if you think about these techniques, consumers have figured out ways to ignore these messages. We use services such as DVR to skip commercials, caller ID to screen our phone calls, and SPAM filters to prevent unwanted emails from reaching our inboxes. 

THE SHIFT TO INBOUND

Forward-thinking companies have shifted to deploying inbound marketing techniques to grow their businesses. Inbound marketing, in contrast, is very buyer-centric: think of calling with context, relevant emails, and helpful content that actually answers buyers’ problems. Inbound marketing draws customers to your products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding. Because of the digital signatures we leave behind, emails and phone calls can be more relevant; things we are actually interested in.

Through an inbound marketing approach, companies attract new customers by delivering relevant, helpful content that adds value at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Individuals are nurtured through the various stages of inbound marketing, where the consumer moves from stranger to visitor to lead to customer to referral. This journey through the various stages is driven by different tools and techniques, such as blogs and social publishing, calls to action and forms, email campaigns, and customer surveys.

Many companies today still spend about 90 percent of their time on outbound techniques and only 10 percent on inbound techniques. When you consider this, and the fact that 54 percent more leads are generated by inbound tactics than traditional paid marketing, it’s clear to me that inbound is a better approach.

LEAD GENERATION 101

To implement an effective inbound marketing strategy, we first need to take a refresher course in online lead generation. Prospects are enticed to visit your website for a piece of content via a call to action. Once clicked, this call to action directs a prospect to a landing page or lead capture page. This single web page has one goal: to convert the prospect into a lead by having them enter information about themselves into a form in exchange for whatever piece of content you are offering.

Once the form information is captured, the lead is redirected to a thank-you page where the promised content is delivered, and the next steps can be discussed and presented. Many stop the initial lead generation process there; however, a best practice is to follow up the thank you page with a customized email. In a follow-up email, you’re not only able to deliver the content directly to their inbox, but also to engage with the lead in another format and touchpoint: email.

The best inbound marketing approach uses a multi-channel communication strategy to ensure you reach people across a variety of platforms, including web, email, social, blog, and ads.

WEBSITE

Prospects are attracted to your website for content via strategically placed calls to action. Gated content is online material, such as white papers, case studies, marketing collateral, and infographics, that requires users to fill out a form before they can access it.

Marketing automation software can send real-time alerts to a salesperson whenever a prospect converts from a prospect to a lead by filling out a form on a landing page. This ensures the salesperson can reach out immediately and with context, which is extremely important given that you are 7X more likely to win a deal if you respond to a prospect in less than an hour vs. in two hours.

EMAIL

An effective inbound marketing approach using email allows you to expand top-of-the-funnel awareness by automating emails through workflows. These emails serve to nurture prospects throughout their journey.

Nurtured leads produce on average a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities vs. non-nurtured leads. Inbound email activity should be very specific to the prospects’ needs and problems you’re trying to solve. The contact information that you capture from the form on the landing pages ideally allows you to deliver the right content to the right contact at the right time.

SOCIAL

You’ve spent a lot of time building a social following, now make sure you engage that audience by building brand awareness on the social networks where your target audience is already naturally and regularly hanging out. Social posts directing prospects to landing pages or utilizing quotes and testimonials from satisfied customers are great types of content to use.

If you think posting on social media about your products will take too much effort or worse, be a complete waste of time, you couldn’t be more wrong. 60 percent of users learn about new products on Instagram. By repurposing and reformatting existing content, such as case studies and blog posts, for social media use, you can work smarter, not harder.

BLOG

Every article you publish on your blog is a long-term asset that both builds brand awareness and provides valuable, educational information to your target audience. By writing blog posts that address your prospects’ problems, you can increase blog traffic, leading to more leads and, ultimately, more revenue.

Blogs should aim to be educational and not overly promotional. Having a blog is an important part of lead generation and inbound marketing, as companies with blogs generate 67 more leads per month than those without.

ADS

Even if you have a great network of followers, there are a ton of people out there who still don’t know that you exist. Social ads allow you to insert yourself into the conversation. The trick with ads and still being “inbound” is to make sure you are targeting the right audience so you are only providing relevant and helpful information to the buyer.

Some consumers like ads, others tolerate ads, while some despise ads, but when two-thirds of consumers can recall a specific brand they have seen advertised on mobile in the last week, it’s pretty clear social ads need to play a part in your inbound strategy.

Inbound marketing transforms strangers into promoters using lifecycle marketing. At each touchpoint, content is created and distributed to meet prospects’ and customers’ needs. Additionally, content is personalized to the wants and needs of viewers, and a multi-channel communication approach is used to reach people where they naturally reside.

The best companies today aren’t using inbound or outbound; they're using both.