Does the idea of developing an inbound marketing strategy at your company have you nodding and scratching your head while thinking “most interesting”? It may be time to take the leap into the exciting world that is inbound marketing!
With 3 of 4 marketers worldwide prioritizing an inbound marketing model, you may be wondering what all the hype is about. If any of the following goals sound like the stuff marketing dreams are made of, know that effective inbound marketing can help you achieve them!
Strategically Define & Attract Target Customer
Unlike traditional marketing, inbound marketing is driven by specific, targeted content that is designed to be directly relevant to the end consumer. Defining your target customer and developing your buyer personas is an important first step. This blog post written by our very own Meredith Stahler offers some valuable questions to ask yourself while going through this process.
Once you’ve defined your buyer personas, this will enable you to fine-tune your focus in creating buyer specific marketing assets. This proven method has shown to be more effective in attracting your target consumer and converting prospects to leads.
Effectively Tracking & Qualifying Leads
Attracting a qualified lead is just the beginning. A big component of doing this effectively is the process of mining and tracking data. Any effective inbound marketing strategy is coupled with a customer relationship management tool. We use HubSpot, a marketing software tool that can also integrate marketing automation tools, host your website, and much more that maximizes the impact of our efforts.
Lifecycle stages within HubSpot allow us to designate our prospective customers based on what stage they are at in the sales cycle. By doing so, we can effectively capture their interactions with us and create relevant, targeted content. This process of lead nurturing takes prospects through the sales funnel and ultimately, converts them into paying customers.
Measurable Return On Investment
We’ve heard it countless times before and boy, can we relate to your pain! While you may recognize the value your marketing efforts bring to the table, proving the return on investment to the board and executive staff isn’t always easy. Bringing everyone on board is most effectively achieved through; you guessed it, hard data!
Rather than shying away from marketing analytics, recognize that harnessing them is a powerful tool to proving ROI. What’s more, according to HubSpot, marketers that prove ROI are twice as likely to get a higher marketing budget the following year. We all know that a bigger budget is often synonymous with investing in better tools, increasing your reach, potentially expanding your team, and less stress.
Establishing Your Brand
Whether your company is newly launched or you’ve been in the biz for years, inbound marketing can further help you establish your brand and pull in prospective customers. The educated consumer of today is relatively well-informed of their options by the time they speak to sales.
Becoming a part of the equation before that first conversation with sales happens is essential! The idea is to establish yourself as the go-to industry resource for your target consumer. A great platform for providing valuable, educational information for prospective customers is a business blog. That being said, consistency is key. We recommend that prior to launching a blog, you outline topics and content for at least a few weeks so you aren’t scrambling to create content.
What’s Stopping You?
Being that we’re an inbound marketing agency, we may be a bit biased to the potential of the inbound model. That being said, all of the goals outlined above can be realized by implementing inbound marketing for your business. Did we mention that according to SalesForce, outbound leads cost on average 61% more than inbound leads?
