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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEPLOYING INBOUND MARKETING TACTICS AND HAVING A SUCCESSFUL INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY
When a business leader identifies a problem that needs to be solved, a challenge to overcome, or a need to be fulfilled, their behavior and actions aren’t that different from the way we behave as consumers at home.
If we wake up on a hot summer morning and discover that our air conditioning isn’t working, turning to Google for help is often the first step many of us take. We look for an expert who can either tell us how to fix our problem or one who will come to our house to fix our problem for us.
Business leaders with HR-related challenges often take this first step as well. Their research, exploration, and decision-making process may take longer, but it still follows the same pattern. They’re looking for an expert to show them how to address their HR issue or someone who can fix it for them.
Ask yourselves: What questions are your prospects asking Google? What kind of help are they looking for? What resources are they finding? Do they find your website or your competitors? If they find your website, do they find it helpful? Does your website engage your prospect digitally and capture insights about your prospects to generate sales leads?
This is what inbound marketing does:
It helps position you as a thought leader and a subject matter expert.
It helps educate your prospect.
It helps your prospect take the “next-best-step” in their buyer’s journey.
Most importantly though, it helps that “next-best-step” to be with your company – and not your competitor. It leverages the “next-best-step” to get your prospect to self-identify, raise their digital hand, and generate a lead for your sales team.
There are many misconceptions about inbound marketing. Many think that blogging or buying Google Ads is inbound marketing. While these can be critical elements of an inbound marketing strategy, they are just pieces of the puzzle. Effective inbound marketing encompasses a variety of tactics. Neglecting any of them (or failing to integrate them into one cohesive strategy) will result in missed opportunities.
CRITICAL COMPONENTS REQUIRED FOR A SUCCESSFUL INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY
Website. A B2B website is often your first opportunity to engage a prospect and capture insights into their potential interest. As your digital front door, it should be easy to find and easy to navigate. This means it should be SEO and mobile optimized and built on current graphic standards. Your website shouldn’t be a static online brochure, but a dynamic information resource for the prospect and a lead generation machine for the sales team.
SEO/Keyword Strategy. SEO keyword strategies are long-term plans for generating organic search engine traffic from relevant keywords to achieve a specific goal, such as increasing organic traffic by 50% within six months or becoming the number 1 brand in a geographic market.
Content Strategy. What content are will be created? Who is the intended target? What is the purpose of the content? What stage of the buyer’s journey are they – top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel, or bottom-of-the-funnel? Your content and associated calls-to-action (CTAs) should be mapped to every type of prospect, so everyone can find a resource that’s relevant to their situation.
Content Calendar. A content calendar keeps your writing and design team focused and keeps your content in line with your overall strategy. Content calendars ensure that content topics are not only in line with your plans, but that they speak to your target audience and touch on various topics related to your campaigns, promotions, or target audience’s needs. The key elements of an effective content calendar include topic, format, author, CTA, as well as editorial, design, and publish deadlines.
Content. Publishing and promoting custom thought leadership content allows you to position your company and your sales team as subject matter experts, valued resources, and trusted advisors. Content can include blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, case studies, videos, webinars, testimonials, FAQs, buyer guides, and checklists. It’s all about creating resources that takes your prospect by the “digital hand” and escorts them to the “next-best-step” in their buyer’s journey. So be informative, helpful, and relevant.
Campaign Roadmap. Content shouldn’t be published in a vacuum. Sure, if your content is SEO optimized people will find it through organic searches; but you can increase the size of the audience with promotional campaigns that that lead your prospects to your online content. Elements of campaigns may include social media, one-to-many email, one-to-one email, paid ads, and on-site promotional CTAs/pop-ups. Marketers need to stop chasing algorithm hacks and marketing fads. Instead, disciplined execution of promotional campaigns will produce a consistently robust flow of website visitors and lead conversions.
CTAs/Lead Capture Functionality. A call-to-action (CTAs) is the mechanism on your website that allows your prospect to engage with your company digitally. It helps them take the first step in their exploration process. The most common CTAs are “Contact Us”, “Schedule a Consultation”, or “Get a Quote”. These are considered bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) CTAs because only prospects who are ready to talk to a salesperson will click these. If your website only has BOFU CTAs you could be missing a lot of potential leads. It’s important to have CTAs that resonate with top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) and middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) visitors as well. Examples include “Read This eBook to Learn More About High Performing HR Strategies”, “Watch this PEO 101 Recorded Webinar”, or “Get HR Insights Delivered to Your Inbox.”
Social Media. If your website is your company’s digital front door, then your social media accounts are your digital sidewalk. Sharing your subject matter expertise and promoting your thought leadership content with links to your website is an efficient way to build your brand, broaden your audience, and drive traffic to your website.
Email Marketing. There are two types of marketing emails. One-to-many email campaigns are traditionally executed by Marketing when they send campaign message to a subset of the marketing database. One-to-one emails are customized messages traditionally deployed by the Sales team as a part of their prospecting and sales. A lot of time and resources are spent crafting and analyzing the results of Marketing's one-to-many email campaigns. But the Sales team is often left to fend for themselves. Do you know what your Sales team is saying in the emails they’re sending? How much time are they spending writing emails? Is their messaging consistent with your brand? Are their emails effective? Do you measure their results? Marketers should collaborate with Sales to craft customizable email templates and sequences for common sales scenarios. Then leverage CRM and other automated sales enablement tools to capture performance KPIs, measure results, and optimize performance over time.
Marketing Automation. Your team will be able to accomplish more with less resources as you use technology to schedule and automate various marketing tasks and workflows. Marketing automation tools help organizations easily manage all the moving parts associated with a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. Creating and deploying CTAs, landing pages, lead capture forms, lead nurture emails sequences, blog publishing, social media scheduling are some of the tasks a sophisticated tool will help your team accomplish more efficiently.
CRM. A CRM should be a fundamental part of your firm’s marketing infrastructure. It can be challenging to manage and monitor the movement of multiple prospects through the sales funnel without the use of CRM. There are a lot of different CRM tools on the market. The key is to find one that your salespeople will use. Remember, the tool should support the sales process.
Reporting/Analytics/Metrics. How do you know which of your marketing tactics are working if you don’t measure and monitor their effectiveness. The “granddaddy” of all marketing performance KPIs is “Revenue”. But you can monitor your progress by measuring early indicators like impressions, website traffic, organic traffic, page views, new followers, new contacts added, email open rate, lead conversions, SQLs, meetings scheduled, and forecasted deals.
Inbound marketing centers around valuing and empowering potential buyers along their decision-making journey. This involves turning strangers into visitors, visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into promoters. Inbound marketing isn't just a program you implement or a campaign you launch; it’s also not just one or two tactics that you deploy in silo; it's a shift in how you do business. It is a change in how you interact with your prospects and customers by having all of the elements listed above working in concert together.
DEAN MOOTHART
Director, Client Solutions
LeadG2
Florence, AL