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HubSpot introduces Breeze, an AI-powered tool with copilot, agents and customer intelligence

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By Kyt Dotson

Inbound marketing and customer relationship management platform HubSpot Inc. introduced Breeze, the company’s artificial intelligence.

It underlies the entire customer solution for go-to-market teams designed with a copilot, automated AI agents and a unified view of customer management.

Dylan Sellberg, director of product at HubSpot, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that although AI has promised to provide transformative value to customers and business at large, it hasn’t gotten there quite yet. Part of the problem appeared to be because AI was difficult to use and it required a vast pool of data to work with. That’s why HubSpot introduced Breeze, an easy-to-use AI companion and system integrated throughout the entire platform that takes advantage of the data, resources and context that the company’s customers work with every day without requiring any technical expertise.

“Breeze Copilot is a product that helps you use HubSpot more efficiently,” said Sellberg. “It’s your assistant. It’s interwoven throughout the entire product. Copilot will exist on every page and every app as a panel that you can talk with, but also as an embedded element.”

Copilot can be summoned by marketing, sales and services teams as a chat-based AI to offer personalized insights and recommendations about leads, customers and engagements. It is aware of the full context of what’s happening on the screen – including, for example, if there’s a list page with 50 contacts on it. Many marketers or service reps might have this common behaviour of opening 10 or 20 tabs and jumping between them. The AI can still read through all of them, summarize and compare all the information in them with just one prompt.

Copilot is also embedded directly into pages as a context menu so users don’t need to think about what to ask. They can just invoke it directly and receive a summary immediately about what they’re looking at without any extra typing, which makes it easier to use.

Breeze Intelligence helps provide a more complete view of customers by bringing in data from over 200 million company and buyer profiles. In beta now, this AI-powered solution assists service workers with building up contract records, discerning buyer intent and shortening otherwise long contact forms to avoid them being abandoned by users.

“Data is typically hard to get about your customers,” said Sellberg. “It can be scattered across the internet, different puzzle pieces, and when businesses can’t put that together, they’re not getting the full picture. Of course, businesses can get the data, but it’s hard work.”

With the data enrichment capability, Intelligence gets the hard work out of the way with one click by adding missing portions of customer profiles directly from HubSpot’s records including firmographic, demographic and technographic attributes that are continually refreshed.

Using the buyer intent capacity, marketers can set their target market, identify buyer intent signals and use that to add likely high-intent companies to their HubSpot customer relationship profiles. The AI helps marketers make these identifications using signals such as page views and other intent metrics.

Breeze Agents automate tasks like experts

All available in beta, Breeze includes four automated agents that will automate tasks to give marketing, sales and service teams AI experts capable of completing work rapidly with just a prompt and a few clicks.

The Breeze Content Agent provides marketers with high-quality content such as landing pages for the web, blogs and full case studies written from start to finish using a customer’s brand voice based on information from HubSpot’s context. It also has podcasting capability where it can write a full script, or even generate a fully AI generated voiced podcast using seven different voices.

The Social Media Agent allows users to create posts that fit into the company’s brand across different networks that use the company’s details, audience and industry. It can generate fitting posts, and prepare and schedule them for the proper times to garner the biggest impact.

The Prospecting Agent can help marketers engage leads by researching and preparing personalized outreach messages to contacts and helping craft the right messages.

The Customer Agent will take over customer-facing support based on an enterprise business service and product line. It can be trained in a few clicks based on a company’s knowledge base, website and blog content so that it can start helping very quickly. Of course, it can’t answer every single question, so when it runs into something too complex for it to handle, it can hand off to a human service worker with all the context of the original question asked by the customer and how it handled the initial contact.

Feature Image Credit: HubSpot

By Kyt Dotson

Sourced from siliconANGLE

 

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How to Split Time Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

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By Deanna Ritchie

For most B2B companies, it’s important to focus on both inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

These distinctive approaches are complementary in many ways, so if you use both efficiently, you can maximize your brand visibility and ultimately reach more people.

However, splitting your time and resources between these differentiated approaches can be a difficult balancing act to practice.

How do you split your time effectively between inbound and outbound marketing?

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing for B2B Growth

First, let’s analyse the distinctive features of inbound and outbound marketing in a B2B context.

Inbound marketing is a set of different strategies all designed to naturally attract people to your business. These strategies work together synergistically, boosting the visibility of your brand, increasing the number of channels on which it appears, improving your reputation, and ultimately building consumer awareness and trust.

Among the most popular inbound marketing strategies are things like search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing. If you’re familiar with these strategies, you understand how effectively they support each other.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing strategies have unique advantages, including:

Cost-effective

Many marketers are drawn to the world of inbound marketing because it’s incredibly cost-effective. Producing content doesn’t cost much. Posting on social media doesn’t cost anything. And while you probably won’t see immediate results from these types of efforts, they have a permanent and accumulating effect; most of the assets you produce here are going to be indefinitely relevant and valuable to your brand, boosting its visibility and reputation for years to come. Overall, inbound marketing strategies are capable of attracting upwards of millions of people to your website for a relatively small amount of money.

Highly Scalable

People also appreciate how scalable inbound marketing is. Even if you work at a snail’s pace, producing only one new piece of content every week, as long as you’re consistent in your efforts, you’ll eventually have a gigantic archive of content to support your brand. And if you’re willing to spend a bit more money, you can accomplish a year’s worth of work in a week. Similarly, small startups and large enterprises alike can benefit from inbound marketing – as long as they know their niche.

Natural/Organic

Inbound marketing is also appealing to some because it’s a bit more natural and organic. Instead of calling a prospect and trying to convince them to buy a product they’ve never heard of before, you’ll be appealing to people who are already conducting organic searches for your type of product. It makes it much easier to build trust, establish rapport, and land sales – even if you can’t reach everyone this way.

Contextually Targeted

Most of your inbound marketing work is going to be contextually targeted. In other words, your materials are going to be relevant to the people seeing them. This isn’t necessarily the case with certain outbound marketing strategies like cold calling or cold emailing.

Tactically Diverse

Finally, inbound marketing strategies are tactically diverse. SEO isn’t the same as social media, and neither of these strategies is the same as content marketing. You can use one, some, or all inbound marketing strategies together, based on your needs.

In contrast, outbound marketing is a set of different strategies, all designed to reach people in your target demographics and deliberately market or sell to them. These strategies are capable of reaching total strangers, attempting to persuade them by showcasing your unique value or overcoming their key objections.

Among the most popular outbound marketing strategies are things like cold calling, cold emailing, and targeted advertising. These strategies can be used individually or as part of a bigger, more comprehensive sales funnel, designed to generate B2B leads over time.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing strategies also have unique advantages, including:

Fast

One of the most important drawbacks of inbound marketing is that it takes a long time to develop. But with outbound marketing, you can see results almost immediately. As long as you have a coherent strategy and a talented team of people to execute that strategy, tactics like cold calling can land you sales today.

Capable of Broader Reach

Inbound marketing benefits from being contextually relevant, but at the cost of alienating at least some other people. In contrast, outbound marketing is capable of a much broader reach. If you’re trying to grow your business, or simply reach as many people as possible, outbound marketing becomes a practical necessity.

Specifically Targeted

It’s possible to use inbound marketing materials to target groups of people based on past interest, search history, and other relevant details. But with outbound marketing, you can target people much more specifically. This is especially true if you cultivate your own lists and gather more data from your pool of prospects.

Easy to Analyse

The effectiveness of outbound marketing is surprisingly easy to measure and analyze. It provides you with a pool of data that’s much more concrete, numerical, and objective. You can figure out exactly how many of your sales calls result in sales, or calculate the difference between two different, contrasting emails. Equipped with more objective data from which you can form better conclusions, you can polish these strategies to perfection.

Tactically Diverse

Outbound marketing is home to a variety of strategies and tactics as well. Cold calling and cold emailing are just the beginning – you can also practice many forms of online advertising, attend tradeshows, send direct mail, and more.

Important Variables to Consider

When discussing the matter of balance between the time you spend on inbound versus outbound marketing, there are several important variables you need to consider. These include:

Budget: First, you’ll need to think about your budget. Outbound marketing can help your business out of the gate, but it’s also more expensive to start up. If you’re working with limited resources, inbound marketing could be a preferable alternative.

Timing: You’ll also need to think about your desired timing. If you simply want to build your company reputation over the course of years, inbound marketing is fine. But if you need to start generating sales, you’ll need to lean toward outbound marketing more.

Industry/competition: Certain industries preferentially choose inbound or outbound marketing, due to the needs of their customers or because of certain tactics that work especially well in this environment. Study your competitors to see what they’re doing.

Target demographics: Some people respond better to inbound marketing over outbound marketing, or vice versa. Consider the preferences and behavioural patterns of your target demographics when choosing how to balance your time.

Historical performance: If you’ve been practicing inbound and outbound marketing for some time, take a look at your historical performances. Whichever group of strategies has consistently performed better should get more of your time and attention (keeping in mind that inbound marketing takes time to build momentum).

Future plans: Finally, think about where you want your business to be in the future. If you don’t have much of an inbound marketing strategy in place, but you like the idea of having an inbound empire eventually, you should spend more time developing your inbound strategies.

Balancing Your Time Effectively

So how do you manage your time effectively?

We’ve established that inbound and outbound marketing are both important, for different reasons. Accordingly, you’ll need to spend at least some time and effort on both if you want your B2B business to succeed.

These are the time management and coordination strategies that can help you do it:

Focus efforts on developing a consistent philosophy.

Prioritizing time expenditure in marketing is much easier when you have a consistent marketing philosophy underlining both your inbound and outbound approaches. Are you aggressive? Or, are you passive? Are you more trustworthy or more available?

Appoint leaders in each department.

If your team is big enough to support this idea, appoint leaders in each department: a captain for your inbound marketing and a captain for your outbound marketing. These people can make it much easier for you to make decisions and balance resources, since they’ll be specialized experts in each field.

Prioritize permanent/evergreen assets.

In both areas, focus on creating permanent, evergreen assets that will continue providing value to your organization indefinitely. This way, you can practically guarantee that whatever time you spend will be a valuable investment.

Record and analyse data.

Always record and analyse data associated with these marketing strategies. If you’re just getting started, you won’t have any data to work with, so you’ll be relying on instincts and the advice of others to balance your time effectively. But once the objective data starts rolling in, you’ll have no more excuses; you’ll have numerical proof that you should be spending more of your time in one area over another.

Automate what you can.

In both inbound and outbound marketing, you should automate whatever you can. Automation spares you manual effort and greatly reduces the amount of time you need to spend. If employed at a large enough scale, it could dramatically reduce the hours demanded of you and allow you to balance your time more freely.

Trim the fat and optimize.

Be willing to trim the fat and optimize your efforts. The balance of your time expenditure isn’t going to matter much if the hours you’re spending aren’t generating results for your business – even if you’re dedicating those hours to the “better” of the two approaches.

Both inbound and outbound marketing are effective in helping B2B businesses promote themselves and find new customers. But splitting your time between these two fundamentally diverse strategy sets can be a headache.

With smarter prioritization and more effective time management, you can figure out the perfect balance between them.

This story originally appeared on Calendar

By Deanna Ritchie

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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7 Ways to Use Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Small Business

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By Thaddeus Collins

Are you a small business owner looking for ways to use inbound marketing to stand out from the competition and grow your small business? Inbound marketing or organic marketing is a great way to build brand recognition and grow your small business. It is also a more cost-effective and time-efficient approach than traditional marketing methods.

In this blog post, we will discuss 7 ways to use inbound marketing to grow your small business.

Inbound marketing is all about creating content that draws people in. It involves creating content that is relevant to your target audience and providing them with valuable information. It is also important to be creative and think outside the box.

You need to create content that will grab people’s attention and make them want to learn more about your business. With the right strategy, you can use inbound marketing to reach more people and grow your small business.

What is inbound marketing?

As a small business owner, you may be wondering what inbound or organic marketing is and how it can help your business. Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on attracting customers organically through digital channels such as search engines, social media, and blogs.

What Is Inbound MarketingUnlike outbound marketing, which involves interrupting potential customers with ads, inbound marketing uses content to draw customers in and build trust.

Once you have a customer’s attention, you can then slowly nurture them through the sales funnel until they become a paying customer.

Inbound marketing is an extremely effective way to market your small business, and it’s a great way to build long-term relationships with your customers. Keep reading to learn more about inbound marketing and how you can use it to grow your small business!

Are you a small business owner who wants to learn more about inbound marketing? If so, you’re in the right place! In this blog post, we’ll share seven ways you can use inbound marketing to grow your small business.

1. Create SEO-Friendly Content
2. Create Targeted Landing Pages
3. Use Email Marketing
4. Use Social Media
5. Use Lead Magnets
6. Use Retargeting
7. Use Analytical Tools

Create SEO-Friendly Content

SEO-friendly content is content that is optimized to reach and rank high in search engine results. In order to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results, you need to create SEO-friendly content. This means creating content that is optimized for search engine algorithms and contains relevant keywords.

This type of content can help you improve your website’s ranking and drive more organic traffic to your website. When you create content, you should always aim to use keywords strategically and create content that is easy to read and understand.

Try to create content that answers questions potential customers may be searching for and focus on providing useful information. On top of optimizing content for search engines, you should also focus on creating content that resonates with your target audience.

Don’t just focus on the technical aspects of SEO; focus on creating content that your customers will actually want to read and engage with. This type of content will not only help you reach customers, but it will also help you build trust with them.

Bonus Tip 1:

When you create a valuable piece of content, it’s always possible to reuse that information for additional purposes. You can turn a white paper into a series of articles and then turn those articles into short videos.

The possibilities for what you can do with your content are limited only by your own creativity and imagination.

Create Targeted Landing Pages

A landing page is a page on your website created specifically for a marketing campaign or offer. Landing pages should be used strategically to capture customer information and to convert visitors into leads.

When creating a landing page, you should be sure to include a form where customers can provide their contact information. You should also consider personalizing the page with the customer’s name or other relevant information.

Doing this can help increase conversions by making the customer feel like they’re receiving a personalized experience. You should also focus on ensuring your landing page is well designed and easy to navigate.

Make sure your form is prominently displayed and your call-to-action (CTA) is clear and concise. With a good landing page, you can effectively capture leads and convert them into paying customers.

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to communicate with potential customers and keep them informed about your products and services. You can send out regular emails to your subscribers to keep them up-to-date on your latest offers and promotions.

This type of marketing can help you build relationships with your customers and generate leads for your business. By building an email list, you can send targeted emails to customers and provide them with useful information.

When it comes to email marketing, you should always make sure to provide value. Don’t just send out emails for the sake of sending them; focus on creating content that your customers will actually find useful and engaging.

You should also focus on segmenting your list and creating content that caters to the specific needs and interests of each segment. This will help you create emails that customers actually want to read.

Use Social Media

Social media is an extremely effective way to reach potential customers and build relationships with them and is a powerful tool for inbound marketing. With social media you can share content, engage with your customers, and build relationships with them.

You can also use social media to promote your products and services and increase your brand awareness. You should create profiles on all the major social media platforms and post content regularly.

When creating content for social media, you should focus on providing a mix of entertaining and informative content. Creating entertaining content can help you engage with customers, while creating informative content can help you educate them about your brand and build trust.

You should also consider using advertising to reach potential customers on social media. Utilizing the targeting features of social media ads can help you reach the right people and garner more engagement.

Use Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are pieces of content that you use to attract potential customers and convert them into leads. These pieces of content could be ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, or webinars.

Lead magnets should be used strategically to target potential customers who are at different stages of the sales funnel. For example, you could use an ebook to target potential customers who are still in the awareness stage, and a webinar to target potential customers who are already in the consideration stage.

Providing potential customers with useful content that they can use will not only help you capture their information, but it will also help you build trust with them.

Use Retargeting

Retargeting is an effective way to re-engage with potential customers who haven’t yet converted into leads. When a potential customer visits your website, a retargeting pixel is placed on their browser so you can serve them with targeted ads.

Retargeting ads can help you stay top of mind with potential customers and encourage them to convert. When creating retargeting ads, you should consider the particular actions the customer has taken on your website and then create ads that are tailored to their interests.

Doing this will help you personalize the customer’s experience and increase the chances of conversion.

Use Analytical Tools

Analytics is an important part of inbound marketing. You can use analytics to track your website’s performance and see which content is performing well and which content needs improvement.

This type of data can help you make more informed decisions about your inbound marketing strategy. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot can help you measure the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaigns.

These tools can track how many visitors are coming to your website, where they’re coming from, what pages they’re visiting, and more. Having access to these analytical tools can help you identify which campaigns are working and which aren’t so you can make adjustments accordingly.

On top of this, these tools can also provide insight into how customers are interacting with your website and where they’re dropping off in the sales funnel. This can help you figure out where adjustments need to be made in order to improve conversion rates.

A Few Ideas to Get Started

The Results of Organic MarketingSocial media has in the recent past become one of the most significant platforms for promoting businesses. This is because of the high traffic on social media sites at a given time. You should never run out of ideas to use on social media that can take your business to the next level.

1. Use humorous, famous and inspirational quotes while posting on social media platforms.

Social media users are highly attracted to quotes by famous personalities. Users are highly likely to be attracted to social media posts that contain famous or hilarious quotes.

Therefore, in the process of reading such quotes, social media users get to read the promotional information attached to the quotes and hence goods or services are promoted in the process.

2. Use creative fill-in-the-blanks posts for promotional purposes.

Naturally, people like to have their anxiety provoked and social media users are not left out. fill-in-the-blanks posts are posts that leave readers wondering what would happen if they got involved with whatever promotional idea is passed across in a social media post.

If I had one million dollars I would……… This is a good example of fill-in-the-blanks.

3. Offer your friends and followers bonus rewards for sharing your content.

On a number of cases, marketers and promoters on social media have devised incredible measures of encouraging users to share their content on their own timelines and pages.

This includes offering rewards for every share. Rewards act like incentives and motivational tools for social media users to share your content on their social media pages and timelines.

Bonus Tip 2

Share useful resources generated by others on your social networks.

In order to show your passion for sharing useful information with your audience, do not hesitate to share other people’s information that you might find useful.

Such information is useful at all times despite its origin. This is an implication that social media users will not mind the origin of a given post so long as they find it useful in one way or another.

Inbound marketing strategies offers us numerous tools to ease our approach to marketing

From the simple approach of creating low-cost polls to the engaging videos for potential customers or even in-depth interviews with industry leaders., the social media has been a buzz of activity when it comes to methods of marketing through the platform(s).

Suffice it to say, social media has provided limitless avenues that can be effectively used by small businesses to market themselves and their services.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing is a powerful tool for small business owners. By following these seven steps, you can build brand awareness, generate leads, and grow your business.

Inbound marketing is a great way for small business owners to reach their target audience and generate leads. By using organic marketing, building brand awareness, creating content, posting SEO-friendly content, using email marketing, and using social media and analytics, you can increase your visibility and generate more leads for your business.

Today, social media sites are no longer just an ingenious way for people to meet, connect and share. It is now also one of the most powerful advertising tools which businesses can use to connect to their targeted market niche.

However, it is noteworthy that social media marketing is like a double-edged sword it is something that needs to be wielded correctly. In the hands of a skilled marketer like Inker Street Digital Marketing, it is an effective sales tool. But in the hands of an amateur, it can turn success into demise.

If you’re looking to grow your business, let us get your organic inbound marketing started to reach more customers and increase your sales. We will start implementing the strategies above today to increase brand awareness and generate more leads for your business.

Inbound marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach potential customers and convert them into leads and paying customers. By following the tips outlined in this blog post, you can begin utilizing inbound marketing to grow your small business. Good luck!

Here are some Questions to gauge your Inbound Marketing readiness.

  • What are the most effective inbound marketing strategies that you have used in your business?
  • What challenges have you faced when it comes to leveraging organic marketing?
  • Do you think this type of marketing is a more cost-effective way of engaging with customers than traditional marketing methods?
  • How have you seen inbound or organic marketing change the way customers interact with your business?
  • What tips or advice would you give to other small business owners looking to leverage inbound marketing?
  • If you had to choose one inbound or organic marketing strategy to focus on, what would it be?
  • In what ways do you think inbound marketing could be improved?
  • What do you think is the biggest benefit to using inbound or organic marketing?
  • What do you think is the biggest challenge to using inbound or organic marketing?
  • What advice would you give to companies that are just starting out with this type of marketing?

By Thaddeus Collins

Sourced from Inker Street

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Demand generation vs lead generation

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Sourced from Boss Magazine

You’ve probably heard of demand generation and lead generation in regards to inbound marketing strategies. However, you might be struggling to differentiate the two. Both…

You’ve probably heard of demand generation and lead generation in regards to inbound marketing strategies. However, you might be struggling to differentiate the two. Both are sales techniques that are used by companies that are trying to generate prospects and sales.

A key difference, though, is that they are both used at different stages of the sales cycle and therefore have independent aims. These strategies are generally used by B2B companies as a way to establish a presence on the market and draw new prospects in so that they eventually buy products and services from the company.

Having a good understanding of both demand generation and lead generation strategies can help your sales team generate qualified leads from an established target audience.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the differences between the lead generation process and a demand generation campaign. We’ll also look at how you can apply these methods to make successful sales.

Demand generation vs lead generation

Demand generation and lead generation are closely linked as one stage follows the other. The aim of demand gen is to spark interest from prospects in the company’s services and products, whilst lead gen aims to establish a relationship with them and convert the prospects into customers and sales.

Demand generation content should create awareness of how your company can provide the solution to a prospect’s problem and therefore create interest in your services and products. Lead generation, on the other hand, is the process by which you turn these prospects into paying customers.

If demand generation is at the top of the sales funnel, then lead generation is at the bottom. Companies usually create gated content as part of their lead generation tactics and then ask for the prospects contact information so that they can receive that information.

Continue reading to find out about both tactics in greater detail and how you can use both to generate leads into sales.

What is demand generation?

Companies use demand generation to create awareness and demand for their products and services. This includes data-driven strategies that are focused on revenue creation. Some examples of demand generation content include blogs, ebooks and videos that are aimed at your target audience.

You could post this content on your website and advertise it on other platforms (such as social media) once you have established your target customer group and know what they will be looking for.

The main goal of demand generation is to raise brand awareness and customer association between their need and your products and services. For example, if a customer has run out of face cream, you want them to immediately think of your company when they go to buy some more.

Thought leadership and a good social media presence are both important aspects of demand generation. The main aim of thought leadership is to establish your company as experts in your field so that when people think of a particular topic or problem, they instantly think of you.

Social media is also a good way to gain a public presence that helps with brand recall. Various sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can all help you advertise your products and services to your target audience.

Sponsored adverts and posts can also lead prospects to your website, where you can encourage them to sign up to a mailing list for more content. This is when you can move on to the lead generation part of your sales plan.

What is lead generation?

The main aim of lead generation campaigns is to turn prospects into paying customers. You can gain their attention through your demand generation efforts and then your sales team can seal the deal through lead generation tactics. One way that lead generation nurtures qualified leads is through the use of gated content.

Gated lead generation content includes things such as eBooks and PDFs as well as courses, free trials and events. The prospect must provide their contact information to your company in order to access these documents and content.

Good lead magnets for lead generation include sign-up content upgrades. For example, you could offer a PDF version of a web page if the prospect enters their email address. Once you have their contact information, you have already established a connection and can nurture this into real sales.

You will have already established brand recall and thought leadership through demand generation, so this is the time to build a relationship with your prospects and help them translate into long-term customers.

What are the main differences between demand generation and lead generation?

Demand generation is used to attract customers to your company whilst lead generation turns those prospects into actual leads and moves them on to the next stage of the sales journey.

You want to create a positive experience for potential prospects during your demand generation campaigns. However, along with brand awareness, you also need to increase conversions by identifying your target audience and creating buyer personas. You then need to think about their customer journey and how each individual persona will experience it.

Lead generation efforts differ from demand generation because these strategies are more targeted. Gated content is a popular lead generation strategy because prospects can only access specialised content once they have given personalised contact information, such as their email address.

Prospects will be expecting relevant and targeted content in return for giving you personal information. Lead generation, on the other hand, provides free information so the content is broader.

A strong demand generation campaign builds brand awareness and nurtures opportunities that will generate high-quality leads and will build your business through increased sales.

How do demand generation and lead generation work together?

Despite their differences, lead generation tactics and demand generation ideas are closely linked and can have a big impact on one another. They are used at different stages of the sales process, which means that they don’t work at the same time. Lead generation relies upon the interest and excitement that demand generation has built for prospects and then converts their interest into actual sales.

Demand generation is at the top of the funnel whilst a lead generation campaign is at the base. This means that you can broadly appeal to lots of prospects with demand generation and then filter down to actual customers and sales with lead gen content.

You want to attract leads through your content, whether that be blogs, social media or videos on YouTube. The next time the prospect needs an item or service, the goal is that they will remember your company because of the content they’ve seen.

After this, you should aim to get their contact information so that you can share specialized content with them through email campaigns in the hope that they will turn into paying customers.

Sourced from Boss Magazine

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What Are the 4 Stages of the Inbound Marketing Methodology?

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By Thom Murtagh

Inbound marketing serves to attract potential customers by dazzling them with great online content, specifically tailored for them.

Compare this to outbound marketing — which often interrupts potential customers in ways they might not appreciate — such as telemarketing, cold calling and television or radio commercials.

But by providing people with valuable content they can consume at their leisure, you can not only generate leads, but you can also secure lifelong customers. This makes inbound marketing essential for gaining new customers and creating loyal brand ambassadors.

Let’s take a look at what comprises inbound marketing, how to effectively implement the four stages of a successful inbound marketing strategy and why this is such an important aspect of your overall marketing strategy.

What is Inbound Marketing?

At its core, inbound marketing provides potential and long-time customers with valuable content. You accomplish this by guiding consumers through the buyers’ journey, and you do it all without actually advertising or outright promoting your brand.

Inbound marketers work in collaboration with the company’s sales team to draft a profile of your desired target audience. This includes answering questions such as:

  • “Who is our ideal customer?”
  • “What kind of income levels do they have?”
  • “Which demographic do they belong to?”
  • “How does our product or service solve a problem they’re having?”

With these buyer personas in hand, you can then move to the next phase of crafting your strategy: following the four stages of inbound marketing methodology.

The 4 Stages of Inbound Methodology

Generally speaking, you can divide your inbound marketing strategy into four main stages:

1. Attract

The first step is catching the eye of potential customers. Ways to attract these consumers vary, but ultimately this is what generates your leads.

Your goal should be to use SEO-enhanced digital marketing content, such as blogs or infographics, or a strong social media presence to drive people to your website, where you can move them further down your sales funnel.

2. Convert

After attracting site visitors, you then need to convert these leads into prospects. You can accomplish this through form-fills, calls-to-action or gated material on your website’s landing pages.

3. Close

Once you’ve converted the leads into prospects, you need to then close the deals. A CRM can identify where each of the leads came from while also tracking the sale sizes, which helps you further hone your messaging.

4. Engage

Your work isn’t done after closing the deal. You still need to delight your customers in engaging ways to earn their brand loyalty and turn them into long-time buyers.

How Can Content Attract Customers?

Each stage of the inbound marketing methodology is important, as is the type of content used at each stage. The type of digital content you publish should relate to the particular inbound methodology stage you’re trying to reach. But most importantly, this content needs to be valuable.

Quality content is key.

Whether it’s in the form of digital ads, videos, blogging, social media or graphics, the content you use in your inbound marketing campaign needs to be entertaining, informative and valuable to your customers.

When your content meets these criteria, you build more brand awareness, credibility and trust, while also educating the audience about your solutions. This helps create demand and, ultimately, generates leads.

How to Create Valuable Content

You have many options for what kind of content you can create to attract or engage customers, so long as you make sure you’re providing something of substance for them.

In the Attract Stage, you can collect data from industry analysts and market research, and share this data in easily digestible and shareable content, such as an infographic or a listicle blog.

Depending on your industry, you might want to make this fun and lively if you have a B2C model. Or, on the other hand, consider utilizing your industry subject matter expertise and write long-form, serious thought leadership pieces.

For example, you can attract consumers with your digital content if they are specifically searching for particular answers to a question they typed into Google. If your piece of content, say a blog, uses search engine optimized (SEO) keywords and phrases specific to your target audience, Google will give your content a high rank on its search engine results page (SERP). This, in turn, attracts viewers to the blog on your website.

Similarly, a strong social media strategy can work to help keep customers engaged. The brand’s official social media accounts can listen for feedback, answer questions, conduct surveys and generally just interact with other users.

It’s important to keep in mind that the type of content you use throughout the four stages of your inbound marketing strategy should all work in tandem and flow from one stage to the next.

While it might require you spending some time to craft and implement your own strategy that’s best suited for your brand’s needs, inbound marketing remains a cost-effective and proven method of marketing.

By Thom Murtagh

Thom Murtagh is a Chicago-based copywriter and digital marketing specialist. He enjoys cooking, jamming out on the ukulele, and trying to keep pace with the never-ending deluge of new movies, shows, and books.

Sourced from Brafton

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Companies are made of people: The importance of personalization in the B2B inbound marketing tactics

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Sourced from doxee.

In a previous series of posts, we have taken an extensive look at the characteristics of Inbound marketing, distinguishing it from Outbound, recounting its history, and identifying the latest developments. The goal was to describe the evolution of a concept, from theory to practice.

In this post, we will look at inbound marketing from the point of view of B2B, looking at why it’s effective, and focusing on the features that make it stand out: the production, management, and strategic distribution of high quality content (content marketing).

What is B2B marketing?

“Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations. It holds several key distinctions from B2C marketing, which is oriented toward consumers.” This definition is taken from the Marketing Solutions Blog from, LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site with over 550 million members.

In a broad sense, B2B marketing content tends to be more informative and direct than B2C content. This is because the purchasing decisions of businesses, compared to those of consumers, are based on the impact on profits. The return on investment (ROI) is rarely a consideration of the average consumer, at least in the sense of a purely “material” investment (the ratio between expenditure and immediate economically quantifiable benefit), but it is an absolutely primary objective for business decision-makers.

B2B marketers find themselves managing a complex sales process, where they are called upon to identify the real decision-makers and the main stakeholders of the target company within a corporate landscape that is unique and characterized by specific organizational charts and decision-making flows. It becomes absolutely necessary to acquire a solid and precise knowledge of the company so as to be able to map the people really involved in the decisions by reaching them with relevant and personalized information.

Who is B2B marketing aimed at?

B2B marketing campaigns are aimed at any individual who has the ability to influence purchasing decisions. This can include a wide variety of professional titles, up to the C-level.

B2B marketing in context 

To start getting an idea of the context, let’s take a look at the Sagefrog Marketing Group’s 2020 Marketing Mix Report B2B (download here), which contains data on B2B marketing strategies, competitive trends and emerging tactics:

  • Between 2017 and 2018, at least 40% of B2B companies invested a tenth of their budget in marketing. Since then, that number has risen to almost 50%
  • The total expenditure is distributed across the following: 56% on Digital Marketing, 52% on Website Development and 36% on tradeshows and events
  • Content Marketing (27%) is an area in constant growth

In the 2018 B2B Content Marketing report focusing on Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends by CMI and MarketingProfs, 91% of companies employ Inbound Marketing  as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Of the remaining 9%, 54% said they plan to invest in content marketing within 12 months; 43% have no immediate plans to use content marketing; and 4% have used content marketing in the past.

Quality content: a strong return on investment

The Sagefrog Report highlights that quality content can offer a strong ROI when properly optimised for search engines so that it can be easily found and shared over and over again.  This means that quality content combined with clear and graphically pleasing landing pages and contact forms can help provide qualified leads. To achieve this goal, each piece of content must be designed in such a way that it is informative, relevant, searchable, shareable, not overly promotional, and above all, distinctive from that proposed by competitors.

Where the objectives of marketing and sales meet

Among marketers’ main objectives for 2020, in the first place is the need to convert leads into customers, followed by increasing sales, growth in brand awareness, the creation of “Thought Leadership,” and finally, increased website traffic.

What’s important to point out here is that the two main objectives are in fact priorities that marketing and sales teams share, which suggests the need to harmonize operations between the two departments.

Sales and marketing leads get personal

Referrals are the main source of qualified marketing and sales leads (63%). This is by no means surprising: B2B draws useful knowledge and contacts from the interpersonal networks of professionals, who are more likely to invest their time and money working with a company if they can rely on an existing connection.

In any case, if referrals are the main source of sales and marketing leads, inbound marketing is also gaining traction (33%). In both cases, we can read the strong signal of increasing attention to the personalization of communications.

In fact, the marketing experts interviewed by Sagefrog say that in 2020 they will explore personalization strategies (47%) through Account-based marketing (42%), video marketing, (41%) and inbound marketing (39%), AI and automation (36%), conversational marketing in the form of chatbots (33%) and influencer marketing (27%).

How do I create a B2B marketing strategy? The best B2B inbound marketing tactics

The competition to win the attention of customers gets tougher every day. Building a B2B strategy that delivers results requires considered planning, execution, and management. In the aforementioned LinkedIn article, the steps for planning a B2B marketing strategy are outlined. The steps for getting there, as the aforementioned LinkedIn article describes, are part of any inbound plan because they incorporate two fundamental assumptions:

  • Personalized, useful, and relevant content that authentically conveys the brand’s vision and value system through relevant channels
  • Continuous listening to the feedback of the reference target, previously profiled
  1. Develop a global vision and select specific and measurable business objectives
  2. Define the market, never forgetting that you’re talking to a person. While B2C goods often have a wider and more general audience, B2B products and services are marketed to a set of customers with specific needs related to their sector, department, and the business function. However, potential customers are also individuals with precise demographic data, urgencies, and priorities.
  3. Identify B2B inbound marketing tactics and channels. Once solid information about the target audience has been defined, determine how and where to reach them. The knowledge gained through the previous step should help. In any case, it is good practice to prepare a list of questions to establish time and place, both physical and virtual, in which to try to intercept those who will be the recipients of targeted marketing actions.
  4. Create content, distribute it and organize campaigns. After deciding which channels to use, plan and implement best practices for each one. Each action should, in any case, be built around some critical elements: a message, expressively translated with a creative approach, a series of useful insights, the most accurate targeting possible and some understandable, transparent and persuasive call to action.
  5. Measure and improve. Consult analysis and metrics reports in order to activate review and fine-tuning processes in real time: even with a well-studied basis, the creation of content and campaigns is intrinsically based on hypotheses and forecasts and must be optimized until you have substantial involvement and conversion data to rely on. Observe the channels, topics and media that resonate the most and then enhance them.

Essential elements of B2B inbound marketing tactics  

Truly effective B2B marketing is conversational, focused, and contextually relevant, and a B2B marketing strategy must include a variety of content, most of which is typically inbound: blogs, white papers, social media, email, videos.

Blogs: Regularly updated blogs provide organic visibility and direct inbound traffic to the website, whether institutional or product based. The blog can contain different types of content: copy, infographics, videos, case studies and much more.

Search: SEO best practices must be updated in conjunction with Google’s algorithm, which is changing more and more often, making it difficult to keep up. Lately, the focus has shifted from keywords and metadata to the interpretation of the user’s signals of intent.

Social media: Both organic and paid traffic should always be part of the mix. Social networks allow you to reach and attract potential customers where they are active. B2B customers increasingly use these channels to search for potential suppliers and to inform their purchasing decisions.

White papers and ebooks: Resources containing valuable information can be gated (requiring users to provide contact information or perform another action to download the content) or freely available. Often used as B2B lead generation tools.

Email: Although its effectiveness in recent years has been impacted by the proliferation of spam filters, email is still widely used today.

Video: Content that can be used within many of areas listed above (blogs, social media, e-mail) is becoming increasingly important for B2B strategies

In conclusion: Be human

When it comes to B2B marketing, the biggest mistake we could make is thinking that you are addressing an abstract and impersonal entity. In fact, as it should be clear by now, any marketing action will be aimed at recipients who are first and foremost real people who are driven by emotional and cognitive motivations. Although corporate decisions tend to be more rational and logical in nature, this does not mean that the content communicated must be formal or “robotic” in tone.

For the same reason, campaigns that are too broad will not be able to connect with (or influence) the audience in the same way that those aimed at specific segments can. Defining and segmenting the audience is an absolutely fundamental preliminary step in creating a message that speaks directly to individuals driven by a real need.

Personalization and relevance are essential: “speaking the language” of customers is a valid precondition because it allows us to cross an initial barrier, that of understanding. But it’s not enough: it’s necessary to publish content and ads that thematically adapt to the place where they are displayed. For example, shorter videos with simpler and more immediate narrative hooks work better on social media feeds, while a longer video is probably better suited to YouTube. Put yourself in the end user’s shoes and humanize your relationship with him or her right away. As in any Inbound strategy, even in the case of B2B marketing the starting point—each person’s needs and desires—is unique.

Sourced from doxee

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When Inbound Isn’t Enough: 3 Questions to Determine Inbound and Outbound Marketing Balance

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By Courtney Dodge

By now you’ve probably read the headlines and seen the stats from HubSpot and others about the virtues of inbound. There’s no denying that inbound marketing can be effective in generating quality leads for your business. Even so, inbound marketing should be treated as an addition to your other marketing strategies – not a replacement. Even if you are really good at it, inbound marketing only opens a small window into your total addressable market, leaving the rest wide open for your competition. So before you consider abandoning outbound efforts for inbound – ask yourself these questions:

#1 – Is it easy for prospects to find you?

To be successful with inbound, you’ll have to produce a substantial amount of premium content that’s highly optimized for search. While quality content can help build your brand and drive inbound interest, it can be resource-intensive, expensive, and there are no guarantees that your prospects will find it. In fact, with every technology vendor trying to become a publisher, getting your content noticed is harder today than ever before.

If you want to truly understand how much demand you can realistically capture through inbound, start by mapping out how many content assets you can produce a week and compare it to vendors who have leading organic positions for keywords you’d like to own. Are you producing as much content as they are? Can you? Remember, certain keywords are going to require much more effort to make it to the first page, especially if you’re competing against larger vendors and publishers who have entire editorial teams dedicated to creating content. Take TechTarget for example. We have over 1,000 editors and freelancers writing content every day just so we can drive thousands of inbound visitors to our sites. Ultimately, competing with such brands for content volume is unproductive. Redirect your efforts from quantity to quality of content and ensure you’re delivering something new and distinct that can be promoted as such.

Instead of going “all-in” on inbound, consider pushing your content out to target prospects and leads to supplement your inbound efforts. These are the exact same people you’re trying to attract via inbound, so why not engage them with outbound marketing too? Not only will this help you generate quality leads faster, but it will also provide additional coverage in areas where you may lack inbound interest.

#2 – Are you attracting and identifying the right prospects through your site?

Even if you’re able to attract thousands of prospects to your website, are they the right ones? Not always. In many cases you’ll fin­­­d tire-kickers, partners, or other vendors downloading your content to better understand your solutions or gather competitive intelligence.

And it’s not just about getting the right people to your site; you’ll also have to know who they are. One of the most challenging parts of inbound marketing is converting anonymous website visitors into leads. And with the average inbound conversion rate for B2B/Tech hovering around 3% (WordStream), you’re going to burn a lot of time generating inbound interest that will never turn into deals. Even if you can convert the right person, there’s no guarantee it’s the right time; you don’t have the resources to waste on false positives.

Unlike inbound, outbound gives you control over who to target and the ability to reach known prospects from companies that are more likely to buy from you. This not only helps you focus your efforts on the right prospects but also eliminates wasted time sorting through (or even worse, selling to) unqualified inbound leads.

#3 – Are you effectively reaching entire buying teams?

Let’s say you’re successful at converting inbound visitors to leads. Now what? To turn them into customers, you’ll need to decide how to market or sell differently to every member of the buying team. Relying on an inbound-only lead source limits your visibility into the entire buyer’s journey and may not uncover key decision makers who are involved in the final purchase. This is critical today when an average of 6.8 people are involved in the buying process (CEB). To win deals, your sales team is going to have to know exactly who is on the buying team and what they’re researching – when they’re with you AND when they’re not.

Instead of relying exclusively on inbound, TechTarget can consolidate your efforts by making your inbound traffic more valuable and employ a strategic outbound approach. TechTarget’s Priority Engine includes Inbound Converter, which identifies accounts visiting your website and exposes active demand from those accounts directly within the platform, including members of the buying team and insights to help you better understand the topics and competitors the buying team is researching when they’re not with you. Overall, Priority Engine identifies the accounts that are most active and interested so you can target the right people at the right time.

By Courtney Dodge

Sourced from TechTarget20

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The Sad Tyranny of an Inbound-Only Approach to Winning Clients

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By Anthony Iannarino

Each of us is a prisoner to our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our interpretation of reality, as well as what we believe is good and right and true. Our interpretation can constrain our thoughts, and those thoughts can restrict our actions, even when other people have different beliefs, ones that increase their choices instead of limiting them. Those constraints can be a form of self-imposed tyranny.

For the last decade, since Web 2.0 and the advent of the social channels, there has been a significant push towards Inbound Marketing. The ability to create and share content to share with your prospective clients changed marketing, eliminating the need for a budget, an agency, or most importantly, permission to publish. For the better part of this period, salespeople, sales leaders, and sales organizations have been sold the idea that Inbound is more effective than Outbound, with the loudest voices suggesting that outbound and cold outreach is no longer necessary. They have also suggested that salespeople and sales organizations that employ an outbound approach will soon be out of business, that no one will work with people companies that use cold outreach.

Inbound-only is not a strategy that any salesperson or sales organization should consider. The result is an opportunity-starved sales force, and on that is reliant on others.

100 Pieces of Content

Recently, a well-known social media marketer suggested that people create 100 pieces of content, a strategy this individual executes perfectly, with help from a large team and a massive investment of both time and money. The inbound-only proponents applauded the idea as an excellent idea. While it might be helpful for an individual working to develop a well-recognized brand, and a terrible idea for salespeople, and one that would be impossible to execute.

Imagine a sales force of 200 salespeople. Each salesperson creates a single blog post each week. First, someone is going to have to approve the content, another person will have to edit the content, marketing will have to vet the content, and in many industries, legal will have to consent to the publication. There is no reason for a sales force to create 10,400 pieces of content a year, and there is no marketing professional who approves a strategy that would create confusion and chaos.

Let’s set aside this extreme misinterpretation of a strategy for personal brand building as a sales strategy, and look at the real problem with an inbound-only approach.

Passivity and Waiting

Nothing about selling lends itself to passivity or waiting. The idea that one must sit patiently, waiting for content to bring them leads and opportunities might be one of the most debilitating and destructive beliefs to take hold in some organizations. The idea that content will cause people to beat a path to your door is every salesperson’s dream; what could be easier than merely taking orders? What could be better?

There is a reason we use the word “hunter” to describe salespeople. It signifies one that has to go out work to be able to feed themselves. We ‘don’t describe salespeople as fishermen or fisherwomen; the idea that someone would put a line in the water and wait for a bite, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how hungry they might be is a non-starter.

For many reasons, there is no waiting in sales. Unlike most other areas of business, salespeople have a quota, a time-bound goal. With each day that slips by without the salesperson creating new opportunities, the deadline gets closer. Waiting is a dangerous strategy and a choice that isn’t available to salespeople or companies that intend to grow.

A Detrimental Reliance on Others

Some people with sales titles believe that inbound should replace outbound, that it is marketing’s responsibility to bring them leads. When salespeople complain about leads not being qualified, what they are suggesting is that marketing should bring them “opportunities,” a prospect that is “ready-to-buy.” Marketing has its metrics and goals, and “new opportunities” ‘isn’t likely to be found among them. The idea that a salesperson should rely on marketing is to misunderstand the difference in the roles and goals.

Not only does an inbound-only approach cause one to rely on marketing, but it also requires them to rely heavily on luck (even though Luck loves a hustler and ignores non-hustlers). Inbound requires your dream client to open their browser, navigate to a search engine, and type it some keyword that an algorithm directs to your website. You have to rely on your client searching, the algorithm to deliver them to you, and the content to cause them to reach out to you proactively.

A Sad Form of Tyranny

The idea that your results are not within your control or influence is an unhealthy belief, and especially harmful for salespeople. Having to wait for someone else to proactively reach out to them before being able to engage with a person or company who would benefit from their help is to accept that you have no agency, that you are nothing more than a victim of circumstances beyond your control.

There is no question that inbound marketing is important, that it should be done and done well, and that it is a powerful form of marketing that can and does help sales organizations. But inbound is ancillary to an effective outbound approach, one that includes cold outreach. Outbound is greater than Inbound.

By Anthony Iannarino

Sourced from IANNARINO

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Going From Impossible to Inevitable: A Case Study on Inbound Marketing

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Startups are hard. In fact, in the beginning, it can seem nearly impossible. But startups are exciting. There’s nothing like the prospect of building something that can change the world. That will keep you going, and when you reach a certain point, your success goes from impossible to inevitable.

Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin know a thing or two about this. They’ve both been successful operators, but both consult countless companies, and they’ve written a book whose title says it all: From Impossible to Inevitable.

Aaron recently swung by the Engagio office, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a quick vlog. Aaron and Jason just released a revised and updated version of their book, which contains a lot of new ideas and all new case studies. So, we decided to chat about one of those case studies – how inbound has changed in the last 10 years. Yes, it’s the story of how Jon Miller did inbound in the early days at Marketo versus how we’re doing it at Engagio.

Here’s my conversation with Aaron. Enjoy!

(Watch on YouTube)

TRANSCRIPT:

– Alright, it’s Aaron Ross here, with Brandon Redlinger, who’s Director of Growth at Engagio. Brandon, thanks for hosting me here.

– Absolutely

– I came in off the plane I was like yeah, I’ll come by, let’s do a video.

– Let’s do a video!

– Why not And I couldn’t say no.

– Yeah

– I couldn’t say no.

– Okay

– So, this time for this updated book from Impossible to Inevitable, I can’t even say it sometimes, second edition. There’s a bunch of great new case studies in sections, like it is a pretty massive update. One of them is from my friend Jon Miller founder, CEO of Engagio. And I thought it was really interesting, because he was the original co-founder of Marketo. And so, this section here talks about the difference in 10 years between when Marketo was founded, and today with Engagio. So, I got one of the tips that I liked a lot, and I realize you’re just kind of like a foil for me to hear to talk, So one of the tips I liked, that Jon had to share was 10 years ago, and you can put up a blog post, and he said he could get it on the highly ranked keywords

– Show up on Google

– on page one, you know Jon Miller writes a post and BOOM!

– Boom!

– Then marketing comes flooding in, right.

– Yup

– All the leads come flooding in. So today he’s been working for three years to get on range for Account Based Marketing, he can’t even get on the first three pages or 10 pages. So two things, he said it’s really important to take an accountant-based approach, kinda mixing content marketing, with outbound prospecting, Account Based Marketing. You’re taking ideas, you’re taking to people, and that was much more a spears approach with marketing. And that was, in the book he he goes to these four tiers, so when you have tier one accounts, these big strategic accounts, you know Wales, like the true Wales, how do you treat them, verus tier two where you got the big companies versus tier three which means like mid-market, and tier four which is small business. So, I don’t know if in those different tiers that you guys use and talk about, love to hear maybe like a tip, if I’m trying to target the big enterprise, not like the, lets say the bigger companies.

– What’s a common mistake that you see companies make, whether their customers or not on Engagio? It’s account based marketing

– Yes, absolutely! So I think we run into this all the time.

– I’m putting him on the spot by the way

– Happy to take this on. People choose too many accounts, then when they take on

– That’s a good one

– Too much, and then they don’t have the resources or they don’t have the time, or the budget, or the people, to properly actually go after… ’cause your top tier accounts

– Top, top tiers

– Top, top tier, right

– Yeah

– We don’t have certain budget, we don’t have certain time, certain resources

– Okay, how many accounts, okay pick a number, how many accounts do you think is too many?

– For tier one?

– For tier one, the biggest ones, and then, ’cause you’re gonna guess too many. Like what would you say?

– Don’t go more than five.

– Five, right, five or fewer.

– We do not, I don’t think we have a rep right now that has five. That’s the most we allow, and I don’t think they do it. There are people, they say, I can do five, I can do five, they know what what their resources are, they know the SLAs they have to hit, they know what they need to do. But like a lot of people are like, oh I can easily do five, I can easily do it. And then

– Yup at the end of the day they’re like, you’re like hey, were you able to touch this account? What happened with this account? And like I just didn’t get around to it.

– Yep there’s no shame in saying, ah maybe I’ll do four, maybe I’ll do three.

– Yeah, like it’s not more, is not better.

– Exactly

– So in page 74, they go through the different tiers here, right. Tier one, two, three, or four. And that was something interesting, that at the top level five, and actually per if I remember, per account they might spend $60,000.00 per account, per one company.

– Yep

– Obviously, if you have money to spend.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Yeah, and anyway, tier two you could do more companies if it’s small, that was a really interesting when we talked about it with Jon, and so that was like when I was really excited to get into the book, so.

– A lot of good stuff in there

– Yeah

– So..

– Go pick it up now, it is the Bible in Silicon Valley for growth.

– Yep, it’s on Amazon, or from impossible.com

– Awesome, thanks Aaron!

– Yeah, thanks.

By

Brandon Redlinger is the Director of Growth at Engagio, the Account Based Marketing and Sales platform that enables teams to measure account engagement and orchestrate human connections at scale. He is passionate about the intersection between tech and psychology, especially as it applies to growing businesses. You can follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Draw Your Prospects To Your Brand By Improving Your Inbound Marketing

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By Karina Tama – Rutigliano

The central question about inbound marketing isn’t about whether you’re doing it. Just by virtue of having a website, you’re inherently soliciting some amount of inbound marketing. The crucial question about inbound marketing is how to maximize its potential.

One of the great things about inbound marketing is that it’s a perfect marketing strategy for companies of every size and in every stage of development. Unlike outbound marketing, where you’re creating ads and trying to capture your audience’s attention, inbound marketing is a strategy that identifies customers who are noodling around the internet in search of what your company offers and highlighting a visible path right to the doorstep of your website. The idea behind inbound marketing is to draw your prospects into your brand experience by creating content that they just don’t want to miss.

By implementing a few new tools and watching your analytics carefully, you’ll learn quickly how to generate qualified leads and convert them to customers, which is the goal of successful inbound marketing.

A successful inbound marketing strategy requires narrowing your target customer profile.

I’m sometimes surprised about how little marketers know about their target customers. I advise marketers to narrow down the demographics of their target customer as closely as possible. Ask yourself the following:

• Are they primarily male or female?

• What age bracket do they fall into?

• What is the average income level of your customer?

• What are their general occupations?

• Is your target customer likely to be married or single?

• Are they a homeowner or more likely to rent?

• How do they spend their leisure time?

• What specific problem can you solve for them?

Keep brainstorming and ask as many questions about your customer as possible. By narrowly defining your target customer, it will be easier to develop content that will draw them to you organically.

Be aware of your buyers and how they search.

Not too long ago, I’d get frustrated if I went to a store and couldn’t find a salesperson to help me quickly. Today, I know that I can get what I need online, without anyone’s help. There are times when I need the assistance of a knowledgeable salesperson. For most purchases, I prefer to do my own research without the influence of a salesperson who’s looking to make a commission based on my purchase.

I find that online buyers shop in much the same way as brick-and-mortar retail shoppers. And there are four stages in every buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, decision, experience.

Use your target customer’s profile as a basis to create various inbound marketing strategies that will keep them tuned in at every stage of the buying experience. Inbound marketing gives your customers the right content at the right time to take them to the next step in the sales funnel.

Awareness: Create content for the awareness stage that outlines the problem in a straightforward way and leads customers to additional content that offers intriguing solutions. Tip sheets, blogs, overviews and other short, factual content drive this stage.

Consideration: This stage calls for explanatory pieces that line up sensical solutions, such as e-books, whitepapers and informative videos.

Decision: Focus on value when customers enter the decision stage. This is the time to present case studies, offer free assessments, highlight features and show your product or service in the best possible light.

Experience: Deliver content in the final stage that helps customers have a good experience with your product or service. I find that this is a good place to post how-to formatted articles, briefs and guides.

A great inbound marketing strategy answers the clients’ questions in every stage.

Consider using various elements of inbound marketing.

In creating content, think about the types of inbound marketing that will generate qualified leads which you can convert into customers. Successful inbound marketing requires you to manage your data well, accurately analyze your return on investment and implement the best tools.

Here are some elements of inbound marketing to get you thinking of how to create conversions:

• Media and public relations

• Building an online community

• Utilizing influencers

• Blogging

• Thought leadership

• Public speaking

• Social media

• Video content

• Word of mouth

Inbound marketing can get Google’s attention, too.

Time and again, Google calls for quality content, but what does that really mean? Quality content is not just what you know about a topic, but how well you write about it. For example, if you’re selling plant seeds, you can certainly write about topics for beginning gardeners. But think beyond the basic soil, sun and water topics to other things gardeners want to know, such as:

• How do I start container gardening?

• Tips on preventing garden pests.

• Which plants require little watering?

• Which plants attract butterflies?

• Which plants are safe around pets?

• Which plants are edible?

• Which plants are easy to grow in certain climates?

• What are the gardening tools every gardener should own?

Quality content means that you’re sharing your expertise on not only the plant seeds that your company sells but on all things gardening and plants. When you blog, produce videos or present other such content on a regular basis, your audience can begin to trust you as an expert in your field. Google recognizes that visitors are flocking to your site on a regular basis because they can’t wait to get the next valuable nugget of information, and this boosts your site ranking.

In my opinion, inbound marketing should be an essential component of every marketing plan. According to HubSpot’s 2018 “State of Inbound” report, which surveyed more than 6,200 respondents from a mix of industries, 55% of marketers consider creating quality content as one of their top inbound marketing priorities. To improve your inbound marketing strategy, narrow your target customer even more, add a few more outlets for content and demonstrate that you’re an industry expert in every aspect of your product or service.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Karina Tama – Rutigliano

Karina Tama-Rutigliano is a Digital Marketing Strategist. She shares her skills in karinatama.com. She works at Thomas in NYC.

Sourced from Forbes

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