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The Definitive Playbook to B2B Inbound Marketing

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By Blake Johnston

The B2B marketing landscape of 2019 is a brave new world for business – one virtually unrecognizable from years past.

If we go back to the start of the decade, concepts like content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and inbound marketing were years away from conception.

At the time, buyer demographic and behavioral data was difficult to find, marketing campaigns were more expensive to launch and harder to track, and  market pulse was tougher to discern.

All that has now changed.

Replacing the old world of B2B marketing is a new landscape that is highly favorable to creative and strategic marketers. Instead of creating big and expensive ad campaigns, marketers are creating thoughtful content that attract inbound customers.

content marketing

Generating quality inbound leads is the key to the success of B2B marketing.  Not only does it help accelerate your sales cycle – it also creates happier sales reps, and bolster revenue growth.

We developed this playbook to help you accelerate sales cycle velocity, and retain and expand its existing client base. Let’s dive in.

The Organic Inbound Marketing Playbook for B2B Companies

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The thrust of this playbook is simple: launching an inbound B2B marketing strategy does not need to be expensive.

It doesn’t require tons of money for Google AdWords and PPC. Neither does it require that you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on large-scale events and sponsorships.

However, it does require the implementation of thoughtful content that truly engages your buyer. To do this, use the nine techniques we share below to help you build recurring organic inbound traffic.

Technique #1. Dial into your target audience

Every great inbound marketing strategy starts with a perfect understanding of your target audience – your ideal client profile.

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If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience or ideal client profile (ICP), use these two simple tactics to master and understand your ICP:

  1. Make a list of your existing client base, enrich their data, and map their buyer journey.
  2. Interview your best clients and ask them about their specific use cases, needs, and experience with your product.

Phase I. Account-level research

This research starts at the account level, where you need to identify insights about the companies that buy you and start building a list of target accounts. It includes a few steps:

The Basics – Businesses often overlook tremendous value in determining their ideal customer profile by neglecting to dig deeper. Within this space, you’re only discovering topical information such as employee count, revenue, location, or industry. This is just a starting point, not where your research should end.

Account-Based Research – Here is where you determine what are key strategic priorities for the accounts you’re targeting. You’ll also want to ask questions such as: how does your solution help them achieve their goals? What can the technology stack of your target customer tell you? Account-based research gives you an extra level of targeting above and beyond company size, revenue, and industry.

Buying Triggers – Here is where you’ll want to find out about your customers: which activities inside an organization indicate your solution could be a fit for them?

For example; at OutboundView, when organizations are hiring inside salespeople, it typically means our services could be a fit. When a new VP of Sales is hired, that is a good time for our team to reach out and discuss their lead generation strategies, because they’re typically reviewing new sales processes. If we can tell a company isn’t getting any inbound traffic, that tells us that the target needs outbound marketing.

Identifying the triggers that drive organizations to buy is absolutely critical for top of funnel targeting. Finding target accounts that are showing “buying triggers” for your business should be the highest priority for your top of funnel outreach efforts.

Phase II. Buyer research

Who’s your buyer? Not ideal company – we’re talking the customer writing the checks or using your products. We think about buyer personas in two main categories: Decision Makers and Doers.

Decision Makers are the individuals focused on high-level, strategic outcomes, and are usually writing the check for your product or service.

Doers are your users focused on the day to day tactics supporting your product or service.

Why is this an important distinction? Each requires different strategies to spark interest in your product or service; but most importantly, each requires a different messaging to initiate a discussion.

Buyer personas outline the specific value proposition, thought-provoking questions, and resources needed to lead efforts toward an opportunity for each type of Doer or Decision Maker.

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Here is a simple list of steps to follow when building your buyer personas:

  1. Start small with a goal of 2-3 buyer personas.
  2. Think pain points – What makes your customer’s job difficult? Keep in mind these pain points need to be related to their overall job, not just pain points your solution solves for.
  3. Perform customer interviews and ask your buyer the tough questions, don’t just make assumptions.
  4. Make them tangible! Create bio pages for “Bill the Buyer”, ”Sally Seller” and have fun with it!
  5. Think “Personally” and “Professionally” – How does your solution help your buyer reach their goals, both personally and professionally?
  6. Create a unique value proposition for each type of persona.
  7. End with messaging – As the last step in the process, build messaging that aligns with the customer’s pain points and helps differentiate your solution.

To see who is engaging with and responding to your content, create an updated database of people who are following you on social media and subscribed to your email list.

This includes adding calls-to-actions for your blog, events, and gated content on your website to passively capture emails over time.  Then, use tools like Clearbit or DiscoverOrg to enrich the data you collect with detailed firmographic information about who your audience is and how well they fit your ideal client persona. Or, have someone curate the list for you by hand.

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Doing so will enable you to build an audience over time and get maximum return-on-investment for your publishing efforts.

This may take a little bit of work, but it will pay huge dividends in the short-term and long-term. You’ll learn which topics and personas to lock in on and focus your future efforts appropriately.

Technique #2. Create epic content in two Forms

Content creation is cheaper and easier to produce than ever.

But your time and resources are precious – so we recommend fixating content on one of two areas: thought leadership on your philosophy and storytelling about client success.

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What is thought leadership, you ask? Two things:

  • An annoyingly-named and often-abused piece of business terminology.
  • Content that explains the philosophy behind the product or service you offer.

Once you find your target audience, you should use BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to find topics relevant to your buyer that have high Google search volume and a high volume of social media mentions.

Why use thought leadership? Because like Simon (Sinek) says, “The best way to inspire action is to ‘start with ‘why.’’”

Think back to Mitch and Murray’s favorite acronym: AIDA.

Lastly, recall that people buy products and services (especially expensive B2B solutions) from brands they know, like, and trust. Thought leadership builds trust and awareness and table-sets future action from your buyers.

The second type of content you should create is flywheel storytelling: telling client stories in evocative fashion by placing them on the Hero’s Journey.

In these stories, your client (note: not your product) is the hero. They are facing a challenge or obstacle to overcome, and your product aids their success.

Here, it’s important to build up your client as a subject matter expert in their field.  This means establishing their credentials, backstory, philosophy, challenges, and how they discovered your product or service.

From there, you can chart their path to success and use their words to describe your product or service’s role in getting them from A to B.

Technique #3. Package content for maximum distribution

To maximize efficiency when it comes to content creation, we recommend repurposing and repackaging content as much as possible.

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For example, you can turn a webinar with a client into a video interview on YouTube, a podcast episode, and an article that can be shared in various formats across social media.

The idea here is expediency. Rather than churning out a bunch of unique, disjointed pieces of content, you can turn one epic piece of content into a multi-purpose series of articles, videos, and podcasts.

Remember – not everyone consumes content in the same format. The beauty of this method is that you can create content in the format of best-fit for your entire audience.

To gain maximum exposure for your content, focus on the best distribution channels. For B2B, a solid email newsletter featuring valuable thought leadership, industry research, and client-led insights is a great way to connect with buyers and build trust.

We also advise supplementing email with social media posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, depending on how much time your ICP spends on those networks.

Finally, we recommend uploading video, audio, and presentation content to social media networks like YouTube, SoundCloud, and SlideShare. Optimize the content for SEO so that it can be found via search and gain the maximum visibility over time.

Technique #4. Create trust and credibility with consistent output

James Carbary has built a seven-figure business around the concept of “Content-Based Networking.”

We found similar value in the concept of leveraging content to create and enhance authentic relationships with clients and audience.

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An important best practice for this method is customer storytelling.

You should foreground your clients in your content as much as possible. Make them the heroes of articles and case studies capturing their success story with your product or service in grand detail. Explain their background, philosophy, challenges, success path, and subsequent gains from choosing you as a vendor.

From there, you should map the distribution of these stories to the audience of best-fit. If the hero in your client success story is a VP of Sales for a SaaS company, then route that story to similarly-situated prospects and clients in your sales, marketing, and client success funnel.

The bottom line is – you should always seek to route content to your audience of the best fit. Use data and well developed personas to make this happen.

Technique #5. Leverage content to build authentic relationships

Once you commit to a content-driven inbound marketing game plan, it’s important to know that you’re playing the long game.

Content publishing pays back exponentially over time. It may take months or years – but you’ll see it. Provided you commit to publishing steadily and consistently.

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Let’s say you publish 3 articles per week – and two out of three posts feature a client or a key ally in your industry. You’re setting yourself up for success.

Think of it this way – publishing 2 articles each week that cross-promote a client or peer leads to 104 goodwill relationships over the course of a year, possibly more if you publish content that features multiple clients or peers.

Content creation is a long-term investment with escalating payoffs in the form of heightened SEO, a strong database, referral-minded channel partners, and powerful press relationships.

These, in turn, lead to increased qualified lead velocity from content you’ve already created.

Technique #6. Build your brand on what others say about you

Every brand needs to cultivate reviews and testimonials that describe their value.

As Daniel Pink and HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan discuss in this must-listen podcast interview, for the first time in history your buyers have as much access to information about your company as your sellers do.

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In other words, your brand is your reputation. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what others say about you. 

Creating a committed campaign that incentivizes happy customers to review your company is an incredibly powerful, worthwhile investment in this day and age. Whether it’s Google Reviews, Yelp!, G2Crowd, or another vendor, it’s important to have your clients affirming your value publicly on the internet.

The second component to building your brand is creating clear statements of philosophy, or why you exist. This can be accomplished through published mission statements and consistent thought leadership output that dials into your purpose as a company, which we covered in Technique One.

Last and not least, always be aware of what is being said about your brand across the web and social media. This means using a powerful media monitoring tool to help you stay on top of real-time mentions.

Technique #7. Serve the entire customer lifecycle

Content should serve the entire customer lifecycle – from first touch to renewal.

This ensures maximum value from your publishing efforts and total artillery coverage for sales development, account executives, and customer support.

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Again, we look back to Technique One. The goal is to provide content with the breadth and depth to add value across as much of your audience as possible. This includes:

  • Cold prospects
  • Warm prospects
  • Lost prospects
  • New clients
  • Long-term clients
  • Lost clients

The broader the scope of impact a piece of content has, the better it serves your bottom-line. If you are only creating content designed to impact the top-of-funnel, you are vastly under-serving your audience, your company, and yourself.

Technique #8. Track and analyze the entire funnel

This technique is a critical component that should be applied to everything you do.

To get the most benefit from your content-driven inbound marketing efforts, you should use a tool to analyze what content and channels drive results.

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Invest in a marketing automation system – HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot (especially if you use Salesforce) are all great options.

Devote a few dollars to a content tracking tool like Guru to build your internal knowledge base.

Use Outreach, Cirrus Insight, or SalesLoft to send trackable content at scale and give your sales reps the ability to see what messaging, links, and attachments get prospects to respond.

Keep track of the data-driven insights these tools give you. Then triple down on what is working and fix areas that need improvement.

Technique #9. Emphasize process, details, and fundamentals

The final technique is also a ‘must apply’ for all aspects of the content-driven inbound marketing playbook.

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The key mantras here are to:

  • Create transparent, consistent workflows.
  • Strike balance between speed and quality control.

To accomplish the former, use a project management tool like Asana or Trello to keep your team on the same page. These tools will also help you strike the balance between speed and quality control.

Being detail oriented when is comes to content means doing every little action that will help you maximize SEO.

This includes adding alt titles to your images, using the proper text formatting with headers, et cetera, and using an SEO tool (we love Ahrefs) to discover the best keyword opportunities for high Google rank.

Here’s a high-performing blog post whose title was chosen specifically for its high search volume (400 per month) and low keyword difficulty (less than 5 backlinks were needed for a top search ranking).

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Going the extra mile is as simple as emailing a partner or client you feature prominently in a piece of content to:

  • Give them a heads up they are being recognized.
  • Gently ask if they can share it across their channels.

The biggest driver of content is the willingness to do these two things. Once you do, you can guarantee a sound return-on-investment in your content marketing efforts to drive inbound leads

By Blake Johnston

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What to Do When Your Inbound Marketing Fails

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There’s no debate today about whether blogging works or not. Studies show that inbound marketing can deliver a high volume of leads. However, inbound marketing isn’t exactly a silver bullet. Just because it works well for one type of company with one type of product trying to reach one type of customer, doesn’t mean it will work well for you.

Here’s why problems pop up and what you should do when they happen.

Where Inbound Marketing Commonly Fails

Inbound marketing can work well for most companies in the long run, as long as you plan for:

  1. How long it will take to pay off (years).
  2. Knowing it doesn’t always attract the right type of buyer.

New companies don’t always have the luxury of waiting around for a few years for enough inbound leads to flood their salespeople’s inboxes.

And other content-based campaigns like blogging or webinars almost never get to hard-to-reach people that need to sign off on six or seven-figure deals (think: lawyers, CEOs, etc.). These people barely have enough time to answer an email, let alone attend a webinar for a full hour (or longer).

Blogging acts like a net, helping you to attract and catch people who may one day need what you sell. But like fishing, you’re also going to catch a lot of stuff that will never, ever convert. Instead of tossing out some bait and waiting around for a nibble, you need to go spearfishing.

Related Article: Beware the Inbound Marketing Trap

How You Can Generate High-Ticket Leads (Instead of Inbound Marketing)

In “Predictable Revenue,” Aaron Ross writes about how his team generated over $100 million for Salesforce in new recurring revenue. They did that by first qualifying the types of companies who need what they do, and then conducting outreach to get introductions to the right person inside each large organization. That sounds easy enough on the surface, right?

Call it account-based marketing or just call it good direct sales. The concept is simple: you need to directly get in touch with the right types of buyers through email, phone calls, direct mail or conferences.

The problem is most marketers don’t do enough of these activities quickly enough. High-ticket deals can take months to close. The revenue you’re booking this month actually comes from the work you did over the past three months (or longer).

The reality is you can’t just focus on increasing the top of your funnel like most marketers and advertisers do. Everyone’s familiar with reach and frequency. Reach is the number of new unique people, while frequency is the number of times you reach the same person.

Direct marketing and selling place a greater emphasis on increasing frequency, instead of reach. It transitions you from mass, one-to-many tactics to one-to-one tactics as quickly as possible. Because the data is pretty clear no matter where you look:

And anyone who’s ever had to sell anything will tell you how much easier it is to close face-to-face than through a digital alternative.

All of these activities are labor intensive. You won’t be able to reach the same number of people, as easily as throwing up a few blog posts. But instead of impressions or eyeballs, you’ll get something much more valuable in return — more sales-ready leads who can turn into new revenue tomorrow.

Feature Image Credit: PHOTO: Paul Bergmeir

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Neil is the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies.

Sourced from CMS Wire

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Three Ingredients For A Successful Inbound Marketing Program

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By  Remy Bernstein

Many digital marketing agencies and software vendors like to tell a similar story when it comes to inbound marketing.

Apparently, inbound marketing is incredibly easy, generates results instantly and is a good strategic investment for any organization of any size, operating within any industry.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but none of these statements are true.

While my revelation may seem obvious, everywhere I look, I still see people buying into the false notion that inbound is this cheap and easy miracle strategy. They think you can slap together a blog, build a landing page, gate a white paper or case study, and then sit back and wait for the leads to pour in.

Sure, some people might stumble across your site or even download a resource or two, but I promise you’ll never see a meaningful or sustained ROI on your program with this kind of light-touch approach.

The truth is that inbound, like anything else that actually works, requires a significant amount of resources — in terms of budget and internal bandwidth — to do it right. However, when executed properly, the ends more than justify the means.

Here are three commonly overlooked components that any inbound marketing strategy should have to be successful.

1. Great Content

While this should, in theory, be a no-brainer, it seems a lot of companies still believe that quantity is more important than quality. This may have been true back in the early days of search engine optimization (SEO); however, it has never been true of the inbound model.

Regular publishing is important, but the idea here is that your content doesn’t just boost your organic visibility on search engines; it’s actually being read and influencing your target audience’s decision making process.

In order to make a real impact, your content needs to be:

• High-quality: Pieces should be well-written, easy to understand, genuinely helpful and relevant to your audience, and they should represent an original point of view.

• Diverse: You need a range of collateral types to engage your audience at different points throughout the funnel. That means generating how-tos, topical updates, press releases, case studies, thought leadership pieces, white papers and more.

• Dynamic: Getting someone’s attention on search or social is only half the battle; you need to hold onto it as well. Your content should strike a balance between beauty and substance. Utilize dynamic media types like digital stories, infographics and video to break through the noise and communicate your ideas more effectively.

2. A Comprehensive Distribution Strategy

The second piece of your inbound strategy is distribution. There’s not much use in generating loads of beautiful content unless it gets in front of your target audience.

The most obvious (and inexpensive) outlets are search engines and social media. Your SEO and social strategies will certainly play a major role in driving organic traffic to your site.

That said, if you want to reach new audiences and generate exponential growth over time, you need to be more aggressive — and precise.

Identify the platforms that are most relevant to your base — LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. — and invest in paid advertising campaigns. It’s an added expense, but the targeting options and data insights facilitate a high degree of accuracy, giving you more control over the ROI.

Additionally, you’ll want to start contributing to well-established trade publications in order to tap into their captive base (on-site, social followers and email subscribers, etc.) and boost the visibility of your brand. Many of these publications offer paid placements, but contributor slots can often be earned if you put in the proper legwork and build your credibility as an author.

3. Robust Down-Funnel Infrastructure

So, now you’re creating great content and distributing it through all the right channels, but how does this translate to new revenue for your business?

This is probably the biggest sticking point for most ROI-negative inbound programs: What do you do with all that website traffic once it arrives at your doorstep?

First, you need to invest in some sort of automated infrastructure. There are all sorts of processes you can automate: lead scoring, nurturing, even qualification.

Ultimately, how much automation you need depends on several different factors, including the size of your business, the amount of traffic being driven to your site and the capacity of your sales operation.

Of course, automation is all well and good, but at some point, your sales team will actually have to step in and take over.

In order to ensure this handoff goes smoothly and that your marketing efforts are fueling your sales apparatus rather than stifling it, these two departments must work in close collaboration with one another.

Is marketing delivering an appropriate volume of leads given your sales capacity? Does the automated qualification align with the sales team’s qualification criteria? Is the sales team aware of and/or on board with the messaging your inbound program is disseminating?

It’s great to see an uptick in key metrics like site traffic, conversions, etc., but, ultimately, the success of any marketing initiative boils down to how much revenue it brings in. When you align your sales and marketing processes, everyone benefits. When you don’t, the whole system breaks down.

All this is to say that if you’re considering investing in a small-scale or fragmented marketing program, I would save your money. Inbound is a go-big-or-go-home strategy.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By  Remy Bernstein

COO of NYC-based digital agency and media company L&T. Directs client strategy and project delivery.

Sourced from Forbes

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5 Steps to Help You Find Inbound Marketing Happiness

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How can inbound marketing impact your customer’s happiness level? The answer might be in the reviews. The growth of social media has led to the growth of consumer power. If a customer loves a product, they have the power to recommend it to friends and family. If a customer felt like they didn’t receive a five-star experience, they have the power to let you know.

Due to the pressure of maintaining a positive online reputation, many brands are beginning to dedicate a customer service specialist to manage and monitor their online reputation. In fact, in 2018, 78 percent of people who complain to a brand via Twitter expect a response within an hour. If the customer holds the power to your online reputation, then shouldn’t they be the focus of your marketing strategy?

Out(bound) with the old, In(bound) with the new!

The way we communicate is evolving, and so is the way marketing operates. Traditional outbound marketing meant fighting for your potential customer’s attention. Inbound marketing differs because it is customer-centric. By generating content curated to tackle the needs and problems of your ideal customers, you appeal to qualified prospects and build confidence for your business.

Why is this important? Because “customer success is your success!” Reviews and customer opinions matter.

Eighty-one percent of people trust advice from friends and family over advice from a business. 69 percent do not trust advertisements.

Customers are your greatest marketers!

Funnel vs. Flywheel

The inbound marketing process is known as a flywheel, while traditional outbound marketing is thought of as a funnel. This funnel starts with marketing, then trickles down to sales and ends with customers as an afterthought. The issue with the funnel is that the only way to grow is at the top because growth is confined to what you can put in for marketing efforts, which are becoming increasingly expensive.

Meanwhile, the flywheel places customers at the center. The customers are the driving force. The basic definition of a flywheel is a mechanism that stores energy and releases it. In a car, a flywheel is designed to keep an engine running even when you aren’t “pressing the gas pedal,” which is what your content is doing online. The flywheel concept forces you to really take stock and invest in your customers in order to achieve growth.

Flywheel Elements: Attract, Engage, Delight

The flywheel puts the customer at the center with three elements based around the customer’s experience with your brand. The goal is for your content to keep attracting, engaging and delighting customers. There are three parts that make up the flywheel components:

Attract

In this stage, through relevant and helpful content you attract potential customers, they “enter your flywheel” and interact with your company for the first time.

Engage

In this stage, through conversational tools like chat and email, you engage with potential customers to promise continued value. In return, this influences the decision-making and purchasing process as early as possible.

Delight

In the final stage, you delight customers by continuing to act as an understanding guide and expert in your field. In return, it gives customers the potential to become advocates for your company.

Inbound Marketing Content Ideas

The content necessary for creating a successful inbound marketing approach needs to pull rather than push. It needs to educate rather than interrupt, and it needs to provide value rather than to sell or persuade. Below are five unique ways to stand out while providing inbound content.

1. Facebook Live

With Facebook Live the possibilities to offer inbound content are endless from expert interviews to meet the team specials and more! Customers watching also have the ability to comment and hit reaction buttons to what is happening during the live video. Through this tool you can provide customers with helpful knowledge in a creative and interactive way.

2. Blog-Like Posts on Instagram

Instagram is a visually driven platform, but when helpful information is turned into a post it can be a game changer. Simply feature creative graphics, created on a program like Canva, which contain blog-like information in either a carousel or single image that provides customers with tips, knowledge, or tools. It’s a growing way to grab a potential customer’s attention.

3. Free Trials

Who doesn’t like FREE? By offering a free trial of an online service or e-book, you have a chance to catch your potential customer’s attention with a more in-depth story than a short social media blurb, and the customer feels they are getting something of value in return. The most efficient way to offer a free trial is to have potential customers enter their contact information in a form. That way you have the ability to engage with them in the near future.

4. Templates

People love content that is ready-to-use and a  template can really appeal to a customer. For example, a social media manager can offer a free calendar template for planning posts. An accountant can offer a simple excel template for formulas. The most efficient way to offer a free template is to offer the download after a potential customer enters their email in a form. That way you have their contact information to engage with them in the future.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are becoming extremely popular as many people are on the go! Fifty one percent (144 million) of the US population has listened to a podcast – up from 44 percent in 2018. Potential customers can listen to podcasts while commuting, working or just on their own time. A podcast gives you a unique chance to humanize your brand through your voice and stories. According to Podcast Insights, Podcast listeners are much more active on every social media channel (94 percent are active on at least one – vs 81 percent for the entire population). This is important to note for the delight stage of the flywheel.

The Best Marketers Use Flywheel

We are entering into the review revolution where customers have more power than brands do. Your best marketers are your customers.

By building a flywheel, you can take advantage of the power of your customers’ influence through inbound marketing. Using a flywheel strategy you can transform your company by doubling down on customer success. It’s not easy and it can be costly to make this change in your organization, but it’s an important one to get right.

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Inbound Marketing Plan for Small Businesses

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By Debra Murphy    

Inbound marketing is something that most small business owners have heard of but few have implemented. But for those who do take the plunge, many are experiencing a more cost effective and successful form of marketing.

Unlike traditional outbound marketing where you push yourself on potential customers, inbound marketing is better aligned with today’s buyers who research solutions before they speak to a brand. Using inbound marketing enables you to build rapport and trust with those who want to purchase your products and services.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that uses content to attract your ideal prospects to your business. The goal is to pull your prospects to you using online activities such as social media, search engine optimization and content marketing to generate warm leads. These prospects find your brand primarily through search, looking for information they need to solve a problem or fulfill a need. The activities used are focused on expertise, authority and trust.

Why do I care?

Buying decisions, both consumer and business, have evolved where they begin with an online search. When a prospective customer finds your business through inbound marketing, the useful information you provide gives them a different perspective about your company.

For most small businesses, inbound marketing is effective because you:

  • Build brand visibility by developing informational content that attracts the attention of those looking for the product or service you offer.
  • Generate warm leads because they find your content when they are most interested.
  • Develop and nurture relationships with these prospects through additional quality content and online conversations.
  • Build your own, permission-based email marketing list.
  • Develop an expert reputation in your field, putting you in a position of authority and trust.

For most small businesses, adding inbound marketing activities to your marketing plan is important to acquiring long term, loyal customers.

What are the benefits?

Costs less

Employing inbound marketing enables you to engage in marketing tactics that cost less and are more effective than traditional outbound marketing tactics. According to Hubspot, not only is the cost per lead is 62% lower than leads generated by outbound marketing, inbound marketing tactics have a higher ROI than outbound marketing.

Creates brand loyalty

Inbound marketing attracts the right audience to your business like a magnet and connects with them more effectively. Most buyers today research the products and services that they need long before contacting a business. If someone is spending the time reading your blog, downloading your white papers and joining your email list, they are making a commitment to your brand. When you build brand loyalty, these warm prospects are more likely to contact you when they are ready to buy.

Builds trust

When you provide useful information, solve a problem and answer questions with no strings attached, you develop a more personal relationship that helps them decide whether to do business with you or not. When you continually push your sales pitch at people who may or may not be interested, they ignore your business and consider you an annoyance.

Expands your universe

For many small businesses, reaching a broad audience was unattainable due to the cost. Attracting potential customers to your website with quality content can help small businesses reach a broader, more geographically dispersed audience. If your business can service customers nationally or internationally, inbound marketing is a must for your business. Even local businesses benefit from inbound marketing, especially those who provide home improvement and major renovation services.

Now that you understand what inbound marketing is and how it can help your small business, it’s time to figure out your inbound marketing strategy and develop your inbound marketing plan.

How to develop your Inbound Marketing Plan

The following framework can be used as the base template for your plan. Remember that your marketing plan should be a living document that gets reviewed every 90 days to be sure it is working and that new market conditions haven’t come into play. If you create a plan and never look at it for the entire year, you will waste a lot of time and effort.

Define your marketing goals

Your marketing goals should define what you are trying to accomplish. It is not a vision but measurable outcomes that you want to accomplish over the next 90 days or so.

Measurable outcomes can be number of leads generated, leads converted into customers or revenue. By setting marketing goals, you can then organize your marketing activities around each goal to see if each is contributing to the outcome.

Analyze your web presence

A web presence analysis is an exercise that helps you determine how your business is viewed when someone searches for your products and services. In many cases, small businesses don’t know what is on the Internet about them or if they can be found at all.

If you haven’t searched for your business to see what is there, you could have some negative surprises waiting for you. If you don’t know how your business is perceived, it is difficult to determine what marketing strategies you need to help your prospects find you.

Know your target audience

Never underestimate the importance of defining your ideal target audience. Knowing who you want to work with and understanding the needs of this unique group of people or businesses allows your business to provide tremendous value to those who need it the most.

Intimately understanding your ideal client means you know with certainty what problem they are trying to solve or what need they wish to satisfy.

Being focused on one particular market enables you to make better choices for all of your marketing efforts. This saves you time and money on activities that don’t make sense for your business and the clients you serve.

Develop strategies to achieve your goals

Inbound marketing involves the strategic use of content, social media and search engine optimization. Each of these areas needs a strategy that align with your goals. Each of these activities are critical to the overall success of your marketing efforts.

  • Content marketing is the offer you make to those researching a solution.
  • Social media is a channel to deliver your content to your audience.
  • Well-written optimized content is critical to a successful search engine optimization strategy.

Content marketing

Social media

  • Which social media tools make sense for your business?
  • How will you leverage each one to drive inbound leads?
  • How will you respond and engage those who share, comment and connect?

Search engine optimization

  • How do people search for your products and services?
  • What keywords will you use to optimize your content?
  • What is your link building strategy?

Lead nurturing:

  • How will you build a relationship with each person that signs up for your email list, subscribes to your blog, likes your Facebook page, joins your LinkedIn Group or follows you on Twitter?
  • What type of content will you provide at what point in their journey?
  • How often will you touch your prospects?

Analyze and measure:

  • How will you determine if your efforts are successful?
  • What will you measure?
  • What are the key metrics you will use to determine success?

There is too much distraction online to try to implement inbound marketing without a plan. Putting structure around your strategy helps you remain focused on the goal.

Don’t let this exercise overwhelm you. Go through each area and answer the questions. Be practical with what you can do given your resources.

As a small business, we have only so much time to devote to marketing, so use that time wisely.

By Debra Murphy    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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How Long Does Inbound Marketing Take?

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By  John Hodge 

If you work with clients who are curious about inbound marketing you’ve probably heard them ask how long it takes. You might tell them that it takes a number of months before you actually start seeing a return. And, you might feel a little uneasy about giving them an exact date when they’ll start seeing some action because you don’t want to make promises you can’t keep.

So, maybe you tell them that the speed of the return is tied to the aggressiveness of the strategy. Understandably, you might feel like this is a little vague. Well, you’re not alone. Chances are the prospect feels the same way.

The good news is it’s vague for a reason. So, let’s pick this question apart and talk about a good way to answer it.

How long does inbound marketing take?

The Thing is, This Question is Vague, How Long Does Inbound Take to do What?

If a prospect starts talking about how long something’s going to take before that something has been determined, then we’re not off to a great start.

Remember this tweet?

To the prospects asking how long inbound marketing takes: Inbound Marketing isn’t the thing that “takes” any amount of time. It’s the goals that take time.

So the question should actually be “How long does it take to achieve X goal?”

If we at least know how to ask that question, we’re in pretty good shape. The next step will be figuring out how that goal will play with the current state of our website, lead generation, social media following, or whatever else is relevant to it.

Understandably, if we want to generate 100 leads per month and we’ve historically been generating 0, it could take a long, long time.

Alternatively, if the goal is to increase leads by 20% and we have clearly defined initiatives that have been generating them in the past, then we can accurately gauge how much of an increase in marketing velocity will be needed to support that goal. Consequently, nailing down a timeline will be much easier than in the first example.

Speaking of Nailing Down a Timeline, Here’s a Timeline of Marketing

Inbound marketing isn’t a practice that is ever completed. It’s not like you’re going to implement inbound marketing in a few days and think:

“Hey, we did it, we’re done. Nice work everyone. Let’s pack it in and go home.”

If this all sounds pretty basic, let’s look at some issues to avoid in goal setting. With that established, we can get on with setting goals, implementing a strategy that supports them, and launch and adjust to drive success.

Common Issues I See Early On with Goal Setting for Inbound Marketing

Here are a few of the biggest issues I see when setting goals with clients.

  • We don’t have a starting point to base future growth because we don’t have conversion or customer data broken up by default channel group or campaign
  • Filters aren’t in place to ensure the data we’re observing is relevant website traffic
  • We simply don’t have any tag management processes set up at all

With issues like the ones above, our first set of goals will be to set up our website and backend tools to capture information that we can use for setting realistic goals in the future.

How Long does it Take to Be Ready to Set Up Goals?

This depends on how much needs to be done. For instance, if you need to rework your website conversion paths to support goals in Google Analytics, this could take a pretty long time to get spun up.

For most other projects, about a couple of weeks will be spent sharing access to tools and auditing them. Then, another few days will be spent configuring them and integrating them together. Lastly, we’ll need to generate data to base future goals upon. In this case, it will take at least one year to have rock solid data.

That said, you can start setting goals after a quarter, just be aware that if your industry is seasonal these goals will be somewhat anecdotal.

Bringing it All Together

From here, it’s a matter of adjusting our marketing to meet our goals. Quarterly goal setting should get better, quarter over quarter. We’ll uncover issues, align sales and marketing, push more leads, or push fewer but more qualified leads. We’ll stop doing certain marketing initiatives that aren’t paying off and have strong data to guide our strategy.

And our inbound marketing strategies will get stronger and stronger the longer we work on them.

So, to answer the question “how long does inbound marketing take?”, the answer is “it depends on how strong you want your strategies to be.

By John Hodge 

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Modern tools & techniques to bolster top-funnel, 3rd-party demand gen

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Inbound marketing has dominated many brands’ strategies recently, but contributor Scott Vaughan explains how technological advances are enabling better outbound efforts.

The B2B marketing world is shifting, and that means we must look for new strategies and techniques to adapt to changing customer, selling and marketing requirements.

A generation of marketers has grown up on inbound-driven demand strategies and tools. You know the process: buy and drive traffic; put up a landing page on your website; get somebody to fill out a form; and then nurture, score and send to sales once they’re qualified. Things have progressed from our days as pure brand marketers, and this has been a solid way for marketing to contribute to revenue.

Digging deeper

As B2B marketing and sales organizations prioritize more precise ideal customer profile (ICP) targets and account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, traditional inbound marketing tactics alone aren’t generating the demand needed to hit increasing pipeline and revenue goals for many B2B teams.

We simply can’t expect all our target decision-makers to find our website and fill out a form. Nor can we keep buying “lists” to populate our expensive databases, especially in a permission-based marketing world. And we can’t direct endless amounts of precious budget at media to drive low-converting website traffic just to have sales and marketing resources chasing down unqualified “leads.”

“In today’s reality, it’s crazy to think all your target accounts are just going to show up to your website,” Jennifer Pockell-Dimas, CMO at Egnyte, told me when I spoke with her earlier this year. “With ABM and the precision that’s required, you must go where your prospects are.”

To meet today’s mandate, we need to get our content and messages in-market where our audiences (ICP and target-account decision-makers) are doing their research.

One marketing strategy that is being re-imagined, modernized and used more aggressively is third-party demand gen — top-funnel contacts generated by third-party channels or sources, rather than through your own website or landing pages or your own social profiles.

A few examples are:

  • Content syndication: Distributing your content (typically branded) to target audiences via third-party sites and social networks; purchasing leads on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis.
  • Product- or service-review sites: Buying leads on a CPL basis from product-focused or crowd-sourced sites that capture contact info from individuals researching relevant products and/or services.
  • Shared-lead campaigns: Running lead gen campaigns with partner brands/channels where leads are captured on third-party landing pages and provided to multiple companies.
  • External webinars: Sponsoring webinars organized by a third party to acquire audiences and generate contacts that fit your ICP.

Many of these approaches may look familiar. The difference today is the modern techniques, tools and data that are providing smarter ways to generate more precise top-funnel, third-party demand that works in tandem with your inbound effort.

Here are a few ways marketers can modernize their top-funnel, third-party strategies, as well as the tools needed to make these strategies work.

Use tools to manage multiple providers and tap into fresh audiences with precise targeting

Many B2B marketing teams have applied a “set and forget it” mindset to third-party demand. You sign a contract with a provider, and you use the same providers every quarter or even sign an annual contract. This approach rarely works in the mid- to long-term because there’s no way to quickly vet low-performing partners nor adapt your plan as business needs dictate.

With today’s top-funnel automation and demand orchestration solutions, you can use tech to manage multiple providers at the same time, continually testing each to identify the sites, providers and programs that deliver the quality you need. And you can validate the data and fix any bad lead data before it hits your marketing automation or CRM systems.

With accurate data, you can route to the right nurture track or sales pro for immediate follow-up. These modern tools allow you to scale by using and measuring multiple top-funnel providers and sources at the same time.

Rescript the follow-up and follow-on process

One of the biggest mistakes when using third-party demand providers is the follow-up. It’s critical we don’t follow up on third-party leads with the proverbial, “I saw you downloaded x white paper, attended y webinar” or, worse, “are evaluating z solution.”

This is not engaging. It simply provides a sure-fire way to turn your prospect off — on the phone, via email or on chat. (By the way, the same applies for inbound leads.)

Rather, marketers report finding more success using a different approach that uses program data and taps into contact or account data in their MA or CRM systems. For example, you may adapt the follow-up script to something more conversational, such as: “It looks like you and your team may be doing some research around x; how is that going? …”

This approach drives a more meaningful dialogue and leads naturally to a discovery conversation about your prospective account and the buyer’s needs and pains. It will also quickly tell you if they fit your ICP.

From here, you can learn more about their initiatives and share additional educational content in the right context. This approach also allows you to qualify the buyer and the account for next steps, including sending the lead to sales with actionable information.

Apply intent data monitoring to identify and prioritize accounts in the market

Increasingly popular is the use of intent data monitoring with these top-funnel programs. These solutions allow you to prioritize and target those companies that are showing increased activity around a given topic across the web. An emerging group of martech and third-party media providers are monitoring their sites and the broader B2B web to understand which companies — in aggregate — are interacting with which content/subjects by topic. For example, if you sell cloud storage solutions, it’s valuable to see which companies are doing research on these solutions.

With a list of active companies — identified by domain — you now have a more targeted list to reach out to with top-funnel programs. You can then prioritize your outreach efforts, targeting the right personas and roles at these companies using your branded content. These techniques increase the effectiveness of your investment when working with third-party providers and sites.

Third-party demand generation is an effective top-funnel marketing strategy when done right. It requires planning, management and more precision, which in the past has caused some marketers to shy away from it. However, the recent advent of several key marketing techniques and technologies has helped with all this, making third-party demand gen far more efficient and effective than it was just five years ago, especially for today’s ICP and account-based approach.

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Scott Vaughan is CMO of Integrate, a marketing technology software provider automating top-of-funnel marketing for B2B marketers to enable demand marketing orchestration. Scott leads the company’s go-to-market and growth marketing strategy. He’s passionately focused on unlocking the potential of marketing, media, data and technology to drive business and customer value.

Sourced from MARTECH TODAY

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