So imagine that you're not feeling well.
Lying in bed, after you've just decided that you won't be making it into work, you start researching decongestants on your tablet, smartphone, or maybe even your laptop. You remember seeing a TV ad for one in particular, but you'd rather read some reviews and product information before you head out to make a purchase. You simply can't afford to miss much time at work, so making the right decision is more important to you than any advertisement you saw.
After reading about 10 different articles comparing products, you make the trip to the pharmacy to quickly make your purchase.
This is the behavior of the modern consumer. Multi-screen research is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessary companion for assisting a purchase.
With access to a wealth of information literally only a click away, they seek the information needed to make a more informed decision, even after they've already experienced the initial stimulus (your advertisement.)
This poses quite the challenge to businesses still relying on traditional, broadcast methods of advertising their product or service. The problem isn't that consumers aren't viewing it – although technology has certainly made ignoring you much easier – the problem is they're looking for more resources and content to assist their buying process.
Inbound marketing directly aligns with the behavior of the modern consumer. Rather than focusing time and resources on traditional, less effective methods of interruptive marketing and advertising, Inbound focuses on creating a powerful online presence and content strategy that acts as the resource your audience is looking for.
Consumers have found ways to phase out the traditional methods of advertising in favor of doing the research themselves.
You get the idea. The shopping behavior of your ideal consumer has changed significantly, and as a result, so have the methods for getting their attention.
The startling truth is that your prospective customers are making decisions well before the moment of an actual in-store or online purchase. (Or prior talking with a sales person, for that matter.)
In the past, consumers have always followed a similar path toward making a purchase. They were stimulated by an advertisement, experienced the first moment of truth at the shelf in the grocery aisle when deciding which product to buy, and had the second moment of truth after experiencing the product's benefits (or lack thereof.)
This has changed, as consumers now crave more information, adding a step to the buying process. Watch this brief 2-minute video on how the Zero Moment of Truth has turned traditional marketing on its head.
The question is how much information your prospects need in order to make a purchase. This all depends on your industry and the type of product or service you're selling. As part of Google's research with Shopper Science, consumers were surveyed regarding how much content they consumed in order to make purchases in various industries and categories.
As you can see, generally the more expensive the product or service, the more pieces of content are needed in order for a consumer to make a decision. Are you winning the zero moment of truth with your audience?
Attracting consumers with the right information at precisely the right time; that's what inbound marketing is all about. By understanding your audience and the challenges and needs they're facing, you can more accurately create a holistic online marketing campaign that works to attract, convert, close, and delight them.
Inbound marketing isn’t focused solely on attracting website visitors, but rather the right kind of visitors that are valuable for business. For too long, the emphasis has been on traffic volume instead of the quality of the visitor. As consumers continually shift their attention online for research, most everyone has an online presence, including your competitors. You need something more.
It all starts with thoroughly understanding your ideal consumer.
Buyer personas are the foundation for an optimized marketing campaign. As fictional representations of your ideal customer, they make it easy to refine your marketing strategy accordingly.
In order to pin-point your specific buyer persona it is a good idea to consult your account managers, or whom ever it is that deal directly with customers or prospects. Start by understanding commonalities among your customer base and conduct surveys and interviews in order to thoroughly identify the demographics and behaviors that make up your ideal audience.
If you’re serious about getting started, check out our customizable kit that includes everything you need to create your buyer personas.
Accurate personas are the foundation of any successful marketing campaign. They’re not something that’ll be created overnight, as a thorough amount of data and information is needed in order to create content and marketing material that truly resonates with the right audience.
With a buyer persona identified, you can move forward with a content strategy that incorporates their interests and needs. Essentially, your buyer persona is the foundation for all of your inbound marketing content including website, blogs, and premium content.
If you’ve accurately identified and subsequently understand your target audience, you’re now set up to become the resource they’re looking for during their Zero Moment of Truth. It’s because of this reason that content is the backbone of inbound marketing, as each new piece of content posted, specifically on your blog, is a new page to be indexed by search engines for your audience to find.
How often should you be blogging? Well...more than you are right now.
Companies that blog convert 70% more leads. (Source: Hubspot)
57% of companies have acquired a customer through their blog. (Source: Hubspot)
Strive for Relevance – Each post is an opportunity to reach an ideal consumer at their Zero Moment of Truth. What challenges are they facing? What questions are they asking? By addressing these with each new blog post, you’ll ensure that your personas are finding you at the exact right moment.
Stay Focused – Highlight one concept and develop it in depth rather than confuse readers with bits and pieces from multiple unrelated ideas. This will also allow you to produce a higher volume of relevant articles, as you’ll utilize each new post to thoroughly discuss one topic better than anyone else in your industry is.
Create Intriguing Blog Titles – To understand consumers collective attention spans, you only have to look to social media. Tweets are 140 characters or less. Vine videos are only 6 seconds. People expect value quickly, so your business can’t afford to release a mediocre blog title. Optimize titles for the human first. How do they ask questions? Consider keywords and search engines next by using tools like Google Trends to understand certain queries that are hot. Lastly, make it sexy. It’s the difference between 7 Apps That Will Make Your Marketing Easier, or 7 Apps Every Marketing Strategy Needs.
Build Thought-Leadership – Thought leadership isn’t about writing content that’s extremely high-level and conceptual. It’s about helping people. If your content is informative, instructional, and speaking directly to the needs of your audience, thought leadership is inevitable.
Post Consistently – Patchy content is the worst. Consistently publishing content will increase your odds when it comes to generating traffic and leads, as it means more indexed pages in the search engines and more opportunities to be found.
The marketplace of social networks provides businesses with an expansive collection of tools. Although they may all seem intriguing, it is critical to select a platform that is applicable to your business. In order to avoid spreading yourself too thin, don’t take on every single network you can get your hands on.
Select a network that meets the needs of your business. Consider where your buyer personas are hanging out in terms of social networks, this will be the best outlet for you to engage with people you are looking to reach.
Due to how expansive social media has become, your messaging shouldn’t be a “one size fits all” broadcast. What resonates with Facebook users is a whole different ballgame than what resonates on Twitter or Instagram.
The key is understanding why and how your audience engages with specific platforms, and offering content native to this behavior.
User motivation: What news or trending topics am I missing out on?
Twitter has increasingly become a place where news breaks and trends are amplified. As a result, users come here to stay in tune with the latest. Focus on spinning your content much like a media company would.
User motivation: What are the people I’m close with up to?
Striking a balance between promotional content and personal content is the key to attracting visitors on your Facebook page. Consider using Facebook to share blog articles and candid photos that reflect your company culture.
User motivation: How can I do my job better?
Think of LinkedIn as Facebook dressed up in a suit and tie. It’s a place where professionals go to get the latest on industry trends and to learn tips on how to be better at their jobs. They’re looking for an information edge. Spin your content accordingly.
Once you’ve started to generate a higher volume of website visitors through the Inbound Marketing methodology, two things are apparent; one is that it’s working, secondly and perhaps more importantly is that you’re now generating more relevant traffic as a result of your content and social efforts.
Problem is, website traffic doesn’t pay the bills.
So that brings us to the fun part; converting all that traffic into leads.
Just as it was critical in the development of your content and social strategy to consider your ideal prospects and their buying process, the same holds true here in order to generate conversions.
Successful lead generation isn’t self-serving, but rather is focused on creating extremely resourceful, downloadable content that resonates with your audience so much that they’ll actually want to hear from you.
https://impactbnd.wistia.com/medias/b5pkb4l508
It’s all about helping.
This helps warm up your prospects and develop a relationship built on trust, ensuring they’re on the right track toward buying from you. As discussed earlier, consumers are searching for resources to assist in their buying process, so providing this in the form of premium content ensures your prospective customers are taking a more organic interest in your company, and therefore, are much more likely to buy from you.
Before you can start generating leads, you first need to offer something of value your website visitors would be willing to exchange their coveted contact information for. This is called...well..an offer.
An offer is the content or something of value that's being “offered” on the landing page. The offer must have enough value to a visitor to merit providing their personal information in exchange for access to it.
HubSpot defines a call-to-action, or CTA, as an image, button, or message that calls website visitors to take some sort of action. When it comes to lead generation, this action is to fill out the form on the landing page and redeem the offer.
However, CTAs have become so much more than simply slapping “Download Now” buttons sporadically throughout the pages of your website in the hopes your website visitors click through to a landing page.
It’s important that they speak to your specific buyer persona. That they adapt to your audience. Consumers have become blind to overly cheesy, salesy pitches via the art of a CTA.
The content – visual or written – featured on a specific CTA will be determined by the persona it’s aiming to attract.
PRO TIP: Consult your buyer personas in order to deliver a targeted message that speaks to your audience. This avoids “talking down” or “above the head” of your audience.
The landing page is where your offer lives. It’s where a website visitor is redirected after clicking on the relevant call-to-action promoting the offer.
Each offer you create will live on its own landing page, creating yet another web page to be indexed in search engines. The more landing pages you have, the more opportunity you have to generate a high volume of leads as shown in this chart from HubSpot.
At this point, you’ve developed the buyer personas that represent your ideal customer. You’ve utilized social media, content creation, and search engine optimization to draw your visitors to your site. From there, you’ve utilized forms, calls-to-action, and landing pages to convert those visitors into leads.
Tired yet?
Well pour yourself a cup of coffee, because now it’s time to show why you’ve spent so much effort attracting and converting those leads. Now it’s time to close the deal, and turn those leads you’ve worked so hard to attract and convert into customers.
In order to close leads, it takes a combined effort from your marketing and sales teams to organize your leads effectively and develop a marketing automation strategy that helps work them further down your sales funnel.
With the ability to create “smart lists” using a marketing automation software like HubSpot that constantly categorize your leads based on certain profile attributes or even behaviors, emails can be a powerful tool for sending out more targeted emails.
Rather than simply blasting out the same message to your contact database, list segmentation will ensure higher open and click through rates due to more relevant content being sent to the right contact.
It’s all about providing context.
Workflows have the ability to drive a specific lead down your sales funnel simply because they performed a certain action on your site, and therefore, triggered an automated email, or workflow.
When setting up a workflow, you want to have a specific goal in mind. For instance, is your ultimate goal for your leads to request an assessment? For them to schedule a consultation? Download another offer?
Whatever the goal, workflows will help push your leads towards that outcome by sending specific emails to your leads in whatever time increments you set. If your leads convert on an email that you send, your workflows can automatically update your lead’s status in your sales cycle, so you’re always up to date on your sales pipeline.
Targeting Workflows Towards your Audience
In order to set up your workflow, first decide your goal. From there, decide all the steps in between that your leads would need to take in order to get there.
For example, your company might sell computer software. The first thing they download might introduce them to basic information about what the software is. This might enroll them into a workflow.
Based on the behaviors and trends of your typical customers, you’ll want to map out the path for taking this lead down the sales funnel. An example of the type of content you might provide to your readers would answer these types of questions in this order:
Now, you’ll go through each stage as listed above, and list the content that you have that answers these questions (eBooks, videos, blog articles, etc.). As your build your workflow, you’ll include those pieces of content in your workflow emails in order to nurture your lead to step 4 (or whatever the last step of your specific sales process is), in order to get that lead closer to becoming a customer.
By the end of a successful workflow, your leads will have either already closed into a customer, or gotten to the last step in your sales process in order for your sales team to take over.
Pro Tip: Case studies are a great piece of content to provide to show proof of value from your company. They offer an invaluable piece of information to your customers to help close a sale.
As a salesperson, picture having the ability to know exactly when a lead opens your email, or when a lead you have been pursuing returns to your website for more information.
With Signals, you have that ability.
Signals is an app that integrates with Hubspot and can instantly notify you when a lead engages with your brand through email, social media, or simply browsing your site.
From a sales aspect, Signals gives you “inside” information to better approach your leads, in turn helping to guide your leads through the sales process, and assist in targeting the right leads for “closing”.
When integrating signals into your sales process, think about what information would be most beneficial for your sales team to know, and what action they would take once that information is obtained.
For example, if your sales team can see exactly when a lead opened their email, can they tailor their next conversation to be more timely or relevant? Perhaps this could encourage your sales team to act faster knowing the lead is engaged and interested, potentially winning a client over a competitor who didn’t have these alerts.
Or...
Maybe a lead that you haven’t heard from in a while has suddenly started visiting your site again, specifically the pricing page. Perhaps the pricing is a big concern of your client, or they’re trying to figure out which pricing structure is best for them.
Your sales team can utilize this information to prepare their next conversation around solving issues and questions with the pricing structure, answering the leads concerns without even needing to be asked.
Most likely, this information can prove helpful for your sales team, and figuring out what your team’s next steps would be would require an analysis of the steps in your particular sales process.
So you’ve attracted a website visitor, converted them to a lead, and successfully sold them on your product or service.
They’re now a customer.
So the cycle is complete, right?
Wrong.
Once you’ve successfully attained a customer, the new goal should be to parlay them into advocates for your brand. To do this, you need happy customers.
Happy customers will not only come back to buy again, but they also tell others of the experience they’ve had.
After all, we’ve all bought a product based off the recommendation or referral from a friend, right?
According to the Harvard Business Review, 23% of customers who had a positive service interaction told 10 or more people about it.
Your job is to be that company your customers can’t wait to refer to their friends and family.
The best way to do this is by delighting them.
“Customers will never love a company, until the employees love it first.” - Simon Sinek
Your employee’s level of satisfaction is often reflected in their ability to deliver a positive customer experience. If your employees are overworked, underpaid, and feeling unfulfilled it’s likely that they will have trouble making a good name for your product or service.
Delighting your employees starts with the hiring process. You want to recruit a group of individuals who believe in your business’ mission and vision. If they don’t see the value in your product or service, it can’t be forced. Don’t sacrifice your business’ authenticity by hiring the wrong people.
After the hiring process, you must empower your team, and be sure that they are well educated in terms of prioritizing the customer’s needs. Make it clear that they are the face of your company, and it is up to them to deliver the highest level of customer service. Encourage them to allow their personality to shine through, and allot them the necessary time and space to go above and beyond with customers.
If you have strong buyer personas, it is easy to position yourself to think like a prospect. If you’re thinking like a prospect, you are proving your commitment to creating the best possible user experience.
Monitor and join in on the dialogues your customers are having on social media channels. If you are a HubSpot user, Social Inbox makes it easy to keep an eye out for prospects who are talking about your product or service.
If you happen upon a complaint or suggestion from a customer, make note of it. Let them know that you are listening, and more importantly that you understand. Keep in mind that your main priority should always be to solve for the customer.
While you want to place a heavy focus on finding solutions for your customer’s problems, there is more to this than just Q&A.
Be a solutionist.
Do your research, dig deeper, and unfold a resolution that does more than just answer their question at surface value.
Customers will take note of businesses that go above and beyond. After you solve their problem, consider providing them with alternative resources or recommendations that may help them tackle their next step. This bit of extra effort will highlight your enthusiasm, and prove to the customer that they are valued.
Practicing quality customer service isn’t enough.
To be truly effective, your business must determine how to measure customer satisfaction. Monitoring your business’ NPS (Net Promoter Score) serves as a constructive way to actualize your efforts.
@Impactbnd has been on time, on budget and on target. What else can a CEO ask from its #inboundmarketing firm? Unsolicited recommendation.
— Helyn Bolanis (@helynbolanis) June 9, 2013Based on a 1-10 scale, your NPS is equivalent to your % of promoters (9-10) minus your % of detractors (0-6).
If you’re turning out a healthy number of promoters, you’re on the right track. While it’s comforting to know that your customers and clients are satisfied with your products or service, their satisfaction goes further when they start promoting your business.
This is why we delight.
Let us walk you through how inbound marketing can transform your business, and why it's the proven method for doing business online.
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