5 billion gigabytes of data was created between the dawn of time and 2003, we now create that every two days!
Information abundance is fundamentally changing the way people find out about products and purchase them. Those looking for a product or service are more likely to research extensively and educate themselves before even contacting a company, where once a salesperson was the first point of contact now up to 90% of the purchase journey occurs remotely. The old marketing playbook is ill-equipped to deal with this, and for companies willing to embrace a new way of thinking this represents an excellent opportunity - inbound.
Inbound means not just pitching products and services to prospects but providing them with relevant and useful content to answer their questions and solve problems for them.
The methodology consists of four phases to take visitors to your website and transform them into qualified leads, customers and in the very best-case scenario, promoters. The four phases are: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight.
Here at EnquiryLab we live and breathe inbound. We’ve seen it work for businesses in multiple sectors. We’ve sketched out 3 steps you can take to start building an inbound marketing strategy and explore the possibilities of this powerful marketing methodology.
- Understand your ideal customer: Take a step back and look at your business objectives. What are your priorities for the future, and which products or services do you want to promote? Who are the people you want to sell them to, and where do they get their information from? What are their goals, challenges and pain points? These are your personas, and they form a big part of an effective inbound strategy.
- Create helpful content that they will love: Think clearly about the messages and content you want to send out - what are those personas you have identified looking for during their purchase journey? What do you want to say to visitors who sit at those different phases of the journey (the content you create to attract them will be different from content created to close the deal). Think about those personas and consider both the tone of voice to use and the places to position that content to reach them. This may be on your website in the form of blogs and downloads, on social media and so on.
- Invest in the technology to turn their interest into action: At EnquiryLab we are big fans of HubSpot, a marketing and sales automation tool that effectively wraps around your website to help you deploy highly targeted and relevant experiences to each individual visitor. The basic principle is to use blogging, SEO and social media to drive traffic to your site, then calls-to-action, landing pages and forms to turn those strangers into leads. Those leads then become customers using automated emails and lead intelligence. Then, to wrap it all up, you constantly analyse the data to replicate what worked well and improve what didn’t.
Is it time to implement inbound in your marketing efforts?
If after reading this you are keen to find out more about inbound, you are certainly in the right place. EnquiryLab are experts in implementing this marketing approach for businesses, and as a HubSpot partner agency we are well placed to guide you to the next steps on your journey. Get to know us better by filling out the form below:
