Let’s assume you’re about to enact your first inbound marketing strategy. You rationalize that the best way to start is with digital advertising. A Google AdWords campaign is your preferred method. However, you can drive tons of traffic to your website, but if you haven’t optimized your landing pages, then you simply won’t convert. Unfortunately, too many companies learn this the hard way. They assume that enacting an inbound marketing strategy is easy. It isn’t, and the payouts are never immediate.
There is simply no comparison between the costs of conventional marketing and inbound marketing. Running ads on TV, radio and print is expensive and tracking results and costs of leads is extremely difficult, which makes duplicating efforts next to impossible. However, an inbound marketing strategy is precise. You can target specific audiences and demographics with pinpoint accuracy. This helps you narrow down what people want, when they want it and how best to deliver it. However, that end-result is built on trust.
Take a Long-Term View
Don’t launch a digital marketing strategy if you think results will be immediate. They won’t. You need to invest the time and resources to make your digital strategies work. Digital marketing isn’t a static, one-time approach. It’s constantly evolving, and it requires real-time adjustments and a thorough understanding of your market and audience. The more you understand that audience, the better your results. Over time you’ll be able to add different layers and each layer will be built on your understanding of your customers.
1. Defining Your Audience
Your in-depth understanding of your audience is what drives a successful inbound marketing strategy. A general understanding of your audience won’t suffice. You need to deep-dive into what makes your audience tick. You need to have a thorough understanding of how your product impacts your customers, how they communicate online through social media and what motivations they have for becoming brand champions.
Once you thoroughly understand your buyer personas, you can start to piece together how, when and why your customers buy. This is what’s commonly referred to as the buyer’s journey and the more you understand that journey, the more you’re able to engage your audience and increase lead generation.
2. Building Trust
Buzzwords like “engagement” mean different things to different audiences, so be sure to define what engagement means to your customers. What social media channels do they prefer and how can you leverage those channels? How will you structure your content marketing strategies and what will you include in that content? What role will video, podcasts, webcasts, infographics, whitepapers, eBooks, and digital imagery play in your approach?
All of these content solutions are vital to reaching your audience but none of them work if you can’t back up your claims with verifiable data. Practice what you preach. Back up your claims, provide excellent after-sales service and raise the bar for customer engagement. That's how trust is built. Customer trust comes from making a claim and backing it up, so be sure to do your research.
3. Embracing Content Marketing
Think about how content marketing works. All those aforementioned approaches build your brand, help you connect with your audience and give you a real-time tool for engaging that audience. Yes, the results aren’t immediate. However, over time, these strategies produce results year-over-year. As your audience and followers increase, you gain a greater understanding of what makes them tick and that information drives your content marketing and digital approaches.
Lead generation through content marketing isn’t a one-time event. Leads will continue to come in years later. Also, you can easily adjust existing content pieces with updates and change your strategy based on real-time customer feedback. In fact, in many ways, your customers drive your inbound marketing strategy. Their feedback is critical to improving that strategy and their ability to build your brand alongside your company means this symbiotic relationship is the key to your success.
4. Tracking Results
Customers are more independent nowadays. They’re less reliant on salespeople. They’re more informed and more educated about their decisions and they want to know everything before making those decisions. They research companies in advance and they rely on the input of friends and like-minded individuals. This makes social media critical to your success. However, this means you need to thoroughly understand, track, and define how customers move from interested prospect, to qualified lead, to a paying customer, and finally, to repeat customer.
Tracking results means you’re defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that help you better understand how well your strategies are working and what digital approaches your audience is gravitating to. A complete, all-encompassing buyer's journey is what’s required and moving first-time customers to repeat customers only happens when you have a digital strategy that reintroduces customers back into your funnel.
5. Keeping Abreast of New Strategies
Your inbound marketing strategy is always changing and so are the strategies you employ. Some of those strategies may be well-established approaches that you’ve either ignored or were unaware of. However, others will come from new technological advancements and customer trends. For example, apps are now commonplace on mobile devices and companies use them for lead generation in addition to keeping customers informed and up-to-date with company news.
Chatbots on websites are quickly usurping call centers due to their 24/7 capabilities and low cost. Long seen as a customer service tool, several companies are using intelligent chatbots to generate leads and help customers navigate the company’s website. Virtual Reality (VR) is starting to make inroads as well and companies are now investigating ways to use VR to generate high-quality leads. Ultimately, digital marketing is forever changing and keeping abreast of these changes will help your company stay in touch with its audience.
Embrace your inbound marketing strategy and make it your primary means of generating leads. Invest the time, resources and capital to make it work and you'll have a continuous source of customer data. Over time, that data will help you further improve lead generation and position your solutions as your customer's first choice.
If you want to see how a digital marketing strategy can improve your market position, then contact us and request an assessment.
Written By: David Carpenter
