Is Your Marketing Strategy IN(...bound)?
Inbound Marketing, as defined by Marketo, the fastest growing provider in Revenue Performance management, is the process of helping potential customers find your company – often before they are even looking to make a purchase – and then turning that early awareness into brand preference and, ultimately, into leads and revenue.
That is right my fellow marketers. The game has changed – potential consumers in this day and age tend to screen traditional marketing efforts like telemarketer cold calls, pitches from sales representatives and direct mailing promotions. With this being said, a marketing mix comprising solely of these outbound techniques will, more often than not, lead to disaster for your organization.
The reality of the matter is that with the thriving presence of the internet, prospective buyers have proven to consistently exercise their ability to instantaneously educate themselves before ever engaging in sales. This resourcefulness and its ease of utility allows potential consumers to research their options on their own accord and thus avoid the pressure and irritation of a direct sales pitch.
With the advent of this newfound consumer capability, marketers may find themselves in a loop when undergoing the process of finding leads. This notion has now become a certainty – as a marketer, if you are solely concerned with generating leads through traditional marketing techniques, you’re bound for failure. Potential consumers who are not yet in the buying stage will reject you when searching for information to solve a given problem. As Marketo’s guide to inbound marketing states,
“In the new world where buyers are in control of self-educating, your job as a marketer is not to find leads; it is to help leads find you.”
 Inbound marketing is based on providing informative, entertaining and differentiated content to help solve a given prospective buyer’s given problem. According to Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, you’re inbound marketing efforts must be as humanized and personable as possible. Your inbound marketing focus should not be based on acquiring customers, but should be grounded in connecting with prospective buyers and educating them on why you’re product or service can best suit their needs. When a buyer is actively seeking information on their own, their marketing defense filters diminish and they become more susceptible to engagement.
Since content is the backbone of your inbound marketing strategy, it is essential that you create content that educates, inspires and demands to be shared. Once again, your goal is to inform – content should not be promotional in nature, but instead provide relevancy to your prospective customers.
Nobody likes a person who toots their own horn either. If your content is strong enough to be shared and advocated by individuals or agencies outside of your organization such as bloggers or analysts, your brand becomes that much more credible. Surrounding and associating your content with that of reliable third parties can lead to great gains in directing traffic towards your brand.
While your inbound marketing content could be second to none in its ability to educate, motivate, enlighten, entertain and inform, if it is not visible to prospective buyers, it is all but a waste. One can expand their brands visibility through search engine optimization and social media platforms. As discussed in my previous blog regarding SEO*, its purpose is to optimize and increase the visibility of your site and content by including keywords that help out rank high in organic search results.
Provided that your site’s content can now be discovered more easily, it is more likely that it will get shared through social media channels such as Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter.
Although the advent of inbound marketing and its reported success may initially seem like an end-all solution to your marketing woes, it is not. We must keep in mind that inbound marketing techniques are intended to drive traffic to your content and when used in other areas of an overarching marketing strategy, it is far from a flawless function.
Inbound marketing has a tendency to lead to early-stage success, yet it is commonly reported that leads dwindle and trickle over time. Aside from that, if analyzed incorrectly, feedback from inbound marketing strategies with B2B products can lead to wasted efforts due to the fact that these efforts rarely lead to decision-makers in these industries. Think about it: what CXO is going to spend their time muddling through the masses of blogs and websites? This job is more than likely going to be assigned to an underling.
Marketo puts great perspective on this situation, “inbound marketing done in isolation doesn't lead to success… it must be incorporated into the overall marketing mix if you want to see bottom-line results.”Â
