Prospects have become more immune to traditional sales and marketing tactics—including the role of the sales rep. With so much information readily available online, buyers can go through most of the purchasing process on their own.
Inbound Marketing Strategy to the Rescue
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that draw prospects in (to your website), rather than having to go out to get prospects’ attention through traditional media channels such as advertising and direct mail.
Inbound marketing focuses on developing valuable content for your target audience (or personas), then promoting the content through online channels such blogs, social media and email.
The following visual summarizes the inbound methodology (source: HubSpot):
- ATTRACT more traffic to your website
- CONVERT website traffic into leads
- CLOSE more leads into customers
- DELIGHT your new and existing customers
Numbers Don’t Lie
Recently, HubSpot, one of the leading inbound marketing software platforms, hired The MIT Sloan School of Management to conduct a study that showed some pretty startling results for companies that implemented inbound marketing programs.
Increased Website Visitors
- 2.4 times more visitors per month in 1 year.
- 3.4 times more visitors per month in 2 years.
Increased Leads
- Nearly 6 times more leads per month in 1 year.
- Nearly 25 times more leads per month in 2 years.
You can read the full report here.
Inbound Marketing Strategy for Manufactures: How to Get Started
- Develop Personas—Personas encompass the goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information. Your personas are the people around whom your whole business is built. Download a Buyers Persona Template Here.
- Blogging— Inbound marketing starts with blogging. A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. In order to get found by the right prospective customers, you must create educational content that speaks to them and answers their questions.
- Social Media—Successful inbound strategies are all about remarkable content – and social publishing allows you to share that valuable information on the social web, engage with your prospects, and put a human face on your brand. Interact on the networks where your ideal buyers spend their time.
- SEO—Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have questions about. So, you need to make sure you’re appearing prominently when and where they search. To do that, you need to carefully, analytically pick competitive keywords, optimize your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for.
- Website—Your website pages are your digital storefront. So put your best face forward! Optimize your website to appeal to your ideal buyers and transform your website into a beacon of helpful content to entice the right strangers to visit your pages. Add content offers and call to actions (CTAs) that link to landing pages in order to capture leads.
- Landing Pages—When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page. A landing page is where the offer in the call-to-action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin a conversation with them. When website visitors fill out a form on a landing page for the first time, that visitor becomes a contact.
- Contacts—Keep track of the leads you’re converting in a centralized marketing database. Having all your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts – be it through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise – and how to optimize your future interactions to more effectively attract, convert, close, and delight your buyer personas.
- Email—What do you do if a visitor clicks on your call-to-action, fills out a landing page, or downloads your white paper, but still isn’t ready to become a customer? A series of emails focused on useful, relevant content can build trust with a prospect and help them become more ready to buy.