If you have a business or you are in the marketing industry, i am sure you have already heard the term Lead Generation before. If not, then you are either very fortunate or unfortunate, let me explain.
The typical e-mail will read, “Hi there! I am from Marketing Company A, we did an analysis on your online communication and we can guarantee your business 1 MILLION GUARANTEED LEADS! If you are interested in unicorns and making 80% more qualified business leads… Bla Bla fish paste.
So what is the truth, really? Yes, leads are important, but any decent digital marketer will tell you that quality leads, guaranteed sales conversion, and those three pesky letters/words – Return On Investment(ROI) is the name of the game.
Attract. Convert. Close. Delight.
The typical Inbound Marketing Model does not change much from its fundamentals:
Attract potential customers that are likely to buy your product or are at least interested.
Convert them into customers through, organic and valuable conversational engagements
Closing your customer after they have bought into your value proposition is an important technique
Delighting your customers and providing effective aftersales service is an important part of closing the loop.
Tip: An important part of ensuring return business is after sales treatment. Sending a courtesy message or call to inquire about customer satisfaction is one of the ways that you can ensure that you have organic brand advocates and third-party endorsers. Who needs influencers?
Inbound Marketing Strategy Terminologies:
For the sake of this discussion, we will define inbound marketing as an interactive communication between two or more parties (via Hubspot).
56% of people would rather message than call customer service.
A Facebook-commissioned Nielsen study of global Facebook data found that 1 billion people use Messenger each month.
This informs us of the importance of understanding the various conversation styles and preferences of people and using those insights to inform your business and marketing objectives.
Why Your Business Needs an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound Marketing is not just a nice-to-have, it is a necessity. Inbound marketing allows you to rise above the noise of traditional media through a focus on the customer than the vendor.
Basically, nobody likes someone who just speaks about themselves. It’s the same with businesses!
Personalized Conversations
Consider delivering your conversations in a
Consistent and relationship-focused way.
Nurture Your Leads
This can help your prospects feel valued because they are chatting one-to-one with your company.
This will allow your relationship with visitors to build over time as you deliver:
- The right information
- To the right person
- At the right time
- Every time
Implement a Conversational Growth Strategy
As we all know, most conversations are transactional, that is why it is important to make sure that you provide value first tor users, and manage your data and information gathering in a:
- Phased
- Contextual
- and uninterruptive manner
Learn Inbound Marketing Techniques
Fundamentally, you want to attract your customers with relevant, timely and helpful content, and add value at every stage of your customer’s buying journey. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels, like:
- Blogs
- Search Engines
- And Social Media
Inbound Marketing Tactics:
- Marketing Automation
- Conversational Marketing
Buying behaviours have changed, marketing needs to be about ways to connect with consumers on more human value. It’s all about building value and trust.
Content is what fuels your inbound marketing and digital marketing strategy, it is a critical point of departure, content is what will help your business get found by your prospects, using search engines and attracting them to your website. But it is also what can educate your prospects, as they are going through their buying journey.
Social Video Marketing
Video marketing has become effective in creating interest and even driving action. Videos on social media are making the most impressions.
Video content will be the driving factor behind 85% of search traffic by 2019. Source: American Marketing Association.
Site Structure
SEO Silos
It is important to create topic clusters and pillar pages, having content isn’t enough, you need to make sure that your prospects are finding relevant content, in an easy and quick manner.
A siloed website structure can improve your SEO efforts and boost the hierarchy of your website content.
This also makes it easier for search engines to easily discover and crawl your site’s content.
A well-executed siloed site structure can also improve internal linking.
