Inbound Marketing, this strategy which consists in bringing the client/prospect towards you rather than chasing him away untimely… I often talk to you about it, you know I am passionate about Inbound. Let’s now see in detail the 3 steps of Inbound Marketing.
1. Attract
Who is your ideal buyer? In all likelihood, the answer will not be just one. By offering a variety of services and products, it’s very easy that you don’t just need to cater to a typical customer, but a variety of models.
So you have to find the time to brainstorm, idealize, and structure different types of ideal clients. Here are some tools that you could use in this phase of inbound marketing to attract new users of your services, to boost your sales and generate growth thanks to digital:
BLOGGING
When the average user searches online for an answer to a question or a solution to a new need they feel, the first thing they do is type the keywords into a search engine. Blog content is usually the most indexed. You have to make your posts, your blog indexable.
Make your ideas, opinions as search-friendly as possible. Create content that meets the needs of your ideal client clearly and completely.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Try to share original content and important information on the web. To be able to engage your potential customers, try to have a conversational, but not insignificant tone. On the social networks and websites where your potential customers spend their time, you should also spend time getting to know yourself.
KEY WORDS
Usually, a buyer person, when he begins the process of buying a product or service online, connects to a search engine and, following his path, types in the keywords that could lead him to the answer to a question or a need. Make sure you are able to appear in the first results of a search engine when your potential customer types in keywords related to your products or services.
To be successful in this goal, you need to carefully study a group of keywords that may refer to your business. Optimize your page structure for search results, create new content and finally draw a series of links around the previously chosen keywords that can attract your customers the most.
ON PAGE
You need to optimize and improve your website to better attract and arouse the interest of your ideal client. Try to design your site as a great content platform that can help even casual visitors to visit more pages of the site, bookmark it, and therefore potentially come back to it.
2. Interact
Once you have succeeded in attracting visitors to your page, the next step is to be able to convert them into leads by collecting information to profile them: one of the most valuable is certainly the email address, but not only.
Of course, it will not be easy to obtain this kind of information. A visitor to a page is always suspicious. So, in order to “receive” this type of good, you must also offer something in return. This type of “exchange” is done through the creation of content, such as:
- eBooks,
- troubleshooting guides,
- webinars,
- vade mecums,
- templates,
- video demos
- or any content that can meet a need/need of your buyer persona.
Contacts must be streamlined and sorted in a powerful CRM! Crucial then is the closing phase in which prospects become real customers. We need to nurture them (hence lead nurturing) to help and support them in the decision and purchase phase through emails containing targeted information. We must therefore convince them to close the loop!
Among the most important tools to convert a visitor into a prospect are:
CALL TO ACTION
Call-to-action buttons or links attempt to engage your visitors to actively participate in the communication through an action, such as “Get the guide!” or “Watch the webinar”. If these types of buttons are not present on your web page, or are present but not clicked, it will be virtually impossible to convert a potential customer into a prospect.
LANDING PAGES
Every time a visitor to your website clicks on a call-to-action button, they are redirected to a landing page. A landing page is the page where the call to action is paid for and where your potential customers will fill out a form with a series of information which will then be used by the marketing and sales team. When a visitor fills out the form on the landing page, they become a lead.
FORMS
As we just said, to convert visitors into leads, they must fill out a form. Here you can’t go wrong in any way! The form to be completed and the related fields must be clear and immediate. The easier it is to complete, the higher the lead conversion rate.
CRM
Once the visitors have been converted into leads, they are contacts that should not be lost, they are your “treasure”. Keep track of all this new information in a CRM: an advanced and unique tool (preferably online cloud) with the database of all the data and information about your potential customers and reachable at any time by the marketing team and commercial.
By doing this, you will have in one place all the interactions you had with each potential customer (email, landing page, social media, live chat and more…). This will help you to have a more complete and exhaustive look at your buyer personas and to imagine possible new future communication, sales or customer service strategies.
There are techniques for calculating the likelihood of a prospect turning into a customer so everyone on your team knows where a particular prospect is at all times.
Let’s imagine that a visitor to your site clicks on the call-to-action button, completes the landing page, downloads your “content offer”, but is not yet ready to become your customer by purchasing your product. What to do ? A series of emails that provide useful information to your visitor, based on the path the visitor took, can help them in the decision-making process. Indeed, with the help of content created ad hoc, a process of building trust is established in the potential customer who gradually feels more and more involved and ready to buy the product.
CLOSED LOOP REPORTING
It is also a useful practice to understand if, within your company, there is effective and constant communication between the marketing and sales departments. It’s much more than a succession of announcements and memos: it’s about an interaction between the different sectors to create a dense network of “needs satisfied or to be satisfied” around the key figure of the buyer persona. . Careful planning down to the smallest detail and constantly updated with the new communications that take place between the company and the client.
3. Build loyalty
The last step is to delight the customer so that they become loyal to our brand.
A satisfied customer, not only with the purchased product, but also with the relationship with marketing, sales and possibly support, will be more likely to return and recommend the same brand to friends, relatives and acquaintances via e-mails. emails or social media posts.
He will therefore be more inclined to “evangelize” the brand. We are all looking for opinions, comments, reviews on something we are about to buy online or offline. We had to address the same idea to our company. We must “make our customers happy and gratified”, so that they can leave positive comments which trigger new contacts.
The tools used to achieve this objective can be:
SMART CALLS TO ACTION
They present different offers depending on the “life stage” a customer is in.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Being present on the various social media allows you to offer real-time customer service. This type of channel allows you to deal with problems in real time and gives you the opportunity to perceive the customer’s feelings, to test their confidence in you and in the brand.
EMAIL AND MARKETING AUTOMATION
Continuing to provide your customers with valuable and relevant content, helping them achieve their goals, can also be an effective way to introduce new products or features of your services which can in turn generate more interest and increase the trust. Thus potentially attracting new prospects.
With inbound and outbound marketing, we connect with real people, who have real questions, real needs, and are trying to be satisfied by purchasing products and services. What changes is the first step in contacting our potential customers to meet their needs. There’s no need to switch from outbound to inbound marketing, but the real challenge is to integrate the strategies and make them work together.