Does your current marketing plan consist solely of outbound marketing activities such as radio, TV, billboards and mailers? If so, your ROI is probably unknown. With outbound tactics, it's much harder to attribute increased sales to your marketing efforts. Outbound marketing efforts also attract lower quality leads because your messages are shown to people whether they care about them or not.
Inbound marketing is different. Your message reaches people who are actively interested in your products and services, and you get higher quality leads and a higher ROI. Outbound may generate a larger amount of leads, but more leads don't necessarily equal more sales. You need the right leads! So how does inbound marketing help? Let's dive in to discover the answer.
The basic concept of the inbound methodology is relatively straightforward. Your marketing efforts are designed to attract potential customers to your company, typically through the use of educational content. Once potential customers start interacting with your organization, you can use relationship building tactics to build their loyalty.
While inbound strategies may look drastically different from company to company. The following are three common tools used in the inbound methodology that are excellent for improving your lead quality: marketing automation, personalized email marketing, and list segmentation.
Marketing automation removes a significant amount of manual processes from lead nurturing. For example, when a prospective customer enters their email address in a lead generation form, the marketing automation system can automatically send the requested content and schedule a relationship building campaign designed to move the prospect down the funnel. The sales team ends up with leads who have received the education they needed to understand the ideal solution, and most of the sales objections are already out of the way.
Personalized email marketing helps you cut through inbox clutter to generate highly relevant messaging. Each email uses a lead details, such as their name and an interest category, to send the most appropriate content. The personal touch can go a long way toward making a mass mailer come off as a one-to-one interaction. When you want to scale your sales efforts, know that this is one way to stay on top of each prospect.
List segmentation gets rid of the one-size-fits-all marketing approach. Each lead is sorted into a particular category to allow for better-targeted campaigns, and the voice, messaging, creatives, and channels can change to suit each audience. You can use the previous two tools to help with this process, since leads may self-segment themselves through an email marketing form, and marketing automation can identify key behaviors for a particular list.
Your new personalized inbound marketing plan helps your sales team spend less time on low-quality leads and more time on qualified leads. Prospective customers have already gone through a lead nurturing process that helps screen out poor fits. The people who are left have a strong set of knowledge about your company, the products you provide and the value you bring to their lives, which converts to higher opportunity rates and win rates. When you eliminate leads that will never end up converting to customers, your sales team has more time to focus delighting your best leads!
Another way inbound benefits the sales team is by giving them the chance to return to their core competencies. You didn't hire and then train top sales performers to do data entry or waste time sending a beginner level guide to a poorly qualified lead. You brought them in to maintain revenue growth and help your organization grow.
When you combine the inbound methodology with a more effective sales team, you end up with a higher marketing ROI. The first improvement comes from being able to track your performance. With Inbound you have more ability to attribute sales to specific campaigns, channels, or other marketing characteristics. With this information, you’ll have the opportunity to optimize your efforts and identify problems in the sales funnel.
With Inbound, you'll end up with a tested and proven sales approach that generates a consistent ROI. Inbound builds traffic to your website, nurtures the leads that go through the funnel, and limits the chances that prime opportunities fall through the cracks. It also empowers the sales team, as they no longer need to manually perform many administrative tasks that eat up most of their day. Instead, their focus is entirely on working with these well-qualified leads and getting them past the last barriers that stand in the way of becoming a customer. Your sales team will develop long-term relationships with the right prospects in no time with Inbound!
Lastly, loyal customers will bring in a lot more revenue than a bunch of one-off buyers, and they often turn into vocal advocates of your brand, both online and offline which results in happy customers and a fulfilled sales team!
Your sales team has a hard job, and they're vital to keeping your business growing. Empower them with the tools they need to do their best by adopting an inbound methodology.
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