Inbound Marketing is an approach focused on attracting customers through content and interactions that are relevant and helpful, not interruptive. With Inbound Marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.
Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing does not need to fight for potential customers attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects and builds trust and credibility for your business.
Inbound marketing is widely viewed as an effective means of brand promotion. However, it’s often viewed as a “nice to have” as opposed to a necessity. By 2017, that’s no longer the case. Inbound marketing is now downright essential.
By creating and implementing an Inbound Marketing process and stack of tools, you can leverage the incoming traffic on your online properties, and efficiently guide your potential customers from prospects to all the way down to customers.
Inbound Marketing involves a full set of technological choices and features
– Figuring out the existing user flows
– Creating a Marketing funnel (from unknown user -> MQL -> SQL)
– Designing the different customer paths that support the Marketing funnel
– Putting together a list of necessary tools to support the Inbound process
– Setting up the user flows on the tools & implement the Inbound strategy
– Integrating the Inbound tools on all available online properties (website, blog, app, etc.)
We will be collecting email addresses and other contact details from the website/blog visitors and doing lead capturing using SumoMe/Appocalypsis (forms, popups, bars, etc.). That data will then be transferred to our Marketing automation/user communication tool.
We will be communicating and engaging with the website visitors (answering questions, offering help and relevant content/resources) based on user behavior using tools like Bubbleballs/Drift/intecomm.
After a user clicks on the “Request demo” buttons, or requests a demo through any other source, they will be directed to an integrated calendar page where they will be able to select a date that suits them for the meeting, and also enter their personal details to be qualified by the sales & marketing team.
All the leads collected through the Inbound mechanisms will be transferred to a marketing automation platform. We will then be using it to set up rules and automated actions based on user behavior, like scheduling and sending nurturing and any other sort of campaigns (informative, sales, etc.). Such a system will allow us to essentially turn website visitors into informed buyers, until they are ready to be treated on a one-to-one basis, manually (if needed).
When a lead becomes qualified (reaches a specific score/status) inside Marketing Automation Platform, they will be transferred to their final destination (aka Social CRM), where they can be handled on an individual basis. A CRM gives us the ability to record all conversations with a lead, assign and monitor their lead score, move them through different stages on the way to actually purchasing our service, etc.
All the events triggered by customers/leads (e.g. viewing a web page, clicking on a button, or performing some action on our app or site) will be collected and passed over to all the services we are using on the Inbound stack, serving as a central hub for customer data and enabling us to provide accurate and complete customer data analytics. Reports like Customer Scorecards (CSC) etc will be created.
