A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO
INBOUND by Digital Impact
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Why Inbound Marketing? Chapter 2: Attract Chapter 3: Convert Chapter 4: Close Chapter 5: Delight Chapter 6: Conclusion
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WHY INBOUND MARKETING? Showing the right people the right information at the right time and turning strangers into customers; that’s inbound marketing.
PICTURE THE SCENE You arrive home from work late one night. Grabbing your coat from the passenger seat and stepping out the car, you swing the car door closed. Instead of the satisfying thump, you hear the nerve splitting screech of a hard steel door meeting soft a iPhone 6. You reopen the door as quickly as possible but the damage is already done. Your phone is bent in half and some fancy looking circuitry is hanging out the bottom: this is the smartphone equivalent of a write off. You head inside and start researching possible replacements. Your TV has been awash with adverts for Samsungs, HTCs and Sonys but none really stick in your mind. Besides, you’d rather read some reviews from real people and find out which is actually best. After trawling through a few pages of Google and poring over a dozen or so reviews, you decide on a new
model and order it online for next day delivery. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the behaviour of the modern digital consumer. The rise of the internet means we are only seconds away from a huge body of information and answers. So even if your advert’s got someone on the hook with an advert, you need some extra to persuade them to convert. This change in behaviour brings new challenges to businesses which still rely on traditional advertising methods. Even though their audience is still seeing print ads and hearing radio segments, they aren’t necessarily reaching for their wallets.
DECLINING TRADITIONAL MEDIA Now, we’re not saying that traditional advertising mediums are worthless. They aren’t. In fact, traditional campaigns can achieve good return on investment if they’re done well.
PRINT ADS Print is in decline. While it’ll probably never disappear completely, your potential audience is shrinking day by day.
DIRECT MAIL
However, traditional advertising is trending downwards and many fear it simply won’t last much longer as a viable option.
Direct mail can only survive so long as people are also receiving legitimate mail; they aren’t. Nowadays many people even opt to receive bills online.
Both consumption and results are declining year-on-year and the writing is already on the wall for a few traditional stalwarts.
COLD CALLING Cold calling is invasive and annoying and the public is starting to lose patience. None with any sense is still using this marketing method.
TV ADS The moment we could record TV was the moment TV advertising started to die. Combine that with the rise of Netflix and the TV ad is simply not an attractive option.
THE INBOUND METHODOLOGY So why are traditional advertising techniques on the decline? The simple answer is this: they just don’t really fit with behaviour of the modern consumer. The modern world needs a new approach and that something is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a new approach to marketing which aligns your efforts with the behaviour of the modern consumer. Instead of shouting your message
at a group of unqualified leads, you carefully deliver your pitch to the people who are actually interested. Instead of working against the natural behaviour of your audience, you work with it. Instead of buying billboards, you build genuinely valuable content. Instead of buying millions of emails and sending out unqualified blasts, you nurture the leads you do have. Here’s how it in broad strokes.
The Inbound Marketing Methodology
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STEP 1: ATTRACT Buyer Personas Content Strategy Social Amplification
While many forms of digital marketing focus on building traffic, inbound marketing does things a little differently. Instead of attracting an unqualified mass of visitors, inbound only goes after the visitors that are most valuable to your business. How does it do that? Well, it all starts with understanding the who. Who are your ideal customers? Once you know who you’re trying to attract, you can start building a strategy targeted at them.
BUYER PERSONAS
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer and they form the foundation for any effective inbound marketing campaign. Creating buyer personas is an iterative and collaborative process that involves everyone in your company. Start by analysing your current
customer base for trends, commonalities and natural groupings. Complement this with in-depth interviews and surveys to build up a more realistic picture of who your ideal customers are. Then work these groupings into profiles of fictional people who represent the defining characteristics of that group. If you’re serious about building quality buyer personas, check out our free buyer persona creation kit. Buyer personas aren’t something you can rush and jot down on a bit of scrap of paper. They’re a complicated mix of data, analysis and creative strategy. So spend some time getting them right because if you do, they’ll amplify the effect of any work you do later.
CONTENT STRATEGY The core of your inbound strategy, the stuff that’s actually going to attract your potential customers, is content. Good quality, engaging and problem solving content. If you’ve built up your buyer personas, you should understand what it is they’re after. Why are they online? What are they looking for? What can you create which will interest them? Using your buyer personas you guide your content creation
process and build content which is genuinely helpful and valuable to potential customers. For example, some of our readers want local SEO advice, so we produced a beginner’s guide to digital marketing. Others want to hear about how to market their business on social media. Cue our Ultimate LinkedIn Marketing Manual. It’s about working out what your customers would want and producing that content. Once your content is live, each piece becomes a new way for a potential customer to find you. If you’re still not a content convert, consider this fact: companies that blog convert 70 percent more leads those who don’t. That’s how important content is.
SOCIAL AMPLIFICATION Once you’ve got your content created, you need a way to get it read. While there are countless ways to distribute your content, our favourite is still using social media. A good social strategy can turn a disinterested mob into an engaged community of enthusiastic brand activists, ready to read your content and willing to promote it to their contacts. Select networks that appeal to your buyer personas. If you’re going after marketing managers, get active on LinkedIn. If you’re trying to attract graphic designers, start posting on Instagram. Not all networks appeal to all users, so choose the networks which best suit your buyer personas. Subscribe to our blog for lots of regular tips on how to maximise your returns from social media.
TWITTER With 316 million active users and 500 million Tweets sent every day, Twitter is the undisputed King of right now. Twitter’s users use the network to stay up-to-date with the latest happenings so try and tie your content into current events.
FACEBOOK Facebook is the largest social network in the world, comfortably ingrained in both the professional and personal spheres. Use Facebook to present a personal face for your business.
LINKEDIN Think Facebook content in a suit and tie. LinkedIn is the only professional social network worth its weight in salt. LinkedIn users are looking for practical information related to their niche.
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STEP 2: CONVERT The Offer Calls-to-Action Landing Pages
Attracting more visitors to your website is great. It means more people reading your content and more exposure for your business. Problem is, exposure doesn’t pay the bills. Once you’ve built up relevant traffic on your site, you need to start focusing on the important bit: converting that traffic into leads. Now, consumers don’t connect with
“80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advert.” - Roper Public Affairs
self-serving marketing anymore. They don’t want to hear about how great you are and how revolutionary your product. What they want - and what we’ve discussed earlier - is genuinely valuable resources and information. Content that is legitimately useful and makes them want to hear from you. It’s about providing value and building genuine relationships with your visitors. Once you’ve made that connections, you can start easing your leads down the conversion funnel.
THE OFFER
CALLS-TO-ACTION
If you want your visitors to hand over their contact details, you’ve got to offer them something genuinely valuable. Something that will benefit them or their company. In inbound marketing this is called the offer.
HubSpot specifically defines a call-to-action as “an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action.”
For example, we’ve previously offered our visitors an SEO citation annual and a LinkedIn marketing manual. Basically, it’s got to be something that benefits their business.
Think of them as your hook, your chance to entice visitors in using your offer. Crafting effective calls-to-action is half science and half art. It’s so much more than just slapping together a button with “Download Now” text overlayed. It’s got to
instantly convey value and make your audience want to click it. Check out our guide on crafting the calls-to-action for some helpful hints guaranteed to boost your conversion rates. Again - and you might be noticing a trend here - your calls-to-action must be targeted towards your buyer personas. It’s important you speak directly to someone and appeal to their specific needs. If your calls-to-actions are generic, it’s much easier for your visitors to ignore them.
LANDING PAGES Ah, the landing page. Home to your offer and where the magic really happens. When your user clicks on a call-to-action they arrive on a landing page, a web page with one specific goal: to make the visitor claim your offer. Each offer you create needs its own landing page and there’s two reasons for that. One, each landing page gets
Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10. indexed by Google and forms a brand new point of entry for potential customers. Two, building individual landing pages means each one can concentrate on one specific deal. That focuses your user’s attention on one thing and increases the likelihood of them converting.
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STEP 3: CLOSE Email Lead Nurturing Workflows SideKick
Okay, let’s recap your inbound marketing campaign so far. You’ve created your buyer personas. You’ve developed some genuinely valuable content. You’ve linked each piece of content to an offer. You’ve selected your ideal social networks for content distribution. You’ve persuaded your users to click through to that offer using a brilliant call-to-action. And you’ve convinced your prospects to reclaim the offer. What’s next? You’ve got to turn those leads into customers. Yep, that’s right. It’s time to close the deal. The penultimate stage of your inbound marketing campaign is a collective effort between sales and marketing to nurture your leads and ease them down the sales funnel towards conversion.
EMAIL LEAD NURTURING
In an ideal world you’d be in contact with your leads from the moment they first contact you to the second they sign off on a project. However, that requires a lot of effort though and doing it manually is impractical for anything other than the smallest organisation. To actually make that sort of contact a reality, you need marketing automation. Thankfully, HubSpot has you covered. Using HubSpot you can set up smart lists and automatic logic decisions to categorise your leads and then send them content tailored to their specific segment. While traditional email marketing blasts the same standard message to every single contact, inbound personalises the content to every individual, ensuring higher click through rates across your campaign.
WORKFLOWS Workflows are a way of automatically sending a user certain content because they’ve performed a particular action. It might sound a bit boring but workflows are actually one of the most powerful tools in your inbound marketing toolbox. For examples, visitors who email us about web design services are automatically sent content about our development process. Visitors who download the Little Blue Book are automatically sent other local SEO tips and tricks. As soon as a lead triggers a workflow, they are sent specific emails over custom time increments.
“Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is all about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” - David Meerman Scott This level of contact makes your leads feel valued, keeps your business in their mind and helps move them down the sales funnel. When a lead has completed the workflow, they will have either converted into a customer or be ready for your sales team to take over.
SIDEKICK AND LEAD TRACKING Imagine being able to know if a lead has opened your email without attaching an awkward read receipt. Sounds good, doesn’t it? How about being able to see them dip in and out of old email chains? Pretty useful, huh? Well, with HubSpot’s SideKick app, you can do exactly that. SideKick is an app developed by HubSpot which automatically includes a piece of tracking code in all your emails. Whenever an email is opened, it pings a message back to you, notifying you that someone somewhere is reading your message. But HubSpot’s tracking goes much further than that. If a user fills out a contact form or claims an offer, they become a lead and HubSpot begins tracking their activity on your site. It records every page they look at, every resource they download and every message they send.
This grants you amazing insights into the motivations of your leads and allows you to tailor your approach to individuals. Short of having a private investigator, there’s no easier way to gain this level of understanding into your leads.
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STEP 4: DELIGHT Positive culture Educate Listen
Visitors attracted, leads converted and customers closed, that’s the end of the process, right?
BUILD A POSITIVE CULTURE
Nope. Quickly consider these two facts. One, 23 percent of people who had a positive service experience told 10 or more people about it. Two, 75 percent of people trust recommendations from people they know. Happy customers are immensely valuable to your business even after they’ve used your service. Once you’ve converted a lead into a customer, the next step is turning them into an advocate for your brand. Brand advocates will amplify your content reach, share their experiences and refer new clients. If you turn your customers into brand advocates, you create a lean mean marketing machine that requires absolutely zero input from you. So how do you turn someone into a brand advocate? By making them happy, of course.
It’s hard for your customers to have a positive experience interacting with your company unless your staff embody that culture. Your staff have to live and breath a customer-centric approach and that all starts with the hiring process. Find and recruit the people who reflect how you envision your company. After all, you can train skills and accumulate experience, but you can’t teach culture. Once you’ve found the right people, equip them with the skills they need to excel and ensure they understand their position as the face of the company.
EDUCATE
The whole inbound methodology is based on providing value to your users. That means learning about their problems and providing practical solutions. You must become an expert in their field. Do your research, create new solutions that legitimately solve a problem and make yourself a legitimate resource. After you have provided a solution,
maintain contact with your leads. Send extra information, provide alternative options and predict their next step. Don’t be a onehit wonder; build yourself into an authority in their niche. Your customers will take notice if you go above and beyond the call of duty.
And whenever you, your brand or your services are mentioned, use this as a way to kick off conversations with new prospects.
“On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.” - White House Office of Consumer Affairs
LISTEN
Buyer personas are not a set-itand-forget-it part of your strategy. You should be constantly trying to refine them as this allows you to improve the experience you’re providing for your users. Monitor your social channels, regularly check review platforms and maintain a presence on related online communities.
This provides a dual purpose. One, it allows you to proactively engage with people who are talking about you or your service. Two, it allows you to get a drop on any positive or negative feedback and leverage it to your advantage. If you find any negative feedback, engage with the user and let them know that you’re listening to them. While unaddressed negative feedback is detrimental to your business, a positive response is a great way to change how your business is seen.
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CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION “People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.” ― Brian Halligan
stories. And our own website deserves to be up there too.
MOVING FORWARD So that’s a brief overview of inbound marketing. It’s a complete approach covering every step in your consumer’s journey, every system you put in place and every tool you use. And it works too. HubSpot’s case study page is a glowing endorsement of the system with hundreds of success
When we rebranded we decided not to tap into the authority of our previous website or business. We wanted Digital Impact to be a clean slate to prove our work. Within a matter of months we were attracting in new customers and starting to overtake the performance of our old website. And that kind of growth can be yours too. Get in touch with one of our consultants to arrange a free consultation and we’ll have a look at how we can help improve your marketing.
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