A Marketers’ Guide to
Inbound Marketing
About the Author A certified Inbound Marketing Professional David Demoe manages Search Engine People’s (SEP) Inbound Marketing Department. David is responsible for strategizing, creating, managing, measuring, and scaling all of SEP’s inbound marketing efforts in order to attract visitors, generate leads and grow sales. As it relates to client projects, David consults on content strategies, lead nurture campaigns, email marketing and if that wasn’t enough, leads the way on developing buyer personas.
Connect with David Demoe on
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The following eBook will outline: Is inbound marketing for you?
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Key challenges and solutions
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Much more than a new spin
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Manage implementation
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Achieving success from within
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It’s methodology, not magic
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Next steps to inbound marketing success
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When will I see results? And what will they be?
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It’s about pulling customers in & not pushing your message out
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Is Inbound Marketing for you? “What you do for a living is spread ideas, make promises and keep them. That’s marketing.” – Seth Godin, Author, Marketing Guru
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Is Inbound Marketing for you? It’s not a big idea at all. Instead, it’s a new methodology for consistently attracting and securing new clients, capitalizing on the ways in which the purchase processes of most individuals and companies have changed due to the continual evolution of the internet. In essence, Inbound Marketing seeks to use content to attract prospects into your site, convert them into leads, and then convert those leads into sales.
Is your company looking to:
• Generate leads that can be turned into long-term customers?
• Achieve sustainable, predictable results? • Develop a cohesive marketing strategy to replace disconnected tactical silos?
• Increase the effectiveness of each individual marketing tactic you use?
Ok, it’s not that simple, but the idea of creating a digital space that attracts leads, creates customers, accrues content value and builds sales momentum over time—without continuous added expense —isn’t that far off.
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Inbound Is Inbound marketing Marketing can transform forsales you?channel your B2B
By focusing on educating, engaging and interacting with all your potential prospects, you can not only attract more visitors to your website, you can also convert more of those visitors into qualified leads and, eventually, into customers. Better yet, as prospects’ connection and commitment to your site and company strengthens, your inbound marketing results compound over time, positioning you for sustainable and predictable growth.
Rather than scattering your marketing efforts across a broad range of tactics with the aim of finding only those people ready to buy, it introduces an integrative methodology designed to help you build relationships across the entire sales cycle.
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IsUnderstanding Inbound Marketing how for you?buy customers In a typical buying process, 75% to 98% of your prospects are simply researching solutions to a problem. Maybe they’re looking up information about the types of products and services you sell, or reading reviews, but they’re not planning to buy in the near term. Another 2% to 25% of your prospects are beginning to establish buying criteria. So they might recognize the need for a solution like yours but, again, they’re not ready to buy today. Only 0% to 10% of prospects are planning to make a purchase at any given time. Traditional marketing still focuses on that bottom 0% to 10%. While there’s nothing wrong with trying to connect with ready buyers, this approach prevents you from building relationships with the 90%+ of prospects who may one day buy what you sell.
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Inbound marketing is becoming a strategic necessity
If you want to keep pace with marketing trends and early-adopting competitors, it’s time to think about inbound marketing.
You may have heard people talking about inbound marketing. It’s more than talk. It’s the next level of marketing and the first to fully realize the potential of the Internet and social media to attract customers and drive sales—and your competition is probably using it.
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Much more than a new spin While some of the ideas behind it may sound familiar, inbound marketing, as an end-to-end marketing model, explores radically new territory. Exploiting the still evolving capabilities of the Internet, it redefines the seller-customer relationship.
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Much more than a new spin
The Internet has changed what customers can do, but more than that, it’s changed how they think about doing it. It doesn’t just mean corporate buyers have faster, easier access to the things they need; it also means they don’t want to be sold things they aren’t already interested in. This means you have to find new ways to affect and manipulate that interest—ways that involve attracting the customers you want to your digital sales space.
The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people find, discover, share, shop and connect. – Hubspot.com
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So what’s really changed? Since the advent of the Internet, we’ve been engaged in a gradual progression toward what inbound marketing is today. These phases include:
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Internet marketing
which encompasses a whole range of online marketing activities, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and display advertising. While not universally true, most internet marketing focuses on the web’s technical capabilities to connect sellers with their customers.
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Email marketing
which traditionally involved sending mass emails to broad distribution lists with the hope of reaching the right person. With improved list segmentation and a more customized approach, email marketing can average a ROI of $40.56 for every dollar spent. (Direct Marketing Association’s “Power of Direct” study)
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So what’s really changed? Continued...
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Permission marketing
which uses online and mobile marketing tactics to communicate only with people who consent to the process. 4
Word of mouth marketing
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Content marketing
which focuses on attracting people with interesting, appealing content, with an emphasis on the content itself, i.e., what materials do you actually provide when people arrive at your site—or to encourage them to go there from somewhere else?
which includes social media, viral and stealth marketing tactics designed to encourage interactivity between brands and their customers.
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So what’s really changed? Continued...
What’s the one common element that unites this marketing evolution? It’s the gradual shift—enabled by the Internet—in the directional flow of the sales process. Essentially, the customer is drawn to the seller rather than vice versa, and this shift makes traditional marketing ineffective as a standalone approach.
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