10 Reasons Why You Must Change How You Market Your Business

If you’re a B2B business that is looking for growth, and you want to drive forward a marketing driven growth plan, then an Inbound Marketing strategy could be the right approach for your business if you need to:

• Drive up your company awareness levels
• Increase the credibility of your company online
• Deliver more marketing qualified leads to sales
• Improve the ROI of your Marketing? 
• Reduce the cost of sales and ensure that sales are spending time on better qualified leads
• Equip sales with more context on the level of engagement of each lead
• Improve lead and customer nurturing

Overwhelmed by the amount of information on the web?  In this blog we'll help you understand the benefits of inbound marketing and learn how top inbound marketers attract visitors, convert them to leads, and convert those leads into happy customers.

You’ll emerge from reading this blog ready to take the next step… So what are the 10 must do steps you should take in order to make Inbound Marketing a success and fuel your growth.

Buyer habits are changing … drastically.  That's the driving force behind Inbound, after all.  What your customers want today is different than what they wanted 10 years ago. That means we must change the way we market and sell to match the way people actually want to shop and buy.

1 - Be armed with your company growth plans and marketing goals

It’s critical to understand what and how marketing needs to contribute to the success of the organisation.  Being able to map marketing results to the growth of the company is an important part of every marketing strategy.

A critical aspect of the inbound journey is the ability to undertsand exactly how your marketing efforts are contributing to the overall success of your organisation.

By developing and mapping marketing goals to the growth of your business, you will be able to see what efforts are working for you, and those that aren't.

2 - Marketers should be aligned with Sales, and their own boss - Marketing needs to be fully aligned at the core of growth within the business 

Bring sales along on the journey, get them bought in early, for some experienced sales professionals, the inbound marketing and sales methodology will challenge them, so you can expect some bumps along the way.  

• Tip #1 - agree an SLA with Sales for monthly leads passed to sales
• Tip #2 - have regular reviews of the results
• Tip #3 - stay engaged with Sales teams - have regular sessions to discuss customer challenges and pains
• Tip #4 - get Sales to contribute to content - every Sales person likes to see their name up in lights, so why not get them writing short blogs for you - that way they have skin in the game.

3 - Benchmark where you are - understand your current traffic and lead statistics

• Website Traffic (visits)/month
• Leads/month
• Customers/month
• Visit > Lead %
• Lead > Customer %

4 - Agree your target ideal buyers and buyer personas

• What do you consider a customer?
• When they buy, how much do they spend?
• On average, how many times does a customer buy per year?
• How many years do they repeat purchase from you?

5 - Create a content / editorial calendar of helpful, relevant, insightful, and fresh content

• Optimise content for attracting, converting and closing customers.
• Content aimed at buyer personas, specifically for each stage of their journey
• Align to the buyers journey, not how your organisation sells
• Use lead intelligence to ensure you serve relevant and helpful content to the persona

6 - Get Website Traffic

• Create blog content, search engine optimize (SEO) your content, and promote it on social media sites.

7 - Get Leads

• Place calls-to-action throughout your website and other channels to drive visitors to landing pages with forms.
• Visitors fill out the forms to get whatever you’re offering and become leads.

8 - Get Customers

• Send your leads automated emails to drive them along your buying cycle until they convert to customers. Alternatively if relevant provide your sales team with lead intelligence so they can make more effective sales calls.
• Nurture existing customers, keep them engaged - drive them to be promoters or evangelists

9 - Measure everything so that you can analyse success and ROI

As Marketers, we're also Scientists, I'm always encouraging my Clients to be obsessed by [meaningful] data, the data tells you the story, and removes every ounce of hearsay.  Trial new methods and tactics, but if you are going to fail, then fail fast - measure everything - trial, measure, analyse and repeat. 

• Be obsessed about data
• Be a marketing scientist
• Closed loop reporting / ROI
• Analyze the success of your marketing campaigns, and determine which areas need further optimizations for future success.

10 - Hit the ground running - by partnering with a HubSpot agency, such as RevM

Resources and implementation help from a real HubSpot expert to ensure that your first campaign is a success.

• Guide you through the process of onboarding / implementation and designing your first campaign
• Create engaging landing page, blog and email templates
• Create visually appealing content such as short film, animation, videos
• Create engaging copy for blogs, landing pages, emails
• Create and build campaigns fast

In Conclusion

We don't expect you to understand all of the above, you're new to Inbound Marketing and Inbound Sales.  As a HubSpot Agency Partner, we're here to guide you through the process in small steps:

• Firstly we'll work out if your business is a good fit for Inbound Marketing, so you don't waste any time or money
• Secondly we'll get to know your business and match your Business and Marketing goals to Inbound Marketing goals
• Thirdly we'll agree what the success metrics would be, and what your return on investment would be
• Finally, we'll work up a straight-forward plan to implement Inbound Marketing, and transfer our years of experience and knowledge to you

Of course, Inbound Marketing isn't a simple as those 4 steps alone, however our approach will ensure that your Inbound Marketing is 100% successful. 

As a certified member of HubSpot’s Agency Partner Program we're constantly helping businesses like yours grow through exciting new ways of marketing, why not talk to us today and find out how we can help you.