There is allot of talk around “inbound marketing” and as a guide to
what it means to a business. Social media marketing agencies and
practitioners seem to have developed a language of their own as digital
marketing has become the dominant channel. Terms such as marketing
automation, marketing qualified leads, social selling and lead nurturing
are now common place words in the quest for business to find more
customers. Here we will try to help you understand some of this
vocabulary.
To start with, most inbound marketing plans would focus on five key stages
Attracting visitors/web traffic to a site,
Converting visitors to leads,
Convert those leads to paying customers,
Turn the customers into repeat purchasers,
Analyse KPI’s and metrics to improve results,
Some reasons that have boosted inbound as a marketing tactic would
include the fact that companies with a content driven strategy have 50%
more website visitors than those that don’t and
leads captured from inbound marketing cost 60% less traditional forms of lead generation.
The reality is that an inbound marketing strategy has more or lessthe same goals as outbound marketing so the difference between them is
not what any company wants from the marketing effort but how it goes
about getting it. Inbound marketing is focused on attracting IN buyers
to consider a brand usually with content as the bait (articles, videos,
images, whitepapers etc) while outbound marketing employs diversion
tactics (online ads, direct mail, cold calling) to get buyers attention.
Most businesses would use a mixture of inbound and outbound marketing. A
worrying trend is that some effective outbound activities like
prospecting and lead generation via sales people is becoming dormant as
too many start-ups or small businesses rely exclusively on inbound
marketing to deliver leads and sales.
For a whole host of reasons, inbound marketing is now the primary
channel deployed to engage buyers when considering a purchase due to the
more non-interruption nature of inbound marketing.
Below are a list of activities and terms relating to inbound
marketing, so next time a social media marketing agency speaks about how
to put in place a plan then you will be well prepared to talk about it.
While content is the rock upon which inbound marketing is built there
is more to this strategy than articles, it also includes the use of
social selling, targeting long tail keywords, interest sharing, engaging
in social network conversations, attracting social media influencers
and managing multi platform social channels.
Inbound Marketing Plan;
The inbound marketing plan is basically a publishing calendar of
activities including goals and targets covering blogging, content
themes, articles, and whitepapers, landing pages, social networks
engagement, social selling, lead generation, traffic and engagement in
social media conversations.
Growth Hacking;
A recent term added to the marketing vocabulary. Mainly a tactic
employed by start-ups in the App or SaaS space, growth hacking works on
out of the box thinking blended with technology to try to achieve
massive growth in numbers in a short pace of time. The sole focus of
using this as a strategy is to grow big (web traffic, social media
followers etc but not revenue) quick so every action is designed to
drive that growth.
Viral Marketing;
This is about taking a marketing campaign, seeding it to other people
and hoping the content appeals on a large enough scale to make the
campaign grow rapidly. It is the multi level marketing of the digital
age. Think “Ice Bucket Challenge”. Lots of marketing people go to bed at
night dreaming about their image, video or article going viral. However
the reality is there is little control when it comes to what will go
viral. To try and make viral marketing work the key is to create some
unusual content that will get lots of people to promote it for you. The
more people who share your content will lead to increased brand
exposure. It boils down to encouraging people to plug you to their
social media audiences.
A/B Testing;
This refers to the testing of two different versions of the same
email template, landing page or call to action (CTA) to figure out which
version delivers the best results. A/B testing is something all
marketers should do. Examples would be to take a call to action and test
it with different strap lines, colours, text, and or with a different
image. This allows you to determine which call to action performed
better. So don’t guess as different messaging works to different
audiences and even geo-locations. Always be testing as even a small
percentage increase in leads or traffic can have a huge impact on sales
(depending on your average order value).
Content Marketing;
Content marketing is the seed that will grow to capture future
opportunities for web traffic, leads and customers. It is the bedrock
upon which inbound marketing was formed and still powers. It involves
the creating and distribution of valuable, relevant content on a
consistent basis (daily, weekly) to attract buyers with the goal of
getting the customer to take some predetermined actions. The content
created is heavily keyword/SEO orientated the majority of time for a
start-up and a high percentage of the time for companies with larger
databases.
Marketing automation is software that is used to
automate large parts of the marketing process like lead nurturing,
content publishing to social media or auto-responder emails. This
software usually appeals to mid-sized upwards companies with larger
databases or well trafficked sites. Marketing automation is mostly used
to improve the nurturing, conversion and closing stages of the sales
funnel and is not a one fit fits all solution. The hard work of getting
traffic and creating content is still yours to complete.
Social Selling;
Social selling is a great inbound tactic, despite its name it is not
focused on sales but rather selling oneself or a brand to raise
awareness to buyers of what you offer. It is a subtle and patient tactic
where time is spent building up trust or “emotional lodgements”. It
works on the premise that social media accounts are a fantastic
broadcast channel while also a place to gradually build relationships
and make connections. The key is to share content from other sources
(not just your own), like other articles, participate in social
conversations and provide regular updates. Social selling can be used as
the key to unlock sales calls if used correctly, otherwise you are seen
as a smash and grab merchant.
Lead Nurturing;
This is the marketing or sales process that is set in motion after
someone downloads or fills in a form (newsletter, white paper) on your
website. In the B2B sales environment it could be a series of emails
together will social selling and direct sales contract. In B2C it
usually involves a series of emails. The skill here is that when someone
downloads a piece of content from your site, you ask (and give reasons)
for them to provide their email address. Now with the verified and
opted-in email address, you can implement a series of emails to be sent
to them in the next days, week or month after they first signed up to
downloaded something. Lead nurturing is important as it reduces your
cost of customer acquisition and allows you to build a relationship as
you know what they are interested in from your offerings. Be careful not
to over expect the speed of developing the relationship or put too much
urgency into the nurturing as their initial sign-up could only be a top
of the funnel action.
Long Tail Keywords;
This term usually applies to your content marketing efforts and is
the SEO keywords you have selected to target. These keywords are
normally three plus words such as “social media marketing in Ireland”
and are not as competitive in Google as a one word keyword such as
“marketing.” Google also auto suggests long tail keywords so research
these as part of your content strategy. Can I target hot or one word
keyword, you ask? Sure as lots of people are probably searching on that
word daily but on the flipside your competitors are targeting these
keywords too. It could take years to even get on page 5 of Google for a
heavily trafficked keyword. Ten or twenty well indexed long tail
keywords when combined will deliver just as much traffic in the medium
term as a single keyword. So when creating content titles and web URL’s,
choose longer, more detailed keywords. If you research your buyer
profiles well enough you will get clicks and views from potential buyers
from your target market faster than you think.
The above is not a complete list of phrases as new words and terms come into play all the time around inbound marketing but hopefully by the time you have read this article, some of them are still relevant. Thanks for reading.
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