According to a HubSpot Research survey, 55% of people trust less than they used to when purchasing from companies. As organic searches increase in difficulty, promotion through social media is less effective and with the increase in competitiveness, marketers must become more creative to maintain customer loyalty and trust. The repeatable campaign formula that once existed and worked now needs more innovation to succeed.
Unfortunately, traditional funnel businesses fail to consider how the customers they are servicing can help them create new customers. This is why successful organisations have moved away from the funnel model to the fly-wheel model.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust, (HubSpot). At the core of this methodology lies the flywheel model, which acts as the fresh framework for your inbound efforts.
Attract: by earning the attention of your potential customer. Attract through interesting and useful content to eliminate barriers as they try to learn about your product and services.
Engage: by building relationships, not just focusing on closing the deal. Shift your organisation to focus on customer success. Enable buyers to engage with you on their preferred timeline and channels.
Delight: Allocate resources across all stages to enhance the customer experience. Give the customer the best service you have on offer.
Inbound marketing is beneficial for your business, in fact, according to a recent study by Invespcro, 41% of marketers say inbound marketing leads to measurable ROI, and when done well, inbound marketing can be 10x more effective in converting leads than outbound.
How to Create a Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Campaign
What is an inbound marketing campaign?
According to HubSpot, Inbound marketing campaigns are well-planned and strategic initiatives designed to advance a specific company objective, such as increasing awareness for a new product or service. At its core, an inbound marketing campaign has three approaches; starts with the customer in mind, uses integrated tools to connect everything and works in every situation.
1. Use S.M.A.R.T. Goals to Create a More Effective Campaign
Goals provide the structure and purpose of your campaign- giving your organisation something to work towards. The goals that you set for your inbound marketing strategy should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). SMART goals serve as a valuable guide for your inbound marketing efforts, enabling you to measure your progress easily and assess your level of success.
A proper road plan will help ensure your campaign stays on track. If goals are too broad and unfocused, it can be impossible to fully understand how the campaign is performing and processing.
2. Define Your Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are the foundation of all things inbound marketing. Without understanding your target audience's preferences, you won't be able to delight them. To craft content that truly resonates with the ideal customer, you must know the individual preferences of your personas (fictional representatives of your buyers).
Each persona of the buyer entails information about buyers’ interests, priorities, and objectives. By dedicating time to define and understand the attributes of each buyer persona, you can effectively tailor your content creation to address topics that resonate with your ideal customers.
3. Outline Your Marketing Triggers
Part of understanding your buyer is understanding their pain points and identifying events that cause them to search for information about a service you are providing. For example, a prospect is due a system upgrade, or their contract renewal date is approaching etc. These buyer actions are known as marketing triggers. Trigger-based marketing aims to meet potential customers at the point of need by being reactive and delivering targeted messaging.
Focused content that is going to a potential buyer who has “buyers-intent” will perform better than mass-marketing to a large audience who may not even be in the market for your product or service.
4. Optimising Content with SEO and Keywords
The next step is to figure out how your ideal buyers are searching for information about your product or service.
Keyword research provides insights into various factors such as search volume and keyword difficulty. When selecting target keywords, aim for those with higher monthly search volume and moderate to low competition.
By conducting this research, you can compile a list of key terms and phrases to create content around. Crafting content that incorporates these keywords and addresses the common questions of your buyer personas when triggered by marketing ensures you attract the right audience to your website at the right time.
5. Outline Your Content Strategy
As a prospect enters the inbound funnel, they typically fall into different stages:
- Top-of-funnel Awareness: Leads in this stage are actively seeking general information on a topic.
The goal of the top-of-the-funnel content build awareness and convert visitors into leads. Your content strategy at this stage should be focused on building information-rich content that resonates with prospects. Content like social posts, whitepapers, info-graphics, blog posts/articles and presentations.
- Middle-of-funnel Evaluation: Leads here need to be acquainted with your brand and understand your business's value proposition.
Middle-of-funnel content begins to position your product/service with the prospect.
To effectively introduce your brand and provide value to viewers, consider utilising content formats such as branded webinars, case studies, free samples, FAQ sheets, specification sheets, or brochures.
- Bottom-of-funnel Purchase Decision: Leads at this stage primarily seek detailed information about your product/service's functionality and benefits.
Convince the prospect by providing value before the sale. For example, with a free trial, a demonstration tailored to their pain points, consultations or complimentary assessments.
As these types of content are just suggestions, your buyer may prefer content at another stage than the one we have suggested. This is a content strategy that is built with your persona in mind, with real data. Evaluate how your content has performed and use those insights to better future content.
Consider if your buyer personas possess the necessary information throughout the buying cycle. By understanding the questions, concerns, and objections specific to each buyer persona within the three stages of the inbound funnel, you can shape your content strategy accordingly.
6. Design Your Lead Nurturing Process with AUTOMATION'S
HubSpot CRM is purpose-built for lead nurturing activities like automation.
Automation takes the pain out of day-to-day tasks, by automating repetitive tasks and helps eliminate missing an opportunity. Building a workflow that sends the prospect an automated email at the right time increases your chances of converting opportunities.
This is the best way to reach out to leads and provide them with information. Email automation gives leads a little nudge or reminder that you have valuable content available at their disposal.
Within automation, utilising a lead scoring model helps better categorise prospects who are more likely to buy, or whose behaviours indicate they are gathering information on the service or product. By assigning numerical values or scores to different actions and characteristics of leads, such as engagement with marketing materials, demographic information, and behavioural data, companies can identify and focus on the most promising prospects.
Lead scoring enables sales teams to allocate their time and resources more efficiently and nurture leads with the best content. It helps streamline the sales process, increase conversion rates, and improve overall marketing effectiveness.
7. Measure Campaign Performance
You can use data to improve your marketing strategies. Using data-driven marketing techniques, you can fine-tune your campaigns for maximum impact. If you don’t analyse campaign performance, you will continue to make decisions based on assumptions, not based on facts. Continuously evaluate to understand key metrics, such as website traffics, conversion rates and content performance. This data will make sure your future campaigns perform better.
8. Implement an Inbound Marketing Platform
While strategy and content creation form the core of crafting an inbound marketing plan, it's crucial not to overlook the technology that enables effective inbound lead generation.
HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Tool
When it comes to performing inbound marketing, HubSpot offers a wide range of capabilities to support your Inbound Marketing efforts. Among other key benefits, HubSpot is crafted with the customer experience in mind.
The HubSpot solution is easy to customise to your business, so your customers and prospects get the best version of your content and experience delivered to them. While the CRM stores valuable data that is the single source of truth, so your sales and marketing departments can build relationships with your prospects that is built on valuable insights.
HubSpot helps keep the customer at the centre of every business decision to help ensure company-wide alignment is achieved. An environment where sales and marketing collaborate.
CRM Benefits: CRM Improves Customer Relationships by Super Office focuses on the benefits of a CRM and how effective it is for improving the customer experience.
- Enhanced customer experience is a fundamental outcome of CRM (customer relationship management). Companies utilising CRMs aim to provide exceptional customer experiences. 85% of CRM users have reported significant improvements in customer experience, while 58% experienced accelerated decision-making processes, (Software Advice Report, 2021).
- Enhanced customer insights obtained from comprehensive marketing data to facilitate the anticipation of needs more effectively. This capability empowers the sales team by providing them with valuable information about prospects, including their purchase history, buying patterns, habits, and the process through which they become customers. Armed with this knowledge, proactive and timely offers can be presented to customers.
- Furthermore, a CRM system is invaluable for delivering exceptional customer service. The availability of interaction history enables the provision of timely and personalised support. It becomes possible to identify any previous product issues, review how service requests were handled, and assess customer satisfaction. This presents an opportunity to address past complaints, improve the company's reputation, and ultimately deliver an enhanced customer experience.
HubSpot Capabilities
HubSpot’s capabilities are vast, the ability to develop web pages, and landing pages, capture leads with forms and lead-capturing software, build blogs, marketing analytics and dashboards, behaviour targeting, call-to-actions, social media management system, campaigns, SEO management, just to name a few of the tools. The platform aims to provide a comprehensive solution to attract, engage, and delight customers throughout the entire buyer's journey.
Outsourcing to a Marketing Agency that knows how to Inbound Market
If you're looking to enhance your inbound marketing strategy with HubSpot, consider outsourcing to a marketing agency. Collaborating with a professional team can help you make the most of the HubSpot system and achieve optimal results. With their expertise, they can assist you in maximising lead generation, optimising your marketing efforts, and driving substantial growth for your business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, understanding and implementing inbound marketing principles can greatly benefit your business. By creating valuable content personalised to your customers' needs and adopting a customer-centric approach, you can build strong relationships, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive positive word-of-mouth.
Crafting a comprehensive inbound marketing plan, with the support of CRM technology helps your organisation compete in the dynamic market.
If you are looking for a HubSpot partner to offer expert advice, generate demand and help manage your pipeline with supportive sales automation, we may be able to help. Maven TM is a HubSpot Gold partner backed by years of demand generation experience. If you would like to chat with one of our experts, why not book a free consultation with us.
We would be happy to go through any needs you may have.
