GUIDE THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING

Transcription

1 GUIDE THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO INBOUND MARKETING

2 ABOUT NEW BREED We partner with highgrowth companies, owning the entire marketing funnel on their behalf. We challenge our clients to think beyond the buyer s journey and focus on the entire customer lifecycle. New Breed is the world s leading customer acquisition agency for high-growth companies. We accelerate your growth by building predictable, measurable and proven marketing and sales solutions. CONTENTS * 3 INTRODUCTION * 6 ATTRACT * 11 CONVERT * 14 CLOSE * 17 ENGAGE * 19 HOW TO GET STARTED * 21 RELATED SOLUTIONS 2

3 INTRO WHY INBOUND? The inbound marketing methodology has quickly become an essential piece to marketing strategies across the globe. Inbound marketing is a unique and highly effective marketing method that leverages personalized content and focuses on attracting visitors to your company and converting those visitors into loyal customers. The innovative nature of inbound marketing aligns the content that your company produces with your ideal customers interests, and enables the customer to be more empowered during the buying process. This guide will walk you through the key elements of inbound marketing and provide you with a holistic overview of the entire inbound marketing process. The four elements we will focus on in this guide are: attract, convert, close, engage. 3

4 CREATE A SOLID BRAND WHAT YOU NEED TO GET STARTED Planning for success that will increase revenue and customer engagement starts with a solid brand foundation. It doesn t have to be a rebranding, or even any changes at all, but your messaging and positioning do need to align with your customers and answer the questions they are trying to solve. Here at New Breed, we have a process called Streamlined Branding, which is kind of like an express boot camp workout for your brand. The process starts and ends with collaboration and together we identify your company s strengths and what attributes set you apart from your competition. We work to deliver results that establish you as a thought leader in your space and a messaging/positioning platform your consumers can rely on. With the planning done up front, we are able to accelerate the creative execution of your brand and most importantly, the approach that will position your company as a successful B2B brand. GET TO THE HEART OF YOUR BUSINESS Is your goal to increase the ROI of your marketing investment? You re not alone; many of our clients present this same challenge to us in the beginning of our engagements. At the heart of this there are a few things: your revenue goals, your target audience and the conversion paths. With our clients, we begin by analyzing their business goals and work through the sales funnel to develop successful campaigns and outperform the competition. Buyer Personas: Essentially, a buyer persona is your ideal customer. Properly defined, buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that are created through substantial research. In the purpose of this guide, however, we ll go with definition number one. Your buyer personas are meant to help you refine your marketing strategy and align them around your target customer. Specifically, the process of identifying your buyer personas is helping you to uncover their pain points. What in their day causes them pain / stress and how your company can solve that for them. Every one of your marketing activities should have your buyer personas in mind and should map back to these pain points. This includes your website architecture. When done correctly, the website experience will feel personalized to each individual user and the experience they are left with will be memorable. 4

5 Conversion paths: Creating clear conversion paths is an essential part of a successful inbound marketing strategy. We ll get into all the nitty-gritty later in this guide, but think of a conversion path as the way a user will move through the buying process. We specifically use conversion paths when we build out websites. Conversion paths typically start with something designed to get the user to take action; this is called a call-to-action. Once there, you continue to lead them through your sales funnel, making sure that messaging and content aligns with the persona. This will result in much higher conversion rates because, (ideally), you re solving one of their pain points with the content you are providing. PARTS OF INBOUND MARKETING ATTRACT, CONVERT, CLOSE, ENGAGE Inbound Marketing is designed to attract visitors to your website, convert traffic into leads, close those leads into customers, and engage your customers throughout your relationship. And most importantly, inbound marketing focuses on unifying your marketing and sales process. 5

6 ATTRACT Before you can generate those valuable leads, you must first think about how you are going to get those leads to your website. This starts with a plan that outlines the various inbound tactics you re going to use to draw people to your site, and arguably more important, the tactics that will keep them coming back for more. BLOGGING: Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Creating relevant and interesting content for your audience is the key to inbound marketing, and a blog is an ideal place to start. Here are some statistics from our partners over at HubSpot, (the inbound marketing geniuses themselves!), that we have found helpful in measuring the success of blogging: On average a company that blogs will generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog. Inbound marketing, of which blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing (paid search, PPC, PR, advertising, etc.). 6

7 SOCIAL MEDIA: Social media is a growing element for successful lead generation and inbound marketing. According to HubSpot, only 22% of all leads came from traditional methods in 2013 and inbound marketing dominates lead sources, with social media and SEO driving the highest level of leads, with each driving 14% of all leads. Social media provides a great platform for engagement, both with your prospects and target audience, but also with your customers. In today s digital world, it s important that companies are where their customers are, and right now for many of us, that is social media. We are seeing too many clients ignoring this essential piece to the puzzle, and as a result, they re missing out on leads and potential new customers. Social media is not only a way to increase engagement and start conversation, but it has also been shown to drive more traffic to your website, filling the top of your sales funnel. We recommend to our clients that they begin by doing a social audit and find where most of their customers are interacting online. If it s Twitter, then join Twitter and start tweeting! If it s LinkedIn, then beef up for your personal profile, create a company profile and start interacting on groups. If it s Facebook, create a business page and start promoting your brand (you could even look into ads, but we ll save that for another day). Wherever your ideal customers are most active, that s where you want to be. As far as content is concerned, we mentioned blogging above, and while sharing your company s content is incredibly important, sharing other s content is how you really begin to expand your social media reach. By sharing other people s content, you re not only providing more value to your followers, but you re also starting to build relationships with other organizations. If you start sharing posts from another blog that you follow, that blogger will see, and will be much more likely to return the favor, sharing your content with their followers. The important part is to strike a balance. We like to say it s the 50/50 rule. Spend 50% of the time promoting your brand, and 50% of the time sharing other people s content and engaging with other users. You ll see a greater increase in traffic, leads, and engagement. 7

8 WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION: Your website should no longer be just a digital brochure. Harness the power of your website and optimize it for inbound marketing by increasing the functionality and effectiveness of your site. As we mentioned above, integrating conversion paths into your website is critical. You want to have clear paths that a visitor can take that will lead them through your sales funnel and result in them becoming a customer. It begins with valuable content and strong calls-to-action. Interesting content will help keep your readers engaged and give them the opportunity to do more than just learn about your company. They re using your site as an educational resource. When optimizing your website, use the research you conducted about your buyer personas. Design the site around them, keeping in mind what might prevent them from moving forward, and provide solutions to help them navigate those pain points. Once you have your personas in mind, you can start thinking about which of your products and services align with these needs. SEO: Optimizing your website for SEO is an extremely important element of inbound marketing. First, like we keep saying, keep your buyer personas in mind when you re developing an SEO strategy. Use keywords that they are searching for, don t just use the words your company may currently be ranking for if they don t align with your personas. We recommend to all of our clients that they focus their efforts on long-tail keywords as they ll result in more highly qualified traffic. When you re starting to develop a keyword strategy, there are many helpful tools you can leverage to make the process a bit easier. Tools like Google Analytics and Adwords, Moz, and HubSpot are just some of the tools we use here at New Breed. Each of these tools will help you generate keyword ideas, demonstrate the difficulty of ranking for that keyword as well as show you the monthly search volume. These numbers alone can t guarantee that you ll be able to rank for a specific keyword, but it will give you an idea of whether or not the word might be worth the efforts to target. 8

9 SEO (CONT.): Before we move onto the next section, we realize we were throwing around a lot of terms that you might not be familiar with in the previous paragraph. Here are just a few definitions that might make it a little clearer for you: Long-Tail Keyword: more specific search terms that can often be much more targeted to your particular buyer persona. For example, a search for inbound marketing would result in more broad results, how to build an inbound marketing strategy would be a long tail search. Rank: your site s approximate placement within search engine results. The lower the rank, the higher you are in the results. If you have a rank of 1 for a particular keyword, then you would be the first result in the search engine. Difficulty: a score of how difficult it will be for you to break onto the first page of search engine results for a particular keyword. (Within some tools, the ranking may be on a scale of.01-1). There are over 5 billion searches made on a daily basis in Google alone. 5 billion! Just think about all that traffic. If you re not optimizing your site with SEO practices in mind, you re missing out on a huge opportunity to attract visitors to your website. By integrating SEO best practices into your website, and by targeted longtail keywords that your personas are searching for, you will have a much better chance of ranking in the search engines, thus more traffic will be directed to your website. When optimizing your website for SEO these are the five elements you need to think about adding keywords to: 1. Page titles 2. URLs 3. Page Headers 4. Content 5. Meta Descriptions Search Volume: the number of times this exact keyword is searched on a monthly basis. 9

10 This image shows where each of the SEO elements fall on your page. This image shows the result in a google search. The paragraph that shows up below your page title and url is the meta description. 10

11 CONVERT Now that you have quality traffic coming to your site, the next step is to ensure you have a way to capture that traffic and convert it into leads. Ultimately, you will want your visitors contact information, but often times this isn t something they will give up freely. In order to obtain their contact information, you need to offer something of value in exchange. This typically comes in the form of free content offer, like e-books, whitepapers, webinars, etc. When you provide your visitors with quality content that is aligned with their interests, you have a higher chance of naturally converting those prospects into leads. 11

12 PREMIUM CONTENT OFFERS: Premium content offers are a great way to promote your brand without being too assertive. Entice your consumers with a variety of different offers that will lead visitors through the funnel. When you re coming up with your premium content offers, you want to not only keep your personas in mind, but also your sales funnel. We look at the funnel in three stages and offer different types of content in each stage: For each premium content offer, you want to make sure it s high quality. We re not saying that it needs to be a 100- page ebook, but your readers need to get more than just unformatted words on a page. We suggest branding the offers that will make them feel more like prized content and the perceived value could ultimate increase, (much like this guide). Remember, by providing your prospects with something of value, they will be more willing to give you their contact information. And once you have their contact information, you can effectively move them through your funnel. CTAS: Calls-to-action, also known as CTAs, are a button or image that is placed on a webpage with the intention of driving visitors to a landing page. For best results, use a CTA on every page of your website so that you have the opportunity to convert visitors at any given point. CTAs are a great way to develop leads so be sure to give visitors as many opportunities to click on the CTA as possible. Also, make sure your CTAs are relevant Unrelated CTAs can possibly discourage your leads, which will lead to missed-opportunities. We recommend that you have at least one CTA for every content offer that you have. This will give you the opportunity to place the CTAs in relevant blog posts, on relevant pages on the site, even in your marketing efforts. By leveraging this methodology, it would mean that you also have CTAs for different stages of your funnel. We also suggest that you sprinkle CTAs from different stages of the funnel into you website. Some visitors may be further along when they land on your site than others, so you want to make sure that you have an offer that will be relevant for all stages of the buying process. 12

13 LANDING PAGES: What are landing pages and why are they important for inbound marketing? First, a landing page is a web page that is designed solely to convert visitors into leads. Most people arrive on a landing page after clicking on a call-to-action where they will provide their contact information in return for an offer. When building a landing page, there are a few things to consider. Here s a quick list of all the essential elements of a landing page that you can refer back to as you re building out your own pages: Write clear, concise and persuasive headlines Remove all navigation links Explain the importance of the offer, using bullet points so the content is skimmable Select the number of form fields for your offer Include a relevant image that represents the offer and your business Add social media share icons (Optional) Include any awards, recognition, or credible testimonials THANK YOU PAGES: The Thank You is the page that your lead will land on after they have completed a form. The Thank You page should look similar to your landing page, but serves an entirely different purpose. The Thank You page is here to deliver the content they signed up for, and perhaps offer them another opportunity to engage. It is a best practice at New Breed to have our Thank You pages contain a bottom-of-thefunnel offer, in case after reading their content the lead is ready to engage even further. Thank you page etiquette: Deliver the offer Provide your visitor with direction Advance them into the sales process Follow up with an Include links to social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogs, etc. Include website navigation so they can click back to your site if they want to Having well thought out landing pages will help to increase your conversions. If your landing page isn t structured properly and the visitor gets lost, they ll leave the page without ever converting. We recommend that you use the pieces we outlined above and integrate these practices into any new (or old) landing pages on your site. We are sure that by integrating these strategies, you will see an increase in conversions. 13

14 CLOSE Now that your website is successfully converting leads, those leads will get handed to your sales team to convert them into paying customers. There are various sales enablement tools that you can hand to your sales team that will help them close the sale. LEAD NURTURING: Lead nurturing builds relationships and trust with your prospects. According to HubSpot, 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. So if you are not nurturing them, you are simply burning money. You can convert quality leads by all the tactics we mentioned above, but without a lead nurturing program in place, those leads are less likely to convert into paying customers. Start your process by filling your sales funnel with leads that have high potential of becoming consumers. You do this by making sure that you re targeting your ideal customers with all of your inbound marketing tactics. Once you have received a lead, you can t just expect them to immediately buy; you need to nurture them through the sales process so that when they are in the purchasing mindset, your company / product is a nobrainer. 14

15 There are a few different methods for lead nurturing, but for the purposes of this guide, we ll just focus on two of them. The first is through automation. If you re using marketing automation software like HubSpot, then setting up an automated workflow is super easy. If not, then it will take some extra work for you to set these up in your own client (although we really think you should consider looking into a software platform that does the work for you!). Once set up, an automation workflow can help pull your customers through the sales funnel by sending them targeted s based on what content they have previously interacted with. For example, if someone comes to your site and they download a whitepaper (a topof-funnel offer), they get put into a workflow where they will then be sent the middle-of funnel offer, followed by the bottom-of-funnel offer. This gives them multiple chances to continue to engage with your company while moving themselves through the funnel. But what if your lead is already at the bottom of the funnel? This is where your stellar sales team needs to step in. It s important that they respond quickly and actively stay in touch. Typically this is when your lead becomes a real opportunity and you will want to work closely with your sales team to make sure they re converting these opportunities into customers. Building relationships with your opportunities is the only way you are going to build a successful brand or service. Make appointments, be available, follow up and be timely. If your brand is reliable, your opportunity will be able to depend on you. This will increase your chances of converting that opportunity into a loyal consumer. MARKETING: marketing is believed to be out of date, however it is in fact still extremely relevant in the world of marketing and sales. It is an excellent tool to use to build relationships, create brand awareness and boost social interaction. It s a great way to send personalized s and connect with your prospects, leads and customers. With all of these benefits in mind, marketing is also an inexpensive way to promote your product or service. When utilizing marketing, don t forget to segment your contacts database. Segmenting your contacts will help to ensure you re sending them content that is relevant to their particular needs. You ll see a much higher conversion rate if you employ this tactic. As we talked about in the last section, marketing plays a key role in lead nurturing. is a great way to move your leads through the sales funnel, and by automating the process, it can become a little hands-off (until they re ready to speak to someone, of course). 15

16 Some ideas for an marketing campaign include sending out a monthly newsletter, sending targeted s that promote your premium content offers, or sending automated workflow s that are designed to bring people farther through the funnel. ANALYSIS: Now that you have a large amount of content, results and direction, it s time to understand what you are going to do with all this information. Understand that your inbound data is critical, as it will give you further insight on how your inbound marketing campaigns are performing and where there may be areas for improvement. First, you should begin your analysis with the top half of the funnel. This can be done with marketing software like HubSpot, which we have found extremely helpful in our analysis. With this tool we are able to search for a specific landing page and identify how many views and leads we received, and then what our conversion rate is. The next thing you will want to analyze is your offers. This list is brought to you by our friends at HubSpot: 1. List Your Offers: List the offers you want to analyze with Microsoft Excel or another tool of your preference. You can then divide the offers into categories to segment them further. Once you have properly organized your offers, you will then categorize the offers into different subject matters, such as, SEO, social media, marketing, etc. This allows you to see what strategy you will use with each offer. 2. Collect Your Data for Each Offer: Using your marketing analytics you will record data for every offer on your list. This will include the launch date, landing page views, number of customers that have been generated from the offer, conversion rates, etc. 3. Compare Results & Draw Conclusions: During this stage of analysis, you will compare the effectiveness of your offers and begin to draw conclusions on your efforts. 4. Communicate & Implement Your Findings: Now that you have collected your data and started analyzing your results you will want to begin leveraging them. Consult with your marketing and sales team to see how you will apply your results in future campaigns and efforts. HubSpot recommends that you conduct analysis on a quarterly basis so you can stay up to date on the effectiveness of your offers - which techniques are successful and which ones need improvement. 16

17 ENGAGE Even satisfied customers need to be nurtured and cultivated so they continue to feel valued by your organization. Keeping your customers engaged with your business is essential for your success, and will ensure happy customers. Keep them highly satisfied and returning for more by using specialized client offerings. At New Breed, we send out s and newsletters that are just for our clients. They get offers, discounts, and exclusive premium content (among other things) and we ve found that they really enjoy it! 17

18 CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT CAMPAIGNS: We hope at this point you realize how effective inbound marketing is in terms of helping brands reach your business goals. One key thing to remember during this entire process is even though your current customer base has already made the purchase, it doesn t mean you should forget about them and move on. If you think about it, isn t it easier to communicate and upsell a client that has already purchased from you, rather than to hunt out a new business opportunity? This is precisely why you want to focus on how you re going to keep those customers coming back for more. You don t want to service them once and then have them disappear so you have to go find that revenue from new opportunities. If you can be in a position where your current customer base continues to return to buy products/ services from you, your organization has a more stable revenue stream and won t have to rely solely on new business. When thinking about customer engagement campaigns, it s important to consider engaging them with the proper mediums and sending new (or even exclusive) offers that will encourage them to return to your site. Some ideas for a customer engagement campaign might be: Monthly newsletter that shares relevant blog articles & content offers Quarterly customer promotions, exclusive offers for customers only Premium content offers exclusively for customers Social media engagement campaigns We aren t going to go in depth into each of these ideas, but one that we do want to focus on is social media engagement. SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT CAMPAIGNS: As we explained before, social media is an important part of inbound marketing. Your prospects are on social media, so your customers are on social media, so it s a great platform to generate interactions An idea for a campaign would be to ask your customers to share moments where they are using your product by using a hashtag. You can also run contests through where your followers will promote your product by posting photographs or tweets that are relevant to your brand, while also using your hashtags. Their followers will see these photos and hashtags, which will ultimately increase your number of followers. 18

19 We have seen that engaging our customers on popular social media channels is highly successful in generating more business. This is because social media gets viewers excited about our brand in a way that feels more natural and casual. With social media engagement campaigns, you can also get customers (and prospects) involved through contests and promotions exclusive to these platforms, while encouraging them to re-post your material for their follower s benefit. There are a lot of social networks to choose from. Identifying which networks will bring you the best results is important, and if this is a new-to-you concept, we recommend focusing on just those to start HOW TO GET STARTED STRUCTURING YOUR TEAM/ASSIGNING RESOURCES: Before you can begin your campaign you ll need a few essential resources and a foundation for how you will position your brand/campaign. Outlined below, we have the resource areas and position ideas that would help ensure that your inbound marketing is successful. We know it might be a new way to think about your marketing department, but if you re committed to inbound marketing and see the value it can bring to your organization, these small changes will make huge changes for you in the long run, including generating more leads and revenue. Resource areas to focus on: Campaign Management Social Media Copywriting SEO Position ideas to think about hiring: Inbound Marketer/Consultant Campaign Managers Social Media Marketers Copywriters (Ideally with SEO expertise) 19

20 The focus of inbound marketing is content. By building a team of people who are experts in the methodology, can strategize to build campaigns and can produce relevant copy you will be much more likely to succeed. Because remember, inbound marketing is all about delivering value to your prospects and customers, with a sole intention of it feeling natural, not forced and unwanted as the traditional methods tend to be. GETTING A PARTNER: Now that you have read all about inbound marketing, how do you plan on implementing it? If the inbound marketing process seems like it may be too time-consuming, or you just don t have the resources on staff, don t worry there are partners out there that can help. New Breed is one of those partners, and we truly love to help our clients build successful inbound marketing campaigns. And seeing them grow their businesses as a result of the campaigns they re running, is just icing on the cake. So, why us? Because our savvy team of inbound marketers has the knowledge and experience to drive success. And we want to help you! Harness the power of inbound marketing to start giving your company a competitive advantage in the business world. EAGER TO LEARN MORE? 20

21 RELATED SOLUTIONS FULL-FUNNEL MARKETING + SALES SOLUTIONS. PROVEN SOLUTIONS FOR EVERY STAGE OF THE FUNNEL. Sales-Ready Website Transform your website from a standard digital brochure into a powerful lead-generation machine. Attract the right visitors, generate better qualified leads and grow your business one conversion at a time. Conversion Optimization Our conversion optimization program goes beyond increasing submission rates for your existing assets. It allows for the creation and measurement of future assets, too all tracking toward your one big KPI. Inbound Marketing Combining proven campaign plans with the details of your business, we design inbound marketing initiatives that work with your ongoing strategies and programs. And we re always tracking those initiatives to your most important goal: revenue. Revenue Operations Get the support you need to develop both business and technical processes within your Salesforce plus an on-call consultant who knows your sales process in and out. Search Engine Marketing Achieve continued site enhancements, gain higher search rankings and improve site optimization with updated strategies and monthly support. Content Development Content is the fuel for your inbound program. From on-site conversion points to long-term nurture tracks, every content type can assist your prospects, boost your credibility and contribute to your bottom line. 21

22 Phone: Winooski Falls Way, Suite 306, The Champlain Mill, Winooski, VT, 05404