Many companies are looking for new means of prospecting in the face of the difficulties they encounter on levers, such as teleprospecting and outbound marketing. Not that teleprospecting no longer works in their company, but rather the turnover observed among the staff contributes to rethinking their company’s commercial chain.
In addition, on traditional digital marketing techniques (outbound marketing), we are beginning, on the one hand, to seriously notice an increase in the cost of acquiring a lead (due to the simplification of access to platforms and the rise in the number of advertisers) and on the other hand, decrease in effectiveness because of the exasperation of Internet users in the face of the overexposure of advertisements.
Virtually unknown as yet in 2022, Inbound marketing is gradually becoming one of the commercial levers of BtoB companies. Inbound marketing, as opposed to outbound marketing, consists of attracting customers to you by pushing quality content on the media they are used to using. Often beneficial for companies that invest in such a strategy, it requires adapting resources and a deeper involvement of the company’s various departments.
Rethink Its Content And Involve The Teams
Regarding content quality, it’s not enough to hire someone with editorial skills for the “wow” effect to be felt by potential prospects. It is necessary to go much further and to be involved beyond the sphere of the communication/marketing team. To have experience this, hiring teams in direct contact with the customers with the expertise you market is essential.
This task is not the easiest because experts specializing in specific fields are not the most available to contribute to the content that will make your company a reference in its field. The manager’s role is to motivate the teams and find specific methods intended to work in the long term. We have also tested the one that consists of setting up a challenge about the content that will be the most read/retweeted/shared over the month.
You will find that your collaborators are proud to have their names at the bottom of an article, especially if others take it up. You will tell me that it is not always easy and sometimes impossible because some collaborators refuse to sign an article… You then have to resort to exceptional remuneration for the content produced. However, consider one thing: Inbound marketing is a medium and long-term strategy.
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Agree To Reveal Part Of Their Expertise
The primary step is to agree to reveal to your prospects some of your knowledge and expertise in a field. This is especially true when you are in a business consulting business. An inbound marketing strategy necessarily involves delivering your thoughts on a subject, your experience in a situation, or your research on a problem to as many people as possible.
To help you make this choice, it is worth telling you one thing: your customers choose you, of course, for your expertise on specific subjects, but above all for your approach to their problems and the DNA of your company.
Ah, yes, I forgot, their choice is also sometimes made about the price… People who search the Internet for answers to their questions to solve their problems alone will not be willing to pay for your expertise anyway. Finally, advice on a subject only rarely makes it possible to respond to the particular situation of a prospect.
Understand That It Is An Investment And Not A Cost
Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing will take several weeks or even months to have a noticeable impact on the number of quotes received. This will depend, above all, on your ability to set up all the links in the inbound marketing chain: content > referencing > site conversion > marketing automation > customer relationship management.
The first weeks are often devoted to rethinking the messages on the various communication channels, publishing content on your blog (which will go up over time in the SERPs of the search engines), rethinking the ergonomics of the strategic pages of your site, automating the process to bring prospects to become customers.
You will have understood it at the start, we invest for tomorrow, but the long-term benefit is more than interesting: improvement of notoriety, reduction of prospecting costs, shortening of the time of signature after a price offer, ease of negotiations, lower turnover in inbound sales teams vs. pure prospecting…
Implementation Of New Performance Indicators
All of this will naturally lead you to rethink the performance indicators of this strategy. The final judge will, of course, be the number of sales you have signed. Nevertheless, it is necessary to assess the evolution of specific indicators beforehand:
- 1st level: Number of keywords positioned and number of visits to the site, number of followers on Twitter, number of fans, number of subscribers to your newsletter, etc.
- 2nd level: Number of interactions with content (downloads, consultations, sharing on social networks, resumption of content on other sites, etc.)
- 3rd level: Number of new prospect profiles in your CRM
- 4th level: Conversion rate of the site and landing pages
- 5th level: Number of quotes requested
- 6th level: Number of new customers acquired
Each indicator should be monitored and improved as your inbound marketing strategy is implemented. As mentioned above, the progression of the final hand will depend, above all, on the variety and quality of content you can offer. Ultimately, inbound marketing requires the global involvement of your teams and a long-term vision of the investment, but the benefits need to be better.
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