Some people believe that the Internet offers too much of a good thing, in this case, sales success. If you have a working sales funnel, know what you sell, can produce high quality content and have plenty of inventory, they may be right. You may experience sales that wildly exceed your expectations. But first you need a working sales funnel.
All successful Inbound Marketing campaigns depend upon having a defined sales funnel. Ideally, you will have defined various actions that customers take, that take them from MQL->SQL->Opportunity->Deal.
/
The simple and transparent Inbound Sales strategy sees strangers attracted to your brand with useful, appealing content, aimed at building brand awareness and reaching new audiences. This content first strategy is part of a wider Inbound Marketing, content driven, growth driven design process.
Your inbound marketing strategy all comes together when you're using the right marketing automation platform, which in our case, is Hubspot.
Your marketing automation platform helps you design and execute an inbound marketing and sales strategy that is dynamically customized to each buyer's journey.
As someone who has built a massively successful website that draws thousands of organic visitors a month, and generates far more highly qualified leads than my company can possibly cope with, I can attest to the fact that the internet, more specifically, the internet using the proven techniques of Inbound Marketing, can indeed lead to some very nasty outcomes.
How can that be, you may ask?
Before I do a deeper dive on Inbound Marketing, it is best to understand what is meant by traditional marketing.
When we think about traditional marketing methods, we typically think about outbound marketing… buying radio and TV ads, running print ads, buying email lists, cold-calling, advertising on billboards, or sponsoring a booth at a tradeshow. We are pushing our marketing message OUT to a given audience hoping for a response, a lead, and new customer.
There are different techniques for doing inbound marketing. One of the first things to consider is understanding your target audience and what they want from you as a brand. Once you've established this through data and research, you can work out how to engage and build relationships with them through inbound marketing. This could be launching a blog, creating an email strategy or speaking to your customers via social.
That's a short introduction to Inbound Marketing. Now let's dive in to what can happen when it works too well.
As someone with a supply chain background and deep interest in the intersection of big data and marketing, I have wondered how companies will deal with the following signs of way too much success:
Aside from these challenging but dangerous outcomes from your Inbound Marketing success, one major challenge will remain, how to deal with bad data.
This truly is one of the dangerous outcomes, though more one of too much success to be sure.
You see, no matter how much you try, successful Inbound Marketing requires a delicate balance of asking for just enough information to move the prospect along and yet not so much as to scare them away.
One near constant problem then becomes the generation of bad data, in the form of bad names, email addresses, etc., which is understandable if you consider all the lead generation forms people are asked to fill out.
While we are specialized in the art and science of Inbound Marketing, most if not all of customers still carry out a great deal of cold calling activities.
When they have good data, i.e., they know what content someone consumed, plus all the other activities they performed on the website, cold calling is actually 'warm' if not 'warmed up' calling.
While high quality data, such as accurate contact data, makes cold calling work better, for many of our clients, getting potential customers to call in, which is an inbound call, is the goal.
To get prospective customers to make that call, it is very effective to combine content marketing, with highly personalized email marketing.
Email continues to be the most effective marketing channel in terms of ROI. However, when you combine the power of the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Platform, with the power of both manual and predictive lead scoring, you can send out highly contextualized emails at the right time, to the right person, at the right stage in their buyer's journey.
Another source of bad data is social media, specifically, lead generation forms used by Google, Facebook, LinkedIN and others. People don't typically provide accurate information on these channels, and those lead generation forms will be pulling in inaccurate information to your marketing automation platform.
This bad data can wreak havoc on your on your inbound and outbound marketing efforts. It can dramatically, negatively affect your efforts at building brand awareness.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the way people want to buy, and thus, the way marketers have to market, is changing rapidly, and your systems will have to be upgraded, from finance to logistics to human resources, to deal with this brave new world.
Because marketing, sales and logistics are constantly changing, it is always tempting to skimp on the labor intensive activities required to successfully make your marketing efforts pay off. However, when it comes to successful Inbound Marketing, creating content is a major long term investment that must be made.
If you're an Inbound Marketer working for a company that is led by a well known expert, you're going to want to pick their brain and put them to work. It is never easy to get someone in a senior leadership position to create a thought leader piece of content. But, you can always record an interview with them, have it transcribed and create various types of content pieces, which you can use 'front and center' on your website. One key type of content you'll be creating is the blog post. In fact, blogging will prove to be an ongoing major activity you'll have to invest in to show up in search results.
That's just a hint of what advice you'll find in our Guide to Internet Marketing, a bible for the Inbound Marketer.
That is why we are offering this guide to Internet Inbound Marketing; after all, some people might actually see massive numbers of highly qualified leads delivered to your doorstep as a good thing, though we advise caution…
People Who Read This Also Read:
About SAP BW Consulting, Inc.
SAP BW Consulting, Inc. provides comprehensive SAP solutions, including SAP Business Intelligence (BI) and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) consulting, SAP ABAP development, and project management. Our services also include a 1099 Contractor Invoicing and Payment Management System, Salesforce consulting, and Balanced Scorecard consulting for strategic planning.
As HubSpot Marketing and Sales Partners, we specialize in Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Account-Based Marketing, Content Marketing, and Ecommerce solutions, including Shopify.