Inbound Marketing Services

They Also Ask "Will It Work For Us"

It works for most types of companies in most industries.   There are some specific characteristics about the product or service that must be true for it to work.  For example, if there is not a need for a customer to do any research whatsoever about the product, then it probably isn't a good fit for Inbound Marketing. 

CAC Must Be Less Than LTV

If your product or service doesn't cost enough, usually around $500 and up, then this approach probably isn't the best approach.   That's why your Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC) must be less than the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer. 

Of course, determining your CAC is not easy, nor is determining your LTV.  Surprisingly, even for some of our largest SAP customers, who have had SAP implemented for years, they struggle to determine either of these KPIs.  Fortunately, with today's Inbound Marketing platforms coupled with analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, it is a lot easier to get this data. 

Many of our clients are smaller and do not have either SAP or really, anything close to an ERP system.  Quickbooks is much more likely to be the system of record, and it isn't designed to collect granular cost data.  That's where our experience comes into play, we know how to integrate Hubspot and any other system to help clients get this critical business data.

Is Your Business a Good Fit For Inbound Marketing?

Want to find out if your business is a good fit for Inbound Marketing?  Take our Inbound Marketing Fit Quiz and find out.

• New companies who are trying to gain a competitive marketing edge
• Existing customers who aren't getting the leads from their website they expect
• Companies suffering from low lead quality
• Companies wanting to improve their lead-to-customer conversion ratio
• Companies that have decided to increase their demand generation using the Inbound Approach
• Companies wanting to shorten their sales cycle time
• Companies who want to lower their cost of customer acquisition (COCA)

If you want to start learning how to achieve Inbound Marketing success, then you'll want to read our guide on how professional service firms, such as SAP Consultancies and others, can win with Inbound Marketing.

We specialize in taking your SAP CRM to the next level of performance by bringing to the table the missing piece of the marketing pie - a SAP recommended and proven marketing methodology - the Inbound Marketing and Sales Methodology.  With years of experience as users of SAP's CRM and the Hubspot Growth Stack, we know what it is good at, and what other tools you need to add to it to make your marketing shine.

With the available SAP and Hubspot integration solutions available, there is no reason to wait to embark on your Inbound journey.

Of all the many marketing strategies, inbound marketing strategies have proven to be one of the most effective marketing strategies available.  

How Do We Define Inbound Marketing?

 

It's the process of helping people with a problem find a solution to their problems.  

What Are The Components of Inbound Marketing Tech Stack

Let's start with an overview of all the tools in the Hubspot Growth Stack, which include both Marketing, Sales, CRM and Service solutions.

What customers are looking for today is a new immersive online experience.  Though Hubspot is at the center of your Inbound Marketing and Sales technology stack, you will often find that in order to deliver that new immersive online experience you will need other pieces of software to develop and deliver them.  

That's one of the primary reasons we partnered with Hubspot, considered one of the best inbound marketing platforms; the fact that it sits at the center of a huge universe of natively integrated applications that allow us to develop immersive interactive online inbound experiences to help our customers attract right-fit customers using inbound digital marketing strategies and tactics.

That's a tough eye test.  So to make it easier to understand, I've grouped the various apps into categories:

• ERP
• Service & Support
• Scheduling
• Website
• Surveys
• Ecommerce
• Social
• Video
• ABM
• Live Chat
• Email
• CRM
• Events & Webinars
• Accounting
• PPC
• Data & Project Management
• Automation
• Lead Generation
• Workflow
• CMS
• Calling
• Sales
• Piesynch Connector
• Analytics

This is an ever expanding universe of integrated apps, reflecting the ever growing complexity of today's marketing requirements.  In our Inbound Marketing practice, we typically find clients need about 25 applications we have to provide the skills to both specify them and integrate them.

Demand Generation vs Inbound Marketing

When it comes to inbound demand generation, there are a few key differences, though clearly there is a lot of overlap between the two concepts, especially enterprise inbound marketing.  

The hubspot inbound marketing methodology is a digital first, content centric methodology.  In our role of providing hubspot inbound consulting, we teach our client's marketing teams how to use inbound marketing as part of a wider demand generation effort.  For instance, in the large enterprise software space, who often use a technique called Targeted Account Selling (TAS),  there will often be a series of complex activities planned for each account, including both offline and online touch-points as part of a well planned marketing and sales engagement process.  Much of that process could be said to be outbound marketing, i.e., inviting a client to a conference where they can learn more about what the client has to offer, i.e., SAP's Sapphire Event or the annual Hubspot Inbound Marketing Event.   

In this scenario, clients want to know how to do inbound marketing as part of a inbound demand generation process.  This is when it is critical to know how to evaluate inbound marketing consultants.  For only inbound marketing consultants who hold a current inbound certification and have enterprise sales and marketing experience know how to start inbound marketing and how to sell inbound marketing to senior management.

This is the very first, and probably the most critical step is setting your sales goals.  Everything flows backwards from there.

Your Sales Process Is Key

Before you start marketing, you need to have a sales process, which is sort of obvious.  To have a sales process, you have to know exactly what you sell and what you don't sell.  If you're an established business, you probably (but not necessarily) have a defined and refined sales process. However, if you're just starting out and are using the Lean Startup approach, you may hardly have a product or service ready for Minimum Viable Product (MVP) testing, but it is never too early to start developing a sales process.

We Are Inbound Sales Methodology Architects

As Inbound Sales Methodology Architects, we recommend you map out your sales process, step-by-step, as much as possible.  But from hard won experience, we know that most sales processes don't survive first contact with the customer, but at least you will know where the sales process variation is occurring.  This is how you set up a measurement system and ultimately, how you develop a scalable sales process.

There's much more to learn about Inbound Marketing and Inbound Sales.

Knowing how you sell is almost as important as knowing who you sell too.  Within the marketing world, they call this Buyer Persona while within the Sales world, it is sometimes known as the Ideal Buyer Profile. It is sometimes the case, when you don't have a strongly aligned Sales and Marketing team, that these two terms aren't actually the same.  

But what is a buyer persona and how do you know who yours is?

There are several components to developing your Buyer Persona, which can include:

As you can see, there are large number of elements that go into developing your buyer persona.  If you want to get started developing your own, a simple tool available from Hubspot is the 'Make My Persona' tool.  Though good, it doesn't go nearly far enough for most serious inbound marketing consultants.  Instead, as inbound consulting experts, we find that many need to do much more work in the area of developing buyer personas.

Once you know who your Buyer Personas are, which we will refer to as users, best-in-class content marketers start the process of content creation.  Content creation can be broken down into 3 distinct phases:

Budget For Content Creation

What should be apparent from the above table is that high quality content creation takes time and time equals money.  But apart from money, effective Inbound Marketing Content requires expertise about what you are trying to sell.  This is perhaps the greatest overlooked part of the content creation process.  The Subject Matter Expert or SME is rarely, if ever, trained to create marketing content.

For our smaller customers, the owner is often the SME.  But for our larger enterprise customers, who may sell thousands of different products across a huge variety categories, the SME is often the constraint.   So budget appropriately.

Lead Magnets Are a Type of Content

Though they do not sound like they are same, lead magnets are of the same family as ebooks and calculators, and many other types of content.  The main difference is that a lead magnet is typically used to get the initial contact established, while the rest of the content is used to 'nurture' or pull through prospects with ever more helpful content using email marketing.  They are key marketing method used by businesses today.

There's plenty more to learn about about the content creation process.

Technically, everything that appears on your website is a piece of content.  That said, the most common types of content developed by businesses with an inbound marketing focus are listed in the following table. 

We're breaking them out by the Inbound Marketing Phase they are most commonly used in, but they can all be used in any stage as part of a complete content marketing strategy given today's customer journey.  This is only a partial list of potential types of Inbound Marketing content you can use with today's Inbound Marketing platforms.  Many businesses use a strategy of creating inbound marketing content hubs and have one or more pieces of each of these types of content.

Why You Need A Skyscraper 10x Content Pillar Page

Now that you know about some of the different types of content that can be used as part of your Content Driven, Inbound Marketing Strategy, it is time to take your Inbound Marketing to the next level.  We do that by creating what Hubspot calls a Pillar Page, which is a a type of content hub.  It is part of the always evolving SEO recommendations from Google's advice to webmasters.

How To Construct An Inside Out Pillar Content Strategy  

The diagram above is an actual screen shot of the pillar page you're looking at, as visualized by the Hubspot SEO Pillar Page Strategy Tool.

It's A Skyscraper Web Page Built Following Pillar Pages Best Practices

The first thing you should notice is the node at the center of the web - it is this page.  This pillar page, which covers Inbound Marketing Services that we provide, is meant to provide what some call skyscraper content, a page that is so tall, if you printed it out, it would look like a skyscraper.   It is built following Web Design best practice principles while simultaneously supporting our digital marketing plan.

The nodes that are connected by green lines are displaying blog pages and other pages, that support or go deeper into each sub-section of the Pillar Page.

The connecting lines represent hyperlinks that exist between the connected blogs, which are keyword specific to the particular section of this pillar page.  By providing a rich internal linking structure, the search engines can do a much better job of helping us gain quality leads via organic search results.

Pillar Page Design

There are a variety of pillar page design best practices that result in what you, the user sees on this page.   There are other ways to design a pillar page, of course, and on this site, you may run across different experiments we are running, or A/B testing, as part of our CRO efforts.   We are glad to share our experiences with you.

Pillar Cluster Content Strategy

One of the key take-aways of following the content pillar strategy is that everything on the pillar page should revolve around a central content theme or spine.

There's a lot more to learn about developing your own pillar pages, so we invite you to press the button and take a deeper dive into pillar page content.

There are a lot of Social Media channels you may need to use to meet your social media marketing goals.  The problem is, you only have so many hours in the day, and not all channels work for all types of business.  For the majority of service firms, LinkedIN, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter will be of primary importance to your Inbound Marketing efforts.  For others, perhaps Pinterest, Snapchat, Whatsapp or Instagram will prove to be the most profitable channels for your efforts.  In order to know what is working, you have to be able to measure each channel's actual performance, from an Inbound Marketing Perspective.

Effective Social Media Marketing Monitoring Using Hubspot

People Want To Interact With People

The key thing you need to understand about Social Media marketing, from a content marketing perspective, is that it is first and foremost a social channel.  That means people are there to interact with people, not necessarily companies. That doesn't mean they don't expect or won't react to messaging from your company, but keep it personal.

It also takes on-going effort to achieve success on social media.  For instance, LinkedIN is based on your relationship to other people.  More 1st level connections means more ability to interact with people who you presumably have a deeper relationship to.  With tools such as LinkedIN Sales Navigator, sales teams can leverage the vast treasure trove of information that is LinkedIN, but it works far more effectively when your network is working for you.  So, ABC (always be connecting).

For other channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, the social dynamic is different, and much more visual in nature.  You can also mix in video with this channel, and with a bit of paid advertising, you can get high levels of engagement.  For e-commerce type businesses, Facebook can be an especially powerful channel.

Video should form a key part of your social media efforts.  If you have the time and budget to produce slick, Corporate 500 level videos, that's great.  But that isn't going to get you to the finish line.  You need to concentrate on getting video produced as often as possible and then upgrade the quality.  Pay particular attention to engagement levels and do more of whatever type of video resonates most with your target audience.   Facebook insight is particularly useful for determining how your videos are doing on Facebook while YouTube's Creator studio will tell you virtually everything you need to know about your videos.

What type of videos work best?

• Duration of 3 minutes or less
• How to videos
• Those that tell a story and provide interactivity

For the Inbound Marketer, equipped with the right digital marketing platform, such as Hubspot, you have the tools available to design and test every element of your website.  If you combine it with Google Analytics, you have analytical power that is nothing short of amazing.

Once you have sufficient traffic, usually around 1000 visits per month and up, you should be designing a test with one goal in mind - improving conversion performance.  You can improve a lot of elements of a page, such as how the boss thinks it 'looks' but unless and until you test, you will not know what works best.

It may be that an 'ugly' page works better than a pretty page.  You may find that no one single element of a page actually accounts for the performance of a page. Instead, through testing, it may turn out that it is the combination of imagery and functionality, i.e., having a calculator on a page that causes a page to convert at extremely high rates.  

You should also be testing your Marketing and Sales Funnel, not just individual elements of a given page.  This is a much higher and more difficult level of testing.   That's why we call Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Sales Conversion Rate optimization, as that is always what we see you should be optimizing for.

As advanced users of Hubspot's Inbound Marketing automation platform, as well as hard core SAP users, we rely on our systems to replace expensive labor - and you should as well.  By combining Smart List and other types of lists with workflows, you can make the system do a tremendous amount of both automated marketing for you as well as administrative tasks.  It may or may not rise to the level of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but we're driving towards that level of task automation.

Some of the key tasks you need to learn to make the tool do for you include:

• Recording all products and services a customer has consumed from you and all related data, such as prices, quantities and dates of consumption.  This will allow you to do such things as kick out an alert when a renewal contract is coming up and to alert the sales team.
  
  
• Informing the Sales Team when a prospect has opened a certain number of emails or when a certain event, such as viewing a pricing page, has occurred.
  
  
• By using Sales Sequences, you can provide your sales team with an automated workflow tool as well, thus ensuring you are not allowing revenue leakage.

While you may think your marketing is performing well, unless and until it turns into sales, it doesn't matter.  Fortunately, with a Predictive Lead Scoring system, you can evaluate each and every lead on both a score you develop manually and with the closed loop nature of the Inbound Marketing and Sales Platform, with a score that is automatically generated by the system based on what actually works.

Once you have enough deal flow happening with your system, you can use it as part of your improvement feedback loop.  It brings together both elements of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help you make data driven decisions.  Marketing can use it to judge what works and do more of that, while doing less of what doesn't work as well.  

Predictive Lead Scores should also be incorporated into your testing process. Keeping careful records of what you have done in the past will help you avoid wasted efforts.

Blogging remains one of the key tools in the marketing tool kit, this despite the fact that there are more than 7 million blogs published each day.   With it, your content distribution plan will work, without it, there is little hope.  

It is also one of the key ways you will need to use to reduce your Paid Ad Spend.  Why does it work?  Because each new blog page is a new page for the search engines to index on.  The basic Content Marketing model involves a piece of downloadable content behind a form on a landing page which the search engine then finds.  Along with it, you typically will publish one or more blogs that have as a goal to get someone to press a button that takes them to the content offer.

Blogs also typically allow people to subscribe to them.  That means that people have agreed to receive an update from you every time you publish a new blog.  They cannot do this for a static landing page and even if they did, the landing page, once published, is not going to be updated and thus there would be no ongoing interaction with a subscriber.

Blogs can also incorporate a wide variety of media, both visual and text based or even embedded calculators.  A well written blog, when part of a series of well written blogs, can provide a high degree of user engagement.  In short, if you want your website to generate a lot of high converting traffic, you're going to need to blog, a lot.

Just how much.  There are several key numbers to keep in mind as far as blog numbers go.

Once you have published about 60 high quality blogs, there appears to be an exponential increase in traffic to most sites.  Once they hit 200, they are seen as authoritative.  Keep in mind, there are many other KPIs or Metrics you should also be aiming for in terms of content offers and overall domain authority.

For truly high performance you will also need to hit a certain frequency - twice a day or more on a sustained basis seems to be what works.  This is no small task, especially if you want to produce high quality blogs that all have tightly focused conversion goals.

According to InsideSales and based on our own real world experience, if you don't call someone who converts (typically meaning they completed a form or took some other meaningful action) on your site within 5 minutes of a conversion, you have almost no chance of actually getting someone on the phone who has just converted on your website - ever.

That's why you need both a marketing and sales automation system as well as a highly responsive sales team.  For many people in Sales or even more importantly, many small business owners, calling someone on the phone remains challenging.  But if you don't - and within that magic window, you're basically wasting your marketing budget. 

Why Talk About Sales On A Marketing Page?

The hard truth is that there is a high degree of turn-over within marketing in every company we work with.   It doesn't seem to matter how many leads, qualified or otherwise, marketing is delivering, when sales misses the mark, marketing takes the hit.

However, upon closer examination, we typically find the real issues are with poor sales performance, not the least of which is a failure to follow-up in a timely manner.   Therefore, we're on a mission, to make sales and marketing best buddies, so everybody wins.  

It's also why we provide additional information on Sales Follow-Up Best Practices, which you can read by clicking the button.

How To Segment Your Customers using SAP BW and CRM

Even before you start on an Inbound Marketing journey, you can make improvements to your site by taking care of common technical SEO issues.  The easiest way to do that is to run our Website Grader, which quickly grades your website for 48 separate common SEO issues.  It will provide you a report which you can use as your SEO improvement roadmap.   Of course, our team can help you fix any issues that might be identified by this free website marketing grader.

More Reading and Related Topics:

12 SAP CRM Content Management System Requirements [Checklist]

We Are Proud To Say We Are Hubspot Certified Marketing and Sales Partners

We Would Love To Be Your Partner in Business Success