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Did you know that 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement?  Also, research conducted over the past four years shows that because of the way people shop or research purchases today through the internet, 60% of the sales cycle is already over before a prospect ever talks to a sales person.

There has been a fundamental shift in the way we now do business and how marketing and sales practices relate with potential and existing customers. If you want people to find your website, and you want those people to buy your product, you need to begin to educate your consumers about what your products and services can do to benefit them. If you care about what your customers care about, reflective of the information on your website, the sales will come. 

Imagine a typical ad in the newspaper. You’re engrossed in reading an article, you flip to the next page and there is a huge one page color ad. You proceed to pass right over it being so engaged in the news story. Now, that ad in the newspaper probably attracted more than a few customers but, wouldn’t it be great if you could engage your customers and buyers in the way that newspaper article did? Potential customers will learn and educate themselves about the benefits they can receive by coming to your website. That is the ultimate goal in inbound marketing.

Long gone are the days when traditional marketing alone can significantly increase sales.  Consumers have learned how to tune out these advertisements.  Instead, consumers search online for relevant information about products and services, when they have a need.  It’s a “trigger event” and you need to get their attention and continue to keep their attention. This triggered search process for a certain need gives you the unique opportunity to engage directly with the prospects when they are viewing your website. When consumers search, find, get informed, and buy online, it is called inbound marketing. Welcome to the new era of marketing.

The goal of inbound marketing is to attract visitors to your website in the early stages of discovering a need, get leads and turn them into customers. How do you do that? You do that by creating relevant, remarkable content to educate and inform your prospects. When done right, visitors will give you their contact information and become a lead awarding you the power to contact them.

An inbound marketing campaign includes:

• Marketing Strategy & Goal Setting
• Website Design & SEO
• Conversion Strategy
• Content Strategy
• Content Sourcing & Development
• Social Media Marketing
• Sales Strategy
• Campaign Analytics

Each of these important parts of inbound marketing supports the creation of a new customer sales funnel that you’re going to hear a lot about.

The role of the sales funnel is to: attract, convert, and close. You want people to find your company, you want to get their contact information before they leave the website, you want to nurture those relationships, you want those people to buy your product and, finally, you want your customers to promote your product because of their great experience in dealing with your business.

From the prospect’s perspective it generally means search, find, get informed and buy (or ignore if you’ve missed the mark).

If you want more leads to grow faster, inbound marketing is a way to fill the sales funnel and get results. Our goal is to help entrepreneurial businesses gain the upper hand on competition.  Below are the core fundamentals of the inbound marketing strategy we will be discussing. 

In the next blogs, we will be explaining the first two bullet points in detail and how they are effective inbound marketing strategies.

• Attracting consumers, converting them into leads, and closing the sale

o   Specific strategies in attracting the right customer to you website and the content needed along the way to guide prospects down the sales cycle.

• Marketing strategies to define and target your prospects

o   Questions to ask to create your perfect “Buyer Persona” or what a fictional person’s life situation would have to be to come to your website.

• Website  optimized for prospect engagement throughout the sales cycle
• Conversion strategy to promote lead generation
• Content marketing to educate and inform your target market
• SEO & content development
• Social Media engagement to build a following
• Sales strategies to foster engagement and sales transactions
• Metrics & Analytics to measure and optimize performance

Please leave your thoughts and comments below about our inbound marketing blog series.  We are The Marketing Department – Malvern PA and we would love to hear from you.