Importance of inbound Introduction to SMarketing & creating an SLA

STAGE-1 ATTRACT

Building effective buyer personas Creating unique content

Content Content

STAGE-2 CONVERT

Call to action (CTA) Landing page Thank you Page

STAGE-3 CLOSE

Best practices of email marketing

STAGE-4 DELIGHT

How to delight your customers

Conclusion How to Generate B2B leads through Inbound marketing

Struggling to generate qualified b2b leads? Is your team getting frustrated by low ! quality leads generated by your marketing team?

Dont worry! I am going to show you a step by step procedure of generating the maximum B2B leads using the inbound methodology.

But before I proceed to the actual topic, let me answer common questions that bother most people when it comes to inbound marketing.

O f c o u r s e , i f y o u a l r e a d y k n o w t h e b e n e fi t s o f inbound marketing and have made up your mind to get started, then you can fast forward to the section below. Why not outbound?

Outbound marketing practices like cold calling, print ads, press releases etc. are fast losing their charm in producing more leads. Not only are these practices becoming more expensive by the day but they also tend to result in a large number of low quality or unqualified leads.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 1 W h e t h e r y o u a r e a B 2 B o r a B 2 C o r g a n i z a t i o n , content is still king. The more unique content you provide, the more audience you would attract and eventually would generate more leads. If content is everything, Why not content Infact according to a study by HubSpot, only 17% of the marketers feel that outbound practices marketing? produce high quality leads for sales.

Now, as an inbound marketer I don’t want to sound too salesy.

Yes through outbound marketing you can reach a large number of audience.

But in an era of content explosion (and easy access to internet), customers have access to an incredible amount of information. And after decades of being hounded by spammy emails, they have now become resistant to any sales message that is remotely pushy.

T h i s i s a g e n u i n e d o u b t r a i s e d b y m a n y B 2 B Businesses are doing a thorough research marketers. Content marketing with the correct before they invest as much as a penny. Even 31% strategy works great. I agree. of outbound marketers rank outbound marketing practices, such as paid , as a top waste As a matter of fact, when asked if their respective of time and resources. organization uses content marketing, 88% of the respondents said YES!

Now that’s a huge number. But will a content marketing campaign truly help you in generating qualified leads?

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 2 Content marketing doesn’t include many critical marketing tactics like email marketing, website design etc. You can drive more people to your What about website for sure, but you may not convert them into leads without a bigger strategy. digital A 2016 study by content marketing institute even says that only 30% of B2B marketers feel that their organization is effective at content marketing? marketing, down from 38% in 2015. Many companies over the past decade have hap- pily created a campaign with Content Marketing is a part various tactics such as SEO, SEM, social media of Inbound Marketing marketing, e-mail marketing, etc.

While these stand-alone tactics are successful to That’s right! Inbound marketing is the bigger an extent, there are a lot of missed opportunities. strategy in which content is just one part.

Simply put Inbound market- There are so many reasons why inbound methodology works better than traditional digital ing = Content + Context marketing for B2B companies.

In inbound marketing, content is used at various For instance, you cannot get a detailed analysis stages as required. Depending upon the context, report of the whole campaign using the isolated i.e attracting, retaining or delighting, content is tactics of digital marketing. distributed accordingly. Without proper segregation, the performance parameters of each tactic can’t be analyzed and corrected conveniently. This results in the spend- ing of a huge amount of money as it is tough to determine which specific tactic works well for a particular type of campaign.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 3 But before you start this procedure, I would recommend you to come up with a Service Finally why Level Agreement (SLA) between your sales and Inbound? marketing teams. I love inbound marketing for many reasons. The most impressive thing Inbound marketing has more of a persona based approach and results oriented methodology. about Inbound marketing that sets it apart from the rest is that it provides an effective marketing and sales alignment or Smarketing.

Now there are so many key essentials of Smarketing

But you can kick start with a simple Sales and Marketing agreement.

Here’s how you can do it

Inbound marketing provides a clearcut strategy to Say your revenue goal is 1 Million within 1 year. generate qualified leads and enables an excellent sales and marketing alignment.

HubSpot even says that Inbound organizations Revenue goal 1000000 are 4 times as likely to rate their as effective. Average deal size 20000 (Assume) Inbound marketing not only places the right content at the right stage but also gives you a detailed analysis of what’s going wrong or right at each part of the campaign. Customers 50

Now that we have discussed the importance of Inbound marketing in lead generation, let me show you how exactly it’s done step by step.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 4 Now that, you are clear of how many customers you need, come up with the basic SLA

Stages Quantity needed

Customers 50

opportunities 100

SQLs 200

MQLs 400

Leads 800

Visitors 1600

It is advisable to take the conversion stage between each stage at 50%.

MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) : Leads which are found worth pursuable by the marketing team.

SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): Leads which are found worth pursuable by the Sales team.

There are many benefits of such agreement. For instance you can easily know how many sales reps you need and how much man-hours are required.

A good SLA not only increases collaboration between both teams but also helps them take better decision at various stages of the marketing campaign i.e how much content should be generated and distributed? How much should be spent on PPC campaigns? To name a few.

Now that you have established an agreement between your sales and marketing team, It’s time to launch the campaign!

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 5 Here is an example of a buyer persona:

Image Source: IndieGameGirl Here are a few tips to develop an ideal buyer Attract! persona: Do basic The first stage of Inbound marketing is to attract. But attract who? Who is your ideal customer? Interview and survey existing customers Who is most likely to buy your product/service? List down demographics, background, goals Develop a and challenges of the persona. 1. Buyer Persona Collect as many personas as your business Buyer persona is a semi fictional character of your requires! ideal customer. Developing a buyer persona not See also: How to Create Detailed Buyer only helps you in creating relevant content but Personas for Your Business also assists your sales team in segmenting leads for better follow ups. Create Unique How you can do it? 2. Content One of the biggest challenges for organizations Now that you have developed your ideal while developing a persona is that they simply buyer persona, it’s time to create suitable content can’t come up with all the questions needed for a relevant to the persona. persona research.

U s e H u b S p o t ’ s M a k e M y P e r s o n a t o o l t o g e t started.Dont worry! You can even use one of their insightful free downloadable persona templates.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 6 Here are a few tips to develop an ideal buyer persona:

In order to generate quality content, you need to understand your buyer persona’s real pain points. Question yourself, what troubles and challenges might he/she be facing? How does your persona use google or any other search engine to search for his/her needs? How is the challenge relevant to my products/services?

Now there is no “ ideal ” method to find out what your prospects want to know. But you can always use your common sense to find out their real pain points. In an inbound methodology, content is developed for three stages based on a buyer’s journey. Let’s take the example of TheSmarketers.

Awareness: At this stage you create content The ideal persona for this company would to educate the visitor about the problem he/ be someone who is searching for better lead she is facing generation methods or someone who wants to Examples: Blog posts, ebooks, white papers increase their website traffic. etc. Here are a few methods I Consideration: Content is created to provide a usually follow. solution to his/her problems Go to Quora.com Examples: Webinars, Case studies etc.

Decision: Content is produced to help your Since lead generation is a service that we offer, I prospects take a final call or nurture their would scour for topics such as: interest. This is the time where you actually start advertising your product/service. Examples: Trial downloads, Product demos etc.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 7 Here there are about 3k questions regarding Lead generation with almost 65k followers!

Now I am not asking you to go through all the questions, but just check out the ones which are most followed and understand the real challenge the person asking the question is facing.

Take a look at the contents of the book and then jump straight to the comments section. Com- ments offer invaluable insights into what your prospects really want to learn more about.

Learn what people are talking about. Understand There are so many questions regarding the best what types of content they like better and what ways of B2B lead generation. topics they really want to learn more about.

That’s it! I have now found the topic for my next If you take a look at the first comment in the blog post! And it’s guaranteed to resonate with screenshot above, you can see the buyer is really my readers and target audience because that interested in learning different examples of lead is exactly what they are searching for on the generation strategies. web. I also personally recommend checking out amazon.com and search fortop selling books on In addition to these methods, I also keep an eye lead generation. on all various discussions that happen on social media. Important do’s of content creation:

Create quality content. (More is more only if the quality of your content is consistently amazing!))

Keep it educational

Do not force self-promotion

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 8 Distribute your Infact hubspot says that 60% of marketers content feel blog content creation is their top inbound 3. marketing priority Now that you know what content to create, the next critical part is to find the right place, time, By creating quality blogs consistently, you not only and context to distribute your content. increase your rankings in google but also emerge as a thought leader in your industry. There are a lot of ways you can structure your content on the various stages of buying cycle (i.e In addition to the tips I mentioned earlier in awareness, consideration, decision) creating unique content,use tools lik buzzsumo t o fi n d o u t w h i c h c o n t e n t i s g e t t i n g t h e m o s t What content type should you choose for your engagement and choose the right topic accord- organization at different stages? Through which ingly. formats can your reach more customers?

The answer is - it varies from from one industry to another.

A whitepaper might work for a b2b tech-based company during the consideration stage, but for a health care industry a webinar might be more effective. Here are few tips you could use when writing a It really depends! blog.

Since there are so many content types, I would talk about the single-most important type of con- tent which is relevant to all b2b companies.

Blogs!

Blogging is one of the most critical type of In addition to these, I would recommend you to content for any b2b organization.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 9 write lengthy articles (above 2000 words) Promote your Content Include lots of images, internal and external 4. links You finally created all of your content, but what is Use a lot of white space to enhance the the use if it doesn’t reach the correct audience? reading experience of your blog

Use your primary keyword and its synonyms You can have the best piece naturally throughout the blog of content and make the You can always write blogs in the shortest time best point ever. But if no one possible. A bit of practice and motivation is all it looks at it, the article is a takes! waste. Struggling to come up with new topics for your blog? Use HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator Here are few ways you can promote your content effectively Not good at writing? Check out this article: How t o C r e a t e A m a z i n g A r t i c l e s E v e n I f Y o u S u c k a t Writing Social media campaigns

Social media is used in almost every stage of in- Note: Blogs are just one part of your content bound marketing. Whether your goal is to drive strategy. To truly leverage your lead generation more web traffic, create awareness or gen- strategy you will be needing various types of erate more leads, social media campaign is highly content according to your industry needs. critical.

Feel free to get in touch to know which content 93% of B2B marketers say social media is their plan you must be using. number one tactic for marketing their content.

Now, there are so many social media platforms out there. Which one should you choose?

This is where the buyer persona comes to play.

From the data you develop in the buyer persona, learn what could be the demographics, job roles, possible interests, hobbies etc.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 10 Understand what channels these buyer personas Twitter & Facebook: spend their most time on. In terms of monthly active users, twitter and face- Suppose your prospects or consumers tell you that book lead by a large margin. By promoting your they spend 30% of their online time on Facebook content via these channels, updates from your or- and 10% on Twitter, you know which secondary ganization can reach a large section of your ideal and primary social networks you should focus on. audience.

A study by hubspot reveals that 73% of people use Facebook for professional purposes. For a B2B marketer, this is great news!

Quick tip: Create a blog promotion campaign to target all your website visitors on these platforms. You can even start a campaign to target all your prospects directing them to download that new e-book or white paper you created! Instagram:

No I am not kidding here!

Here are few platforms that are most effective for a B2B company. LinkedIn:

Linkedin is still the best channel for generating leads for B2B companies.

In fact, about 79% of content marketers feel that Linkedin is effective at generating B2B leads. Even though Instagram has over 600 million us- Linkedin helps you reach your target audience ers, most B2B marketers overlook its importance through various avenues such as Linkedin groups, in promoting their content. InMail, or even by posting relevant content to Pulse.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 11 While it is true that the appeal of instagram Optimize your website is very informal, unlike Twitter and Linkedin where people are more open to having serious You created the required content and started a conversations around a business interest, ins- social media marketing campaign. What next? tagram allows you the incredibly opportunity to reach out to key industry influencers and clients Without optimizing your website in an effective when they are off-work! manner, you can never reach your prospects who are looking for your product/service on Google! To truly become a lead generation machine in the long run, you need to increase and maintain the Infact, Google says that 71% of B2B researchers awareness of your brand across all relevant social start their research with a generic search! media channels. You definitely want your page to be on the first See also: 5 tips to use Instagram For page. B2B marketing Infact, page 1 results garners 92 percent of all Set goals: Understand what you are using traffic from an average search. social media for and time your target accordingly To get started with optimizing your webpages, follow these steps: Create a content plan: Depending on the social media platform, choose the right format Use Google’s keyword planner and do of content. complete research of all the relevant Download a free social media content keywords. calendar to track all your posts.

Measure and Analyze: Keep a track on all of your social media analytics and always meas- ure the outcomes.

Check this article to know the different tools you can use for social media analytics. A lot of them are FREE! A L i s t o f t h e T o p 2 5 S o c i a l M e d i a Analytics Tools Use these keywords throughout your website and web URL, but in a way that is still natural, See also: The what, why and how of social media contextual and user-centric. strategy

Use SEMRush tool to get a thorough analysis Need a professional touch for your social media of your main competitors’ strategies marketing? Get a free marketing review from us!

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 12 However if you creatively craft the ad, you can make it an inbound-ish one. Hubspot confirmed that 53% of it’s customers integrate PPC ads into their inbound marketing campaign

What is an inbound PPC Ad?

Create a customized 404 page with a search box Unlike an outbound one, an inbound PPC ad is and social buttons. educative and helpful rather than promotional.

Take a look at the ad below:

Optimize your website for mobile devices 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphone.

Mimic your buyer persona’s language for all your content headings (Phrases like How to, Rather than pushing their offerings on the Why, Tips, Free get the highest CRO) prospect, BlogStarter’s ad offered a free step by step guide to help the buyer start a blog.

Here are few more examples of an inbound PPC ad. Now, All these are few basic tips. To truly leverage your website for a better SEO, I suggest you to get A smart inbound-ish ad is always more inviting to a free website audit from professionals. click than a promotional paid search ad. PPC Ads

When I say the words “PPC Ads” , it’s natural for you to think “Wait isn’t that an outbound practice? “

If you logically look at it, yes, the concept of PPC ads does come under interruptive advertising.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 13 How to integrate PPC ads in Use at least the first four parameters in your URL. your inbound marketing Further Reading: campaign? 9 Strategies for Improving Lead Quality From B2B Choose the right channels to place your ads. I PPC Campaigns recommend LinkedIn and Google for any B2B organization Remember - PPC ads are just a small part of inbound marketing. Your main objective is to cut Keep the ad language educational (remember down the paid advertising budget as the you want to help the visitor) campaign progresses.

Use the correct landing page that is relevant to the ad content instead of using your home page

Track, measure and analyze your ad campaign Convert! Convert is the second part of the inbound Here’s one way you can track marketing methodology and measure your campaigns. You attracted a whole lot of visitors, now is the time to finallyconvert them to leads! UTM Codes

UTM Codes are a great way to know from where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they are using, which device they are using, etc.

UTM code is just a simple code that is attached to the custom URL to track the medium, source and the campaign name.

Take a look at this example

http://www.thesmarketers.com/10-inspiring- infographic-designs-for-2017/?utm_source= facebook & utm_medium=social The conversion process has three stages. By using these snippet codes you can know from where you are generating the highest number of 1 Call to action leads and which campaigns you must focus on. 2 Landing Page 3 Thank you page Use the Campaign URL Builder tool in Google Analytics to add your UTM codes hasslefree.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 14 Convert visitors to You can place CTAs at the end of your blog leads with a CALL post to prompt the visitor to subscribe to your 5. e-mail newsletter TO ACTION Place a CTA at the end of the newsletter If you ask me, this stage is the most important asking the subscriber to start their free trial one in the entire campaign. Use bright colours and clear fonts for CTA This is the stage when you finally get your leads. buttons

A call to action can be a line, button or image that Always experiment with CTA positioning and encourages visitors to take an action. formats. This action can be anything, i.e newsletter subscription, starting a free trial, ebook download See also: Call-to-Action examples you can’t help etc. but click

Here are a few examples: Want to create your own CTA? Download these customizable CTA templates

Landing Page & 6. Thank You page

All your lead generation efforts finally come down to this!

Landing Page!

Once the prospect has decided to download that ebook/whitepaper or register for that webinar and clicks on the CTA button, he/she should be navigated to a landing page. Where to place your CTAs? The main purpose of a landing page is to obtain the prospect’s details (email address) by asking There are no definite places to place your CTA. As long as it doesn’t look artificial and fits into the him/her to fill a form in return for the content you content and context suitably, you can place them provide. anywhere. It’s the stage where your prospect goes from Here are a few suggestions and best practices: being a silent visitor to an active lead.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 15 Here is an example: Deploy another CTA to redirect them to another blog post or other offerings.

Include social buttons (so you can build your social following) CLOSE! Quick tips for creating an After successfully generating new leads, it’s time effective Landing page: to nurture them and finally convert them into customers. Remove all navigation buttons and links (You don’t want your visitor to get away without What’s the use of generating so many leads filling the form) without converting them to customers?

Explain what content he/she can expect from MarketingSherpa identifies lack of lead nurturing the offering in a clear manner! as the primary reason for 79% of leads not converting to sales. Do not ask for too many details (You might lose the user’s trust!) So how can you close?

Don’t have enough time to create a landing page This brings us to the email marketing stage of from the scratch? Use these free templates from inbound methodology. Ucraft to create customized landing pages.

See also: 16 Examples of Great Landing Page Convert your leads Design 7. to customers! Thank you page In inbound marketing, the role of a sales rep is of an educator rather than a hardcore seller. The goal After successfully obtaining your lead’s is to educate the lead as much as possible before information, you need to encourage them to move promoting your product. further in the buyer’s journey by directing them to thank you page. What you should do Segment your leads according to the buyer Here’s what you should do: persona developed

Thank the new lead (showing gratitude builds Segregate your content database according to trust ) your lead’s 1 Demographics Provide additional content 2 Company type 3 Role and seniority in the organization

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 16 Integrate SMarketing into your company and draw up an SLA (as discussed earlier). Get a professional sales consultation to evaluate Delight! your current sales team efforts. Become a lead According to the SLA report estimate how generation machine many follow-up emails are required per lead 8. and how many targets a sales rep must by serving your produce. customers Unlike any other marketing campaign, the inbound Write attractive subject headlines to boost the strategy doesn’t end after acquiring customers. email open rates

Add CTAs whenever required

A satisfied customer can be a hero in advertising your product.

Delighting your customer not only gains their trust Check out this infographic to know the best time but also helps you in generating more qualified to send an email for various countries leads in the future.

Use automation tools like HubSpot CRM, Surveying and analyzing your existing customers SalesForce CRM, LeadSquared etc. provides powerful insights regarding your ideal buyer persona and helps in improving your lead Further Reading: 5 Easy And Effective Email Hacks quality in the future. For Better Lead Generation What you should do

Be a strong problem solver

Be an educator instead of a promoter

Provide your own recommendations and solutions for a problem.

www.thesmarketers.com Proprietary information - Do not copy or duplicate without written authorization from the author. 17 Conclusion While implementing inbound methodology may Create remarkable and unique content which fits take time to start showing results, it’s one of the your buyer’s needs and you are already halfway most effective marketing strategies right now. there!

By properly implementing all the 8 steps I mentioned, you too can easily see a spike in your website traffic, conversion rate, lead generation etc. Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any doubts and for a more personalized guidance.

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