What Is an Inbound PPC Ad?
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Importance of inbound marketing Introduction to SMarketing & creating an SLA STAGE-1 ATTRACT Building effective buyer personas Creating unique content Content distribution Content Promotion 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 sales 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 advertising, 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 digital marketing 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 marketing strategy 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 market research 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.