Being in the right place at the right time: this would be a great definition of what inbound marketing aims for.
Contrary to outbound marketing, where you expose yourself to prospective buyers, inbound is the art of building strategies to align, attract, and retain your customers.
At every step from the first touchpoint to the loyal customer, a good inbound strategy will strengthen the relationship with prospects and buyers more incrementally than with outbound.
In short, inbound drives people towards your product almost without them realizing it, because you will have built a perfect net of content, hooks, and offers adapted to their needs and bringing them value.
But such a strategy is harder to assess than classic outbound: for example, you will not have clear numbers of conversions from a hundred cold calls or emails.
That’s why, at every step of the way, it is necessary to always know what questions to ask to monitor and improve this key piece of your growth strategy.
In this blog, we will help you identify the best way to understand your inbound strategy step by step:
- Attract, from stranger to visitor,
- Convert, from visitor to lead,
- Close, from lead to customer,
- Delight, from customer to advocate.
Attract
The first step is to build strategies to drive the right audience to your website.
Content will be your best ally: in all forms, across all platforms, building content that resonates with your audience is the most effective way to get people of interest to cross your path.
Whether your product solves a pain or responds to a need, in either case, you can base your content on subjects surrounding it.
The form of this content can take several forms, and among them are:
SEO
SEO will be the most durable but, in a sense, the most difficult to build from scratch. It can take up to several months to start to see the effects of your SEO content strategy. This channel is also prone to unpleasant surprises: you can win a wide audience based on just a dozen keywords and a few very good pieces of content but lose everything as a new player starts to seed competitive content on the same keywords.
So, how to build a good network of keywords that will drive relevant people to your website?
There are a lot of very good guides on the Internet, but here’s a quick summary:
- Find the right keywords: What would be your searches to address the pain or need your product is addressing? Ahrefs has a guide to assess the business potential of a keyword.
Here’s the matrix, with some examples for Blobr:
- Aim at the low-hanging fruits: Try to concentrate your efforts on the keywords with the most impressions and the lowest level of difficulty.
- Look for the competition: There is no shame in taking examples from the 10 best-ranked pages, as long as you add value from your offer.
- Monitor and adjust: SEO is a long-distance race—don’t hesitate to adjust content based on your findings until achieving the top position.
Social Media
Another popular way to attract prospects is to build a reputation on social networks. With dwindling results from outbound, more and more companies choose to build a profile using this medium.
Usually, the CEO is the top voice, speaking on behalf of their product. They will not mention the product directly but instead nudge the conversation towards subjects covered by the product.
Like SEO, the content needs to be value-loaded, meaning that each post must bring something of value for your followers (and the algorithm).
The downside is the difficulty of raising a powerful public profile, notably the time and effort it takes. You must be ready to give 6-12 hours every week to build, publish, and react to your posts.
If you want to try by yourself, here’s a quick guide:
- Frame your subject, and stick to it. Analyze your existing audience and the audience of your company. What do they want to read about?
- Create a persona. Try to establish some ground rules from the typical structure of your posts to the emojis you like to use. This will form a complete playbook giving you the necessary frame to build your content faster.
- Regularity is key. Try to start with at least 3 posts per week, and don’t stop. It takes weeks to months to start to see an uptick. Once you’ve got traction, try to publish more, almost every workday.
- It’s OK if it fails. If after 3 to 6 months of publishing restlessly you perceive no traction, try other channels.
Here are a few questions to ask Blobr to help aim and adjust:
Convert & Close
Your efforts have paid off! Visitors are now pouring into your website, thanks to your powerful content, your strong SEO strategy, or your posts on social networks.
Now, what?
Enlightened users have to convert for your efforts to pay off. Even the best content in the world, if not correlated to a potent strategy to nudge your visitors into giving their email, signing up, etc., will have no value in the end.
This is why an optimal website experience is essential.
Before taking a look at the different ways to make visitors convert, you can review the current state of your website to adapt your website design and message.
An often overlooked metric concerns the devices from which visitors are reaching your website. A bad mobile experience, for example, could hamper your inbound strategy. This set of questions is here to help you assess the state of your website traffic:
Now, let’s review the different methods to make your visitors stick and convert them.
Landing Pages
Content that talks to the visitors you are targeting is one of the best ways to convert them.
There are lots of guides on the Internet to help you build efficient landing pages, so we’ll stick to the basics.
- Audience segmentation is key when planning your landing pages, and the message you will use — or the way you will introduce your product, is what will make your visitors click.
- Structure is another important element.
- The H1 should feature a pain your prospective users are facing, and a bold statement about how you ease that pain.
- Then, highlight the features of your product, and keep this problem-solver focus for each of them. 1 feature = 1 problem.
- Add social proof from users from that same audience segment or household names if you have some in your portfolio of users.
- Then, provide information about pricing or a reminder about your offer.
- Measure the impact of messaging with a complete set of trackers that you can set up with Google Tag Manager. You can add page scrollers that will inform you of the percentage of a page seen by a visitor and track the buttons and calls-to-action.
Lead Magnets
Even if in recent years this inbound strategy has lost some relevance (after being widely used for a few years), it remains a powerful tool for some industries and sales-lead products with a high entry-level price.
Basically, a lead magnet is gated, premium content.
Getting access to it usually requires the visitor to give their email address and some basic information about themselves.
With a highly-targeted, value-loaded lead magnet, conversion can rise by a few points, from approx. 2% to 6-8%.
Plus, the content acts as a natural filter: the people ready to give personal info for your content belong to your prime audience target.
Side Products
Another very efficient strategy to attract people to your website and make them convert is to offer a free side product.
It can be a Chrome add-on, a little simulator, a feature of your product running on your website… something small quickly bringing value and answering partly to a more important pain point.
Side products are great at increasing brand awareness, with a good potential to become viral.
All Roads Leading to Closed Deals
But those strategies are barely the beginning of the process leading to sealing the deal.
If your product is self-served, chances are that your lead has signed up.
If not, you’ve now got an email, and a hot prospect on your hands — but not a sale.
From here, depending on your business model, you still have some levers to help the decision process.
Among them, the most simple is the email workflow.
A series of emails sent on a pre-defined schedule that will push additional content relevant to your lead, along with prompts to book a meeting and start talking in person.
Content you can share includes:
- Comparison pieces with your main competitors — a lead that went that far is probably checking for other options at the same time.
- Testimonials from people who shared the same problem as your lead, and how your product solved it.
Your CRM is your best ally here. It will track all the actions from leads, and possible interactions.
If you want to send a personalized message, you can use this useful request on Blobr to get a quick recap of what happened with a lead:
Delight
Perfect! The deal is closed, and the visitor is now a faithful customer.
However, this is not the end of the story. You can achieve more from them.
The more satisfied your customers are, the more inclined they will be to talk about your product, creating a virtuous cycle leading to more sales, brand promotion, and even virality.
Customer care is the best path to delight your customers.
Asking for feedback, and being on top of the issues they can encounter while using your product, is essential.
Social media is also a channel of choice: you can use them to communicate about updates, and directly answer people citing your company.
Other potential strategies are to offer a referral program or promotional offers to your power users. It greatly helps strengthen the link between you and your users.
Blobr helps you keep an eye on the amounts spent on offers:
Delighting users also helps increase the average revenue per customer, as you can push additional features:
Let’s face it: inbound is hard, and not the most straightforward strategy.
It takes lots of effort and even more time to build it from A to Z, and to start having customers from those channels.
But the advantages compared to outbound only are undeniable: lower costs of acquisition, a broader audience, possibilities to go viral, and the potential to scale.
Blobr helps establish faster, understand, and optimize your inbound strategy.
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