Inbound Marketing Automation - The Time has Come
Introduction
The pervasiveness of digital technology no longer surprises us; what does amaze us as marketers is the size of the digital marketplace. Facebook has more than 300 million subscribers. If it was a country, it would be the 4th largest. And LinkedIn would be bigger than Canada.
But for some marketers, this digital revolution spells uncertainty. Where do you stand on this digital divide? Are you still committed to the traditional, Outbound, approach to marketing? Have you embraced Inbound Marketing and its suite of Automation tools, or are you still thinking about which way to go?
If you’re a B2B marketer, the choice has been made for you. More than 90% of business buyers today begin their search for a solution online. And the overwhelming majority of them use Google to find their solutions. More than 85% of these people don’t progress beyond the first page of Google’s results: If your company’s website isn’t in the top ten results for its field, you may as well not be in business. If you’re still relying exclusively on Outbound Marketing, you soon won’t be. (For the experts among you, yes, there are other ways to drive traffic to your site, such as Pay-Per-Click ads and referral links, but organic search, the non-paid-for search results, is the best).
Strong words? Perhaps. But it’s hard to fault the theory below on how Outbound Marketing became irrelevant. And for those of you who agree with me, the rest of this post is about why its replacement should be Inbound Marketing.
My next post will describe what Inbound Marketing is, how its Automation works, and provide the 5 steps you can take to harness the power of Inbound Marketing in your company.
Outbound’s 3 Strikes
Outbound Marketing broadcasts a message to as many people as possible, hoping that it will resonate with some of them. Ads in print, direct mail, tradeshows, email blast campaigns – each one a steamroller trying to crack a nut. I believe Outbound Marketing is broken because:
1) Digital transactions have shifted power from the seller to the buyer. We all prefer to buy things rather than be sold to, and the Internet has not only enabled this, but made it compulsory.
2) In Recessionary times, the least defensible budget is the first to suffer cuts. With their notoriously difficult to calculate ROIs, traditional marketing programs are prime targets.
3) Attention Deficits caused by the overuse of Outbound techniques. Viewers, readers and listeners are tired of the noise, cynical of the claims, and fed up with the interruptions. They have simply tuned out.
A little more detail on each point
Before the rise of the world-wide-web, the seller controlled the dissemination of information to the people in his or her sightline. Today, buyers surf the net to find all the seller’s information, and their competitors’, without talking to sales professionals. They enjoy the freedom to set their own pace and to explore more and more details until they feel they know enough to make the right decision.
As for ROI, Inbound Marketing automatically calculates the Return on Marketing Investment for all your campaigns. By showing you, in real time, what each campaign is contributing to the bottom line, you can stop doing what doesn’t work and spend more on what does.
And Attention Deficits? Well Inbound solves this issue by listening instead of shouting.
For more detail on the demise of Outbound, read my blog.
In with Inbound Marketing
How Inbound works
Imagine your website has been setup to take advantage of Inbound Marketing and is fully Automated to handle it. Further imagine that Joe Visitor arrives on your website after clicking a link in Google. Let’s assume that your site matches the keyword phrase he entered to initiate the search, so he doesn’t bounce off immediately. He discovers that your content answers his questions. He finds a white paper promising to give him some information he values enough to give up his name and email address to get it. He registers, downloads the white paper, reads it, and returns for more. Each time he answers a few more questions about himself or his company, building up his Profile. And right from his first visit, and on every visit thereafter, the system:
1) Tracks his digital footprints around the site: pages visited, time on page to judge if he read it, length of visit, and many other micro-analytics.
2) Handles his requests for information, and sends him reminders and links to new information based on his previous choices. And continues to ask questions, adding to his Profile.
3) Uses all the above to grade his Profile (which indicates how interested you should be in him), and score his online footprint behaviour so you can see how interested he is in your solution.
4) Feeds his name into your Customer Relationship Management system when he reaches a predetermined grade and score.
Inbound Marketing Automation’s benefits
Inbound Marketing, and its suite of Automation tools, provides the following benefits to your organization as a whole:
More Leads: 60% of B2B buyers start their online research with search engines. Of that, 64% click on organic search engine results listed on the first page. If your website ranks on the first page for your targeted keywords, you can drive almost 40% of all potential sales leads in your industry to your website.
Higher Quality: B2B companies with “best-practice” lead management systems deliver a 250% increase in closing rates.
Lower Cost: Savings of 30% are common.
And Inbound Marketing Automation provides marketing with the following additional benefits:
1) By automating the drudge or routine tasks of lead generation and management, the system frees up your marketers to create one innovative campaign after another. And these higher quality leads, graded and scored till they are sales ready, allow your sales people to focus only on hot prospects, ending their complaints about poor sales leads.
2) The digital footprints and the person’s profile information yield priceless market insight into your prospects, for free. Even paid-for market research doesn’t yield this kind of insight: it’s provided in real time, literally while you watch your prospects interacting with your website, observe their performance on multivariate tests, and record their reactions to your latest offers.
To learn more, feel free to download these white papers:
How to gain Priceless Market Insight for Free
7 Ways to boost Profits using Sales and Marketing Automation
Next week, a brief overview of Inbound Marketing Automation and the 5 steps you can take to harness its power.
Eric Goldman is CEO of Gossamar Inc.
