The ultimate goal for marketers has always been to create the right offer, at the right time and to the right people. As customers now have unprecedented amounts of information to sift through, a brand’s inbound strategy plays a critical role in leading the customer successfully through each stage of the buyer’s journey to maximize success. Modern marketing must rely on the awareness, interest, consideration and delight phases of the customer’s path to purchase. Marketing Automation platforms, including tools such as Marketo, Hubspot, and SharpSpring, help to coordinate and manage your marketing efforts. In the first articles of a two-part series, we will teach you how to attract the right audience, and convert visitors into qualified leads.
1. Attract
Tools: Inbound Website, Optimized Blog, Social Media Listening System, SEO Researched Keywords, Strategically-Placed Calls-to-Action
Providing educational content and becoming a knowledge-repository to reach a wide, and dedicated audience with contextually relevant information is the goal of this phase. Did you know that 68% of all organic links go to the top three search results? Blogging about questions that your target segments are asking, engaging on social media with industry thought-leaders and keyword optimized websites will help you build a solid base, and keep you well ranked.
Website: Your website should be clear, concise, include relevant calls-to-action and be optimized for performance. The purpose of your site should be prioritizing the paths of your target audiences. At this stage it’s useful to consider the following questions: What are my customer’s pain points, and how can I quickly and easily offer a solution?
Tip: Read our latest blog post on specific tips for effective homepage design.
Blog: Share relevant, high quality content in an optimized blog. Keywords are now only part of SEO and search engines are looking for the most relevant and most desired blog content. Search engines also take into account “social signals,” which encourages the sharing of content on social networks to improve organic rankings. The more you blog, the better it is for your SEO – delve into different ways to optimize your blog for your audience. For example, companies can expect a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50.
Tip: Blog at least once per week and create blog titles that include SEO-researched target keywords.
Social: No matter what industry you are in, your customers are present on social media. In fact, the role of social in the modern sales cycle is quite significant: Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than traditional outbound marketing efforts. During the awareness phase, social media is particularly valuable for building trust because it is a great place to access customer service, reviews and testimonials. It is important to have optimized and active channels to help your customers find you and remain engaged.
Mambo recommends: Choose your level of involvement based on available resources. It is better to have one great social channel and weekly blog than several channels that post inconsistently and a blog that never gets updated. Once you develop a plan, research the best times to post, trends in the industry, and look for quick fixes to optimize your website, like fixing broken links or adding images to text.
2. Convert
Tools: Secondary Calls-to-Action, Landing Pages, Forms, Contact Profiling, Dynamic Segmentation
After showcasing your thought leadership by providing valuable and relevant information to potential leads as well as anticipating and pre-emptively offering solutions to their problems, you should be reaching people who are actively looking for this type of information. In the beginning of the relationship with your brand, it’s important to provide high-value, top-of-the-funnel content, like a white paper or an eBook. This offer should be tailored to the individual and should reflect where the lead is in the buyer’s journey. You can capture information from leads by gating content on a landing page and implementing clear calls-to-action. By using relevant forms to progressively profile leads and capture necessary information you can effectively qualify and prioritize them in your nurture process. Companies that increase their number of landing pages from 10-15 see a 55% increase in leads.
When it comes to creating your landing pages, keep it simple. On a great landing page the value proposition and purpose should be very clear and easy to consume. Users should be able to instantly identify why they are there and what they are getting. Keep everything above the fold, eliminate distractions like excessive external navigation (you don’t want to make it easy to leave!), and design the experience around guiding the user to complete your forms.
Mambo recommends: Visitors to your site may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Have a wide variety of content available on your page to cater to all of those personas. For example, someone who is in the beginning stages will be interested in a one pager or a white sheet, while someone who is farther into the journey will be more interested in an eBook or a demo. Don’t be afraid to reuse and repurpose old content! When developing your landing pages, a good rule of thumb is the “7-second test.” Someone who has never seen the page should be able to understand what they’ll be getting and the value they’ll gain within 7 seconds.
The process of attracting visitors and converting them into qualified leads is all about connecting your audience with valuable information that intelligently addresses their questions and concerns. It is an ongoing effort and requires continual evolution and innovation. Stay tuned for part two to learn how an inbound marketing strategy can help you close sales like a pro and delight your customers.
If inbound marketing and automation interest you schedule a consultation with us today.
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