How to succeed with inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that requires preparation and continuous follow-up to succeed. By taking a strategic approach from the start, it's easier for your whole organization to structure your work, allocate your resources effectively and create the right kind of content. This blog post describes how to succeed with inbound marketing.

Structure your activities into campaigns

To put it simply, inbound marketing is based on campaigns. Such a campaign consists of a content offer that is linked to a landing page with a form, which in turn collects the visitor's contact details. For this, a marketing automation flow is developed to process the lead further. At the same time, you work to spread your content offer through, for example, SEO, social media and search advertising. The word "campaign" should not be understood as a time-limited event linked to a specific offer or topic, as we are used to seeing advertising campaigns. An inbound marketing campaign usually runs over a long period of time and is the very wheel within which marketing spins.

What needs to be in place to get started?

Inbound marketing is suitable for most companies, but perhaps best for those in the B2B sector that deal with complex buying processes and customers who know what solutions they are looking for. To get started, you need all the key people on board, a clear strategy, and ideally, flexible digital tools in place.

Buy-in

Inbound marketing is a marketing technique that initially requires a lot of work. Above all, it is about understanding that you create communication that generates business in both the short and long term. Unlike advertising in various digital channels that can immediately show a change in traffic or new followers in social channels, an inbound marketing campaign works long-term to drive business online. Internal buy-in from management and decision-makers is crucial to the success of inbound marketing. Budget and resources are needed to make the right decisions and achieve the goals.

Strategy

A well-defined strategy is also in the pot when the inbound marketing work is to be started. You need to keep track of personas, buyer journeys, messages, keywords, content offers and lead generation, among other things, in order to plan a profitable initiative. The strategy answers what to do, when, how and why.

Software

The need to manage and segment leads and convert them into customers has opened the door to new software that can manage various automated communication flows. Email is at the center of this communication flow, but an inbound marketing system is more than just an email management system. It includes more features and can be linked to more channels, such as social media and SMS. Most systems offer the possibility to create landing pages. In addition, communication flows can be advanced through segmentation, personalization, triggers, and more. Read more about different inbound marketing systems here.

CRM system

CRM systems help you organize all the details about your leads and customers. It makes it easy for everyone on your team to get a quick overview of the status of each customer relationship. CRMs are especially important for companies with larger lead and customer records, where simple Excel spreadsheet documentation is not enough. Today, many CRM systems are equipped with lead scoring functions that record different types of characteristics and activities of the target group. By connecting the CRM system with the inbound software, it is easier to create personalized follow-up flows.

Identifying personas and customer journeys

Personas

A persona is a fictional character that describes the needs, goals, attitudes and behavioral patterns of a segment of your target audience. It is a tool used to provide a clearer picture of who visits your website or uses your services, what they expect to get help with or find answers to. The insights you gain from creating your personas will help you make better decisions and communicate more effectively.

There are different ways to create personas and the structure and content can vary. But the aim is always the same: to provide a clearer picture of your target audiences, what they need and how you can support them in achieving their goals. Read more about how to create useful personas for your business here.

What is the customer journey?

A customer journey is all the events and steps that occur between a need or interest emerging in the customer's mind, to the actual purchase being made and the product being delivered and tested. In the past, it was common to see the customer journey as a funnel or tunnel, where the customer is sluiced downwards and then falls out into nothingness. We prefer to see it as a forward process, where customers who fall out are rather looped back to earlier stages. The customer journey also looks different depending on your sales model. An e-commerce for consumer products has different touchpoints and messages than a complex and slow-moving B2B process, but they share the same steps: awareness, consideration and decision. For each step the user takes, there should be relevant and compelling content to engage with. Read our tips to map your personas and customer journeys and create the right content for the right steps.

Create conversions

Lead generation

A common goal for a B2B organization working with inbound marketing is to generate leads. A lead is a person who has shown interest in your company's product or service in one way or another, for example by downloading a catalog or subscribing to a newsletter. A lead is in the middle of the customer journey and is getting ready to make a purchase decision, but still needs to be nurtured.

Lead generation is about creating conversions by getting the visitor to do what you want on your website. Usually, this means collecting contact details so that you can continue to engage the user with relevant and compelling information. There are several types of content that help you convert your leads, such as white papers, e-books and webinars. Read more about how to succeed in lead generation.

Lead scoring

But how do I know what is a lead? That's really up to you. For some, an email address may be enough, while others need more contact information and details about the user to take the next step. Many companies put a lot of effort into generating inbound leads, both into the site and the CRM system, but then it stops. It can simply be difficult to know which leads are particularly interesting and moving forward in the buying process. And this is where lead scoring comes into the process. Lead scoring is one of the factors that determines how quickly your lead generation efforts pay off. By scoring your leads based on various attributes, such as job-related information, behavior, and interaction on your website, you can rank and prioritize each lead. This process helps both sales and marketing teams to prioritize the right leads, communicate with them appropriately, and increase the number that actually become customers. Here are some great tips on how to create a successful lead scoring strategy.

MQL, SQL, SLA - three acronyms for smooth lead generation

Lead generation will be more successful if you manage to get your sales and marketing departments to work together. The marketing department focuses on converting visitors into leads, which they then hand over to sales for further processing. In some cases, problems can arise in the handover, for example if the departments have different definitions of what should be classified as a lead qualified for processing. Such a lead is not far enough along the customer journey and thus not ready to make a purchase, which of course creates frustration for an eager salesperson who wants to close the deal here and now. To avoid such problems, there are two smart solutions

1. Define leads based on MQL and SQL.
   A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that you judge to be more likely to become a customer than others. A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a lead that is deemed ready to be contacted directly by sales.
2. Establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
   An SLA is an agreement that outlines the requirements and expectations that the sales team can have on the delivery from the marketing department. By defining what each team commits to deliver, it is possible to ensure that the delivery contributes to achieving the common goals.