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We live in a world where content is king and customers drive the market. This makes it an inevitable choice for businesses to invest in means that attract potential customers. When your approach to driving sales is customer-centric, there is no better option for you to consider than inbound marketing initiatives.
Inbound marketing helps you win the long game regardless of which industry your company serves, what it sells, or the audience you cater to. If you are wondering which inbound marketing strategies can help drive sales for your business as desired, this is for you!
In this blog, I will discuss an inbound marketing strategy, how it compares to outbound practices, and what benefits it can bring to your organization, along with examples.
Hop on for the ride!
The foundation of an inbound marketing strategy for a B2B audience is a customizable and reproducible blueprint of best practices. Utilizing these, inbound marketing experts may draw ideal prospects to your website, convert website traffic into leads, engage in content marketing activities, and eventually nurture those leads to convert into paying customers.
Rather than outright advertising your products or services, the objective of an inbound marketing strategy would be to familiarize potential customers with your brand and its products or services by driving them to your website and your social media channels.
88% of B2B consumers concur that authentic content generated by a business helps them grow trust in their brand. Your inbound marketing efforts help you ideally leave a positive impression, increasing the likelihood that your prospects will choose your product or service when they're ready to purchase.
To construct an inbound marketing strategy in the long run, you must position yourself right in front of your target audience segment. And before you do that, you need to know which marketing channels they are majorly present on, what kind of content they like to see the most, and how you would measure the success of your efforts (i.e., defining your KPIs), amongst other things.
Research indicates that campaigns integrating multiple marketing channels show a 90% customer retention rate compared to businesses using a single channel.
Let’s see how inbound marketing compares to traditional outbound marketing methodology.
Here are some key differences.
Talking about inbound marketing first:
Moving on to outbound marketing:
Before you choose your preferred marketing methodology, consider the benefits of inbound vs. outbound marketing tactics and what challenges you might face while devising a good outbound marketing strategy.
For each stage of the buyer journey, the goal is to develop persona-driven and ICP-driven content centered around a keyword serving the relevant intent. If done correctly, your potential customers are already looking for the inbound marketing best practices your company specializes in.
Effective inbound marketing techniques help your business locate the friction points in your ICP—then structure the architecture of the solutions you are providing in your messaging so that systems may be operated to help them attain their optimal state.
However, there is no “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategy for any business. To ensure that your plan is as effective as possible and continually improved to meet your ROI targets, it is beneficial to keep up with the most recent studies and trends.
Inbound marketing emphasizes producing high-quality content that attracts targeted traffic and leads to your website rather than conventional outbound marketing strategies like buying ads, email lists, and lead generation.
The inbound marketing methodology focuses on identifying the ideal customers and helping them purchase. And it doesn’t end there—you must keep surprising them even after you've closed a deal. You want to give your clients the tools they need to succeed throughout their relationship with you.
Inbound marketing strategies also:
Now that you know all about inbound marketing and what it can do for you, let’s see 17 successful examples of inbound marketing strategies that drive sales!
Inbound marketing examples can be covered under the following categories:
Did you know that marketers that prioritize blogging on their company website are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI? More blogs indicate more indexed pages, which can help your website rank higher on the SERPs.
Blogs are an excellent way to inform your audience and position yourself as an expert in your niche. Regarding blogging, certain subjects generate significantly more traffic, leads, and revenue than others, but most businesses are reluctant to do so. These subjects, while perhaps uncomfortable for companies to address, must be done since they can directly answer the more generic queries of potential customers in search engines and sales discussions.
Here are five of them:
The Pendo blog is a great example that covers all of these blog subjects. Such blog articles become the center of your SEO strategy. Since they have an indefinite lifetime, these can be the best resources for your company to establish thought leadership in your market. Your blogs can help you drive your sales leads right to the bottom of the marketing funnel.
Since everyone may not be into reading long-form content, you can publish a snapshot of insightful data in a visually attractive form, such as an infographic. But what is an infographic?
An infographic is an excellent content form that displays data and explains complicated propositions in a way that can quickly provide a better understanding of the ideal prospect by combining parts of the text, image, chart, diagram, and, more recently, video.
You need to nail down three things before you start crafting an infographic:
You can start with a compelling headline. MIT researchers, using eye-tracking technology, discovered that effective headlines are crucial for retaining readers. They captivate your audience, describe the adventure they will take, and pique their interest in learning more. You must understand the best charting practices and use fonts and colors that can stand out to the viewer. One more thing to remember is that busy visuals will defeat the purpose of conveying complex data. Therefore, you must keep it simple
You may take inspiration from this infographic based on The Power of SMS Marketing created for SlickText
A white paper can have various purposes, and how you define it dramatically depends on the objectives you are pursuing with it and the industry you are writing it for. Based on general marketing opinion, a whitepaper is an authoritative, in-depth report that presents a problem and offers a solution for a particular situation
Marketers produce whitepapers to inform readers on a specific topic or to describe and advance a particular methodology. They are sophisticated problem-solving manuals. Whitepapers are excellent for generating leads because they typically require more information than just an email address to download them, not to mention provide the reader with insane value in return.
A whitepaper is your thesis, whereas a blog post is your weekly experiment report. You must always presume that those downloading your whitepaper are looking for more in-depth information to help them overcome their pain points. Packing it choke-full of information is also not enough. It needs to be presented in a visually captivating form.
A white paper positions your company as an industry expert, which is why it is a winning inbound marketing example. In most industries like business, product, and web3, white papers have filled the sales pipeline and driven prospects to part with their money.
Check out this example of the Terra litepaper published by Leap Wallet, a decentralized wallet for the Terra cryptocurrency blockchain.
One of the best tools for driving sales—is a case study. It is a thorough account of your business's accomplishments with one or more of your existing customers. A beginning, which frequently discusses a conflict, a description of what happened next, and an explanation of how the organization resolved or improved the situation—that is what a case study should include.
A case study provides tangible evidence of how your product has benefited other businesses. Furthermore, case studies frequently include quotes from the client, so they go beyond simple product-praising advertisements. Instead, other businesses complement your business, and there is no better form of marketing collateral than a vocal endorsement or testimonial. A fantastic case study also includes research and statistics supporting the assertions made about a project's outcomes.
You may include it on your website as a resource or push it using your social media channel. Still, case studies are the best way to show potential customers why they should collaborate with you—from the point of view of a satisfied customer who has already used your product or service. Case studies are the most effective form of self-promotional content marketing strategies.
Want to get your case study right? Well, you can look at this case study by Online Metrics elucidating how you can Optimize Landing Pages in Google Analytics.
If you want to generate qualified leads, there is no better inbound marketing tool than an e-Book packed with valuable information covering everything a potential customer may need to build and scale their business.
An e-Book can be a holistic source of relevant knowledge for your niche audience, but it takes a lot of work to create one and requires a lot of time and effort. You must ensure it offers your readers much value if you want yours to be successful. This will not only help you develop closer ties with your readers, but it will also make the process of promoting your ebook much easier.
You need to have an initial plan when you start constructing your e-Book.
If it’s your first book launch, you’ll want to focus on the marketing strategy and book promotion, not the design aspects of your e-Book. Another thing to remember is to make your e-Book easily accessible and downloadable.
A great example of an e-Book could be the Digital Marketing for Small Business e-Book by HubSpot. It takes readers through the process of accessing digital marketing resources and building actionable strategies to scale a small business—and even offers free templates and concrete examples relevant to the industry.
Did you know that 95% of the respondents (in the ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Assessment) said webinars play a crucial part in marketing, with 38% considering them critical for digital communications? The reason is that webinars may add the humane element otherwise missing in the content generated as part of an inbound marketing strategy.
A webinar is an online seminar that delivers lecture-style content to a select group of internet audiences. This form of content delivery gives a member (or a few members) of your content team a chance to provide vital information relevant to your target prospects in a very engaging and human manner.
Even if it's only the sound of a real person, it gives the impression that your business is speaking with potential customers directly. With a webinar, your prospects are more likely to pay attention to the skilled individuals who produce your blog posts, whitepapers, and e-Books. Besides, webinars collect lead information from your ideal prospects as an entrance price.
You can take inspiration from the SEMRush: Live Audit webinar series. One simply has to nominate their website during registration, and if drawn, experts from this SEO tool organization serve your website with a free content audit during their webinar. This is an ingenious way to collaborate with prospective customers and show them first-hand what benefits they could avail of once they sign on to the SEMRush services.
With 86% of businesses using video as a marketing tool, the skyrocketing popularity of Instagram reels and TikTok videos says it all—video is the future. It is the most engaging and effective way to attract your target audience and consistently present your product or service to them so that you are the top-of-mind option when they are looking to buy.
Unlike textual information, which benefits from being long-form, the video should be served as bite-sized. There are always exceptions to the norm, but social media users generally watch videos for a minute or two.
Additionally, video is a fantastic way to repurpose content in a more palatable format. A potential customer might not have had the opportunity to watch your webinar, but he can probably find two minutes to browse LinkedIn and absorb the essential information. Yes, you would prefer that he attend the webinar and complete the form, but establishing a solid reputation for your video production firm is okay, too.
There are many different kinds of video content that you can create—the more popular types in the B2B SaaS niche would be:
A great example of an informational and super entertaining video series is Social Media Trends 2022 on the Hootsuite YouTube channel. With engaging visuals and a preppy presentation, these videos perfectly depict how you can engage and entertain your audience using video.
Podcasts are underrated but an excellent way for your audience to imbibe the information you’re delivering on the go. With over 2 million active podcasts in the world, it may be difficult attracting the right audience segment to your podcast. Still, if you push it using social media and market it through emails, you can have some potential customers sign up to listen to the content you create.
The widespread use of mobile devices and evolving content consumption patterns create a significant opportunity for podcast growth. Since it is unusual for a content format to be able to retain your attention for more than 30 minutes, podcasts encourage deeper engagement. Additionally, they are possibilities for multitasking because you can listen to a podcast while cooking or driving, and not true of blog entries or any other type of visual information.
Starting your podcast has several benefits, including new listeners, reduced competition, and closer relationships with potential customers. And getting started takes less time than you may imagine!
If you are looking for a great example of a SaaS podcast, I would suggest you listen to SaasTr—hosted by Jason Lemkin and Harry Stebbings. This podcast interviews SaaS experts and reveals their best tips and tricks to scale SaaS startups. Listen to episode #215 with Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics.
The one element of your inbound marketing strategy that could ruin all your efforts if not done right—search engine optimization is the group of practices that put your content in front of your target audience by making it rank on top of the SERPs and gaining you the much-needed visibility that your business needs to thrive.
Before you begin writing, you must understand the type of content your readers want. You can increase organic search traffic and your SEO efficacy by researching the following:
You may use Ahrefs or UberSuggest to perform basic keyword research or browse your competitors' websites. Sprinkle relevant and long-tail keywords throughout your content. This will improve your search exposure and help you climb the rankings.
There are many aspects on which you can work for search optimization. However, on-page and off-page SEO are the most essential of them all.
Remember, people will not visit websites they are unaware of—which is why SEO is vital to your inbound marketing strategy to drive sales.
When we say emails for inbound marketing, we do not mean promotional emails—we mean newsletters. Did you know that 40% of B2B marketers claim that email newsletters constitute one of the most important parts of their content marketing efforts?
Although emails more popularly belong to the outbound game, a newsletter curated in the best interests of your target audience can do wonders in attracting the right people and boosting brand value. You can increase audience engagement and retention by properly crafting an email marketing campaign sequence.
Making a good impression from the start is essential for email marketing to be effective. You can use your newsletter to:
The bottom line is that you craft your email sequences, so your potential customer looks forward to hearing from you! What could foster a love for your brand beyond that?
With well-crafted email campaigns, you can have the chance to stay in touch with potential clients at all times and advertise your products or services free of cost. But don't go overboard! You do not want your brand's reputation tarnished by spamming or sending irrelevant information. Additionally, if you're clogging up your subscribers' inboxes, they could quickly unsubscribe. You also shouldn’t pitch your products straight up after someone signs up. Instead, send them a welcome email sequence that makes them aware of your services and brilliance.
I would like to highlight Monday.com’s onboarding sequence as an excellent example. Customers receive it just after subscribing, and it acts as a helpful guide for them to navigate the software. With crisp copy and a video tutorial, email sequences such as these can create a positive impression that can get satisfied customers to vouch for you when selling to new prospects.
The best way to help your business grow is by helping yourself with the versatile range of self-service marketing and sales tools available today. Customers want to weigh their alternatives and make decisions about their purchases independently, but they also desire a quick, frictionless, and hyper-personalized process. They are more receptive to using bots and artificial intelligence that respond to their inquiries quickly and guide them through the buyer's journey (as long as their problems are addressed accurately).
In a nutshell, most customers desire more control throughout the entire sales process to decide what to buy independently and precisely. If you provide self-service options to them, you would be reducing the workload at your end and pulling ahead of the curve, with your ideal prospects thinking of you as a progressive organization helping them have the best customer experience possible.
Now, self-service tools can be of different kinds, but the most popular include product or service selectors, customized offer builders, pricing calculators, chatbots, and automation tools. You may check out Wix’s Website Creator as an example, which allows anyone to set up their website in minutes! With recommended templates and attractive page designs, the entire process is fast and easy and can instantly help any business set up an online presence. Not to mention, it is for FREE!
The core value of an inbound marketing strategy is to get potential customers to come to you. For that purpose, your website needs to be designed to provide a seamless user experience. 48% of website visitors concur that a website’s design is the most crucial factor in deciding the brand’s trustworthiness..
A wide range of factors, including layout, content, graphics, search engine optimization, and conversion rate optimization, are involved in web design. Even though web design is a crucial component of your marketing strategy, many companies overlook that it's only one element of a larger digital marketing plan and should look, feel, and serve the same purpose as your other marketing initiatives.
A home page should typically come with:
Your web design should focus on clarity and efficiently direct your ideal prospects to the following stages, mainly how to establish their first contact with you. It also should serve your potential customers why they should try out your product or service or at least sign up for a free trial. One more thing to remember is to optimize your website for mobile users. Research shows that 50% of visitors will use your website less if it is not mobile-friendly, even if they like your brand!
Getting your website looking and feeling right is vital, as it is your digital storefront, just like you go into a shop when you like what you see displayed before the windows. So your website should indicate your value propositions that will ultimately drive sales.
You can check out the Evernote website as a stellar example of excellent web design. With an attractive color scheme and clear CTAs, as you roll down the home page, Evernote pushes you to “sign in” and then “go premium” to explore excellent features that help you take notes virtually and keep track of anything that needs to be written down in daily life.
These are an indirect approach to building credibility with your audience and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. Certification courses are a big commitment in terms of time and effort. They require specialists to curate content—but once you have them up and running, they are a lifetime investment as a brand, and each sign-up automatically translates as a potential lead for your business.
Certification courses are significantly gaining popularity in recent times. Since the digital world is constantly evolving, you may need help locating books with relevant knowledge to serve your needs. On the other hand, these courses cover quite a wide range of subjects, depending on the niche. For SaaS businesses, these courses provide learners with in-depth knowledge about the software.
It is a win-win situation. Such courses are majorly offered by software companies that have their products employed in several industry-leading organizations. The learner can apply to these companies for jobs once they are a certified software specialist. On the other hand, the software company gets a potential lead for an organization that may need to employ the product and can approach them with the intention of selling.
A great example would be Whatfix University’s Digital Adoption courses that help individuals learn how to design and help prospects adopt digital software. They have multiple “specialist” course options, and I would rate it a brilliant inbound marketing initiative.
Customer surveys can help categorize brand connections and determine where they are in the sales funnel—in other words, how near or far they are from making a purchase. This process is called lead scoring, and each brand must establish its standards for categorizing those contacts.
Doing a survey, tailoring it to meet your target profile, and sending it to a particular lead group may be a constructive supplement to your inbound marketing plan.
You can complete the individual profiles of your contacts and get more precise information about each person by using the data provided by participants. In turn, this will enable you to segment data more precisely. Surveys can also act as powerful lead magnets if you compensate the takers with rewards. Suppose you ask them to submit minute personal details or lengthy opinions. In that case, they would be more interested in performing the necessary functions if you promised some substantial reward.
Based on the answers you receive, you might fine-tune your questions so that prospects feel like they are adding value to your brand when they participate in these surveys. You may also pose your surveys as giveaways, like in this example, where SigmaBeauty announced a giveaway reward of $500 for survey participants who would answer questions that would help the company improve customer experience.
Landing pages are where you shoot your shot. You make your offer, highlight the best features, and pray that the visitors on your website leave you with their contact details.
Having 10-12 landing pages is beneficial in increasing conversion rates by 55%, but first, let us define a landing page.
It is a standalone web page made especially for a marketing or advertising effort. It's the page that a visitor "lands" on after clicking on an email link, an advertisement from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or another comparable website.
Landing pages are created with a single emphasis or purpose, known as a call to action, as opposed to web pages, which often have multiple aims and encourage research (or CTA, for short).
Customers are more likely to purchase if they believe they are getting something of value in exchange for nothing. Giving away something for nothing and converting leads are two great uses for landing pages.
You may offer a free e-book or a how-to manual to educate your audience on a specific subject or product feature while adding value. A gift might prompt a customer who is undecided about a good or service to decide considerably more quickly. The landing pages you create must have a visually appealing design to gather contact information from leads, encourage newsletter sign-ups, or sell your digital goods.
(Pro tip: You should consider developing a mobile-friendly landing page given the absurdly high number of people that shop on their mobile devices.)
You may take inspiration from the Doordash landing page for recruiting Dashers for food delivery. It impresses upon the visitor that Dashers have an independent use of their time while highlighting potential earnings. The more clear and concise the copy, the more appealing your value proposition is.
Social media marketing is one of the most effective forms of inbound marketing for acquiring visibility. You can maintain contact with your audience by maintaining a solid social media presence. Additionally, it will generate regular, targeted traffic to your website and spread awareness of your business.
Your material will reach potential customers more as you share it on social media platforms. Using social media, your business may display its human side, and you can build a vibrant online community through which your consumers will want to learn more about your brand and its offers.
Social media also gives you the advantage of directly accessing your potential customer’s wants and needs through social listening. While comments and inquiries from followers may appear on your social media pages, the conversations that are taking place may highlight what they feel about you. Based on their opinions and assumptions, you can tailor your products or services to include the most popular features that will benefit your ideal prospects and improve the overall customer experience. With social listening, you can always stay informed, respond quickly, and benefit from happy customer experiences.
One example of an organization nailing its social media marketing is HootSuite. It is a platform that offers social media marketing services. Therefore, they have mastered their own game. Their Instagram page features frequent product updates and relatable reels for anyone working in the digital marketing world, not to mention their employee-specific hashtags that those working at their offices may use to show off their incredible company culture. This helps them attract their ideal prospects and top talent worldwide.
Influencers are new-age digital individuals who have already established rapport and trust. If you can harness the huge audience base of an influencer relevant to your niche, you can use it as a powerful inbound marketing tactic to build consumer trust and drive sales.
Influencers may be instrumental in shortening your sales cycle and introducing your brand to hundreds and thousands (even millions) of consumers at once. Most influencers have a dedicated fan following, and who better show them the benefits associated with your products or services than their digital idol?
To utilize influencer marketing in your inbound strategy:
Using influencer marketing, you can drive demand and churn out brilliant content to grab as many eyeballs as possible, translating into paid deals in the present or sometime in the future. Influencer marketing especially works in the retail and e-Commerce niche.
One great example is American Express, the famous payments merchant organization. With their brand hashtag, #AmexAmbassadors, American Express has collaborated with hundreds of influencers with luxurious lifestyles to sell the special privileges that come with their Platinum card to the masses—a masterstroke that has led their Platinum cards to be insanely popular amongst the common man.
Inbound marketing enables you to establish trust with top-notch leads interested in your products or services
This is especially crucial if your company has a lengthy sales cycle. Building brand awareness and trust are important if your prospects typically take the time to explore several offers and assess the benefits and drawbacks of each. All the strategies listed above may not all work for your business—it may be one of these or a combination of a few. Try and test, and go back to the drawing board frequently to find out what works best for you.
But one thing is sure—marketing and sales automation software can improve your chances of making sales. This is why we would like to introduce you to RevenueHero!
Now, why should you invest in this sales automation tool? It checks all the boxes that make your sales process seamless.
Lead qualification? Check.
Lead prioritization based on high-value propositions? Check.
Booking instant meetings to maintain prompt communication (and sort out your existing (or potential) customers’ concerns at a moment’s notice? Check!
Do you see? With a robust lead scoring system and easy integration with every product you may own as part of your GTM stack, ReevenueHero covers all bases to help you enhance your company's customer service while managing all your high-quality leads in one place. This SaaS platform is the ultimate tool to never miss out on a deal again and drive sales in an organized and seamless fashion—all affordable for you to get started!
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