What is Inbound Marketing?

How Inbound Marketing Can Help Your Company:

What is Inbound Marketing?

There are four phases to inbound marketing. They are:

1. Attract

   1. You want people to come to your website who will become your customers

   2. You can attract them by creating blog posts, have a content strategy for what you create and post, and then have active social media accounts

2. Convert

   1. After you’ve attracted someone, you want to convert them into a lead

   2. You can do this through forms, meetings, messages, and CRM

3. Close

   1. Once someone has become a lead, you now want to make them your customer

   2. You can do this with pipeline management, lead nurturing, email, and lead scoring

4. Delight

   1. After a customer has experienced your product or service, you want to engage and delight them

   2. Smart content and conversations are two ways to delight your customers and keep them happy

These four phases allow strangers to become customers, visitors to your website, and promoters. This also allows for customers and promoters to attract others to you through word of mouth.

What Makes Inbound Different?

While traditional marketing focuses on cold calling, cold emails, ads, and are marketer-centric, inbound marketing utilizes SEO, blogging, attraction, and focuses on the customer. Instead of creating content that’s geared towards the company, inbound marketing creates content that helps the customer and makes them the center of the campaign.

Inbound marketing is effective because it’s much more economically efficient compared to traditional marketing, and it allows companies to create an experience that people want instead of spamming them. By using inbound marketing, you’re getting people to come to you instead of reaching out for them.

Remember, inbound marketing is about the content that you create. By creating blogs that are interesting to the customer, they more likely they are to use your product or service. You can bring strangers into your website with different forms of content such as: videos, podcasts, eBooks, etc.

Why Do You Need Inbound Marketing?

There are numerous benefits to inbound marketing. Some of these are:

• Shape a company

• Influence future purchases

• Generate social media shares

• Provide leads

• Increase customer awareness of a brand or company

• Encourage customers to communicate with you on a more personal level

Compared to traditional marketing, inbound marketing is built over time. For example, your company might create a blog post in a few hours, but then over weeks and months, that same post might get more traffic and more and more people will share it. Eventually, it creates better SEO and brings more people to your website and creates more customers. Remember to be patient with inbound marketing, it’ll pay off in the long run.

Types of Inbound Marketing

• SEO

  • Search Engine Optimization uses keywords from your posts or website to connect customers to you. You want to make sure when you’re creating content, you’re keeping SEO in mind. You want to use words that will make your website pop up when a potential customer is looking online.

• Blogs

  • Blogs are very effective in connecting with customers. They provide a conversational tone and allow a company to make the customer feel valued. With blogs, make sure the content you’re writing about helps the customer, and doesn’t strictly talk about how great your company is.

• Social Media

  • Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms can be very effective when used correctly. Create a social media calendar in order to plan out what you want to post and when. This will help you stay on track and create social media posts that align with your campaign.

• eBooks

  • These are informative materials that can also help you keep your customers or appeal to potential leads. They should be informative and help the customer out in some way.

Using these different types of inbound marketing will make your campaign much more successful. If you can incorporate multiple types of inbound marketing in your campaign, you’ll have a higher rate of success. For instance, if you can create a blog post with specific words for SEO, and then share that post through social media, you’ll get more attention and have a better campaign.

Start Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

So you’ve decided you want to start an inbound marketing campaign. How do you begin?

First, understand that the more you invest into your campaign, the greater the results will be. Make sure you have the time and the ambition to create a great campaign.

Here’s how to start:

1. Identify who your target audience is and begin researching them. You want to learn all you can about them in order to create content that pertains to them. You don’t want to go in blind or else you won’t get the full benefits of inbound marketing.

2. Create a compelling story for your customers. You want to be able to explain why they should choose your product or service above all others on the market.

3. Decide what platforms you’ll utilize to deliver content. Is this going to be a social media campaign? Is it going to be blog posts? Decide now so you can effectively create content.

4. Create a content calendar and stick to it. You might have to play around a little bit to figure out how often you should post, what time, and on what platform. There isn’t a magic date and time, you’ll just have to figure it out from your customers.

Keep in mind that with an inbound marketing campaign, all the content should be customer focused, not business focused. Don’t create content that only talks about your company and what you can do for your customer. That won’t be effective in getting their attention or convincing them to use your product or service. Create content that feels personal and makes them feel valued.

Lastly, remember to have a weekly review session. You’ll want to recap your efforts at the end of every week to make sure your campaign is effective. If you need to adjust anything, this debriefing session will be the time to do it.

What is Marketing Automation?

Introduction

Marketing automation is a form of technology that has one goal in mind; to automate the marketing process and make it easier for marketers to accomplish their goals. This helps marketers become much more effective and efficient in their work. It takes repetitive tasks such as social media and email blasts and automates them. This allows marketers to spend more time focusing on other tasks and to-do items they have, rather than having to remember to do the same thing again and again.

One question you might have is, “Does marketing automation interfere with the authenticity of the message my company is sending?”. The answer is no. The goal of marketing automation is to continue to produce authentic and helpful content to customers, without having to take up more of your time. It will help you reach your goals faster, and will still ensure your customers are still receiving quality content they would expect from your company.

How to Use Marketing Automation

Effective marketing isn’t creating a general email and sending it to as many people as possible. That doesn’t make the customer feel valued, it makes them feel like another number or another customer that a company doesn’t care about. You want to make the customer still feel like they’re important to your company, and that your company cares about them.

Rather, effective marketing is creating an email targeted at a specific audience and sending it to them, following up with them after the initial contact, and at the end, thanking them for their time. Your customer doesn’t want to be sent a generic email with a product or service your company offers. That feels impersonal and they can tell a thousand other customers got the same email. They want something that feels tailored to them, and feels like someone took the time to craft for them.

Using marketing automation allows you to still effectively market without having to sacrifice more time crafting content and following up with customers days later. Instead of having to remember to follow up with the different leads you reached out to, marketing automation will do that for you. It allows you to focus more of your energy on other marketing campaigns.

Three Categories of Marketing Automation

Marketing Intelligence

• This tracks codes to see what customers interact with online. Marketers are able to see and analyze this data for patterns or behaviors that can help with a campaign

• Business Development

  • This focuses on moving customers from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom. Essentially, this brings them from the interested stage to the buying stage. This category focuses on utilizing behaviors and attitudes of customers and closing the deal based off of those. A marketer might use SEO, social media, and blogs in order to achieve this goal

• Workflow Automation

  • This category focuses on internal processes. Some of these are budgeting, calendars, etc.

What Does Marketing Automation Help You Achieve?

There’s a lot that marketing automation can help you achieve. Here are some examples of what it can do for you:

• Generate more leads

• Prioritize your efforts and to-do list

• Nurture leads to become customers

• Manage email campaigns

• Reflect on the success of campaigns

• Better customer relationships and retention rates

It also helps you achieve a more efficient workflow and helps you generate more revenue for your company. Leads are also of higher quality if you use marketing automation.

What Should You Do with Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation can do a lot of things. However, in order to get the most out of it, here are a few things you should do with marketing automation:

• Combine marketing automation with your inbound marketing efforts

  • Inbound marketing is all about creating tailored content for targeted audiences. This main goal shouldn’t change by adding marketing automation into the equation. They should work together to still create that tailored content, but then taking over after the initial contact

• Send tailored content to a target audience

  • Don’t just create content without an audience in mind. Along the same lines, don’t send content to everyone you know. You want to create content that aligns with a customer’s wants and needs. By doing this, the customer feels like the company cares about them and will be more likely to use your product or service

• Create customer engagement campaigns

  • Once you close the deal with a customer, you don’t want to just forget about them. Make sure to create content specifically for them and still engage them. By nurturing those relationships, you’re guaranteeing that they’ll keep coming back, and they may even recommend you to people that they know

What Shouldn’t You Do with Marketing Automation?

As with anything, there are a few things you shouldn’t do with marketing automation. Here are a few things you shouldn’t do with marketing automation:

• Don’t start automating without double checking your goals

  • Marketing automation makes things much easier, however, with that, sometimes it’s easy to not keep an eye on it and make adjustments as needed. Take the time to revisit your goals and ensure your marketing automation is staying on track with them

• Don’t send generalized emails to everyone

  • Sending the exact same email to everyone you can think of is one of the worst things you can do. It wastes your company’s time and effort, as well as your customer’s. The success rate of just sending an email blast is almost nothing. Create content for specific targeted audiences to get the best out of your marketing efforts

• Don’t forget about your customers

  • Being focused on getting new customers and generating revenue can sometimes make it hard to remember about your current customers. Remember them and engage them. It’s not easy to gain them back if they feel like you only cared about their money and not about them as a consumer

If you’re just starting with marketing automation, keep going even though it can be lengthy. It’s worth it in the end! If you haven’t started using marketing automation, start now!

Challenge Coin...Accepted

The history and meaning of the challenge coin runs deep for many that carry them. With my military background, there is rarely a day I'm not packing my coin ready to draw.

The SMHeuristics team has been so excited to plan, design and launch a Challenge Coin gift to the Idaho Manufacturing community. The coin had its debut at our Start-ups & Suds event at Barbarian Brewing this week.

Challenge Coins are typically a representation of one's company or industry and a symbol of pride. It’s a powerful way to gift your customers, to challenge your competitor’s design or to recognize your internal team.

We hear the idea of the Challenge Coin is already spreading in the Idaho Manufacturing space and many are producing their own, if they haven't already. Here is a nice article from the New York times presenting a history and rules for the Challenge Coin:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/us/politics/challenge-coins.html