Introduction

When deciding to implement an inbound marketing strategy, many companies face a dilemma whether to outsource the services or do the work in-house.

On the one hand, outsourcing to an agency means relying on skills and expertise of professionals, on the other hand, there is always a fear of dependency on a third party who does not have the same stakes as you in your brand.

I believe that the pros of outsourcing outweigh the cons. Inbound marketing requires a lot of experience and a high volume of work. The learning curve is long, and at least for the first year, the right agency can get you on the track to inbound success.

Eventually it sums down to the professionals you choose to join you on your marketing journey. A qualified agency, working together with your in-house team, could help you maximize your online marketing and achieve your business goals, in scopes that could be very difficult to deal with, without an external professional advantage.

Read this post to find out what you should be looking for when outsourcing inbound marketing services to an agency.

TLDR: Always evaluate what added value the agency can provide over an internal employee.

1. What do you expect to acheive from Inbound Marketing

The entire Inbound Marketing methodology includes four stages:

Make sure that you are working with an agency who is able to help you identify what stages you need to create or strenghten. For instance, there is not need to hire an agency who are top lead nurturing pros, specializing in converting visitors to leads, when you have good conversion rates and are dealing with a problem of attracting strangers and turning them to visitors.

2. Does the agency do inbound marketing for their own marketing?

Does the cobbler walk barefoot?

Your agency needs to be able to provide professional insights based on constant in-depth learning and experience. If your agency doens’t do their own marketing well – that’s something to worry about.

• Do they have a blog to which they publish constantly?
• Do they create content offers? (eBooks, whitepapers, infographics, etc)
• Do they use forms and CTAs to advance prospects down the buyers journey?
• Do they send personalized emails
• What is the quality of their content?
• Are they active on social media?
• Do they participate in discussions in forums and blogs?
• Do they speak in industry events?

3. What are the agencies’ qualifications?

Review Linkedin profiles and research the personnel online.

4. Who are the agencies clients?

Note that some inbound marketing clients prefer to remain under an NDA. However, any respectable inbound marketing agency will be able to provide at least one satisfied client that you can speak with.

5. Do they have any special achievements?

• Are they tiered partners  (look for partner agency badges such as Hubspot partner agency, Google partner agency and so on)
• Did they win any industry competition
• Did they create any notable publications (published books, wellknown articles, etc)

6. Evaluate costs

Make sure there are no additional costs that you are not aware of and may encounter with time. Be very clear on what fees include and what’s expected of your team.

7. Reporting

Your agency should keep you informed at all stages. Make sure you are aligned regarding the KPIs that are important for your success, and that you are conducting weekly meetings with your agency in order to evaluate where you stand with respect to the performance of your inbound marketing.

8. Workloads and deadlines

Part of the reason you will be outsourcing your inbound services is the inability to deal with the workload in-house. Your agency should solve this hurdle. Make sure your expectations are adjusted and that the agency is aware that their job is to successfully navigate your company through the inbound waters.

9. What tools does the agency use

Different inbound marketing tools are relevant for different stages of the inbound methodology. Make sure your agency is hands on, regarding the relevant tools that are the best fit for your company.

As you can see in the above image, different tools provide soluitons for different stages of the inbound methodology.

Conclusion

The agency you hire should be able to deal with large scopes of work, and be goal oriented. If an agency is rushing to close a contract with you – that is a bad sign. A professional agency will evaluate your goals, set clear KPIs together with you, and then work as your partners towards bringing your company to those goals, constantly evaluating and optimizing. A professional agency will tell you if your goals are not realistic, and will not proceed to working together if they do not believe they can help you reach your goals. Goals should be specific, measurable, attainable and time bound. In time, you may want to shift all services in-house. That’s perfectly fine, just make sure you are clear on what that entails, and that you are confident in the level of knowledge you have acquired from your agency partners.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your marketing I invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an inbound marketing strategy.

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Introduction

Have you ever paused to define what qualifies as a MQL vs. SQL in your company? (marketing qualified leads vs. sales qualified leads) If not, let’s set some ground rules and improve your marketing and sales approach to incoming leads.

Rule no.1 – not all leads should be transferred directly to sales!

If you are selling a product or service that requires the lead to make a significant investment in time or money, you can count on the fact that most of your incoming leads are not ready to make an immediate purchase. Sending incoming leads directly to sales, simply because they filled out a form correctly (i.e. information qualified) and with no regard to who they are and their state of readiness is a waste of your sales team time.

Rule no.2 – not all leads are MQLs, qualify them and let go of the rest!

That begs the question, what qualifies leads as MQLs?

The answer will always be different from company to company. In essence, MQLs are leads who match your company’s buyer personas. As you are probably well aware, your company is not targeting “everyone”. If you do not yet have a clear understanding of who your buyer personas are, I urge you to first read this post and learn how to define and live by them.

Say your company is a B2B company, targeting CTOs at startups, would you agree that a marketing manager of a private college is not an MQL? No. That’s a no brainer right? Look closely. If you don’t have a clear definition of your buyer personas, you’re making such mistakes in your day to day marketing efforts.

Rule no.3 – not all MQLs should be transferred directly to sales!

As the name infers – MQLs require marketing action. Be sure to nurture those MQLs using lead nurturing best practices. Send them relevant blog posts to read, eBooks, whitepapers, surveys, webinars. Make sure you are creating a personal journey and taking into consideration the buyer’s journey. Only once your lead is at the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, is it time to get sales in the picture.

The following pyramid will help you get an idea of the type of content that is relevant for MQLs on each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Source: Hubspot

Rule no.4 – Not all MQLs are opportunities!

Sales calls should also be evaluation and qualification calls. Make sure to have a clear understanding of what makes a lead an SQL. 

Most salespeople are already familiar with the IBM BANT method for qualifying prospects:

Budget – can they afford your product or service?

Authority – is your lead the one making the decision or are there other decision makers that should be part of the process

Needs – what are your leads needs and can you help them reach those needs

Timeline – When do they want to take action (and why then)

However, in our current rapidly changing markets, BANT isn’t enough. Your prospects are informed and educated. Qualifying them requires a further drill down. That’s where the Hubspot GPCT method comes in handy:

Goals – what are their goals and can you help them achieve them?

Plans – how do they plan on achieving their goals? are you under the impression that their plan is the best way forward? does their plan require your product/service?

Challenges – what are they challenges they’re facing? can you help them overcome their challenges?

Timeline – drilling down further than the timeline discussed under BANT – what’s their timeline for achieving their goals by implementing their plans? do you find that timeline realistic?

No need to waste time on leads that are not worth more sales follow up and will not become real sales opportunities in your CRM.

Rule no.5 – once an lead becomes a customer, get marketing back on board

Marketing needs constant feedback from sales and vice versus. Companies with a healthy smarketing approach, report 20% more annual revenue growth. Be sure to measure conversion rates, understand which of those SQLs became customers and always improve your definition of your buyer personas. Then, adjust your buyer’s journey in accordance.

Also, once a lead becomes a customer, make sure to keep providing valueand delighting the customer with relevant VIP premium offers such as discounts, customer events, webinars and so on. This will also help sales up sale and crossable when relevant.

Conclusion

Sales cycles should not be taken lightly. In order to make the most of your time and budget, be sure to understand who your buyer personas are, what makes a lead an MQL, how to nurture MQLs, when a lead becomes an SQL and when an SQL is a right fit for your company. Yes, it’s lots of work, but trust me, it will pay off.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting inbound marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an inbound marketing strategy

Schedule a FREE consultation

Introduction

Inbound success does not happen overnight. However, if you understand the value of creating long lasting relationships with potential customers, this post will break down the 4 fundamentals of Inbound Marketing success.

Be sure to review this post before you set off to creating an Inbound Marketing strategy.

1. Identify your buyer personas

These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. It’s important to understand who you are trying to reach. What are their behavioral patterns? Their demographics? Their goals?

You can research and figure this out by:

• Speaking with your sales and learning who your current best customers are and why
• researching the web (specifically websites such as Quora, blogs and industry forums)
• making educated guesses
• Interviewing your current customers. Focus on:
  • Background
  • Demographics
  • Mannerisms
  • Primary goals at work
  • Primary challenges on their to success
  • What are their common objections

Here are some questions that will help you get started:

(source: HubSpot)

Figure out how you can help your buyer personas overcome their challenges and reach their goals

You can learn more about how to define your buyer personas.

2. Use the buyer’s journey

“73% of consumers prefer a personalized online shopping experience” HubSpot.

In the awarness stage, a prospect could be asking themselves “My foot aches when I step, especially in the morning or after I go running. What’s wrong with me?”.

In the consideration stage, the prospect would realize “I have an infection in my heel. What are my options for releiving or curing my symptoms?”.

In the decision stage the prospect would be taking into consideration the following options “I can see my family doctor, I can try acupuncture or go to a private orthopedist. The latter costs a lot but I have insurance”.

Approaching the prospect with an offer, at a stage where they do not even know what their problem is, would be entirely out of context.

Make sure to interact with your prospects in correlation with their stage of the buyer’s journey. You can learn more about the buyer’s journey.

3. Create remarkable content that is easy to read and navigate

“Stop thinking like marketers and start acting like humans” Dharmesh Shah.

Your content should always be providing contextual added value to your prospects. Make it as educational as possible. Note that educational does not mean teaching them who you are. It means teaching them about how to solve their challenges and what solutions you can provide to their problems.

Inbound Marketing = content + context.

On average, conversion rates are 20% higher when using contextual marketing.

Here are a few best practices:

• Make sure you are using keywords that are relevant to your buyer personas, at their relevant stage of the buyer’s journey.
• Go easy on your prospects, always make sure they are able to easily navigate to every piece of content
• Be creative but try to keep it short and friendly. People are impatient – they want bottom lines.

4. Leverage your content

Always distribute your content via:

• Your blog
• Social media
  • Join LinkedIn groups and post your content there
  • Post on Twitter
  • Post on your Facebook page
  • Get your entire team to share the content and engage
• Landing pages – when built well they are like employees working for you and generating new leads:
  • Always include the company’s logo
  • Use a form to gather visitor information
  • Remove distractions
  • Use as few templates as possible
  • Use empty spaces to help the information you’d like to deliver stand out
  • Create a visual hierarchy with text, colors and imagery
  • Feature a list of benefits

You can learn more about how to create effective converting landing pages

• Relevant calls to action within your website, blog and landing pages. Click here to read more about how to create attention grabbing, persuasive CTAs
• Email marketing:
  • Send your prospects personalized emails that are relevant to their stage of the buyer’s journey and to any other info you have gathered about them and their interaction with your company
  • Always set one goal per each email
  • Track your emails performance, look out for delivery rates and click rates. Here are 6 pro tips on email marketing that will boost your performance.

Conclusion

Each Inbound Marketing strategy should include an understanding of:

• Who you are trying to reach and how you can help them
• What is the buyer’s journey and how it applies to your prospects
• What content would be most relevant to your prospects
• How to leverage your content

Once you understand the above essential four, you can dive deeper and learn how you can integrate these fundamentals within your organization in order to drive growth, generate qualified leads and achieve your goals.

I invite you to download our How To Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy FREE eBook in order to learn how to create a long lasting inbound strategy.

Good luck!

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Introduction

Here’s a simple truth, it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire one. You should be focusing on building trust from the first moment you interact with a prospect, and from then on, never take your foot off the gas. Keep nurturing your prospects as you would in any healthy relationship.

If you are currently focusing all your marketing efforts on attracting, converting and closing your customers – you are failing on what might be the most important stage – retaining and delighting your most precious asset – your current customers. Just as you would not buy a plant and then move on to buy another only to stop watering the first plant, don’t neglect your customers.

Ok enough with the analogies, here are 7 customer retention tips to get you on track:

1. Know your customer personas

Make sure you know who your customers are. Learn their challenges and needs.

Send out surveys, create loyalty events, and reach out to them just to ask if there is anything you can help them with.

Download our 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks and Ideas Free eBook

2. Be innovative

Deliver to your clients in accordance with their needs. Stay ahead of the game and don’t let them settle for a product or service that might be losing relevancy, or simply not helping them enough.

3. Educate

Always provide added value, educate your prospects and see how you can help them achieve their goals. This can be done by creating special content offers, personal emails, regular posting educational material in your company blog, conducting webinars, conferences and more. The rule of thumb is that your content should be aligned with your prospects’ needs and challenges.

4. Don’t be a heartless robot

Be personal, listen, ask. In each interaction with a customer, follow the pareto (80/20%) principle – listen 80% of the time, talk 20% of the time. Acknowledge your customer’s needs and empathize with them.

Make sure to use social monitoring as a listening aid. Find out what their current problems and goals are.

Record measure and track all interactions with your customers.

Pay attention to non-verbal ques – expressions, voice, body language and general sub-text.

Always follow up and always do it ASAP. NEVER EVER take longer than you promised. Saying “Hello Mr.Customer, I apologize but I still don’t have an answer to your issue, I will be sure to check back and keep you posted within the next three days” is a perfectly legitimate follow up interaction (needless to say – do take the time to actually try and solve the issue, don’t create an endless loop).

Pro tip: you can use marketing automation to create follow up drip campaigns .

6. Stop measuring success from your own perspective!

Focus on your customer’s experience. When speaking with your customers don’t boast about your companie’s acheivments, talk about how your vision and metrics can benefit them. Your customers don’t care about your one sided goals, and why should they?  Focus on your mutual goals and remember that in a long term game, if your success doesn’t correlate with your customers success, you need to reevaluate you point of view and metrics.

I think this image sums this point up perfectly:

source:IMGUR

7. Build your dream team

“Customer service shouldn’t just be a department; it should be the entire company.” -Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Be sure to hire people who are foremost people – train them for skill. See that they fit culturally in your organization, and that they are in line with your companies’ overall agenda. When interviewing potential team members, prepare culture specific interview questions and set cultural expectations in advance.

Everyone on board should understand that they are representing their company in each interaction with prospects and clients.

Each interaction is part of the larger customer experience.

Your team members should be using your company product or service themselves.

Ways to empower your teams:

• Have a new hire training program in place as well as an on-going training program
• Be passionate. Set an example. Educate your team by doing not by lecturing.
• share stories of remarkable customer service with your team.
• Encourage your team to learn from one another and seek company-wide collaboration
• Develop clear work ethics and principles and make sure everyone is aware of them
• Let team members be themselves. Enable them to shine.

8. Complaints are opportunities

“All great victories, be they in politics, business, art, or seduction, involved resolving vexing problems with a potent cocktail of creativity, focus, and daring. When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.” ― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage” (not affiliate link)

A customer reaching out to you with a complaint is an opportunity to make an unhappy customer an ambassador. Make sure the customer knows you care and do everything in your power to see to the problem. If the complaint is public (on social media for example), resist the urge to try and hide the complaint – this is your time to shine and show the rest of the people who have seen the complaint how your company deals with issues. There will always be complaints, it’s how you deal with them that matters.

I love this example of how Domino’s Pizza listened to their critics and turned it to their advantage.

9. Stay on your customers’ mind using automated email drip campaigns

Now’s might be the time to point out that there’s no marketing cure for sucking. Make sure that your product lives up to your promise to your customer or else it doesn’t justify its existence. Assuming that’s a given – engagement is the name of the game. Neil Patel makes a strong point:

“However you choose to define it, engagement matters. Why? Because a customer who doesn’t use your product isn’t going to keep paying for your product. Think about it. If you pay $90/month for a home cable subscription, but nobody in your home uses it, you’re going to cancel. Likewise, if your customers are not engaged — not using the service for which they are paying — then they will cancel.”

10. Use automated email drip campaigns

A drip campaign is an automatic campaign utilized to send certain information at a certain order and time.

There are many online tools you can use to set up automatic email drip campaigns. Mailchimp and autopilot are great solutions for quick wins.

• Pay your customers special personal attention on occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and holidays
• Send renewal incentives to customers nearing the end of their membership.

Integrate your product with your marketing automation tool and create product action triggered events. Some ideas could be:

• Product action follow up email asking for feedback or providing more information about the action conducted
• Sell other features
• re-engagement emails to inactive customers after a certain time of inactivity, offering incentives and answering FAQs
• Send coupons as loyalty rewards
• Say goodbye when a customer leaves, ask for feedback and provide incentives to reconsider

Conclusion

Retaining customers should be one of your companies’ top missions and one that all team members should be active participants in. A deep understanding of your customers, clear work principles and a curious empathic state of mind are key principles to adopt and adapt.

A happy customer is a potential ambassador. No reason to miss out on that.

(source – Hubspot)

No point in trying to sell to a person who isn’t even aware they need your services. Create a patient strategy that is attentive to your prospects needs and mental stage.

The benefits

When implemented correctly, inbound marketing services services can offer hundreds of benefits, such as:

• Generate qualified leads with low cost
• Increase brand awareness
• Impact upcoming purchases of prospects
• Get broader reach
• Create trust and credibility
• increase social media shares and inbound links
• Have increased conversation with customers 24/7

Unlike other traditional marketing methods, inbound strategy builds upon it as time passes. That means that, for instance, a valuable content posted will bring both quick and long-term benefits. Besides the fact that it will bring much attention to your company when launched, it will also serve as a resource for your customers for a long time. As the content reaches a wider audience, it may become a source of inbound traffic via SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social shares.

But does it really work?

To prove the effectiveness of Inbound Marketing, here are some quick facts that are worth reading:

• B2B businesses which blog get 68 % more leads than businesses who do not (Social Media B2B)
• Nearly 84 % of users ignore ads that are sponsored by Google (Search Engine Land)
• Inbound leads are cheaper than outbound leads by 65 % (Search Engine Journal)
• Almost 75 % of marketing specialists prioritize an inbound approach to marketing (State of Inbound)
• 42 % of B2B companies have a documented Inbound Marketing plan (Content Marketing Institute)
• 76 % of companies who blog get positive ROI (HubSpot)
• 87 % of business decision makers would like to get information through articles rather than advertisements (Cmo.com)
• Surveyed companies with more than 300 employees allocate about 55 % of their annual marketing budget for content creation and promotion (Kapost)

The average cost per lead drops by 80 % after 5 months of Inbound Marketing implementation (Eloqua)

What you HAVE to include in your strategy

If you are thinking of implementing this type of strategy in your business, here are the 3 most important elements that should be present in your strategy:

1.Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

According to Imforza, 93% of online experiences start with the search engine. This indicates that if you need to bring more people to your business, then you should be online as well. SEO is all about the optimization of website’s structure, form and content for search, in order to get higher places on Google search results. Having a high quality and optimized content is the first requirement that needs to be present for Google to find you and make your content appear in the first places of its search. SEO is a crucial element of an Inbound Marketing strategy, because if you cannot be found, then won’t get the business.  To go deeper in SEO, here is an awesome guide to SEO by Search Engine Land.

2.Content Marketing

You don’t invite guests and leave them with no drinks, right? The same goes with Inbound marketing services. Now, when you got leads with the help of SEO, you have to provide them with valuable content, because without it, there is no chance of keeping and satisfying these people. Just because different customers have different needs, preferences and problems, you must develop content in multiple forms with the purpose of assisting your audience to solve their problems and satisfy their needs.  Here are the components of a successful content marketing strategy:

• Blog: Having a high-quality blog is one of the most effective ways of promoting a company. According to HubSpot, companies that are blogging are 13 times more likely to get positive ROI than those who don’t. Blogging can help your business get new visitors and make them return to your website. Blog is a reliable source where your audience can get information about your products, services, company and industry.
• Ebooks, white papers, guides: With the help of such downloadable content, you get the opportunity of nurturing your leads with longer-form content, where you can show them how the interaction with the company can benefit them.
• Case studies and testimonials: In general, people trust customers more than companies. Cases and testimonials are an excellent way to convince leads, because when they hear from someone like them, the chances of converting them increase.

3.Social Media

Creating content is just the beginning of the journey. Making sure that the content reaches the target audience is the crucial part. After creating a content, it is the right time to promote it, and this is where social media comes in.

With 1.6 billion active users on Facebook, 332 million active users on Twitter and 400 million active users on Instagram, social media creates never ending opportunities for companies to market their products/services and attract more clients to their business.

A key task for companies is to determine which platforms are most appropriate to their buyer personas and where they should concentrate their efforts. To get rich exposure, it is important for companies to create their social media promotion plan, which will help them to better understand where they should distribute their content, how they can analyze their content and how much they need to spend on promotion in order to gain more traffic. Here are the 8 essential elements of a social media marketing strategy by Social Media Examiner to help you get started.

Conclusion

Nowadays, more and more businesses start to realize that outbound efforts alone are not enough to get profits. Instead, Inbound Marketing should be used to attract more leads and create brand awareness. To be successful in Inbound Marketing, companies need to create a specific approach to content generation, introduce marketing automation tools, which can help in nurturing leads and follow how these leads flow through the sales pipeline.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy

Schedule a FREE consultation

Decision

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) is represented by the decision stage, which is mostly focused on product features and capabilities. At this stage the buyer is finalizing his decision and may need a test drive to discard his last doubts.

In our example the prospect learns he can get treatment from his family doctor, ER, a nurse or private clinic. ER costs more but is the fastest and he has insurance.

The idea is to build trust and create value by presenting relevant content to your prospect, in accordance with his stage of the buyer’s journey. The content should be presented when he is ready and interested in reading it. Not a second before.

The content at this stage should help the prospect make a purchasing decision. Product comparisons, case studies, trial offers and live demos are a good fit.

Food for thought: 47% of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson – your prospects are consuming your content before your sales people even know who they are. Whether your like it or not, if your content is only typical decision stage content, you’re in fact ignoring the buyer’s journey and driving them away by being “too much” and too soon.

How to apply

(Source: Hubspot)

Distribute valuable content, build trust, create lasting relationships and turn visitors into customers when they’re ready. Take the time to research your buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Make a list of websites they use for networking, drawing inspiration, solving their day-to-day needs, etc. Speak with current customers and ask them about the journey they went through prior to deciding to work with you. How long did it take them? what did they identify as a problem? what solutions did they consider? What made them choose you?

List their favorite social media accounts, their preferred marketplaces to monitor prices, their most popular resources for trade-related news and technical specifications.

Dive into their buyer’s journey and help them down the path leading to a purchase.

When placing the right content at the right place and time, you will be able to attract strangers, convert them to leads, and further on to customers and even promoters.

Having a deep understanding of who you are writing to (your buyer personas) and at what stage of the buyer’s journey, will enable you to become customer centric. Instead of focusing on who you are and what you have to offer, simply being aware of the potential journey your prospects go through before they decide to buy from you can make a dramatic shift in your marketing strategy. If you’re unsure about the mechanics of driving conversions from content, make sure to read this post and learn how to structure your funnel.

Conclusion

As any relationship, buliding a relationship with your prospective customers takes time and investment. Make your marketing relevant and useful. Create the type of marketing that people will enjoy and benfit from. Put yourself in your prospects shoes and walk their buyer’s journey.

Then, when the time is right, pop the question and head off to towrads the susnset together.

Enjoy your journey!