So, how do you turn your business into an Inbound Organization that focuses on customer success?
Inbound Marketing is about having and using a holistic approach to how you market and sell. The approach requires you to have a set strategy, as well as processes and systems, to attract, engage & delight customers.
It is important to always keep in mind that, while Inbound Marketing is effective in helping us to attract, engage and delight customers, customers have their own parallel journey that they walk towards purchasing what we offer. This is known as the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is made up of the Awareness, Consideration and Decision stages. During the Awareness stage, the prospect is experiencing challenges and symptoms of a problem or opportunity. By the time the prospect enters the Consideration stage, they would, to some extent, have defined the challenge they seek to overcome or opportunity they seek to exploit. It is during this stage that they start to evaluate the different avenues and solutions they can use to solve their problem. And, ultimately, during the Decision stage, they conclude and make a commitment to the solution they will invest in to solve their problem.
The Inbound methodology effectively addresses the buyer’s journey by matching it to your seller journeys, as depicted below:
Attract
The first stage of inbound marketing is attracting visitors to your website. This is done by creating and promoting content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience. This can include blog posts, e-books, infographics, webinars, and more. The key is to create content that addresses the needs and problems of your target audience and that is optimized for search engines.
One of the most effective ways to attract visitors to your website is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of optimizing your website and its content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is done by researching and incorporating relevant keywords into your website’s content and meta tags, as well as building backlinks to your site from other reputable websites.
Another effective way to attract visitors to your website is through social media. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are powerful tools for reaching and engaging your target audience. By creating and sharing valuable content on these platforms, you can drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.
Engage
Once you’ve attracted visitors (traffic) to your website, the next stage is to convert them into leads. A lead is someone who has expressed interest in your product or service by providing their contact information, such as their name and email address. To convert visitors into leads, you need to provide them with something of value in exchange for their contact information. This can be a free e-book, webinar, or other piece of content.
To convert visitors into leads, you need to have landing pages on your website. Landing pages are dedicated pages that are designed to convert visitors into leads. They typically include a form that visitors can fill out to access the offer. A good landing page should be clear, concise, and to the point, and should include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that tells visitors what to do next.
Case Study: A B2B SaaS company named XYZ has been using inbound marketing to generate leads. They have a strong buyer persona of small business owners and entrepreneurs. They created a lead magnet in the form of an e-book that provides actionable advice on how small business owners can increase their revenue and improve their operations. By promoting the e-book on their website, social media channels, and in email campaigns, they have been able to generate a significant number of leads.
Delight
The final stage of inbound marketing is delighting your customers. The key is to make sure that your customers are happy and satisfied with your product or service, and that they are convinced to continue doing business with you.
One of the best ways to delight your customers is through proactive exceptional customer service and support, as well as creating ongoing engagement and loyalty. By providing quick, helpful responses to customer inquiries and addressing any issues or concerns, you can delight, build trust and loyalty. Additionally, implementing a customer feedback system can help you identify areas for improvement and make necessary changes to your product or service.
Another effective way to delight your customers is through ongoing engagement and loyalty programs. This can include creating a customer community, offering exclusive content or promotions, and providing personalized recommendations based on purchase history. By keeping your customers engaged and invested in your brand, you can increase customer retention and lifetime value.
Sidebar: The Funnel vs the Flywheel
The Sales Funnel
The sales funnel, also referred to as a sales pipeline, is a systematic approach to selling a product or service. It is a prospect-to-customer conversion-focused sales model that shows the different stages through which a prospect moves on their purchasing journey. These stages include being aware of their need, having an interest in solving the need, deliberating on various purchasing solutions which solve for that need, and ultimately making that purchase.
Typically, you need to work through a lot of prospects to achieve a sale.
For example: If you have 1000 prospects, typically 500 may sincerely be interested in your product or service. Of those 500 people, only around 50 people may end up buying your product.
Many leads or prospects fall through the cracks because of a lack of follow-up with them. They may well end up buying from a competitor or are simply “qualified out” of the sale because they can’t afford your product or service, or because they lose interest. Therefore, you continuously need to be filling your sales pipeline with more prospects.
The funnel, unlike the flywheel, is very linear and does not take the customer’s success into consideration. Therefore, it is safe to say that customers in a linear funnel seldom further propel the growth of the business.
The Flywheel
The concept of Inbound being a flywheel, instead of a linear funnel, is that a flywheel is continuously spinning, given the right amount of energy and momentum. If applied correctly, the flywheel will align all of your marketing, sales and service teams to collectively apply greater force, while also reducing friction to the momentum that your flywheel is gaining. By so doing, you are providing an appropriate marketing and sales experience as well as a delightful service and customer experience to your customers. Not only will it keep them coming back to you, but it will also add and apply energy to your flywheel by referring other customers to you. These new customers will, in turn, be given a similar customer experience journey, thereby adding greater force and energy to your flywheel. The result: Your business grows, with a tribe of happy and loyal customers, at a healthy rate.
Unlike the funnel, the flywheel focuses on improving your business by applying energy in the areas of your business that can have the biggest impact – not just in sales, but also in marketing, service and customer experience.
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