Inbound marketing has become the latest buzzword in the world of commerce. A term devised by marketing software company HubSpot, it refers to the art of making your company interesting enough to get your customers to come looking for you. It focuses on earning attention (instead of buying it) through engaging content and social media.
In the B2B environment, inbound is particularly powerful because it eliminates the need for cold calling endeavors and is less intrusive than traditional marketing methods. It boosts the efficacy of your website among your target audience and generates sales leads by getting your prospective customer to lower defenses and allow your message to get through.
Here are some of the reasons why B2B companies are starting to use inbound marketing approaches:
It’s Cost-Effective
Marketing is often considered a "luxury" expenditure by businesses, particularly during rough economic times. This has led to the need for cost-effective methods to trump very expensive traditional marketing, such as television and print media. Inbound marketing delivers on this promise because the message reaches those users searching for your products and services—not just the ones your sales team works so hard to find and make contact with.
- Digital marketing is cheaper than traditional methods
- Online advertising works on a Pay-Per-Click/impression basis, so the ROI is amplified
- Marketing efforts are much more closely targeted, so the expenditure reaches the people it’s aimed at, not the redundant masses
Research shows that inbound marketing costs an average of 62 percent less per lead than traditional marketing does.
It Helps with Sales
Warm leads are every salesperson’s dream, and inbound marketing delivers them. Most prospective customers become leads because they are looking for the product or service you offer, searched for it online, found your website or advertisement, clicked on it and gave you their contact information. That’s a far cry from cold calling people who may or may not be in the market for your product.
Apart from providing qualified sales leads at a fraction of the cost, inbound marketing also helps the sales team make strategic shifts instantly if they need to. The results are much easier to measure than outbound marketing because of the availability of website analytics and tracking technologies. This means that the moment your marketing department spots that something isn’t working, it can change the focus and adjust the campaign to suit, so you never have a dip in lead generation.
It’s Less Invasive
In the B2B environment, traditional advertising is particularly invasive. To really reach the individual buyer, ads need to impinge on private time such as when your buyer is sitting down to dinner. Flighting an ad in the middle of the business day is useless because your prospect is at work. Sales calls during business hours often result in interrupting the prospect in the middle of a meeting or an important task. Follow-up calls can be inconvenient and cause the prospect to back off because he’s too busy to give attention to the issue at the time.
Inbound methods, however, are giving marketing a new, improved reputation—simply because they're not invasive. Rather, creating quality content that people want to share on blogs and social networks drives your ability to be found. The content is included in Google search results, and prospects who are interested in information about your products and services will find you.
Most B2B customers aren’t yet ready to buy the first time they make contact with sellers. This results in more than 80 percent of leads being lost with outbound marketing. That is because the sales person moves on to other, hotter leads. With inbound marketing, you can nurture your sales leads along and guide them through the sales funnel until they are ready to purchase.
It Builds Trust
Develop thought leadership by providing useful content your current and prospective clients can use, whether they buy your product or not. This builds confidence in your company and helps to create relationships based on trust rather than commerce. Your content is a way of sharing your knowledge and owning your place in the industry, which helps your prospects "navigate" through waters they may be unfamiliar with.
When the time comes for them to buy, who are they most likely to turn to—the person or company they trust, who helped educate them without a (palpable) thought of making a sale, or the hard-sell provider whose main focus is closing the deal?
The B2B world is highly competitive, with a number of providers for practically every product or service available. Inbound marketing offers you a way to differentiate your company from the rest, by building a reputation that makes you attractive to your target market. For that reason, many corporations are switching to inbound.
* Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
