Inbound marketing (aka ‘permission marketing’) refers to the strategy of attracting leads for your business via company-created digital content. That content addresses the needs which your products or services fulfil or problems which they solve, resulting in the right people (those trying to solve that problem or fulfil the identified desire) approaching your organization, and working their way through your material in order to self-select or qualify themselves as a potential customer.

So, inbound marketing is a strategy. You need to assess whether it is a strategy that is suitable for your particular business and marketplace.

Why Inbound Marketing?

Because everyone hates being sold to … it’s that simple!

When was the last time you were on the end of a cold call, and you thought “oh yes, why not spend the next 15 minutes listening to this offer about why I should switch electricity companies?” And even if you have engaged in such a phone call lately – perhaps to the person from a very worthy charity, rather than the electricity provider – did you end up buying / donating or just wishing them a nice day?

If you are in sales, and you only have to talk to people who are already in the market for your products / services, your job is so much easier.

Inbound marketing the focus is on providing help or value, rather than making a sale. The sale will come as a natural result of providing value and solutions.

Inbound marketing also addresses the new buyer behaviour that we have seen evolve over the last decade; customers carrying out personal research and practically making the decision with regard to what they want to buy, before they ever talk to a vendor. Also, with the proliferation of paid TV, many more free to air channels, internet radio, and free video content, ensuring that a more traditional advertisement is seen or heard is a lot more difficult. This article provides many statistics showing how effective inbound marketing can be compared to outbound marketing.

Please note, I am not saying that traditional marketing no longer works … I heard a presentation from a career telemarketer just last week, explaining the benefits of lead generation via cold sales calls. You need to ensure that your choice of marketing strategy is right for your market and your ideal customers.

Fleshing out your Inbound Marketing Strategy

If you decide that an inbound marketing strategy is right for your organisation, then you need to:

1. Plan the content you are going to create in order to solve your prospects questions and engage them in their journey of discovery, building trust in your organisation, and desire for your products and services.
2. Determine which tools or platforms you will use to make your content accessible to prospects.
3. Create the content!
4. Disseminate the content and make it easy for people to find, and/or pay for traffic.
5. Measure and analyse the results, improving the content over time.

Clearly implementing an inbound marketing strategy requires effort and coordination of a variety of activities. Utilising a team of resources will help you implement more quickly. Tools such as a content calendar will help you to plan out the creation and distribution of your content in a logical manner.

Which Tools should I use?

Inbound marketing = making your marketing material extremely accessible so that your prospects can easily find the answers to their questions or solve their problems (i.e. find your products or services) when they are actively looking. Your content must add value, and guide prospects for whom your products and services are a good fit, towards the point of purchase. Some people will be in a hurry and will purchase immediately that they find a solution, so being able to buy from any piece of your digital content is important. Other prospects will take their time, evaluate multiple options, test you out, and then finally purchase days, weeks or months down the track. For such buyers, your content needs to educate and build trust.

The following tools are useful in implementing an inbound marketing strategy:

• Search engine optimisation (‘SEO’) – this activity is very important for ensuring that your digital content ranks above other organisations competing in the same space. Over time you want to “own the topic”, that is, be on the first page of results for every search on relevant words or phrases. SEO obviously needs content in order for search engines to point somewhere. The following types of content will deliver high ranks in the search engines the most quickly:
  • Blogs – either a blog on your own website, or blogs published on other popular websites, pointing back to your website.
  • Videos – most commonly distributed via YouTube, giving you access to people searching through this video search engine.
  • Reviews – usually in 3rd party platforms such as Google Reviews. However, they can also take the form of testimonials in your own website, including video reviews.
  • Website content – including online courses, guides, survey results, reports and research, white papers, diagnostic tools.
  • Press releases – often distributed via dedicated PR sites.
• Pay-per-click advertisements (‘PPC’) – whilst this might sound like traditional outbound marketing, because you can configure your ads to only appear in response to searches for specific keywords or phrases by people located in a particular region, PPC ads can be very useful for bringing visitors to your website who are trying to solve a particular problem. PPC is very useful for bringing in immediate readers of your content while you are waiting for your organic ranks (SEO) to improve. Google Adwords and Bing are the main two platforms for PPC ads, because they are the most used tools for searching for answers to problems. PPC ads must be supported by dedicated content on your website, also called ‘landing pages’. People who click on your ad will arrive on your landing page. To get the best return on your investment in that click (you are paying per click), it is important that the content delivers on the ad, and then takes the visitor along their journey of [hopefully] deciding to buy from you.
• Social media – people talk about topics on social media, as well as talking about their lives. Find where topics related to your products and services are being discussed, and then get involved in the conversation. Posting your own content in your social media accounts will also help people to find your content when they search for it in the social media platforms ? most social media platforms use hashtags (#) for helping people find content on a particular topic.
• Social media advertisements – this is PPC within social media platforms. The difference is that for some of the social media platforms, you can configure your ads to only show for people who match very specific demographics.
• Email and SMS marketing – once people have identified themselves as actively seeking to solve a problem or fulfil a desire, hopefully for your product, they may subscribe to receive future email and SMS messages from you. To inspire the visitor to opt-in for email / SMS there must be compelling value contained in your digital content. Often your blog content and other website content will be pushed to subscribers in a logical manner.
• Marketing automation – tools that automatically send a choreographed series of content to subscribe to learn more about your products and services. The more sophisticated of these automation tools will start and stop the delivery of your content, based on the manner in which your prospect is interacting with your content.

One of the great advantages of digital marketing tools is that they enable you to measure the interactions of people with your content and identify where visitors are dropping off. This can help you to improve your content and marketing process over time, and therefore increase the rate of conversion of visitors to paying customers.

As part of our digital marketing services we would be delighted to help you determine whether an inbound marketing strategy is right for your organization, define and plan your strategy, create the required content, implement, and analyse the results.

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According to Wikipedia¹, people in sales and marketing positions have been talking about sales funnels since the 1920s. The sale of many products and services involve a lead time from investigation through to purchase. Having a certain number of leads at each stage of the sales funnel or customer journey is frequently used as a lead indicator of your likely sales volume at a point in the future. Marketing attempts to ensure that people entering an organisation’s sales funnel have a certain problem they are trying to solve or need that must be met, and that are aware that solutions to these problems exist. The organisation then attempts to guide the prospective purchasers through their process of research, interaction with the sales team, competitor evaluation and ultimately the purchase of that organisation’s products/services.

A well-managed sales funnel perpetuates interaction with the individuals even after they become clients. Client’s evaluations of the company, employee performance, products and services are ongoing. The sales process should nurture and support clients, leading to repurchase, renewal of contracts and referrals, that is, back to the top of the funnel.

Unfortunately, in practice not all leads will emerge from the bottom of the funnel as clients. Even the best companies will lose a few leads along the way. Astute marketers will be constantly seeking to identify and improve all interactions down through the sales funnel and seek ways to fix common leaks. Improving the efficiency of their sales funnel ranks as the second highest sales priority after closing more deals².

The Graffiti Eaters is an example of a company who understood the benefits of a sales funnel but knew theirs was leaking somewhere along the way. They came to us with an existing website, Google AdWords campaign, and frequent blog and social media content to target prospects in the early stages of the sales funnel. Relationships with existing clients were maintained through blog and social media content as well as more personalised email newsletters.

After analysing the entire cycle, it became clear that the hole in this funnel was the website. We were able to drive significant traffic to the website of people who were looking to purchase their services via first page ranks in Google search results for relevant search terms. We were able to ensure the Google AdWords ads were displayed above organic search results. We were also able to encourage relevant traffic to click on the ads. However, once traffic reached a landing page of the website, much of the traffic did not continue through the sales funnel. Potential clients were lost and there was little to show for the advertising expenditure.

Landing pages play a key role in paid ad campaigns; they support the ad with more detailed content and help the prospect to take action and interact with the vendor. After clicking on an ad, visitors should be directed to a page that provides a clear, specific solution to their problem in a tone and style suitable for the audience type. Once the visitor has interpreted the key messages, that visitor should be guided on how to act on this information. A clear, yet tasteful ‘call-to-action’, such as a form for requesting a quote, a booking form, a request further contact link or the option to make a purchase.

After analysing The Graffiti Eaters website, we found that the landing page provided an unsatisfactory user experience and had significant room for improvement (see image below).

A cluttered appearance, with excessive text, images and animations grouped close together made it difficult for visitors to find the key information. Style inconsistencies throughout the navigation, headings and text provided a substandard appearance which wasn’t appropriate for the predominantly B2B audience. The call-to-action comprising 3 different options was confusing, and on mobile devices, it was only visible by scrolling to the bottom of a very long page.

We analysed the top performing websites in graffiti removal and similar industries which target the same audience. A design was selected which overcame the aforementioned issues (see image below or visit www.graffitieaters.com.au/graffitiremoval/).

The text was simplified to demonstrate the key points that owners and managers of commercial properties are looking for when seeking a professional graffiti removal service. A video was provided for those who are prepared to spend more time on the page.

We provided a clear call-to-action via the ‘Get it Off Now’ button which leads to a simple form, handling both bookings and quote requests. This button is part of a sticky header, which stays in view while the visitor scrolls down the page. A second button was placed towards the bottom of the page with the label ‘Request a Quote’.

The mobile number listed in the sticky header features click-to-call functionality when viewed on mobile devices. This enables visitors to click on the number and automatically call head office. As with the booking/quote request form interactions, this is linked to AdWords conversion tracking so that we can monitor the number of leads the ads provide.

These changes are part of an overall re-design of the website which is now clean, modern and user-friendly on desktop, tablet and mobile devices while retaining The Graffiti Eaters unique branding elements.

We reviewed the results of the AdWords Graffiti Removal ad group during April 2018 and compared it with April 2017 when the previous website was in use. The landing page gained an astonishing 242.85% more leads in April 2018 than in April 2017.

To put this into perspective, we compared the conversion rate of the Graffiti Removal Ad Group in April 2018 with global averages for AdWords campaigns across all industries³.

The campaign for The Graffiti Eaters achieved more than double the global industry average for conversions and more than triple the conversions gained from the previous website. Not only is the client receiving more leads, but they are also receiving a far greater return on their investment.

The effect of the new design was felt throughout the website, with the number of quotes completed increasing by 44.95% and the number of new clients generated increasing by 25.53%. A great result!

The Graffiti Eaters are one of many clients we are proud to have assisted with Google AdWords management (PPC), website design, and sales funnel optimisation.

Contact us to discuss how you can increase sales by optimising your digital marketing.

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