An Overview of Inbound Marketing Automation

Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation are relatively new ways to market. We’ll call this Inbound Marketing Automation or IMA in this post.

The old approach to marketing relied on sending out messages in as many formats and mediums as possible, to broadcast it to its maximum reach. Maximum reach was essential, because these Outbound Marketers knew that less than 3% of these messages might resonate with their recipient. And today’s slew of spam filters and non-returned calls or emails attest to how many ignored messages have been sent.

Inbound turns this around by using all of your marketing spend and ingenuity to get your website found on the web, and then engage your visitors with the aim of converting them into prospects. This is one of the major benefits driving Inbound Marketing’s success. Done right, your ideal prospects come knocking on your door and give you permission to sell them something. It’s a lot like the Field of Dreams: If you build a great website, the buyers will come.

And because the buyers may number in their thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands), you need automation to manage it all. We’ll cover off in a moment a little of the how and what you do to achieve this, but if you’re new to all this web stuff and feel a little daunted, take heart. The rewards are high indeed. Inbound Marketing Automation really does work:

1. Most people more than double their website traffic using it
2. Conversion rate increases of more than 250% are frequent
3. The average cost to acquire a lead is 60% less compared to Outbound Approaches.

If these numbers seem overly optimistic to you, consider that 92% of B2B buyers begin their solution search online. Hark back to the Outbound days and think of what you would have had to do, to make this marketing claim: If you get your site to #1 on Google, you will reach almost 60% of your target audience (Google’s 70% of the search engine market and almost 90% of people click on the 1^st result).

Now you know why you want to implement an Inbound Marketing Automation system, lets clarify an important point: Inbound Marketing Automation is best thought of as a process. Tools and specific techniques, of course, but the Process is the way you tie them all together and ensure that the whole system is greater than the sum of its parts.

A formal process description is based on the Continuous Process Improvements approach of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat.  Here’s a good example of such a process description, this one deals with How to run a Social Media Marketing Campaign: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln

Three points to consider as you think about the Process:

1. A Marketing Strategy is essential

The first thing to contemplate is your Marketing Strategy. If you already have a strategy including online components, it’s still an idea to review it. The online world changes rapidly and your strategy must be current. If your strategy is out of date (or doesn’t exist), or doesn’t cover the online aspects of Inbound, you must create one first: Your whole website (all of its copy, graphics, structure and content) will be based on the keywords and marketing concepts you define in the strategy. If your strategy is wrong, your subsequent effort is a waste of precious resources.

2. Holistic Websites

You are going to either redesign or renovate your website. Holistic websites are really the one ones to consider. A Holistic Website is carefully designed upfront to accommodate the results of your SEO effort, is easily extended to include a Blog and the other forms of Social Media marketing, has its copy and content properly designed around its keyword phrases and your prospect’s buying-cycle, and, of course, is ready for your IMA system to plug into when you switch it on. There’s a LinkedIn group called Holistic Website Performance which discusses approaches to building such sites for those of you who are interested.

3. Define KPIs (Key performance indicators)

What are the key objectives you have for adding Inbound Marketing to your website: As the famous slogan so succinctly puts it, the goals are usually More Sales Leads of higher quality at lower cost ^TM. But we also need a way to measure our success, so it’s a good idea, for each clearly stated KPI, to list the metrics you will use to measure the current values now and then decide how best to portray these metrics as a trend thereby making it easy to monitor your progress towards your goal. Include the thresholds for use in measuring performance (i.e. the expected values, averages, whatever you need to discern the trend and the performance quickly and accurately).

The Components of an Inbound Marketing Automation System

A typical system is shown below.

 

Components of Inbound Marketing Automation

1. Your Content. The subject of content marketing is gaining much attention lately. In essence it depends on having content that makes your site the destination of choice for people interested in your field. The tools indicated here help create it, display it, disseminate, promote and catalogue it. Our blog offers some ideas on how to create such content (website details at the end).
2. SEO and PPC Tools. Search Engine Marketing includes tools for Organic Search (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC).  There are also tools to help devise Keyword strategies and others to assist with advertising campaigns; score your website, analyze its traffic share, determine your Search Engine Results Page ranking, assess incoming and outgoing links, etc.
3. Social Media Marketing tools help you run your SMM Campaigns. Reputation Analytics scan social networks determining the “buzz” around your products and company. The tools help find authoritative or influential blogs and websites for your area. Others help with Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and the many social media platforms. A search for any of these topics on Google will result in a long list of articles and tools, and our blog covers the subject too.
4. Demand Generator (sales lead nurturing) packages track and evaluate visitors on their profiles and digital footprints, and nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects via drip-email campaigns run via Automation Rules.
5. The hot prospects (with a sufficiently high score) are fed into your CRM system helping your sales people to place effective sales calls.

And this could be your site…
Imagine visitors arrive on your site, attracted by your keyword and SEO strategy, and all that Social Media Marketing you’re doing. They find that your site perfect matches their keyword phrase (because you created your marketing strategy and keyword phrases well, and then built a holistic website).  The site is such a perfect fit to their expectations that begin exploring and don’t bounce away.

They register to get your thought-provoking content. They read it and return for more. Because they have given you their name and email address (they are thus an Official Prospect), they are assigned to the first of your drip-email nurturing campaigns and are now automatically nurtured and cared for, according to your best sales and marketing practices encoded in your system’s Business or Automation Rules. Your prospects are cared for flawlessly, repeatably and 24/7. Each automated drip-email element provides just the right response to nudge this person to the next step in their buying cycle.

Marketing people are released from the drudgery of managing leads and responding to routine inquiries, freeing them to create new campaigns. And sales people concentrate their efforts on the hot prospects who are ready to buy now and leave the “just looking” leads to the automation system. This is how Inbound Marketing Automation increases your revenues while lowering your costs and thus boosts profit significantly.

Our website introduces Inbound Marketing Automation, and through its glossary of terms, white papers and tools, details the way it works, its advantages and cost benefits.

Author: Eric Goldman