What are Inbound Marketing objectives?

Today, Digital Marketing isn’t complete without mentioning Inbound Marketing. The level of sophistication and complexity that the behavior of clients on different networks and platforms has reached demands an answer at the same level; only Inbound Marketing, with its perfect mix of place, time, and content can support the client experience and get the return on investment we desire.

Businesses that support Inbound Marketing save more than $14 for each new acquired client, according to a study published by Invesp. In addition, 41% of marketing experts confirm that they can measure ROI with Inbound and 82% say that the impact of their Inbound actions on their marketing strategy is positive.

Establishing goals throughout the entire inbound marketing process is essential, but they have to be smart goals that help us progress. If you still don’t know what the SMART methodology is, take notes because it’s very useful:

SMART Goals: what they are

Smart goals should meet 5 criteria:

• Specific: Answer questions like what, how, when, where, and why. You must be concrete and specific when defining them.

• Measurable: Choose quantifiable goals that allow us to quantify the goal and benefits and analyze and compare the results to know if we’ve successfully achieved our goal or failed.

• Attainable: Don’t waste your time with unrealistic or unreachable goals, even if you really want to reach them. You should see the reality of the situation, which will help you to avoid failure and frustration. Keep growing step by step, not all at once. 

• Relevant: The desired goals must have a real and important impact on your company, in addition to being linked to your business goals.

• Time-related: Goals must be achieved within a timeframe and have a time of realization and a desirable scenario. Scheduling is very important for the effectiveness of a project. 

Applying the SMART philosophy to inbound marketing goals can help us expand different actions and paths with which we can reach our goal. These are the inbound strategies that will help you reach the smart goals that you lay out for your project:

Inbound Marketing Strategy: key goals

Attracting web traffic

Your web must be thought out and designed to capture the attention of potential clients. Then, you must interact with them through forms, CTAs, and other acquisition techniques. The right content and perfect usability for the visitor is necessary for them to make the jump from unknown users to leads.

Not all traffic generates business: it’s imperative to attract the right users, those to whom we can offer the product or service that they need. To successfully achieve this, Inbound Marketing proposes the following techniques:

• Define the Buyer Persona: The BP is a representation of the ideal client of a company or a specific product/service. To know what kind of users interest you and determine how you are going to bring them to your site, you have to first analyze and define their profiles and behavioral patterns. Here, you’ll find a step-by-step, detailed guide on how to create a Buyer Persona. 

• Create content: Quality, interesting, new, original, and instructive content wins and is key to seducing future clients. When it comes to creating it, keep in mind that it should be directed at your Buyer Persona and adapted to the moment in the inbound marketing funnel in which they are. Content can vary widely in format: blogs, ebooks, webinars, video tutorials, and much more. 

• SEO Techniques: Web positioning is imperative to get traffic. That’s why we have to work on SEO writing, learn how to use long tail keywords, and improve link building techniques to increase the number of links and improve our domain authority.

• Social media: Sharing content on different social networks where we find our target audience allows us to create engagement, build a community, and increase our visibility with the users that interest us. That’s why we have to be careful when choosing which networks to strengthen and which to ignore, according to the trends and different profiles on each network. 

Increasing Leads

We’ve achieved attracting new visitors to our website. Now is the moment to accompany them throughout the entire buying decision process until they become real sales opportunities. To achieve this, it’s imperative to gather all possible information about them.

How do we do it? By offering something in exchange for their information through forms. Value content is the best tool to get it, as we mentioned earlier: e-books, technical articles, guides, etc. Basically, any information that is interesting and valuable to each of your buyers and helps them resolve doubts or problems so that you become their principal source of information about a concrete topic. 

Some of the most important elements to convert visitors to leads include: 

• Call To  Action (CTA): CTAs invite leads to realize a determined action. It must include an attractive copy that encourages them to click (‘Download your e-book now’, ‘I want a free guide about Inbound Marketing’). It’s one of the tools that can create important sales opportunities.

• Landing Pages: Once the user clicks on a CTA, it should redirect them to a landing page where they can find all the necessary information about the product or service in which they have shown interest.

• Forms: This is a necessary step for visitors to become leads. Thanks to the information that the visitors give us, we can incorporate the data into our CRM and kickstart the next actions to convert them into real clients. To achieve this and ensure that the conversion is simple for the user, it’s necessary that the form is optimized.

• Thank you page: The visitor has trusted us with their information, so thanking them is a good way to complete this process. Design a nice thank you page and you’ll be on your way to increasing the engagement rate of your potential clients.

• CRM: Leads don’t do anything for us if we don’t follow them and convert them into sales opportunities. A CRM like Salesforce, with all its cloud tools (Marketing Cloud is what you’re looking for if you’re a marketing expert), helps to centralize the management of the database, the interactions they produce, and the place and time and track all the movements of the lead to then optimize our interaction with them.

Conversion of leads into clients

Once we have the information of our potential clients, how do we make sure they become real clients? The most important and immediate action is to sort the databases and classify the leads in different lists according to their characteristics.

Then we put in place different actions through which we get them what they need at the right time and through the right channel, using the information they have left us about their behavior on our website.

• Email Marketing: it’s important that the emails we send are personalized so they have a strong effect on the users and we provide value with our communication. Email marketing tools like Email Studio, within Marketing Cloud, open the field of possibilities of our email strategies.

• Lead Nurturing: it’s crucial to nurture and feed leads with what they are looking for. It’s not just a simple email marketing campaign; it’s a technique that takes one more step to achieve the conversion of these leads into real clients. Lead nurturing is a multichannel strategy that requires automated marketing software to function effectively.

• Workflows: with tracking campaigns, we can know how the lead nurturing process works and control all the actions to drive the lead to the final buying process through the sales funnel. Establishing the condition that triggers the interaction process with the potential client is the first step.

• Lead Scoring: Lead scoring is a technique that helps us qualify the leads according to the interest they have shown in relation to our communication with them. Learning the behavior of each lead in detail allows us to determine the level of interest of our product or service and know how to act with them, allowing us to create different actions and create lists in which each client is classified according to the parameters that we ourselves have created. Through Lead Scoring and Workflow creation, we can help users advance through the buying process.

The traceability of our actions is another of our tools that we can use to offer a value interaction to our leads. We observe their actions and measure their download, interaction, or rebound levels with respect to the content to know if it works and, if it doesn’t, to improve it. It’s important to have real time information about all our actions. How do we get that? With Tableau, for example.

Tableu is a Business Intelligence tool that, together with Salesforce, shows us new forms of visual data analysis, mixing variables to extract more trustworthy conclusions. And if you have various technological solutions that collect information about your company, consider integrating them with Mulesoft and centralizing all the information so that the work of marketing and sales is more fluid. 

Inbound Marketing techniques are the solution to the challenges of digital sales in the 21st century. Technological support is necessary, and there are solutions that will help you kickstart all these actions in a more effective fashion. At We Are Marketing, we do consultations to evaluate the state of your project and recommend the best tools and actions to improve your marketing and sales. Let’s get started!