Why should my B2B company care about inbound marketing or SEM?
This isn’t the Field of Dreams—if you build it, they will not come. Other distribution channels like blogging, social media, and emails need to be employed in order to boost your lead generation efforts. The intention is to make it easy for buyers to research, evaluate, and purchase your products and services, so it’s critical to have the right marketing mix.
That’s where inbound marketing comes into the picture. According to Hubspot, inbound marketing generates 54 percent more leads than traditional paid marketing methods. Those are some serious lead numbers to consider.
Let’s take a look into the new way of marketing versus the old…
B2B Inbound Marketing: Capture the eyeballs of your unique customers
Inbound marketing focuses on earning attention by attracting prospects to your brand through sought-after content—content that answers a potential buyer’s questions, educates them on topics that may not have considered, and helps them make an informed decision—in an easily digestible way.
The term “inbound” comes from the idea that we are drawing prospects into your site to get that content.
- The prospect invites you to an ongoing dialogue. The conversation is interactive and adds value to both the buyer and seller.
- Regardless of your marketing budget, companies are three times as likely to see a higher ROI on inbound marketing campaigns than on outbound.
- Your business can accurately analyze, measure, and track how many prospects your campaign reached and its effectiveness.
Outbound vs inbound marketing: What is the difference?
Outbound marketing, otherwise known as traditional marketing, focuses on buying the attention of prospects by pushing products and services at them without their consent.
Unlike inbound marketing, outbound means pushing your marketing efforts outward into the public eye. Thinks magazine ads, billboards, direct mail pieces, emails.
- This is a disruptive and intrusive one-way conversation in which you talk at your potential customer to generate leads.
- Outbound leads costs 61 percent more than inbound leads.
- There are generally no concrete results to identify the number of prospects your campaign reached or persuaded since often times your communication is missed due to its passive nature. How can you really determine if a billboard is successful, right?
Thrive in Your Market
In this information age, if your brand can’t be found online, then it’s unlikely your business will thrive (or worse, survive) in the upcoming years. By 2020, it is predicted that more than 80 percent of the buying process will happen without any human interaction even taking place, according to Forrester. Therefore, it is important to publish and distribute content that targets each phase of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. In our experience, many companies focus their content on the bottom of the sales funnel with the decision phase. However, the majority of your site’s visitors aren’t ready to buy when they first come to your site so companies are missing a huge potential to meet the buyers during their first 80 percent of their journey.
Content is King
Inbound marketing utilizes many forms of pull marketing, including but not limited to:
- Blogs
- Social Media
- SEO & PPC Campaigns
- eBooks
- Website Pages
- Email Marketing
Enjoy More Business Success with Inbound Marketing
Contact us today and learn how Lform can improve your company’s online image and generate more awareness and quality leads through a comprehensive inbound marketing plan.