So if you’re just starting out in internet marketing, or perhaps you are taking you first steps into inbound marketing. It can often be hard to see how it can attract prospects to your website, let alone how it then is able to convert them into leads and further segment them into additional marketing channels for further nurturing.
If you fall into this category, then I hope this gives you a better understanding of the mechanics behind inbound.
It all sounds rather complicated, but it isn’t.
Let’s break down the process for you, so you can see how all the parts come together to and work together.
Firstly we need have a look at the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer’s journey.
- We develop an ideal customer. We do this by building a buyer persona to represent your ideal customer, you can find out how to create one in a previous blog post – Creating a Buyer Persona & why it’s important in another blog – Buyer Persona’s: What they are and why they are important.
- We then develop our content; blogs, articles, videos and so forth in line with what interests and pain point’s that our buyer persona can relate to. The best content at the awareness stage is educational, as this allows the visitor to gain trust from reliable information, while not pushing a product on them.
- Then we look at optimising via On-page SEO and Keywords the content, for search engines to find.
- We also look at a Social Media and Paid Advertising to help promote this free relatable content.
- Once the prospect becomes a visitor to our site, we use Calls-to-Action (CTA) to grab their attention to a value add offer we are presenting.
- Once the visitor clicks through the CTA to the landing page we then direct them to a lead generation form, which will allow us to trade a valued offer for their contact information. This is known as a conversion or a goal.
- Once they have converted and downloaded their content, they arrive at a thank you page, from here they will be greeted by related free content and perhaps other free offers.
- So in the background here we are collecting the prospects contact details and additional information, which we can start using in a few different ways.
- One of the best ways is to refine your buyer persona. Sometimes you can ask additional questions to segment your buyer persona into multiple, this allows for slightly different marketing or nurturing approaches in the future. We can also segment clients into what’s called a negative person which is one you don’t want to market to, time wasters etc.
- We can enter this data into a workflow or CRM to nurture leads that are not ready to buy just yet. Another cool way of doing this is an automated workflow system such as offered by Hubspot, coupled with their free CRM it makes this process very seamless and easy to track.
- Email marketing, now we have their contact details we can over time educate them via email, and hopefully nurture them back to a product or service.
This is the basic loop. If we look back at step seven, we see that the new lead may choose to download another offer, this will give your marketing and sales team addition information and will allow them to better manage the future nurturing of this lead, and that’s great thing.
They may choose to leave with their content offer, and go read or use it, only to return from an email a month down the track suggesting blog posts related to that offer download, that might catch their interest.
Further allowing us to gather more information on where they are on their buyer’s journey, as well as what product or service they are gravitating to.
Read more in our inbound essentials series of blogs:
- Creating your Buyer Persona
- Buyer Persona: What They Are and Why You Need Them
- What is Inbound Marketing Methodology
- Is Inbound a good fit for my business?
