Core Actionytics Inbound Marketing and Sales Services

Since 2006, Inbound Marketing has been the most efficient way of doing business online. Instead of the older outbound marketing methods of buying ads, direct mail, buying email lists, and generally spraying for leads, Inbound marketing emphasizes on creating quality content that draws people in who will want your business and your products.

Nowadays, the average decision-maker does the majority of his/her shopping research online, whilst long before they’d reach out to you and contact you for all their information. In fact, according to a white paper authored by Google and CEB:

“B2B customers reported being nearly 60% through the sales process before engaging a sales rep, regardless of price point. More accurately, 57% of the sales process just disappeared.” -The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing

This is why having an all encompassing view of your agency’s Inbound marketing and sales service is so vital. By the time your clients get to the hard sell, the process is almost complete.  Now is the time that you need to prepare a strategy that helps the customer’s decision before they reach the hard sell, and guide them step by step till they can meet their needs.

If your Inbound strategy is deficient or inadequate, you won’t be able to achieve this. If you don’t build the essential foundation first, the ultimate sales case will be less likely to land successfully, and you won’t deliver the results your customer expects.

If however you have someone to help your team through sales support services in addition to a complete and fully executed Inbound marketing plan, you will be able to achieve a better ROI for your company. Indeed, businesses with closely aligned sales and marketing teams make an average of 208% extra ROI from marketing.

So how can you create a complete Inbound marketing and sales strategy that will boost your sales? There are seven core services that our team can help you with. In this ebook we’ll be going over the services in detail and show you how you can benefit from them in your business and your own customers’ success. 

Attracting More Qualified Visitors:

In an Inbound marketing strategy the first step is to attract more and more prospects to find you online and increase awareness towards your products/services. Perhaps you already have a social media presence such as a Facebook page that hardly ever updates, or a blog page with a few old posts. It depends on you to create a strong online presence that guides your customers and lays the foundation for your Inbound Marketing strategy.

Since attracting the right volume and quality of visitors is such an important section of your overall marketing and sales, three of the seven core services are part of this phase as you can see below.

1- Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Boosting and increasing website traffic is the same as baking: like baking, your company needs lots of supplementary ingredients that work consistently to get a desirable result. There is no authorized single strategy to create beneficial results by itself, rather it is a set of techniques and supporting appliances working together. These strategies include:

You lay the foundation for victory by hashing out an SEO procedure along with an SEO manager or responsible agency. Aiming to boost or strongly increase traffic without SEO is practically impossible.

According to your potential personas/customers and their interests, targeted keywords are set in on-page content. So when those personas/customers seek information regarding their words or terms of interest, your website will be prominently displayed among the results.

You’ll need to have a vital discussion around finding the correct keywords and phrases to target, and have your SEO manager or agency do momentous research to guarantee that the keywords you’re centered on are feasible and beneficial. To develop the site authority with SEO, it is essential for you to observe the main bloggers and industry influencers to make relationships and create back-links. Monitoring page rankings and traffic is also required; with analysis your SEO partner can adjust your strategies accordingly.

If you have a vigorous business with multiple services/products, create and optimize individual pages for each product. These individual pages help improve rankings for your brand. This ranking will improve over time, so get started as soon as you can with a website that has the right features and capacity to handle it. 

2- Blogging

First of all you have to clearly understand the importance of a blog for your business. As you know, regular blog posting with rhythm shows that a website is active and fresh which helps improve a site’s ranking on search engines. Moreover, using blog posts you positively influence the customer’s purchase decision because this way you’ll help the prospects find their answers and meet their needs more easily. Helping customers find their way to the best solution is the heart of Inbound.

3- Social Media

Even optimized keyword-rich blog content isn’t enough on its own. You definitely need to promote your blogs. That’s where social media comes in to help your business grow. Having a page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and other social platforms gives you a chance to share your helpful blog with people who are enthusiastic about your products/services. Furthermore, social media contributes a wonderful opportunity for their audience to share links they find engaging and fantastic with their own social circles, further expanding your client’s reach even more.

As a business who is alive in social media, you will use practical and unique imagery to post content on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to increase interested clicks, and links back to your website. In fact, whenever you share content on the website or blog, your prospects can easily share what they have read directly with others in their circle of family and friends just by a simple click. 

Converting Visitors to Leads:

Imagine that you have now optimized your website with targeted keywords and therefore enjoy high SEO rankings. Your team regularly publishes three or four posts weekly and you are sharing those links in social media. Moreover, the team members cohesively participate in online conversations about keywords and phrases they will target each month.

All these regular efforts lead the business to boost monthly traffic successfully. 

But here you see that actual sales and revenue are still in the same place. So what’s the problem?

Well, simply put, boosting traffic is just the first step which is essential but surely not enough. Those website visitors need to be converted into highly qualified leads which can then be converted to sales. How is this done? You’ll have to create landing pages, with practical content pieces for lead generation.

What does this consist of?

After you’ve successfully generated a solid amount of web traffic for your business, now you’ll want to separate the qualified from unqualified visitors. I mean you need to find out who is really interested in your product or service and who is just passing through.

4- Content Development:

Most of the time content offered on the website like webinars, ebooks, white papers and other kinds of content are very practical and specifically pinpointed to your business services/products. This helpful content aids the customers to solve their problem or even provides a step by step process which shows them how to do something that they need. 

The point is that your content is FREE but to access it, the prospect should register on the website and put his/her name, email address, and other requested contact information.

Through this easy process you guide the visitor into a deeper part of the sales funnel. If they fill the form and try to download the content, it demonstrates to you that he/she is significantly interested in that topic or offer.

When a visitor fills out the mentioned form to access the content, a lead is born. After that, based on the requested information about your services/products and downloaded content, both a digital and human follow up process is triggered.

For converting leads into customers it is significantly important to work on your website and nurture the visitors with compelling content, landing pages and CTA buttons.

To put it in a nutshell, valuable content in the form of guides, how-to’s, tutorials, comparisons, and videos is important in actively converting visitors to leads because it’s where they can meet their needs.

Converting Leads into Customers

For converting your leads, you need to cooperate with your agency to create lots of targeted content. It is crucial that the content covers the persona’s sales funnel from A to Z. Educational information like industry trends and how-to blogs are proven winners for the top of the funnel.

Despite this, the middle part of the personas’ buying journey requires content that ties more closely to your products/services. This content is ready to  deliver to leads in their preferred format. So wherever they are searching on any digital device these are accessible. This active and effective content helps to convert the leads to customers.

5- Marketing Automation

After leads are engaged in your content, a human follow-up is needed to communicate with them personally. Besides this, an automated process must do so to fill gaps.

Some of that follow-up ought to be deeper content and offers that persuade them to access more of your content. Of course how deeply you follow-up with them directly depends on the leads and their goals.

These offers are specifically sent to qualified leads through email marketing and marketing automation. Good news is that if you are using Hubspot Content Optimization System (COS) and workflows, you can customize the visitors’ journey according to their past activities.

You can create customized content for different stages of the buying journey. By Hubspot COS and workflows you can offer additional relevant content to leads which answer their questions and solve their problem at the different stages in their buying journey. Additionally, you’d want to incorporate email campaigns into your arsenal of tactics to target leads more effectively. By using email campaigns such as lead nurturing campaigns, you can aim to successfully generate more sales.

If you want to achieve your goal and boost your sales and revenue, we strongly suggest you figure out from your own viewpoint “how content can nurture leads at all stages of the sales funnel from the beginning to the end of the customer journey”.

6- CRM Implementation

So you start from boosting traffic, then convert visitors to leads and nurture the leads in order to extract the qualified leads for your client’s sales team. 

What do you have to do now? 

Nowadays, businesses expect efficient closed loop reporting on their marketing activities. Because with the right tools, companies can track their ROI from the beginning till where the visitor converts to a customer at the bottom of the funnel. How?

As Hubspot puts it:

“A 2014 study by Nucleus Research found that for every $1 spent on customer relationship management (CRM) software, a company saw an $8.76 increase in revenue. Yet, less than half the 140K respondents to the 2016 State of Inbound report use any CRM software. That means agencies have a major opportunity to increase their value proposition by offering CRM implementation services.”

Businesses need the expertise of agencies to help them because technical complexity, lack of qualified employees, and lack of time for the initial steps are common blockers to CRM adoption.

Initial CRM Setup

Running a CRM for your business needs an entire understanding of your sales process. Planning interviews at every step of the sales organization individually is important. This way you can determine the essential information for each group then personalize the CRM’s contacts, companies, and deal stages to meet your needs.

The first step is to transfer your historical data to the new CRM platform and teach your team the steps to importing their own data to the new platform. 

After your business’s historical data has been successfully uploaded to the CRM, the last step is to make the information relevant and accessible to everyone in the sales organization.

If you are looking for an effective FREE CRM to get clients started, you can book a consultation with us. We are here to help you.

Ongoing CRM Maintenance

So many managers and sales reps work with the CRM daily, that it is usual to get things disarrayed fast. In this case, custom objects, new deal stages and a lot of exclusive reports can block the system so your employees can’t access the required data quickly and easily.   

In large companies, CRM audits are generally run in house by the sales team. However, small and medium-sized companies like yours don’t have their own operating departments. There is lots of hidden value in assessing and evaluating your CRM’s efficiency every 3 months with an experienced CRM service provider. 

7- Sales Enablement Services

Sales Enablement has a broad definition. It is commonly used to explain resources or programs that help empower the capability of the sales team. Sales enablement service can include a multitude of different items, from email templates and sequences to using bottom of the funnel resources and even product documentation.

On top of that all, there are lots of applications that enable prospects to book meetings directly on the sales rep’s calendar.

For attracting the eager buyers for instance, on the pricing page or contact page, you can replace the existing CTA buttons with the link to the sales rep’s calendar.

It is crucial to know that meetings booked through a landing page decrease a sales rep’s prospecting time, hence this directly links ROI to your agency’s effort. It’s a win-win situation.Try to give prospects an easy accessible way to book meetings. Your calendar stays full and you stay valuable.

Whilst everyone imagines that the marketing team is responsible for content development, Ducurated’s 2016 State of Sales Enablement report, rejects it. According to Ducurated’s 2016 State of Sales Enablement report, marketing commonly produces nearly 30% of the content, while sales creates around 40% of the company content.

So what kind of content do sales teams create? Sales reps write hundreds of email templates yearly which contain good and bad templates.

Good templates highly improve prospecting speed, while poor templates quickly decrease and destroy credibility. 

Reviewing the sales email templates and providing the best performing content to all the team members can significantly improve the efficiency of your sales department. Email trends change very much over time. It is best practice to review email template performance every 3 months.

Measuring, Analyzing and Taking Action

Tracking your results via the whole marketing process is a vital step in your business. Through precise analytics you’ll know your ROI. This way you will find the strong and weak points of your business thus try to improve your strategy. In addition it’ll help you show your agency’s value to your board of investors.

If you are the one that wants to help your company improve tactics and generate more revenue you must know the answer to these questions:

• Do you completely and precisely know about  your sales funnel?
• Do you know the rate in which organic leads convert into customers in comparison with PPC campaigns?
• What percentage of your website visitors become qualified leads monthly?
• How many of your leads become new customers monthly?

If you understand these questions and know their answers, you will absolutely have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not in your Inbound marketing and sales strategy. You will need to track all of the above factors to boost your revenue.

If you are looking for a clean, easy and quick view to all the data and reporting, our suggestion to you is Hubspot. In fact it is an all-in-one software that allows companies to streamline the process and improve their practical capability.

One of the most strong points of this software is that it gives you a 360 view into all areas of marketing and sales, so you don’t need multiple tools anymore.

We are here to give you more detailed information about this fantastic software.