Marketing within the digital age is changing, with inbound marketing at the forefront of the evolution. HubSpot defines inbound marketing as a method of attracting, engaging and delighting customers to grow a business that provides value and builds trust. This new approach to B2B marketing allows tech and telecoms companies to align their activities with consumer behaviour. Customers want content that allows them to gain information about a solution they need, rather than being targeted with irrelevant content.
Behind every successful B2B tech and telecoms business is a successful inbound strategy. Creating your B2B inbound strategy doesn’t have to be hard, and with our 5 tips you can get started straight away.
Tip 1: Determine Your Target Audience
The foundations of an effective inbound strategy are to have buyer personas. If you’ve read our recent blog, Buyer Personas: A Beginner’s Guide, you already know the importance of this marketing tool. Defining your target audience can help you to personalise your inbound strategy. This specialist approach ensures your sales, marketing and service teams are equipped with knowledge that will help to them to generate, close and nurture leads successfully.
Tip 2: Create a Variety of Content
Simple as it sounds, some B2B tech and telecoms companies find it hard to produce content that will spark the interest of their customers. Some B2B marketers will fall into the trap of producing similar pieces of content, which can result in the loss of current and potential leads.
A quick and easy way to get started would be to repurpose some already great content. This can be done by turning a blog post into a video or a SlideShare, adding depth to content as well as creating variety.
Tip 3: Having a Strong Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Strategy
Google is the answer to everyone’s problems. It’s the first-place potential customers with a problem will go to find a solution. Therefore, having a strong SEO strategy will secure a high organic ranking for your content upon a search engine. This means customers will be more likely to come across your offering.
This can simply be done by targeting high traffic keywords and analysing data trends. These small steps can help to reposition your website and brand in the search engine results, giving greater online visibility.
Tip 4: Nurture Your Leads
Building relationships with customers throughout the funnel should be a high priority within your B2B inbound strategy. According to Marketo, 96% of visitors that enter a website are not ready to buy. With this in mind, your marketing and communication efforts need to cater to your prospects’ needs, giving them the information and answers they desperately need.
A great way to start nurturing your leads is to create valuable content. Marketo states that potential customers would be willing to provide contact information in exchange for valuable content. From here, you can slowly nurture leads via email marketing and tailor content to their needs.
Remember slow and steady will always win the race. Most B2B marketers will spam potential leads with a heavy sales approach. Not everyone will be willing to buy from your brand straight away, it takes time.
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Tip 5: Analysing Your Strategy
After you have implemented your B2B inbound strategy, you should be continuously analysing its progress. This will enable you to determine which parts of your strategy you will need to optimise.
When analysing, you will need to start gathering data on click-through-rates and conversion paths to see which channels have high Return-On-Investment.
Here at Ilex, our main aim is helping your B2B tech and telecoms company to prosper. Saleh states that a properly executed inbound strategy is 10x more effective for lead conversion than outbound.
Our expert team are at hand to help develop your inbound strategy, so you can generate, close and nurture leads successfully.