Like so many businesses, yours has decided to invest in an inbound marketing strategy. You know you’ll need to invest a lot of time into your game plan: creating your content calendar, researching keywords, creating your buyer personas. You’re thinking about all the time and money you’ll spend when you ask yourself, will inbound marketing help get customers?
Short answer? Absolutely!
Think about it. What’s the first thing you did to answer that question? You probably went to Google and searched something like “Inbound Marketing Help.” Then you clicked one of Google’s top ranking results and, if this blog practices what it preaches, you came here. That is the magic of inbound marketing. Great content gets you noticed and brings you potential customers.
But wait a minute, you say. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to become a customer. True. This just highlights the first phase of inbound. But remember inbound marketing’s key performance indicator isn’t customer acquisition, it’s lead generation and lead quality. So when considering if inbound marketing helps gain customers, it’s important to keep that in mind.
Allow me to continue to demonstrate how inbound marketing helps gain customers. But first, take a look at the compelling statistics yourself.
Statistics credit of: Kapost.com and Hubspot State of Inbound 2016
The data doesn’t lie but, just like anything else, inbound marketing isn’t a magic pill that will launch your sales into superstar status. It also isn’t a cure-all for other areas of your business that are not working properly. On the other side of inbound marketing lie many other factors that will determine its overall success.
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Sales, for example, must support your inbound marketing efforts in order to see the fruits of your inbound labors. Simply put, if you want to see results, sales and marketing must work hand in hand. In fact, your sales team should adopt an inbound mindset as well.
Here’s how inbound marketing continues to help gain customers. Once strangers find your website through your awesome content, you nurture them to become contacts. This can be done through relevant calls-to-action where visitors are invited to give you their name and email in exchange for more helpful content.
And just like that, your visitor becomes a lead at which point your content strategy must continue to warm them with timely, relevant content before sales takes over and gains a new customer.
Image credit: Hubspot.com
The process is logical and makes sense given the ways in which today’s consumers make their purchase decisions. But don’t be fooled. Inbound marketing takes a lot of planning, time, and testing. It won’t bring your business company overnight, but its efforts will pay off with patience and commitment. Plus, your efforts will cost 62% less than traditional marketing!
But wait! There’s still more. Inbound marketing doesn’t just help you gain customers, it helps you retain them. When done right, your social media, blogs and emails will continue to delight your customers, so much so that they’ll become your greatest content promoters.
