In years past, your business may have spent too much time pondering how to reach more leads rather than executing a strategic inbound marketing plan. The good news is that 2018 is still shiny and new and ripe for your business's best marketing year yet.
What's more, several online platforms have evolved to the point of offering businesses easy on-ramps to success. Here we highlight three steps to guide your business's inbound marketing:
1. Grow Your Mailing List with Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook ads have always gotten glimpses and clicks, but Facebook lead ads can generate more valuable information to sustain your inbound marketing strategy. The call to action is clear in a Facebook lead ad, typically inviting leads to "Sign up" or "Subscribe."
When leads click on your ad, they will be met by a few questions your company has prepopulated, such as name, email address, and zip code. Leads can also elect to receive your newsletter or email marketing, indicating specific interests such as updates on new products or services, upcoming promotions, freebies, etc. You can obtain this information immediately.
Your investment in a Facebook lead ad not only has the potential to capture valuable information about a lead's needs and interests, but to maintain as a contact in the future, as well.
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2.) Continue to Deliver Valuable Content to Your Leads
Why did those leads originally subscribe to your email marketing? Because they esteemed you as an expert in the industry, with valuable information to share. Now that you've captured these leads, it's time to prove them right.
There are a variety of vehicles and forms for delivering that content.
One popular form is an email "drip campaign." A lead opts-in, e.g. through the Facebook lead ad described above. Then, a series of content-rich emails are sent on a staggered basis that is predetermined. Email drip campaigns hold a lot of appeal for a marketer that doesn't want to duplicate inbound marketing efforts. Rather than constantly drafting new emails to reach different lead demographics, marketers can build up a strong content bank with email drip campaigns. Many client relationship management systems make sending email drip campaigns easy, such as with Sequences, a tool in HubSpot Sales.
Further, because you know the lead is already interested in this information, you can test the success of certain subject lines and times of email release. If the internet standard of a 50% open rate is the sign of a healthy list, marketers strive to keep that list healthy. Emily Thompson of Being Boss writes:
Setting up list segmenting requires some forethought in online strategy and carefully setting up forms to send subscribers to the right segments based on placement and messaging, but it’s a great way to cater your marketing specifically to those on your list who are most likely to buy.
With a captive audience, and a high open-rate, successful inbound marketing will allow us to learn even more about leads and their behavior.
This leads us to the third step, which is to capitalize on that information.
3.) Become Your Own Artificial Intelligence
Drawing from the wealth of data generated by Facebook lead ads, as well as the subsequent behavior of leads with email drip campaigns, we have arrived at step three. The final step in strengthening your strategy is to use that data to create an increasingly personalized experience for leads and existent clients.
This is effectively the work of Artificial Intelligence. Successful inbound tactics is already able to harness the power of AI when the data is available at our fingertips. For example, when you set up behavior triggered emails, drip campaigns, or use chatbots to respond to customer questions, this is all fueled by AI. The automation not only takes the extra legwork out of marketing, but it increases the odds of your content breaking through the inbox noise of and distinguishing you from the competition.
