Understanding the Inbound Principles

Inbound Marketing is one of the most popular modern marketing methodologies that attracts customers by creating tailored experiences and being helpful at every stage of their journey with your brand.

Created by HubSpot, the Inbound Methodology is a business model that utilises the attract, engage and delight framework that our team at ProsperoHub lives and breathes by. The sales and marketing pipeline is no longer a unilateral funnel but a constant process of nurturing and converting customers to qualify them as valued, satisfied customers.

Using the inbound methodology, your content strives to solve the challenges customers are facing and help them with your products and services. The key element of your strategy is to produce and share high quality, attractive content that your buyer personas will be interested in. 

Solve your buyers’ challenges when and where they are looking for solutions. 

Gone are the times of interrupting someone’s day to push your product that they may have no interest in. Traditional efforts (also known as outbound marketing) refers to tactics such as telemarketing, cold calling, newspaper adverts, billboards etc. Essentially, outbound is an expensive way of reaching cold prospects when most of the time, they aren’t even interested.   

B2B Inbound Marketing is a less intrusive approach to lead generation that attracts buyers to you based on your content. This allows sales and marketing to target prospects that are more likely to convert.  

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that we can no longer rely on traditional methods to reach our prospects and customers. With people working from home or just a few days a week at the office, the sales and marketing environment has changed. The shift to digital has never been more apparent and your sales and marketing strategy should follow suit.  

Tip: Start actioning ‘inbound selling’ to accommodate to the 2021 climate through LinkedIn. Download our Ultimate Social Selling on LinkedIn guide.  

How can you use inbound marketing to grow B2B business sales? 

Developing an inbound campaign involves curating content that is targeted to a specific buyer persona. Each channel works together to make the buyer journey seamless and streamlined. To understand, where and when your future customers will be looking for information, your strategy needs to start with the buyer. 

Tip: Typically, it can take 6-9 months to see the return on investment from your inbound strategy. Be patient it’s worth it! 

Step 1: Develop Buyer Personas

Understanding human behaviour is essential for developing an effective inbound strategy. When market trends change, we, as marketers, must be able to adapt our marketing tactics accordingly. So, what is a buyer persona?

“A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” - HubSpot

Buyer personas are the result of the facts you know about your key target customers - information collected from a range of sources and through a range of methods such as observation, experience, interviews, and surveys – supplemented with some speculations derived from the areas you do know. Developing this persona that embodies all the interests, challenges and characteristics of your target audience to help visualise and empathise with their needs.

Ask yourself: "Who are my customers and current prospects and why do they need our help?" The ‘why’ question will be the most important you will ask when consulting potential buyers, because understanding what drives a person to make the choices they make, means that you are better positioned to predict their movements within the market place.

For an ultimate guide on persona development click here or book a buyer persona workshop with our inbound team.

Step 2: Create a Buyers Journey 

Consider the touchpoints your persona may go through before making a purchase decision. Understanding these touchpoints is fundamental for marketers to move prospects down their pipeline to be passed to sales. These touchpoints are then quantified using lead scoring in your CRM to determine what stage your prospect is at in their buyer journey and what triggers the movement to the next stage. 

Tip: This stage is fundamental to your CRM implementation and is often missed out. Lead Scoring and Lifecycle stages enables you to configure your system to make it work well for your organisation, by properly mapping out your sales and marketing pipeline. 

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

Audit your content on your website, identify the gaps, and review the performance from the last year to make informed decisions on what can be improved on. 

Ensure your team ask these questions  

• What can be updated or repurposed?  
• What can be deleted?  
• What is missing?
• What performed well?

If you are wondering why should you perform a content audit for your organisation read our blog below to find out more.

Step 4: Develop a Content Strategy 

With buyer personas in mind, create content targeted to individuals' challenges and interests based on what stage they are at in their customer journey. The better you know your audience, the better you can understand what kind of content will attract them to your website.  

Providing a continuous stream of high-quality content will allow your brand to be recognised as a thought leader in your industry. Each piece of content should be optimised for conversion by adding suitable CTAs for the stage in your buyer journey. For example: add pop up forms to other blogs for awareness content, buttons to downloadable tutorials for consideration, and sign up forms for pricing guides. This will help move prospects along their buyer journey and further down your pipeline.  

Here are some content ideas we have for each stage of the buyer journey: 

Awareness: eBooks, educational blogs, guides, easily consumable tips, social media posts and videos.  

Consideration: webinars, interviews, tutorials, white papers, actionable checklists and templates.

Decision: demos. free trials, pricing guides.

Tip:  Don’t forget to continuously check the performance of your campaigns through your CRM Reporting & ROI.

Step 5: Curate Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters 

The final stage in your inbound journey is to optimise your content for Search Engine Optimisation using pillar pages and topic clusters to allow your buyer personas to find you.  

Topic Clusters 

The first step in creating this framework is identifying a broad topic that you want to be known for and build authority around. Use monthly search volume to help determine what is worth ranking for.  

Once you have chosen the broad topic, create content based on specific conversational long-tail keywords related to that topic to create broader search engine authority. This structure can be created with HubSpot’s SEO tool.  

Tip: Ensure your keywords are more than two words long. This allows google to pick up your website on longer search queries. People are submitting more detailed queries to sort through the junk get the information they need, faster. 

Pillar Pages 

Now that you have a group of content addressing specific areas of a wider topic, it is time to create a pillar page. A pillar page covers all aspects of the topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. For example, you are reading our Inbound Marketing Pillar Page right now. 

Congratulations You are ready to start your Inbound Journey!