You’re probably in search of information about inbound marketing to understand if it’s viable for your organization. While reading, you probably noticed everything that has been written about inbound sounds wonderful, borderline too good to be true. The truth is, Inbound marketing is here to stay – but it has been and will continue to fluctuate, like everything else in life. Marketing automation platforms like Hubspot, Eloqua, Marketo and Clientify, among others, created this very interesting business model that generated the birth of thousands of agencies. But quantity does not guarantee quality.
Let’s be honest: we’ve been reading up on this topic and doing the legwork on it for years and there’s maybe a handful of agencies that will openly talk about the issues within Inbound Marketing. At Nytro, we love to defy the status quo, and that’s why within our Inbound Marketing offering, we want to tell you what no one else will. So here we are, sharing three essential secrets from behind the scenes of Inbound Marketing, with a promise to share tips in a future post to help you navigate them. Let’s begin:
The three truths about inbound marketing:
You and the Board need a new vision – the days of cold-calling databases gathered from that event that the company was a part of are in the past. Calling someone might give you the feeling that you’re doing something in the sense of lead generation and sales, but we all know the real conversion rate of those old-school practices and how they impact the business.
Inbound Marketing is not a campaign, but rather a methodology that consists of:
Combining different tactics including blogs, social media, e-mail marketing and automationGenerating a genuine interest in your targetAttracting them to your sales funnelQualifying them (without being intrusive) while they consume valuable contentConverting them to MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) so that sales can close the deals
With this in mind, if the Board expects to save the quarter with a lightning action from Inbound Marketing… that would not work. Inbound tactics need time to mature properly.
Results take time: creating value content through the blog to attract genuine interest, positioning the company in search results or building a reputation as a thought leader in social media are all tasks that require time. Inbound Marketing requires a lot of initial effort, especially during the first six months. It’s similar to building a house: during the first few months, you don’t get visual finishes because the work is being done in layouts, leveling the land, first laying of bricks and concrete, etc. The same happens with Inbound Marketing, where if we don’t take our first steps carefully, we run the risk of incorrectly positioning the company in the market. This is what the first six months will look like:
Your marketing team can’t do it: it’s not about lack of ability, but about specific knowledge required. An Inbound Marketing team perfectly combines experience profiles with a series of brand-new skills, or at least with new perspectives. In the case of content strategy, for example, there are copywriters that write thinking about the target, but also considering SEO in order to ensure that your blog, besides adding a good customer experience, is highly ranked by search engines. On the other hand, there are people in the team that are focused on very specific and newer items like capturing and analyzing an incredible amount of data that must be converted into insights in order to adjust the strategy, measure, and adjust again and again. Similarly, we have to consider the unending number of platforms and tools at our disposal; they all require specific knowledge to be operated and extract the best results from them.
The road can be perceived as extremely long when it comes to accomplishing the goals you set out at the beginning, but what is certain is that after the first six months of execution, the results will start trickling in. The traffic will feed the initial phase of the sales funnel, the marketing automation will ensure that prospects go through the customer journey while consuming content that was planted strategically, the leads will turn into MQLs, the MQLs in business opportunities, and these potential customers will be closed deals for the company. In your time of pressure remember, you need to sow the seeds to reap the harvest.