A preliminary reminder: Inbound Marketing consists of attracting leads and nurturing their interest and reflection throughout their decision-making process, in order to convert them into qualified leads, prospects and then customers, and even ideally into convinced ambassadors of your brand and your offers!
It is based on the change in attitude observed among buyers, who now carry out most of their purchasing process independently, relying in particular on the tools offered by digital technology (websites, forums, social networks, etc.) to develop their selection criteria and make their purchasing decisions.
It is opposed in nature to outbound marketing, which is based on more "push" strategies (advertising and mass emailing, in particular) that have now lost their effectiveness.
The funnel logic of Inbound Marketing and the steps towards conversion can be summarised as follows:
The evening's programme covered the 3 main stages of the Inbound process:
1- Attracting :
It's about attracting a relevant audience - potential prospects - to your website by offering content that appeals to them and interests them, in line with your expertise. Several ingredients contribute to this:
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- Storytelling (Nathalie Grynbaum, IDRAC): producing content (that can be distributed on the web) in an Inbound logic means above all knowing how to "tell a relevant story" that will attract and convince your audience. It is certainly a question of demonstrating your expertise, but above all of responding in a concrete and useful way to the concerns and questions of your prospects, by providing them with elements that will at least enable them to fuel their thinking, and sometimes even to do some of the work themselves. You will then be identified as an expert partner of reference, to whom they will naturally turn when they need it.
- S.E.O. - Search Engine Optimization (Eric Guillermain, IDRAC): publishing rich and relevant content online for your targets also means working on the visibility of your site : producing this content is often a long-term job, so it has real value, in your eyes as well as for your targets... It would be a shame if it did not reach its audience! This means generating traffic to your site, preferably qualified traffic. One of the levers to achieve this is the SEO(or "natural" referencing) of your website and your digital content : this means making it easier for search engines to identify your pages and their content, by working on the meta-tags, titles and descriptions, page URLs, image titles, lexical fields of texts, etc., according to their reading criteria. This optimisation work is based on the study and analysis of the keywords used by your prospects during their online searches.
2- Engage
Being able to produce interesting content (for your target) and representative of your expertise allows you to attract strangers and turn them into visitors to your website. Once this first objective has been achieved, however, the main thing remains to be done in order to really reach your goal: in the end, it is still a question of selling your product or your service offers! To do this, you need to work on engaging this audience.
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- Engagement and social networks (Fabian Innocenti, PUBLIC ACTIF): This crucial step consists of getting your visitors to go further in the relationship with you. To achieve this, you need to provoke interactions with your prospects that will lead them to invest (time, energy... and above all, affection!) in a process that links them to your brand. One of the most effective current vectors in this area is the animation of social networks: the animation of a community by the diffusion of viral images, gaming, services and products with direct online access, a capacity for personalisation or even co-design of products... All this plays a key role in engagement. This allows you to expand your audience, to get to know them better and, above all, to really "meet" their interests, expectations and purchasing behaviour.
3- Transforming
If you already have a qualified audience engaged in a relationship with you, you've come a long way. However, your entire audience represents a mass of contacts that is too large to be handled effectively by your sales staff. What's more, not all visitors to your site or your social network pages are necessarily in the buying phase! It is therefore up to you to bring them there, or to identify those who are already at a "usable" level of maturity for your sales force...
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- Lead nurturing and lead scoring (Olivier Prost, KESTIO): the objective of this patient work and its outcome is to generate qualified and mature leads that can be passed on to the sales teams ! This involves a "nurturing" process that consists of "feeding" your visitors' thoughts and getting them to mature their purchasing project (for example, by offering them white papers, providing them with benchmarks, or inviting them to take advantage of a free trial, etc.). The design and delivery of this rich content is the subject ofa close collaboration between Marketing and Sales, in order to align and coordinate the objectives and tempo of the operations. The interactions offered to prospects and their reactions make it possible to establish a "scoring" system to identify "mature" and interesting prospects. The score is established according to criteria such as the prospect's characteristics (scale, sector, etc.) and his or her level of progress in the pre-purchase process (general information, definition of choice criteria, etc.). At the end of the process, only the leads that have reached the necessary score are passed on to the sales staff, in order to efficiently feed their pipeline and maximise their chances of success (optimisation of transformation rates and allocation of sales effort).
This conference demonstrated the effectiveness of this new marketing approach, and the need to master all its different facets in order to implement it effectively. It was well received by the participants: entrepreneurs, managers, marketing and sales professionals, and students.
How far have you got? How do you approach the implementation of Inbound Marketing in your company?
To stay competitive and maximise your chances of converting leads into future customers, it is important to optimise the return on your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar:
The generation and exploitation of qualified incoming leads is our business. For 10 years, KESTIO has been helping companies (from SMEs to large groups) to acquire and retain customers.
