A quick reminder: Inbound Marketing is all about attracting leads and nurturing their interest and reflection throughout the decision-making process, in order to convert them into qualified leads, prospects and then customers, or even, ideally, convinced ambassadors for 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.
By its very nature, it is opposed to Outbound Marketing, which relies 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 summarized as follows:
The evening's program covered the 3 main stages of the Inbound approach:
1- Attract :
It's all about attracting a relevant audience to your website - potential prospects - by offering them 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): Inbound content production means above all knowing how to tell a relevant story that will attract and convince your audience. It's all about demonstrating your expertise, but above all it's about responding in a concrete and useful way to your prospects' concerns and questions, providing them with elements that will enable them at least to fuel their thinking, and sometimes even to do some of the work themselves. You'll then be identified as a reference partner-expert, to whom they'll naturally turn when they need one.
- S.E.O. - Search Engine Optimization (Eric Guillermain, IDRAC): putting rich, relevant content online for your target audiences also means working on your site's visibility : producing this content is often a long-term process, so it has real value, in your eyes and for your targets... It would be a shame if it didn't reach its audience! This means generating traffic to your site, preferably qualified traffic. One of the levers for achieving this is theSEO (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 optimization work is based on the study and analysis of the keywords used by your prospects in their online searches.
2- Engage
Being able to produce content that's interesting (to your target audience) and representative of your expertise enables you to attract strangers and turn them into visitors to your website. Once you've achieved this first objective, however, there's still a lot to be done to really reach your goal: ultimately, it's all about selling your product or service offering! 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 stage consists of getting your visitors to take their relationship with you a step further. 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 today's most effective vectors in this field is social networking: animating a community through the dissemination of viral images, gaming, direct online access to services and products, the ability to personalize or even co-design products... All this plays a key role in engagement. It allows us to broaden our audience, to get to know them better, and above all to really "meet" their interests, expectations and purchasing behavior.
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 too large for your sales force to handle effectively. What's more, not all visitors to your website or social networking pages are necessarily in the buying decision phase! It's up to you to get them there, or to identify those who are already at a level of maturity that can be exploited by your sales force...
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- Lead nurturing and lead scoring (Olivier Prost, KESTIO): the aim of this patient work is to generate qualified, mature leads that can be passed on to our sales teams ! This involves a "nurturing" process, which consists in "nurturing" 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...). The design and provision of this rich content is the subject ofa close collaboration between Marketing and Sales, to align and coordinate objectives and the tempo of operations. The interactions proposed to prospects and their reactions enable us to establish a "scoring" system designed to identify "mature" and interesting prospects. The score is established according to criteria such as the prospect's characteristics (scale, sector...) and his or her level of progress in the pre-purchase process (general information, definition of choice criteria...). At the end of the process, only leads that have reached the required score are passed on to sales reps, so that they can efficiently feed their pipeline and maximize their chances of success (optimizing conversion rates and sales effort allocation).
The conference demonstrated the effectiveness of this new marketing approach, and the need to master all its facets in order to implement it effectively. It was well attended by entrepreneurs, managers, marketing and sales professionals and students alike.
What about you? How are you approaching the implementation of Inbound Marketing in your company?
To stay competitive and maximize your chances of converting your leads into future customers, it is important to optimize the performance of your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar:
Generating and exploiting qualified inbound leads is our business. For the past 10 years, KESTIO has been helping companies (from SMEs to major corporations) to acquire and retain customers.
