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Inbound Marketing Plan, Part 4: Lead Nurturing

Thanks for joining us again on our Guide to Inbound Marketing series. Today we are going to talk about lead nurturing. If you haven’t already done so check out the first post for the beginning of your inbound marketing plan.

Our last step was about creating our collateral and landing page. You have built your great content and landing page; now you have some leads.

Awesome!

Keep in mind, your inbound campaign does not stop when someone converts on your landing page. Today most people go through more than half of the funnel by themselves before talking to anyone from your company.

You want to guide them down the funnel keeping their interest and educating them about your offering.

Automated lead nurturing is the suggested tactic to use. However, if you don’t have your lead nurturing software, or are trying out inbound on a small scale, you can perform your lead nurturing marketing manually. However, keep in mind that it is more efficient to use the software.

Goals: The first thing to do is revisit your goals. What are you trying to do?

Let’s go back to our earlier example. We are an insurance company with a Whole Life product that needs a boost in sales. We know who our audience is and to whom we are talking.

Our goal is to increase qualified sales leads in the first quarter by 12% to our “Whole Life Wally” audience using inbound marketing.

Process: Let’s say that we get a lead on our insurance product from the website. We add it to the CRM and from our email system Mailchimp, IContact, or whatever you use, we take that information and create a few emails.

Note: We do not want to create these in our regular email program (like Outlook) since it does not enable tracking or additional features that we will need later.inbound marketing plan lead nurturing.png

1st Email: Our first email is going to say something like: Thanks for downloading our Insurance Collateral. We hope you found it helpful. If you would like more information, visit our page at”Our great Offering.com.” “Our Great Offering.com” page on your website should talk more about the product offering.

Timing: I would send the first email very shortly after the download, perhaps the next day.

2nd Email: Send your second email a few days later. We are continuing to keep it casual and informational. If we have another piece of downloadable content about the product, bonus points. If not, we need a different page to send our lead to.

Keep track of your click-through rates (not open). See how your emails are doing. If you have the capability of A/B testing with your email provider, I would create a variation and see which works better.

3rd Email: Now for our final email we want another clickable link. Again keep it informational and not sales-y. We are trying to help this person solve a problem; we are not trying to sell them.

If you do your lead nurturing correctly, you have a much better chance of handing the more qualified lead over to sales. This means that they have a higher close rate and aren’t wasting their time on unqualified leads.

Want to learn more about inbound marketing? We offer a free inbound assessment.

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1 Marketing Strategy & 2 Tactics to Improve Your R.O.I. in 2017

Are you content with your marketing efforts? Is everything going just great? Do sales have more leads than they can handle? (oh and are they good leads?)

If so, you don’t need to change a thing in your marketing.

But….if everything’s not going perfectly how are you going to improve your marketing? Remember Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. You have to change and evolve your marketing.

So today I want to talk about some strategies and tactics that you can use to change your marketing in 2017.
Just like every other plan you need to start with your goals. Your goals are going to guide the strategies that you use. And, of course, the budget is always a concern. 

I have listed the tactics and strategies you might want to consider below. I have ranked them by the smallest to largest investment and by the greatest return. I would suggest you use them all 🙂

Updating Your Website: There are certain things you can do to your existing site to make it more effective.

For instance, you can incorporate a Call to Action on your front page. Lots of visitors to your site might not get past the front page. If you can use a strong call to action, you may be able to transition visitors to leads.

Another place to incorporate a good Call to Action is at the end of your blog post. If you are blogging with a strategy your blog should conclude with a Call to Action that is relevant for your visitors that you want to convert.

Event at the Event: If you are exhibiting at tradeshows you need to kick up your investment a bit and maximize your return. At your booth, you can set initial meetings, but the Event at the Event (EatE) is what moves leads down the funnel and creates quicker opportunities.

Improve your marketing strategy for 2017 industrial manufacturing.pngWhen you are on the booth, you want to get people in, qualify them, and get them on their way. At the EatE you have a chance to enhance and qualify and build a human touch with prospects.

In fact, at one company we were able to move qualified leads down the funnel 23% faster. This meant a quicker ROI and more rapid sales cycle.

Inbound marketing: Inbound marketing is the most holistic approach to a marketing strategy. It has a high ROI especially if you have longer more complicated sales cycles like in industrial, manufacturing, material handling, and financial services.

Another reason to use inbound marketing is if you have a higher sales price $5-10,000 plus and a higher lifetime value for customers.

However, inbound marketing strategy is also a greater investment. You are looking at a starting price of 3k a month. As a recent example, we have a client that sells $75,000 projects, and their customers tend to buy every three years, so lifetime value is around $225,000.

If we can increase his sales from one a month, to two a month we are looking at the below numbers.

Agency Profitability for Potential Client Engagement
Build:
Adjustment for likelihood of progress towards customer goal: 50%
Adjusted Potential Value $ 22,500.00
Cost Based Monthly Minimum: $ 3,913.76
Gross Profit $ 18,586.24
Gross Profit % 83%

A quick way to look at Inbound marketing is content marketing + automation software + analytics.

If you would like to learn more about inbound marketing you can download out guide.

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Better Leads for Material Handling with Inbound Marketing

A few years ago I was the director of marketing for a large material handling company. The traditional way they got qualified leads was that the salespeople prospected, found their leads, qualified them and then launched some of them into opportunities.

Not the most effective use of a salesperson’s time.

Then we discovered Inbound marketing. In six months we were able to increase qualified leads by 1200%. Not a bad R.O.I., right?

Let’s explore why inbound marketing works so well for material handling companies.

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Marketing for Manufacturing Companies? Your Site is Only the 1st Step

You finally convinced your team that to effectively market your manufacturing company you need to update your website. Now you have a new site, it looks great and you are crushing your competitors site. 

Message? We have a great message!

And check out those images. Man, they are crisp!

Video? Heck, yeah we have awesome video. An interview with our CEO! And man he can tell a story!

So… I guess we just sit back and wait for the new leads to pour in….and let’s keep waiting….and wait a bit more…..

OK, so now what?

While a great looking, slick website is important for branding and presenting a good outward face for your company, it is not necessarily going to draw in hordes of new leads for manufacturing companies.Marketing_for_manufacturing_companies.png

For that you are going to need a digital marketing strategy. You have your fancy new website, but now you need to promote it.

Here is a step-by-step intro to a campaign to promote your website.

Step 1: Find or create a great piece of digital content that will be of value to your customers. Ideally it is content that will help prospects solve a problem they just discovered.

For instance, a possible problem might be that they need more accuracy in their distribution center.  Your piece of content should be something along the lines of an e-book or a kit to help them figure out how to solve this problem.

Step 2:  Set up a landing page on your new, cool website where people can download the content. I would put a form in front of it so people have to give you a bit of information to download. If your content is valuable people should have to pay for it with a little information, don’t you agree? And this is how you are going to generate the audience.

Step 3: Now you need to promote your awesome digital marketing strategy. Write a blog post with keywords that will appeal to your target audience. Talk about your content on your social media channels. When you send your newsletter, use a great call to action to push your content.

Step 4: Repeat next month.

While this is a time intensive strategy, it has some clear advantages.

It serves multiple goals. Not only does great content generate leads, you can also use this digital marketing strategy to position your product.

It brings more qualified visitors that you are trying to attract. Because you have targeted content for your audience you get more of the people you want on your website.

It is evergreen. Meaning that unlike other tactics that if you stop spending, or stop promoting, it will cease to generate leads. Once you produce something it will always be there, and in fact, the longer it is up garnering likes it becomes more powerful.

Want to learn more about marketing strategy for manufacturing? Download our guide.

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Why CFO’s Should Love Inbound Marketing

We have preached the benefits of inbound marketing and content creation on this blog before. In my opinion, everybody should love inbound marketing. In fact, even your CFO should love inbound marketing.

Actually, especially your CFO.

I know that the CFO of an organization seems like an odd choice on the surface when it comes to loving a marketing strategy, but follow me on this one.

As a marketing agency we tend to approach inbound marketing from a marketing or sales perspective, but today I wanted to talk about it from a more bottom line approach. Something that most accounting people and CFO’s seem to have a great deal of interest for some reason. Weird, right?Why_CFOs_should_love_Inbound_marketing.png

As a real quick definition borrowed from our friends at HubSpot “Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention.”

While there is always expense associated with marketing whether it is in opportunity cost or capital, inbound marketing gives a great return on your investment.

Let’s look at a few reasons why.

Evergreen: Inbound marketing is built around content creation. Any content that your marketing team creates is for all intents and purposes evergreen. It lasts forever.

That makes it different from other marketing tactics like trade shows or PPC, which are limited by time period or budget. When you pay with either time or money for a piece of content you are creating something that is valuable for a much longer time and continues generating leads.

In fact, content can get more valuable as it accrues more links back to it and more mentions on social media.

Recyclable: Content can also be recycled, which means instead of starting from square one you can reuse it. For instance, if you start with a video you can then change it a bit and have a whitepaper, ebook or case study, then an infographic. That means that you don’t have to pay for brand new content every time. You can take an older piece of content, recondition and refresh it, and have something that attracts new leads saving money in the process.

Closing: Your company probably makes more money when sales is closing sales, correct? If sales is prospecting, or god forbid cold calling, isn’t that a huge waste of resources? If sales has a valuable pipeline of MQL (marketing qualified leads) that means that theoretically your sales teams should be making more sales.

If you institute an inbound marketing strategy, your marketing team can toss highly qualified leads over to sales to pursue. That means that sales is spending more of their time closing sales rather than chasing down leads.

Want to learn more? Get our Guide to the 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About.