Marketing Blog

What is Inbound Marketing? And why do we spend so much time talking about it? In a nutshell, the inbound strategy is a holistic, data-driven approach to marketing that attracts companies and converts them into lasting customers.

Wow, that is a mouthful. Another way to describe it is smart content marketing plus software automation.

OK, so how does it work? There is a four prong process to execute this strategy.

Each part of this strategy relies on a few different tactics. We will repeat some of the tactics in more than one of the pieces. Keep in mind that this is a 30,000-foot view. If you would like to talk more about how inbound marketing could work for your company, you can contact us for an assessment.
Note, this is not in consecutive order. You should execute all of these sub-strategies in tandem.

Attract: We want to attract the right people to our website. For this part of the strategy, we use keyword research, blogging, social media, and pages built around topics that interest our audience.

The main goal for this piece of the strategy is to increase the views that we have on our ideas. We want to get more people to visit in the hopes that we can add some value.

“Inbound Marketing is Smart Content Marketing with Software Automation”

Remember partners add value. Vendors don’t.

Convert: We want to take advantage of the visitors that come to our site and make sure that we capture some information about them so we can continue to nurture their interest.

This approach differs from traditional marketing where any lead gets thrown over the fence to sales. But we know that is not the best option.

Our tactics for the convert sub-strategy are Call-to-Actions, Forms, and Landing pages.

The goal of this part of the plan is to continue to build value for our visitors, so they are willing to trade their information to get the content we created.

Delight: Here we are nurturing our leads. The tactics we use are lead scoring, emails, workflows and integration with our CRM. The key is to make sure that we are nurturing the leads.

We are giving our leads more and more relevant value so they can solve their problems. We are continuing to position ourselves as a thought leader and give them value as they progress down the funnel.

We want to remain top of mind with our prospects and leads. Also, we want them to know the value we add and how we can solve their problems.

Close: In this part of the process we want to make sure that we hand over qualified leads to sales. We will use Smart Calls-to-Action (gathering, even more, information about our leads), social media, workflows, and emails.

A lot of the earlier tactics coalesce for this part of the strategy to refine our leads. We take the best leads, businesses we can help the most and move them towards a solution.

Want more information about inbound marketing? Check out our in-depth guide to inbound marketing, and we will show you how you can get more ROI from your marketing dollars.

In 2017 marketing for industrial companies is moving to online from offline. This is not a new trend.
OK
The problem is that most industrial and manufacturing companies have spent years building up their offline collateral. They have tons of brochures, case studies and other hard-copy pieces that are just gathering dust. This is a great source of low hanging fruit that we see for industrial marketing.

One of my favorite phrases in inbound marketing is recycle. You need to be able to take a piece of content that you have developed to hand out at a trade show, or for a salesperson to give to a prospect, and make it valuable online.

However, there are pitfalls here. Sure you can just take a pdf of the content and put it on your website. However, that is not the most efficient strategy. Let’s take a look at how you can maximize your strategy for online marketing.

Step One: You need an overall strategy of what you want this project to accomplish. What is the goal that you want to achieve with this project? Is this to bring in new leads? Is it to help conversion on the site? Is it to launch your overall industrial inbound strategy?

Step Two: Find out what content is still effective. I used to work for a company that had a room full of old content. The problem was that most of these brochures and case studies were so outdated they were more suited to kindling instead of recycling.

But there were odd gems here and there within the pages that you could recycle. We decided to work with our sales staff and engineering to decide what is still worthwhile. The question was how can we transform it?

Step Three: How will you turn these old pieces of content? Now, you need to triage the old content you have.

I would suggest three separate piles. 

Garbage: This is our kindling as mentioned earlier. This is the easiest. Toss it.

Semi-Useful: We can take this and steal parts of it to make something. Maybe an infographic. Maybe we combine with other content to turn it into something else. Or maybe we can use this for a blog. This step will require the most work.

Almost Perfect: This information just needs to be updated and transferred to digital. This requires the second most amount of work but is the low hanging fruit.

If you would like to try a different sortation tactic you can sort by content type as well.

Interested in learning what you can do with your new content? Maybe start an inbound campaign. Get our checklist here.