Importance of inbound marketing

Introduction to SMarketing & creating an SLA

STAGE-1 ATTRACT

Building effective buyer personas

Creating unique content

Content distribution
Content Promotion

STAGE-2 CONVERT

Call to action (CTA)

Landing page
Thank you Page

STAGE-3 CLOSE

Best practices of email marketing

STAGE-4 DELIGHT

How to delight your customers

Conclusion
 !
How to Generate
B2B leads through
Inbound marketing
Struggling to generate qualified b2b leads?
Is your sales team getting frustrated by low
quality leads generated by your marketing team?

Dont worry! I am going to show you a step by step

procedure of generating the maximum B2B leads
using the inbound methodology.

But before I proceed to the actual topic, let me

answer common questions that bother most people
when it comes to inbound marketing.

Of course, if you already know the benefits of

inbound marketing and have made up your mind to
get started, then you can fast forward to the section
below.

Why not outbound ?

Outbound marketing practices like cold calling, print
ads, press releases etc. are fast losing their charm in
producing more leads. Not only are these practices
becoming more expensive by the day but they also
tend to result in a large number of low quality or
unqualified leads.

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 Whether you are a B2B or a B2C organization,
content is still king. The more unique content you
provide, the more audience you would attract and
eventually would generate more leads.

If content is
everything,
Why not
content
Infact according to a study by HubSpot, only 17%
of the marketers feel that outbound practices
produce high quality leads for sales.
marketing?
Now, as an inbound marketer I don’t want to sound
too salesy.

Yes through outbound marketing you can reach a

large number of audience.

But in an era of content explosion (and easy

access to internet), customers have access to an
incredible amount of information. And after
decades of being hounded by spammy emails,
they have now become resistant to any sales
message that is remotely pushy.

This is a genuine doubt raised by many B2B

Businesses are doing a thorough research
marketers. Content marketing with the correct
before they invest as much as a penny. Even 31%
strategy works great. I agree.
of outbound marketers rank outbound marketing
practices, such as paid advertising, as a top waste
As a matter of fact, when asked if their respective
of time and resources.
organization uses content marketing, 88% of the
respondents said YES!

Now that’s a huge number. But will a content

marketing campaign truly help you in generating
qualified leads?

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 What about
Content marketing doesn’t include many critical
marketing tactics like email marketing, website
design etc. You can drive more people to your
website for sure, but you may not convert them
into leads without a bigger strategy. digital
A 2016 study by content marketing institute even
says that only 30% of B2B marketers feel that
their organization is effective at content
marketing?
marketing, down from 38% in 2015. Many companies over the past decade have hap-
pily created a digital marketing campaign with
Content Marketing is a part various tactics such as SEO, SEM, social media
marketing, e-mail marketing, etc.
of Inbound Marketing
While these stand-alone tactics are successful to
That’s right! Inbound marketing is the bigger
an extent, there are a lot of missed opportunities.
strategy in which content is just one part.

There are so many reasons why inbound

Simply put Inbound market- methodology works better than traditional digital
ing = Content + Context marketing for B2B companies.

In inbound marketing, content is used at various For instance, you cannot get a detailed analysis
stages as required. Depending upon the context, report of the whole campaign using the isolated
i.e attracting, retaining or delighting, content is tactics of digital marketing.
distributed accordingly.
Without proper segregation, the performance
parameters of each tactic can’t be analyzed and
corrected conveniently. This results in the spend-
ing of a huge amount of money as it is tough to
determine which specific tactic works well for a
particular type of campaign.

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 Finally why
But before you start this procedure, I would
recommend you to come up with a Service
Level Agreement (SLA) between your sales and

Inbound? marketing teams.

I love inbound marketing for many reasons. The most impressive thing
Inbound marketing has more of a persona based
approach and results oriented methodology. about Inbound marketing
that sets it apart from the
rest is that it provides an
effective marketing and
sales alignment or
Smarketing.

Now there are so many key essentials of

Smarketing

But you can kick start with a simple Sales and

Marketing agreement.

Here’s how you can do it

Inbound marketing provides a clearcut strategy to

Say your revenue goal is 1 Million within 1 year.
generate qualified leads and enables an excellent
sales and marketing alignment.

HubSpot even says that Inbound organizations Revenue goal 1000000

are 4 times as likely to rate their marketing
strategy as effective.

Average deal size 20000 (Assume)

Inbound marketing not only places the right
content at the right stage but also gives you a
detailed analysis of what’s going wrong or right at
each part of the campaign. Customers 50

Now that we have discussed the importance of

Inbound marketing in lead generation, let me
show you how exactly it’s done step by step.

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 Now that, you are clear of how many customers you need, come up with the basic SLA

Stages Quantity needed

Customers 50

opportunities 100

SQLs 200

MQLs 400

Leads 800

Visitors 1600

It is advisable to take the conversion stage between each stage at 50%.

MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) : Leads which are found worth pursuable by the marketing team.

SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): Leads which are found worth pursuable by the Sales team.

There are many benefits of such agreement. For instance you can easily know how many sales reps
you need and how much man-hours are required.

A good SLA not only increases collaboration between both teams but also helps them take better
decision at various stages of the marketing campaign i.e how much content should be generated
and distributed? How much should be spent on PPC campaigns? To name a few.

Now that you have established an agreement between your sales and marketing team, It’s time to
launch the campaign!

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 Here is an example of a buyer persona:

Image Source: IndieGameGirl

Here are a few tips to develop

an ideal buyer
Attract! persona:
Do basic market research
The first stage of Inbound marketing is to attract.
But attract who? Who is your ideal customer? Interview and survey existing customers
Who is most likely to buy your product/service?
List down demographics, background, goals

1.
and challenges of the persona.
Develop a
Buyer Persona Collect as many personas as your business
Buyer persona is a semi fictional character of your requires!
ideal customer. Developing a buyer persona not
See also: How to Create Detailed Buyer
only helps you in creating relevant content but
Personas for Your Business
also assists your sales team in segmenting leads
for better follow ups.

How you can do it? 2. Create Unique

Content
Now that you have developed your ideal
One of the biggest challenges for organizations
while developing a persona is that they simply buyer persona, it’s time to create suitable content
can’t come up with all the questions needed for a relevant to the persona.
persona research.

Use HubSpot’s MakeMyPersona tool to get

[Link] worry! You can even use one of their
insightful free downloadable persona templates.

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 Here are a few tips to develop
an ideal buyer
persona:
In order to generate quality content, you need to
understand your buyer persona’s real pain points.
Question yourself, what troubles and challenges
might he/she be facing? How does your persona
use google or any other search engine to search
for his/her needs? How is the challenge relevant
to my products/services?

Now there is no “ ideal ” method to find out what

your prospects want to know. But you can always
use your common sense to find out their real pain
points.
In an inbound methodology, content is developed
for three stages based on a buyer’s journey. Let’s take the example of TheSmarketers.

Awareness: At this stage you create content The ideal persona for this company would
to educate the visitor about the problem he/ be someone who is searching for better lead
she is facing generation methods or someone who wants to
Examples: Blog posts, ebooks, white papers increase their website traffic.
etc.
Here are a few methods I
Consideration: Content is created to provide a
usually follow.
solution to his/her problems
Go to [Link]
Examples: Webinars, Case studies etc.

Decision: Content is produced to help your Since lead generation is a service that we offer, I
prospects take a final call or nurture their would scour for topics such as:
interest. This is the time where you actually
start advertising your product/service.
Examples: Trial downloads, Product demos
etc.

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 Here there are about 3k questions regarding Lead
generation with almost 65k followers!

Now I am not asking you to go through all the

questions, but just check out the ones which are
most followed and understand the real challenge
the person asking the question is facing.

Take a look at the contents of the book and then

jump straight to the comments section. Com-
ments offer invaluable insights into what your
prospects really want to learn more about.

Learn what people are talking about. Understand

There are so many questions regarding the best what types of content they like better and what
ways of B2B lead generation. topics they really want to learn more about.

That’s it! I have now found the topic for my next If you take a look at the first comment in the
blog post! And it’s guaranteed to resonate with screenshot above, you can see the buyer is really
my readers and target audience because that interested in learning different examples of lead
is exactly what they are searching for on the generation strategies.
web. I also personally recommend checking out
[Link] and search fortop selling books on In addition to these methods, I also keep an eye
lead generation. on all various discussions that happen on social
media.
Important do’s of content creation:

Create quality content. (More is more only if

the quality of your content is consistently
amazing!))

Keep it educational

Do not force self-promotion

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 3. Distribute your Infact hubspot says that 60% of marketers
feel blog content creation is their top inbound
content marketing priority
Now that you know what content to create, the
next critical part is to find the right place, time, By creating quality blogs consistently, you not only
and context to distribute your content. increase your rankings in google but also emerge
as a thought leader in your industry.
There are a lot of ways you can structure your
content on the various stages of buying cycle (i.e In addition to the tips I mentioned earlier in
awareness, consideration, decision) creating unique content,use tools lik buzzsumo
to find out which content is getting the most
What content type should you choose for your engagement and choose the right topic accord-
organization at different stages? Through which ingly.
formats can your reach more customers?

The answer is - it varies from from one industry to

another.

A whitepaper might work for a b2b tech-based

company during the consideration stage, but for
a health care industry a webinar might be more
effective.
Here are few tips you could use when writing a
It really depends! blog.

Since there are so many content types, I would

talk about the single-most important type of con-
tent which is relevant to all b2b companies.

Blogs!

Blogging is one of the most critical type of In addition to these, I would recommend you to
content for any b2b organization.

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 4.
write lengthy articles (above 2000 words) Promote your
Include lots of images, internal and external
Content
links
You finally created all of your content, but what is
Use a lot of white space to enhance the the use if it doesn’t reach the correct audience?
reading experience of your blog

Use your primary keyword and its synonyms You can have the best piece
naturally throughout the blog of content and make the
You can always write blogs in the shortest time best point ever. But if no one
possible. A bit of practice and motivation is all it
takes!
looks at it, the article is a
waste.
Struggling to come up with new topics for your
blog? Use HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator Here are few ways you can promote your content
effectively
Not good at writing? Check out this article: How
to Create Amazing Articles Even If Y ou Suck at
Writing Social media campaigns

Social media is used in almost every stage of in-

Note: Blogs are just one part of your content bound marketing. Whether your goal is to drive
strategy. To truly leverage your lead generation more web traffic, create brand awareness or gen-
strategy you will be needing various types of erate more leads, social media campaign is highly
content according to your industry needs. critical.

Feel free to get in touch to know which content 93% of B2B marketers say social media is their
plan you must be using. number one tactic for marketing their content.

Now, there are so many social media platforms

out there. Which one should you choose?

This is where the buyer persona comes to play.

From the data you develop in the buyer persona,

learn what could be the demographics, job roles,
possible interests, hobbies etc.

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 Understand what channels these buyer personas Twitter & Facebook:
spend their most time on.
In terms of monthly active users, twitter and face-
Suppose your prospects or consumers tell you that book lead by a large margin. By promoting your
they spend 30% of their online time on Facebook content via these channels, updates from your or-
and 10% on Twitter, you know which secondary ganization can reach a large section of your ideal
and primary social networks you should focus on. audience.

A study by hubspot reveals that 73% of people

use Facebook for professional purposes. For a B2B
marketer, this is great news!

Quick tip: Create a blog promotion campaign to

target all your website visitors on these platforms.
You can even start a campaign to target all your
prospects directing them to download that new
e-book or white paper you created!

Instagram:

No I am not kidding here!

Here are few platforms that are most effective for

a B2B company.

LinkedIn:

Linkedin is still the best channel for generating

leads for B2B companies.

In fact, about 79% of content marketers feel that

Linkedin is effective at generating B2B leads.
Even though Instagram has over 600 million us-
Linkedin helps you reach your target audience ers, most B2B marketers overlook its importance
through various avenues such as Linkedin groups, in promoting their content.
InMail, or even by posting relevant content to
Pulse.

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 While it is true that the appeal of instagram Optimize your website
is very informal, unlike Twitter and Linkedin
where people are more open to having serious You created the required content and started a
conversations around a business interest, ins- social media marketing campaign. What next?
tagram allows you the incredibly opportunity to
reach out to key industry influencers and clients Without optimizing your website in an effective
when they are off-work! manner, you can never reach your prospects who
are looking for your product/service on Google!
To truly become a lead generation machine in the
long run, you need to increase and maintain the Infact, Google says that 71% of B2B researchers
awareness of your brand across all relevant social start their research with a generic search!
media channels.
You definitely want your page to be on the first
See also: 5 tips to use Instagram For page.
B2B marketing
Infact, page 1 results garners 92 percent of all
Set goals: Understand what you are using traffic from an average search.
social media for and time your target
accordingly To get started with optimizing your webpages,
follow these steps:
Create a content plan: Depending on the
social media platform, choose the right format Use Google’s keyword planner and do
of content. complete research of all the relevant
Download a free social media content keywords.
calendar to track all your posts.

Measure and Analyze: Keep a track on all of

your social media analytics and always meas-
ure the outcomes.

Check this article to know the different tools

you can use for social media analytics. A lot of
them are FREE! A List of the Top 25 Social Media
Analytics Tools
Use these keywords throughout your website
and web URL, but in a way that is still natural,
See also: The what, why and how of social media
contextual and user-centric.
strategy

Use SEMRush tool to get a thorough analysis

Need a professional touch for your social media
of your main competitors’ strategies
marketing? Get a free marketing review from us!

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 However if you creatively craft the ad, you can
make it an inbound-ish one. Hubspot confirmed
that 53% of it’s customers integrate PPC ads into
their inbound marketing campaign

What is an inbound PPC Ad?

Create a customized 404 page with a search box
Unlike an outbound one, an inbound PPC ad is
and social buttons.
educative and helpful rather than promotional.

Take a look at the ad below:

Optimize your website for mobile devices

51% of smartphone users have discovered a
new company or product when conducting a
search on their smartphone.

Mimic your buyer persona’s language for all

your content headings (Phrases like How to,
Rather than pushing their offerings on the
Why, Tips, Free get the highest CRO)
prospect, BlogStarter’s ad offered a free step by
step guide to help the buyer start a blog.

Here are few more examples of an inbound PPC

ad.
Now, All these are few basic tips. To truly leverage
your website for a better SEO, I suggest you to get
A smart inbound-ish ad is always more inviting to
a free website audit from professionals.
click than a promotional paid search ad.
PPC Ads

When I say the words “PPC Ads” , it’s natural for

you to think “Wait isn’t that an outbound practice?
“

If you logically look at it, yes, the concept of PPC

ads does come under interruptive advertising.

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 How to integrate PPC ads in Use at least the first four parameters in your URL.

your inbound marketing Further Reading:

campaign?
9 Strategies for Improving Lead Quality From B2B
Choose the right channels to place your ads. I PPC Campaigns
recommend LinkedIn and Google for any B2B
organization
Remember - PPC ads are just a small part of
inbound marketing. Your main objective is to cut
Keep the ad language educational (remember
down the paid advertising budget as the
you want to help the visitor)
campaign progresses.

Use the correct landing page that is relevant

to the ad content instead of using your home
page

Track, measure and analyze your ad campaign

Convert!
Convert is the second part of the inbound
Here’s one way you can track marketing methodology
and measure your campaigns.
You attracted a whole lot of visitors, now is the
time to finally convert them to leads!
UTM Codes
UTM Codes are a great way to know from where
your visitors are coming from, what keywords they
are using, which device they are using, etc.

UTM code is just a simple code that is attached to

the custom URL to track the medium, source and
the campaign name.

Take a look at this example

[Link]
infographic-designs-for-2017/?utm_source=
facebook & utm_medium=social
The conversion process has three stages.
By using these snippet codes you can know from
where you are generating the highest number of 1 Call to action
leads and which campaigns you must focus on. 2 Landing Page
3 Thank you page
Use the Campaign URL Builder tool in Google
Analytics to add your UTM codes hasslefree.

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 5. Convert visitors to You can place CTAs at the end of your blog
post to prompt the visitor to subscribe to your
leads with a CALL e-mail newsletter
TO ACTION
Place a CTA at the end of the newsletter
If you ask me, this stage is the most important asking the subscriber to start their free trial
one in the entire campaign.
Use bright colours and clear fonts for CTA
This is the stage when you finally get your leads. buttons

A call to action can be a line, button or image that Always experiment with CTA positioning and
encourages visitors to take an action. formats.
This action can be anything, i.e newsletter
subscription, starting a free trial, ebook download See also: Call-to-Action examples you can’t help
etc. but click

Here are a few examples: Want to create your own CTA? Download these
customizable CTA templates

6. Landing Page &

Thank You page

All your lead generation efforts finally come down

to this!

Landing Page!

Once the prospect has decided to download that

ebook/whitepaper or register for that webinar
and clicks on the CTA button, he/she should be
navigated to a landing page.
Where to place your CTAs?
The main purpose of a landing page is to obtain

There are no definite places to place your CTA. As the prospect’s details (email address) by asking
long as it doesn’t look artificial and fits into the him/her to fill a form in return for the content you
content and context suitably, you can place them provide.
anywhere.
It’s the stage where your prospect goes from
Here are a few suggestions and best practices: being a silent visitor to an active lead.

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 Here is an example: Deploy another CTA to redirect them to
another blog post or other offerings.

Include social buttons (so you can build your

social following)

CLOSE!
Quick tips for creating an After successfully generating new leads, it’s time
effective Landing page: to nurture them and finally convert them into
customers.
Remove all navigation buttons and links (You
don’t want your visitor to get away without What’s the use of generating so many leads
filling the form) without converting them to customers?

Explain what content he/she can expect from MarketingSherpa identifies lack of lead nurturing
the offering in a clear manner! as the primary reason for 79% of leads not
converting to sales.
Do not ask for too many details (You might
lose the user’s trust!) So how can you close?

Don’t have enough time to create a landing page This brings us to the email marketing stage of
from the scratch? Use these free templates from inbound methodology.
Ucraft to create customized landing pages.

See also: 16 Examples of Great Landing Page

Design 7. Convert your leads
to customers!
Thank you page In inbound marketing, the role of a sales rep is of
an educator rather than a hardcore seller. The goal
After successfully obtaining your lead’s is to educate the lead as much as possible before
information, you need to encourage them to move promoting your product.
further in the buyer’s journey by directing them to
thank you page. What you should do
Segment your leads according to the buyer
Here’s what you should do: persona developed

Thank the new lead (showing gratitude builds Segregate your content database according to
trust ) your lead’s
1 Demographics
Provide additional content 2 Company type
3 Role and seniority in the organization

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 Integrate SMarketing into your company and
draw up an SLA (as discussed earlier). Get a
professional sales consultation to evaluate
Delight!
your current sales team efforts.
According to the SLA report estimate how
many follow-up emails are required per lead
and how many targets a sales rep must
8. Become a lead
generation machine
by serving your
produce. customers
Unlike any other marketing campaign, the inbound
Write attractive subject headlines to boost the
strategy doesn’t end after acquiring customers.
email open rates

Add CTAs whenever required

A satisfied customer can be a hero in advertising

your product.

Delighting your customer not only gains their trust

Check out this infographic to know the best time but also helps you in generating more qualified
to send an email for various countries leads in the future.

Use automation tools like HubSpot CRM, Surveying and analyzing your existing customers
SalesForce CRM, LeadSquared etc. provides powerful insights regarding your ideal
buyer persona and helps in improving your lead
Further Reading: 5 Easy And Effective Email Hacks quality in the future.
For Better Lead Generation
What you should do
Be a strong problem solver

Be an educator instead of a promoter

Provide your own recommendations and

solutions for a problem.

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Conclusion
While implementing inbound methodology may Create remarkable and unique content which fits
take time to start showing results, it’s one of the your buyer’s needs and you are already halfway
most effective marketing strategies right now. there!

By properly implementing all the 8 steps I

mentioned, you too can easily see a spike in your
website traffic, conversion rate, lead
generation etc. Feel free to get in touch with us if
you have any doubts and for a more
personalized guidance.

Talk To Our Expert’s

[Link]