Inbound Marketing Methods

A good post on Inbound sales lead and marketing methods How to Generate a Steady Flow of Inbound Sales Leads

What Inbound Marketing Methods Work?

In order of its ability to generate more easily close-able leads, I’d rank each activity in the following order.

1. Referrals & Brand Searches
2. Free Tools/Free Trials
3. Organic Search Engine Optimization
4. Blogging
5. Email Newsletters
6. Webinars
7. PPC
8. Sponsorships
9. Social Media

However, it’s also hard to separate any of these activities from each other. Collectively, they create a comprehensive inbound internet marketing strategy. Also, pretty much everyone of these methods is responsible for doing two important things in inbound marketing.

1. They attract new prospects.
2. They help nurture existing leads.

Traditional marketing can do the former. But, prospects generated from traditional interruptive marketing do not lend themselves as well to lead nurturing.

Here’s some experiences from each of these methods. If I were a marketing or sales VP or a small business owner starting inbound marketing, I wouldn’t leave any of these out. But, here’s the areas where I’d focus first. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight. Most of these techniques require a time investment, but little financial investment. Many of these things support each other. So, it’s important to do things in the proper order and to prioritize.

Referrals & Brand Searches - Your best marketing is happy customers. In my previous company, after a few years of working at it, 100% of my business came from referrals. Customers have the ability to sell your services for you because they have little to no selfish interest in you bringing on new clients. So, when they recommend your product or service to a peer, they’re not only establishing that you’re credible, but trustworthy. The trust implicit in their relationship with the prospect they’re referring is transferred to you.

There’s an old saying that says it’s hard to predict referrals. It’s also expensive to build a brand (although fairly easy to measure brand awareness). However, I’d argue that if you’re doing the right things for your clients and you’re truly a stand for their success, it will happen. On the web, you can accelerate the pace by entering the conversation, setting the precedent for receiving referrals by giving them and by generally making yourself available to speak with new people whether there’s an immediate direct connection between their need and your service or not. Practically speaking, I recommend starting a blog and reading these tips on using a blog to improve your sales process and how to use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website.

Free Tools/Trials: Like many other companies, HubSpot has put the Freemium model to effective use. WebsiteGrader.com is a free SEO and website analysis tool that lets anyone analyze the effectiveness of their site and online marketing vs a handful of competitors. Almost 400k people have used it. We don’t call these people directly, but Website Grader refers about 15% of our traffic to HubSpot and is responsible for a disproportionately larger percentage of leads and sales that result from our inbound marketing. HubSpot recently launched Press Release Grader too which analyzes the online marketing effectiveness of press releases. Press Release Grader also helps us target marketing professionals more effectively, helping us target our inbound marketing to the right prospects for us.

Also, I recently learned of Landslide’s sales work management tool that helps organizations design a sales process for free. Constant Contact’s email marketing software free trial is a great example of effectively using a free trial. If there’s a way to take a part of your service that is useful by itself and make it free, this will generate more leads, good will and inbound links than you can imagine.

Organic Search Engine Optimization: This one takes the most patience, but if it is done right, it is simply a byproduct of doing everything else right. SEO requires thorough keyword research and search engine rank monitoring. If you do this well, blogging, PR and social media can support your SEO efforts without an expensive SEO consultant, and without a lot of work dedicated “just” to SEO. The name of the game is to pick keywords, optimize pages with those keywords (could be blog posts) and build links. At HubSpot and many of our other clients that follow the right internet marketing strategy, the effect of SEO on inbound lead generation is cumulative and compounding. In other words, month after month, as long as we keep creating great content and building smart links, the number of leads we generate from SEO goes up and and up and up.

Blogging: You must enter the conversation if you’re going to do inbound marketing. There are so many people who start a blog and think it’s just about saying smart things or about writing. It’s not. It’s about having a 2 way conversation. Any good salesperson knows that an effective prospecting call requires the prospect to be talking more than the salesperson. It’s the same way with a blog. It’s imperative to be a resource for people and to pro-actively network with your blog by reading other blogs, linking to other blogs and leaving comments on other blogs, if you want people to do the same thing for you. It’s not necessarily the law of reciprocity, but it’s the law of participation.

For the 6 or so years I’ve been blogging, I’ve followed “the build it one at a time” model where I try to make acquaintances with a new blogger each week. Now that I help companies start blogs, things are a bit more accelerated for me. I make a lot of new blogger friends each month. But, I counsel my clients to do the same thing. At some point in the lifetime of a blog, after a critical audience is built, things steamroll. Subscribers come out of nowhere, links come from nowhere, random people digg your blog posts and send a flood of traffic. After a while, you can just focus on creating great content and hosting a great conversation on your blog. But, I’d recommend always reaching out. Last week, I reached out to Guy Kawasaki and he launched sales.alltop.com with my blog on it! Just like I wouldn’t stop my consistent telephone prospecting activities, I’ll never stop reaching out to new bloggers.

Email: Permission Based direct email marketing is still a very important marketing technique. It’s critical to use industry standard opt-in methods to build your list. However, notice that I put it fairly low on this list. If this article was written just two years ago, I’d bet that email marketing would be much higher on the list. Of course, it’s one of the oldest forms of online marketing. Successful marketers were using email before the first blog post was written and back when search engine indexes were still built by humans. But, there’s a problem with email. People get too much of it. They are increasingly immune to stuff that doesn’t interest them right now. I’ve had people double opt-in to an email newsletter and then click “this is spam” two weeks later after receiving just two messages from me.

All that said, email is still an important part of the mix. At HubSpot, we send out one email newsletter per month promoting our webinar and a few recent blog posts. It drives significant traffic back to our site and drives attendance for our webinars, which is a great lead nurturing tool.
Solutions like Eloqua, Pardot and other marketing automation tools help with this at a different level. However, most businesses that I speak with don’t generate enough inbound leads to warrant an expensive email-based lead nurturing process. Most don’t have enough leads to nurture yet. I usually recommend Aweber and Constant Contact for most situations. They’re inexpensive, simple to setup and effective if used right. Also, since I’ve seen that blogging, free tools, and webinars can nurture leads just as effectively, all you need your email system to do is get them to come back to your site where you can track engagement.

Our sales team also uses one on one email to nurture leads inside Salesforce.com. Based on a prospect’s interaction with the site and the information they share when downloading white papers and registering for webinars, we can provide the information they need to decide whether they want a custom product demonstration or to decide whether they want us to help them diagnose their challenges and recommend a solution.

I’d also recommend reading Brian Carrol’s Start with a Lead Blog. His company, Intouch is an expert at using email and presales touches to qualify leads for Budget, Authority, Need and Timing (B.A.N.T) before moving a prospect along to a sales team.

Webinars: As I mentioned above when talking about our email marketing process, webinars are a great lead nurturing tool. People that have opted in to our email list are engaged at different levels. Webinars get them coming back and interacting with us. It also helps us establish credibility and communicate what we do in an educational and neutral setting. Mike Volpe has discovered that a series of webinars is much more effective. Normally, many people tell their contacts internally and externally about a webinar in a series, assuming they’ve attended one they got value out of previously. I recently had 50 influencers from one company attend a webinar. We usually also have a bunch of bloggers post the link to our marketing webinars page; Webinars create a great word of mouth opportunity.

PPC – In a good inbound marketing mix, you can’t ignore Pay Per Click Advertising. Many b2b companies of any size seem to be doing exclusively PPC as their sole online marketing activity. In my experience, leads that come from PPC are a bit less likely to convert. They aren’t engaged with your brand as they usually arrive at a landing page and leave right afterwards, and they rarely seem to come back. Of course, I haven’t done a scientific analysis. But, there have been studies conducted that show that less educated people click on ppc ads, while more educated people click on organic search results. Unless your selling to dummies, you’ll be better served with SEO and blogging. However, we have used PPC ads in certain cases successfully, when other methods will not work in the time frame that we want. We’ve used it to test new landing pages to ensure that they convert. We’ve also used it when we needed a larger amount of leads for our salespoeple to work; Every other month, we hire a few new sales people. We spend a bit more on PPC ads in those months.

PPC is an easily controlled lever. You want 25 leads today, give me $1,000 bucks and I’ll make it happen.

Sponsorships – If you’re at a phase of maturity in your marketing where you know what the ideal profile of a prospect is, it’s usually pretty easy to identify publications (ie forums, blogs, trade magazines, email lists, vertical search engines) that can target your prospect. I wouldn’t recommend buying lists. However, if you can place an offer on a targeted site or an email newsletter, the results can be very effective. Most inbound marketing activities don’t make it easy for you to target a demographic profile. Sponsorship does. Of course, these people aren’t going to be as engaged with your brand. But, sponsorship is certainly a good part of a solid inbound marketing mix. Sponsorships can be expensive, so be careful committing to a long term engagement with an unproven media outlet.

Social Media - Ironically, I give seminars all the time about sales lead generation via online networking and social media. Yet, I put this one last. I haven’t really figured out how to “scale” my online networking activities by itself. Online networking, social media and social bookmarking sites are great tools to support blog readership growth and to support search engine rankings. But, I’ve found that the ROI from social media isn’t cumulative or compounding used in isolation – unless you’re already pretty famous like Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki. I do think it’s a very important part of an inbound marketing mix as it adds a human face to your company. However, it does not drive a lot of direct traffic that converts into leads.

It can also be extremely powerful if a sales and marketing team coordinates some social media marketing activities and leverages the distributed team’s personal networks to launch a product, get feedback and raise awareness about a campaign. Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter also make it a bit easier to initially connect with a prospect or lead who seems immune to voicemails and emails. But, I’d never recommend skipping right to social media without a comprehensive SEO and blogging strategy first.

The Four Core Sales Functions

Found this blog from alltop.com. Excellent post on the 4 separate sales functions. Countless times we mix them and then don’t get the results we want.
The Problems with “Lumping”; Separate the Four Core Sales Functions

The four core functions / themes

Here are four basic themes (I say ‘theme’ because even each of these functions can be sub-divided even further as your organization gets bigger):

1. “Inbound” Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800#.  The sources of these leads are either marketing programs/SEO or organic word-of-mouth.  Presentation: Inbound Lead Management Best Practices
2. “Outbound” Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or New Business Development Reps, they prospect into lists of target accounts to develop incremental new sales opportunities that don’t already exist, that require a lot of proactive work. These outbound reps qualify their new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close. Presentation: Introduction to Cold Calling 2.0
3. Account Executives: Quota-carrying closers, either inside or in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay engaged with a new customer past the close and until they are deployed/launched. Also see “Sell To Success (The All-Natural Close)”
4. Account Management / Customer Success: client deployment and success, ongoing client management and renewals.  In today’s world of frictionless karma, someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful – and that is NOT the salesperson!