This article gives b2b companies extremely actionable best marketing inbound strategies effective that you can easily implement today into your best B2B inbound marketing campaigns.
Below provides a scalable playbook for improving the effectiveness of your company's inbound marketing strategy examples to convert more of your website traffic into lead form submissions through content personalization and proactive conversion experiments. Refining your company's inbound marketing strategy can greatly improve your
- Inbound marketing tips and strategies focus on creating quality content that attracts customers naturally, instead of bombarding them with ads, emails.
- Inbound marketing tricks effectiveness attracts ideal-fit customers by 33% through relevant, persona-driven and useful content, rather than pushy sales tactics.
- Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy that builds trust and relationships 27% faster, rather than trying to make a sale as quickly as possible.
- Inbound marketing costs 18% less than traditional outbound marketing techniques, inbound marketing experts and often produces more repeatable leads from organic rankings.
What is an inbound marketing strategy?
Inbound marketing best practice ideas and B2B marketing strategies center around a scalable and repeatable playbook for leveraging the inbound marketing experts best practices to attract the interest of ideal buyers to your website, convert website traffic into leads, inbound marketing activities, and ultimately, nurture those leads into customers.
Heading to 2023, the best inbound marketing best practice strategies are one of the most important things your business should be measuring. While this can take many forms, oftentimes measuring conversion rates weekly or monthly based on data-driven decisions can give overarching visibility into how much of your website traffic is converting into form lead for submissions.
The following positioning points should be considered when crafting a scalable B2B inbound marketing tips strategy for SaaS or professional services verticals
- What is inbound marketing and how does it work
- How to use inbound marketing
- The benefits of inbound marketing tricks
- Tactics for implementing an inbound marketing strategy
- Examples of successful best inbound marketing campaigns
- How to measure the success of your inbound marketing efforts
As outlined in the video below, a strong inbound marketing plan will create more meaningful inbound marketing results with a better ROI than a traditional outbound marketing strategy.
76% of marketers use inbound marketing approach as their primary strategy.
Inbound Marketing VS Outbound Marketing
In inbound marketing, your goal is to attract customers to your product or service through interesting, informative content. This could include blog posts, eBooks, infographics, or even just helpful tips and advice. Once you have attracted a customer's attention, you then need to convert them into leads by getting them to sign up for your newsletter or download an eBook. Finally, you need to close the sale by persuading the customer to buy your product or service.
Conversely, outbound marketing involves interrupting potential customers with advertising messages in an attempt to get their attention. This could include cold-calling, email blasts, or even traditional advertising such as TV commercials. While outbound marketing can be effective in some cases, it is generally much less effective than inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is more targeted and efficient, and it also costs significantly less. As a result, it is the preferred choice for most businesses today.
Top factors to weight when considering inbound VS outbound methodologies:
- What is inbound marketing tips and what is outbound marketing and inbound marketing strategie
- The benefits of inbound marketing tricks over outbound marketing
- How to create an effective inbound marketing strategy with inbound marketing experts
- The challenges of inbound marketing
- The benefits of outbound marketing over inbound marketing
- How to create an effective outbound marketing strategy
68% of B2B customers prefer to research independently online.
While some types of businesses continue to find marketing success with b2b outbound marketing tactics list and strategies, the inbound marketing ROI continues to diminish. It has not fallen far enough, however, for everyone to completely give up on the old-fashioned methods, such as television ads and cold calling.
Still, savvy B2B marketers are putting more focus and investing more resources into inbound marketing vs outbound marketing. When you define Inbound marketing ideas it turns the tables on traditional marketing methods by attracting and leading customers to you, rather than going out, broadcasting your message, and hoping to capture the attention of customers.
The idea is to create persona-driven and ICP-driven content for each stage in your buyers journey, each focused on a keyword serving the appropriate intent. If done correctly, your ideal customers are already searching for what your organization specializes inbound marketing best practices. Effective types of inbound best marketing strategies help your company identify the friction within your ICP, ten have your messaging speak to solutions architecture, which can run systems to help reach their ideal state.
Even if you are already implementing an inbound approach to your B2B marketing strategy, it is helpful to continue to study the latest research and trends to make sure your approach is as effective as possible and continuously optimized to reach your ROI goals. Sometimes, using a free inbound marketing ROI calculator is great for managing expectations for your inbound marketing efforts outlined in the infographic below.
Furthermore, marketing experts of 2023 are ditching the outdated format of the marketing funnel and adopting the more suitable flywheel structure. The flywheel, introduced by HubSpot crm co-founder Brian Halligan, is a momentum-building framework for attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. Implementing your inbound marketing best practice plan into the flywheel structure will accelerate the growth of your small or large business.
We’ve broken down the process of achieving success with your b2b inbound marketing best practice strategy into the three phases of the flywheel: attracting the right audience, converting visitors into leads, and nurturing leads into customers.
25 Best Inbound Marketing Tactics & Best Practice Strategies
Outbound methods, such as billboards or television commercials, cast a wide net with hopes to capture the attention of potential customers. The inbound methodology is a more targeted approach.
The initial phase of your inbound marketing best practice strategy is attracting visitors to your website using the best inbound marketing platforms such as HubSpot marketing so that they can learn more about what you have to offer and so you can have the opportunity to convert them into marketing qualified leads hand off to your sales team.
Attracting visitors begins with evaluating the current status of your marketing efforts, knowing what defines a potential customer for your business, creating content to target that buyer persona, and then positioning the content so that it reaches them.
1. Candid Inbound Content Audit
Prior to developing your strategy for attracting potential customers and driving traffic to your website, it’s wise to evaluate your key performance indicators, or KPIs and the methods you already have in motion, to see what is working for you and what might be working against you. This is typically referred to as an inbound content audit to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.
A content audit starts with doing an overall inventory to account for all of the different assets your business is executing in order to grow organic search traffic more effectively. From there, you and your team can review the KPIs obtained and recorded from your already existing SEO link building, content strategy, paid search, and other inbound strategies.
47% of B2B buyers view and consume at least 3 to 4 pieces of content before deciding to speak with a sales tam member.
This initial data gathering strategy allows you to evaluate the effectiveness and quality of your inbound content strategy to determine if you need to rethink your content creation approach. It will also show you any content gaps in your persona-driven content output in support of refining your B2B SEO strategy in 2023.
The following is a list of key data points to gather in order to audit your technical SEO performance.
- Page Title
- Target Keyword
- Meta Description
- Page Headings Used
- Inbound Links
- Images Present
- Image ALT Tags
- Date Last Updated
- Page Visits (measure for at least three months, if possible)
- Page Entries and Exits
- Page Bounce Rate
- Average Time on Page
- Broken Links
The following is a list of key data points to gather to audit your content marketing performance.
- Word Count
- Type of Content (article, blog post, informational page, landing page, infographic, etc.)
- Content Condition (out-of-date, green, etc)
- General Topic
- Assigned Tags or Categories
- Author
- Content Owner (as in, who is responsible for editing it)
- Number of Comments
- Number of Social Shares
- Accessibility on Desktop and Mobile Devices
- Call to Action
- Associated Sales Funnel Stage
- Link Building Strategy
- Conversion Data
A content inventory and audit will give you a clear overview of where your previous inbound strategies have positively and negatively impact your ROI. With a full understanding, you can implement new strategies to improve your SEO performance, content performance, and overall customer experience.
56% of B2B marketers list organic web searches were the first resource that led them about solutions.
You can also conduct a campaign audit. This involves a deeper look into how your previous campaigns have performed to evaluate the results of the content and messaging used. A campaign edit will help you determine what strategy and objectives should be reused – and what should be kicked to the curb.
2. Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile
Any successful B2B inbound marketing tactics begins with a thorough understanding of the audience. To draw potential customers to your website, begin a relationship, and eventually make them a customer, you must start with an understanding of their needs, challenges, and inbound marketing goals.
So what goes into an ideal customer profile?
Here are some key elements to consider:
- Demographics: What is the age, gender, location, etc. of your ideal customer
- Psychographics: What are the interests, values, and beliefs of your ideal customer
- Behaviors: What does your ideal customer do on a daily basis? Where do they spend their time online?
- Needs: What does your ideal customer need from a product or service like yours?
By taking the time to answer these questions, you'll be well on your way to defining your ideal customer profile. From there, you can start creating targeted content that will help you nurture your inbound leads and close more sales. The first step of your inbound strategy should be conducting research in order to define your ideal customer profile or commonly called an "ICP". An ICP is a company (for B2B businesses) that would benefit most from using your product or service. An ICP simply maps the criteria of a good-fit client and also outlines the facets of a poor-fit client.
It’s also important to understand your target buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of a person within a company you are trying to sell your services to that you will encounter who is a decision-maker or influencer. This can be defined by determining the title, role, demographic, goals, motivators, pain points, and level of experience/knowledge of this specific customer.
What are the concerns and questions they have, and how do those relate to what you have to offer? What are their pain points, and how can you help? Mapping content across your buyer’s journey is vital to ensuring your team is having the right conversation, at the right time in the buyer’s process. Outsourced inbound marketing lists are based on the premise that people are out are searching for what you offer.
The deeper your understanding of your ideal customer, buyer personas, and the challenges they experience, the better chance you have at success.
3. Effectiveness of Website Experience
In order to have an effective sales-ready website experience, you need to have a well-designed inbound marketing strategy. This means having a plan for how you want people to interact with your site and what kind of content you want to provide. It also involves creating a user-friendly design that makes it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for.
Finally, you need to promote your site so that people actually know it exists. Without all of these components, your website is likely to be ineffective and may even repel potential customers. By taking the time to create a strong inbound marketing strategy with inbound marketing experts, you can ensure that your website provides an enjoyable and informative experience for everyone who visits it.
Before you can begin attracting visitors, it’s important that your inbound marketing tactics website is attractive and easy to navigate. If your website isn’t acting as a helpful partner to attract, engage and delight prospective customers, it’s time to redesign.
Inbound marketing-centric B2B marketing agencies that specialize in offering scalable inbound marketing service offer expert and data-based approach, with broader demand generation and lead nurturing objectives in mind, across the needs-based buyer's journey.
Creating an enjoyable website experience is essential to keeping users engaged with your content. By understanding who your ideal customer is and what they're looking for, you can design a site that appeals to their needs and interests.
A high-impact website experience can help your broader lifecycle marketing through:
- Increased leads and conversions from a better website experience
- More time saved through faster loading pages and an intuitive design
- Better customer retention with easy to navigate menus and user-friendly design
- Enhanced brand recognition with an updated look that is reflective of your company values
Paying attention to detail and making sure that your site is easy to navigate will also help keep users coming back. In today's competitive market, it's more important than ever to make sure that your website is delivering the best possible experience to users.
By taking the time to design a site that is user-friendly and engaging, you'll be better able to keep customers coming back.
4. Mobile Friendly Websites
You need to mobilize your website –and your blog, too. More than ever, internet searches are made on mobile devices. In fact, the majority of internet queries are made on mobile devices – not desktop devices, such as PCs and laptops. Therefore, to appeal to the majority, your sites should be accessible and easy to use on smartphones and other pocket devices.
81% of B2B companies said the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact on their buying decision.
- Increased leads and conversions - A mobile-friendly website provides a more user-friendly experience that leads to more conversions. In fact, businesses with mobile-friendly websites see a 104% increase in leads from organic search.
- Higher website ROI - With a mobile-friendly website, you can achieve a higher ROI on your marketing campaigns as visitors are more likely to convert.
- Enhanced brand awareness - Being mobile friendly showcases your commitment to providing the best possible customer experience, which helps improve brand awareness among potential customer relationship management.
- Improved site usability - When users navigate your site on their phones or tablets, it’s important that they have an easy and enjoyable experience.
Mobile websites are more popular than ever before. They allow consumers to get the information they need without any hassle or confusion on their end of things, increasing satisfaction rates in return for which increases revenue streams!
As more and more people use their mobile devices to access the internet, it has become increasingly important for businesses to have mobile-friendly websites. Mobile-friendly websites make it easy for users to navigate and find the information they need, whether they are looking for directions, contact information, or product details.
Additionally, mobile-friendly websites are often faster and easier to load than traditional desktop sites, which is important in today's fast-paced world.
Finally, mobile-friendly websites with sales can help businesses to improve their inbound best marketing strategies. By making it easy for potential customers to find and use your website, you can encourage them to take action such as subscribing to your newsletter or making a purchase. In today's increasingly mobile world, a mobile-friendly website is a valuable asset for any business.
5. Creating Persona-Driven Content
While great content is not the only critical aspect of inbound marketing, it is the cornerstone strategy. Without high-quality, relevant, and up-to-date content, it is going to be challenging to get any traction with marketing inbound activities. And the bar keeps getting set higher for quality. It is no longer okay to get by cranking out mediocre content.
- Increase website traffic by creating persona-driven content that appeals to your target audience
- Attract leads and convert them into customers by providing valuable information they are looking for
- Strengthen relationships with current customers by giving them the content they desire
- Stand out from the competition by providing unique and relevant content
Consumers and search engines are getting smarter. Now, you need to consistently create and post excellent, useful content specifically catered to the customers you want to reach. In many cases, the value proposition outlined in your content marketing efforts will determine the degree of success your content marketing has in converting more traffic into leads.
If you don’t focus on creating targeted and compelling content, they won’t likely find you or, if they do, they might keep clicking after they see the limitations of what you are offering. Often times companies start out by tasking a junior level staff member to create content who does not have experience in writing to pain points of specific buyer personas, and the outcome is the content performs poorly.
Conversely, working with inbound marketing-centricB2B marketing agencies can greatly help churn out persona-driven content at scale, both for your blog and downloadable content offers.
If you are having trouble producing the amount of quality content you need, consider diversifying your offerings. Persona-driven blogs are still a simple and powerful way to create and post content.
Furthermore, continually updating your older blog posts and re-submitting to the Google search console to let Google know the article is updated can greatly impact your rankings and organic traffic as shown in the screenshot below.
Yet, your product, service, or style might lend itself better to e-books, case studies, downloadable guides, or other content. To keep yourself or your team on track, develop a content calendar so you can keep content creation and publishing on a regular schedule.
6. Pillar Pages and Blog Content
Creating persona-driven content via pillar pages that speaks to pain points of your ideal customer is vital in order to convert blog readers into qualified leads. If your marketing content is not speaking to your ideal customer, try using the free HubSpot Buyer Persona Generator and have these buyer persona data points implemented into your older blog posts. Google loves fresh content.
As shown in the infographic below, most of the time they talk to someone from your company, they have already undertaken significant research on you and your competitors.
Many facets of content creation include making videos, articles, and blog posts, which are infinitely more effective forms of advertising for many years down the road, in contracts with search ads, video ads, or paid online retargeting ads.
Quality content ultimately helps in some way, such as actionable tips or relevant insights that add value to the reader. The more your content inspires, intrigues or helps readers in some way, ultimately determines the degree to which your content is successful in converting website visitors into marketing qualified leads to hand leads off to your sales team to close.
Articles and blog posts should contain infographics, videos, and images to break up the written content, and it should be noted that episodic content is particularly popular with consumers right now. The following is a list of content to include on your website blog.
- How-to Guides
- Case Studies
- Book Summaries
- Tool Reviews
- “Day in the Life” Post
- Lists
- Video Content
7. Niche Guest Blog Posting
Not all backlinks are created equal. In fact, some types of backlinks can hurt your rankings. The backlink value of blog comments and profile backlinks is long gone.
By guest posting or link insertions on other niche or major publications related to your company’s offerings, you are able to increase organic traffic and reach a fresh audience, some of whom may never have heard of your company otherwise.
As we look at the best inbound best marketing strategies for 2023, many marketers are overlooking this high-impact way to draw more people to a website and generate more leads and sales. As shown in the chart below, updating old blog posts can greatly increase both rankings and website traffic.
In 2023, guest posting is essential as a b2b inbound marketing strategy in that it can impact nearly every other aspect of your marketing plan. Guest posting can provide backlinks to your site, create brand authority, and build relationships with niche influencers.
To gain traction and get the fastest impact from guest posting, be consistent, especially in the beginning, and choose blogs that will offer the most return for the time and effort you will invest in writing.
It is important to make sure you include backlinks to your own site in your posts so the blog’s readers can easily access information about your company and products.
8. Constant Page Headline Testing
It is often said that 50% of the time you spend writing an article should be spent thinking of a killer headline. While this might be a little dramatic, headlines are still very important nonetheless.
A good headline should contain your chosen keywords, grab your attention, and it should be negated. You are more likely to receive a ‘click’ if your headline contains words such as ‘never’ and negators, such as ‘not’, compared to words like ‘always’ or superlatives such as ‘best’.
As part of any inbound marketing strategy, it's important to test different headlines on your website pages in order to find the ones that perform the best. There are a number of different factors to take into account when testing headlines, such as the length of the headline, the use of keywords, and the tone of voice.
Trying out different combinations of these factors can help you to find the perfect headline for each page on your website. In addition to increasing website traffic, effective headlines can also lead to higher conversion rates. As such, it's well worth taking the time to test different headlines in order to find the ones that work best for your business.
9. SEO in Inbound Marketing
Search engine optimization is an essential aspect of your strategy to attract visitors. It positions your content to appear at the top of Google and other search engines. With the correct keywords and phrases in your content, you can increase a higher ranking to improve organic search traffic over time.
When it comes to planning and implementing a winning B2B inbound marketing idea, it is difficult to know what to determine first: the content topics or search engine optimization (SEO). Early on, many marketers would start with the right SEO keywords and create content based on them. As readers (and search engines) get smarter, it is no longer that simple.
We need to take a broader approach that creates relevant content that is SEO keyword optimized. It is no longer enough just to try and rank for relevant keywords. Those keywords need to lead to content that is helpful and relevant.
In 2023, it is vital to manage expectations internally that SEO will not increase revenue by itself. Because of this, SEO and content need to go hand in hand with buyer personas guiding content development and SEO keyword research.
From there, content needs to be developed with the intention of answering the most relevant questions your potential customers are asking, while at the same time being easily discovered as potential customers search for solutions.
SEO is the bread and butter of marketing on the web. You are most likely already including search engine optimization in your B2B inbound marketing strategy, but are you clued up on how to maximize its effectiveness and grow organic search traffic? Make sure to research keyword trends on the web, and if you’re a new company or start-up, it’s a good idea to focus on keywords with less competition.
While repeating keywords can be useful to increase your site rankings, make sure to avoid keyword stuffing– a method that uses keywords unnaturally and at a very high frequency.
Not only will this deter potential customers from your site, but search engines like Google have started using software programs to ensure that you don’t achieve a higher rank using this method.
When some of us think of Pay Per Click (PPC), we think of traditional advertising, which sounds like it doesn’t belong in an inbound marketing strategy B2B. However, PPC can be an essential part of an inbound strategy to attract leads. PPC is a layer of inbound because it is targeting people who have already visited your company website.
While in a perfect world, the quality of your content and SEO would get you to the very top of the search engine results page, that is not always the case. A reputable B2B PPC agency effective paid search playbook gives you the chance to buy your way to the top of the results and draw people into the content on your site.
Think of these paid ads, which can appear on social media marketing platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as a follow-up for your inbound marketing.
10. Active Social Media Footprint
Social media allows you to stay connected to consumers. A strong social media presence drives traffic to your blog posts and works to boost your targeted traffic.
Moreover, the messaging and positioning aspects of these platforms allow you to interact with potential customers and act as a great opportunity to get to know your target audience better; interested consumers can contact representatives of your company on social media to ask any questions they can’t find the answer to online.
Furthermore, a social media presence increases public knowledge of your company, introducing more potential visitors to your site, product, or brand. However, make sure to earn your social media following in an organic way; definitely do not buy followers.
The HubSpot social media suite allows you to interact with social media users that have followed your company or interacted with one of your social media posts.
11. Work with Niche Influencers
When focusing on your social media strategy, one useful method of attracting visitors is working with influencers. Figure out which influencers are popular with your target demographic while taking into account the age, gender, location, and other determining factors. Then, partner with these influencers and have them promote your company or product.
In today's inbound marketing landscape, one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience is by working with niche influencers. These are people with a large following in a specific interest area who can help to promote your product or service to their engaged audience. When done correctly, influencer marketing can be a powerful way to reach new customers and grow your business.
There are a few key things to keep in mind when working with influencers. First, it's important to make sure that you choose an influencer who aligns with your brand values and who will be a good fit for your B2B target audience. Second, be clear about your goals for the partnership and what you hope to achieve. Always be respectful of the influencer's time and work with them to create content that is interesting and valuable for their audience. By following these guidelines, you can set yourself up for success when working with niche influencers.
The use of niche B2B influencer campaigns is a particularly effective inbound marketing strategy, as they usually have a large following of fans that admire and trust their opinion, and therefore, these followers will likely trust their praise of your product, brand, or company.
This is where working together with a niche B2B influencer to craft a guest blog post or link insertion that touches on pain points of persons reading that influencers blog will greatly increase the likelihood that the readers will engage with your call to action.
Turning Visitors Into Leads
Once you’ve developed a solid content marketing and SEO strategy to drive targeted traffic to your website, the next step is to engage with these prospects in order to convert them into qualified. Moving onto the next phase of your inbound flywheel, the following are strategies to implement to engage with visitors. You want to equip your marketing team with the right tools so that they are prepared.
12. Landing Page Strategy
In 2023, your inbound strategy needs to include more than one front door.
Landing pages serve as a point of entry other than your main home page. By creating additional landing pages, you have the opportunity to direct your potential customers to a landing page designed specifically to convince them to take the next action step.
Whether you want to collect information about leads, get people to sign up for your newsletter, download a white paper, or even buy your product, landing pages can be customized around this goal and free from any added distractions.
13. Call to Action Button Strategy
It is important to provide an opportunity for your potential customers to offer their information so that your marketing professionals are able to start a conversation. Marketing experts of today understand one very important rule: give before you ask.
The more effective call to action buttons need to accomplish the following engagement objectives:
- Increase response rates and drive more leads with laser targeted, personalized marketing messaging
- Get the most out of your marketing budget by sending highly relevant messages that resonate with each individual prospect.
- Create a one-to-one relationship with each and every prospect through catered content.
- Generate more repeat customers and referrals by establishing trust and credibility through personalization
In this day and age, customers don’t trust everything they see online. They have also become sick of pop-ups and other ‘in-your-face’, disruptive advertising. For this reason, the ‘give before you ask’ rule was established.
This means creating call to actions (CTAs) that offer something of value to the customer in exchange for information such as their email or phone number. This could also provide an opportunity to gather defining information that identifies their demographic to help you better understand who your content is reaching.
A call to action can be a big, bold button on your website or blog that requests an action from a prospect. It should clearly state what they will receive in return for performing the action. It is best to be specific and avoid a broad request, such as “Contact Us”.
Some inbound marketing strategy examples of valuable content to offer to include the following:
- White Papers
- E-Books
- Tutorials
- Free Trial
14. Personalized Email Campaigns
Blasting out the same message to hundreds or thousands is a waste of your time and will not do anything but annoy 97% of recipients. Emails personalized to a particular location, lead status, lifecycle stage, referral source can greatly increase your email engagement rates in 2023.
However, like SEO, email marketing is important that you use the tool of email marketing intelligently and with inbound strategy in mind – that is, sending specific email marketing campaigns to prospects who have opted in and not just cold-emailing.
It is also important to conduct ongoing A/B testing of marketing emails (see more on this below) to measure which layout and/or text performs the most effectively.
91% of email users have unsubscribed from an email they previously opted into.
The following four bullet points highlight actionable ways to implement improvements to your inbound email marketing campaigns:
- You can test the effectiveness of your email messages before sending them to your entire contact list, which helps you avoid potentially embarrassing situations.
- By testing different email content and subject lines, you can identify what works best for your audience and begin generating more leads and conversions from your email campaigns.
- The data gleaned from your a/b tests can help you improve all aspects of your inbound email marketing strategy, including the design of your emails, the timing of your sends, and even the type of content you include in them.
- A/B testing is both the submit line and body messaging is an easy way to boost the performance of your email marketing campaigns without any major changes or investments on your part.
You should ensure that all the contacts on your mailing list have opted-in to receive your company’s emails; this will ensure that your reputation and company name isn’t associated with annoying, not-asked-for email campaigns and improve open rates.
Sending emails to people who have opted-in will also decrease the likelihood of your IP being blacklisted, and therefore increase your chances of arriving in customers’ inboxes, rather than their spam folders, in the future.
Furthermore, in order to improve your email marketing ROI over time, you should make sure that the emails you send are tailored to your recipients’ interests based on their buying history.
Lastly, try not to send too many email campaigns- even if consumers have opted in to receive promotions, they might unsubscribe or flag your emails as spam if your emails clog up their inbox.
15. Multi-Variant Call To Actions
To ensure that your B2B marketing strategy is working as an effective asset for your company, you need to be continually thinking about how you will convert inbound traffic into leads and, eventually, revenue. Yes, inbound is indeed different from former outbound strategies in that it is not pushing products and services to people who haven’t shown interest yet.
Below outline some ways A/B testing your CTA buttons can boost clickthrough rate:
- Test different email subject lines to see which gets more opens and clicks.
- Test the body of your email to see if shorter or longer messages get more engagement.
- Compare two versions of an email to see which generates more leads or sales.
- Get real-time feedback on what works and what doesn't so you can send better emails that convert.
Once people have found you and begun to show interest in what you have to offer, it must be easy for them to understand and take the next step. Whatever step you want a potential customer to take, be sure it is clear and visible.
If you're running an inbound ad campaign, one of the most important things you can do is test your call to action (CTA) buttons. After all, your CTA is what's going to determine whether or not someone takes the next step and becomes a customer. There are a few different ways to test CTA buttons, but one of the most effective is A/B testing.
Emails with a single call-to-action button increased clicks over 300% and ultimately sales above 1,500%.
With A/B testing, you create two versions of your ad, with each version featuring a different CTA button. You then show each version to a different group of people and see which button gets more clicks. This helps you to identify which button is more effective and makes it easy to make changes that can help improve your website conversion rate. So if you're not already using A/B testing for your inbound ad campaigns, it's definitely something worth considering.
A/B testing your call to actions, landing pages, email campaigns, and other engagement tools is a necessary step to take in order to see what is working and what is not. You can run A/B testing by changing out the color and size of your CTA buttons. You can also adjust the font size, structure, wording and color of your headline.
Making one change at a time can help you interpret what caused any change – decrease or increase – in engagement. And remember, you should always be testing!
An inbound email marketing strategy is one of the most efficient and effective ways to reach your target audience. It allows you to connect with customers and prospects who have consented to receive communications from you and helps you build lasting relationships with them.
16. Middle of Funnel PPC Remarketing
Another inbound strategy that works as an incredibly useful tool to attract more visitors to your website is remarketing. Ad retargeting is an inbound marketing technique in which ads are served to web users based on their previous interactions with a website. At first, glance, remarketing looks like traditional advertising. However, this specific kind of paid advertisement uses browser cookies to target google ads to people who have already visited your website.
Remarketing allows you to target people who have visited your website before, with ads specifically tailored to them. This can be an extremely powerful tool, as these people have already shown some interest in what you do - so they're more likely to buy from you if they see your ad again.
You can use remarketing to target leads that have visited your website, blog, or a certain set of pages. Remarketing follows a lead’s activity online and produces ads to remind them to come back.
Google ad retargeting allows you to show ads to people who have visited your site in the past, as well as those who have not yet visited your site. This ensures that your ad reaches the right people at the right time, and that you are not wasting your ad budget on people who are not interested in your product or service. In addition, an effective ad retargeting allows you to customize your ads for each individual user, making them more relevant and more likely to result in a conversion.
For example, if someone has visited your site but not made a purchase, you can show them an ad for a discount or free shipping in order to encourage them to complete their purchase. Ad retargeting is an effective way to increase brand awareness and boost sales, and it should be an integral part of any inbound marketing strategy.
77% of marketers are using retargeting as part of their Facebook and Instagram advertising strategy. (99 Firms)
One of the most effective ways to remarket to inbound prospects who have already shown an interest in your product or service is through inbound ad retargeting. By placing ads on popular websites and in key locations throughout the internet, you can reach people who are already interested in what you have to offer.
In addition, inbound ad retargeting allows you to customize your message to target specific demographics and interests. As a result, you can ensure that your ads are seen by people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. Inbound ad retargeting is an effective way to reach potential customers who are already interested in what you have to offer.
By targeting specific demographics and interests, you can ensure that your message is seen by people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.
By following up with ads that are targeted to the user's specific interests, you can keep your business top of mind and increase the chances that they will convert into a paying customer. In addition, inbound ad retargeting allows you to collect data on users' interests and preferences, which can be used to further customize your ads and improve your overall marketing strategy. With inbound ad retargeting, you can take your lead generation efforts to the next level and start growing your business today.
17. Nurturing Inbound Leads into Customers
So you’ve created compelling content, gained traffic to your website, and opened up the conversation with a qualified lead – great! Now you have them right where you want them.
But how do you seal the deal and turn this qualified lead into a paying customer? The following video lays out the importance of B2B lead nurturing throughout the decision-making stage of your inbound marketing plan.
Nurturing a lead and guiding them towards making a decision is a delicate process. Customers of today don’t respond very well to aggressive engagement. It’s imperative that you’re prepared with the proper tools and best outsourced inbound sales marketing tactics to give prospects the gentle nudge they need to make a purchase without being pushy.
As any business owner knows, generating leads is essential to growing your customer base. However, simply generating leads is not enough - you also need to nurture them in order to turn them into customers. One way to do this is through inbound ad retargeting.
Nurturing inbound leads is one of the most important, and often most overlooked, aspects of customer acquisition. In order to turn a lead into a customer, businesses need to nurture their relationship with that lead from the very beginning.
Nurturing means providing the lead with valuable content that will help them throughout their buyer's journey. This could be blog posts, ebooks, infographics, or even just helpful tips and tricks. By providing informative and useful content, businesses can not only help their leads make informed decisions, but also build trust and credibility. Nurturing leads is an essential part of turning them into customers, and should not be overlooked.
18. Targeted Content for Lead Nurturing
As mentioned above, creating content is the cornerstone of your B2B inbound marketing strategy and it shouldn’t end with the attraction or engagement phases. Once you have the attention of a prospective lead and they have opted in to receive more information about your business, you must continue providing useful content that is geared towards helping them make their final decision.
Leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%. (HubSpot)
This is where having a clear understanding of your different buyer personas comes into play. You’ll want to create targeted content for each of your buyer personas based on their specific pain points, needs, goals and motivators.
It is also important to have a marketing automation platform in place to properly identify and target your buyer personas.
Creating targeted content allows you to speak directly to the needs and pain points of your target audience, and it is an essential part of any inbound marketing strategy.
By creating targeted content, you can more effectively nurture your leads and move them through the sales funnel. Additionally, targeted content can help you to better identify suspect and prospect stage leads, and it can also help you to score your leads more accurately.
Ultimately, targeted content is an essential piece of any inbound marketing strategy, and it should be given careful consideration in order to ensure success.
19. Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing Techniques
Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses various online channels to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers. A key component of inbound marketing is lead nurturing, which is the process of building relationships with leads throughout their buyer's journey.
Over 83% of marketers using automation software manage to generate more leads.
There are many different techniques that can be used for lead nurturing, and the best approach will often depend on the specific products or services being offered. However, some common lead nurturing techniques include inbound email marketing strategy, content marketing, and social media outreach. By using these methods to keep in touch with leads and provide them with valuable information, businesses can build trust and credibility, eventually leading to conversions.
Lead nurturing strategies of the past included drip email campaigns that would send out generic email blasts to a list of prospects. Fortunately today, there are more options and ways to reach out to your generated leads.
Marketing automation platforms have made it possible for marketers to execute their lead nurturing tactics through multiple channels. Multi-channel lead nurturing includes a combination of the following.
- Email Marketing
- Marketing Automation
- Social Media
- Paid Retargeting
- Dynamic Website Content
- Direct Sales Outreach
20. Agile Lead Nurturing Cadence
We know that it can be tough to keep up with the latest lead nurturing best practices. That's where we come in - with a tailored lead nurturing cadence, you can focus on your business while we take care of the leads.
Research from the Marketing Lead Management Report has shown that on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of funnel until they’re closed won customers. However, many best marketing strategies of today are not following this protocol.
In inbound marketing, lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, from awareness to purchase. The most successful lead nurturing strategies include multiple touches across several marketing channels.
For example, a company might use inbound ad retargeting to reach leads who have visited their website but not converted into customers. They might also use email marketing to send regular updates and special offers to leads who have subscribed to their newsletter.
The most successful lead nurturing strategies include multiple touches across several platforms. By creating content to act as different touch points, you can help a buyer progress through their sales journey by addressing common questions and concerns they might have along the way.
By using a variety of marketing channels, companies can create a more holistic and personalized experience for their leads, increasing the likelihood of conversion. You can use a combination of content types such as social media, blog posts, white papers, interactive calculators and direct mail.
21. Engagement-Driven Follow Up Lead Nurturing
After you’ve engaged with prospects with targeted content, it’s important that you follow up in a timely manner with a direct call or email. You have a much higher chance of converting a lead into a paying customer when you reach out directly following a website conversion.
Calling an inbound lead is much different than cold-calling an outbound lead. Effective inbound marketing strategy for b2b provides you with important information about a lead so that you can be prepared when speaking with them.
Because inbound leads have already shown interest in your business or have accepted a promotional asset, your marketing team is able to do a little research prior to calling to find out more about the organization a lead works for, or their specific role at the company.
Effective engagement-driven lead nurturing services are the perfect way to ensure that your leads stay interested in what you have to offer. By providing valuable content and keeping your company at the forefront of their minds, we can help you turn leads into customers.
22. High converting Content Personalization
smart content personalization allows you to create unique, personalized experiences for each and every one of your website visitors. With smart content personalization, you can target specific content to individual users based on their behavior, interests and preferences. This way, you can ensure that each and every visitor sees the content that is most relevant and interesting to them.
Sending out personalized emails and user generated content allows you to deliver the right messaging to the right audience, at exactly the right time. Personalization is based on data-driven behaviors, actions taken, and other indicators of the lead’s stage in their buyer’s journey. These can be referred to as triggers.
Examples of personalization can include sending out a thank you email when a lead downloads educational content. Or sending out relevant content when a lead clicks through to a certain landing page or interacts with a specific CTA. Other triggers include high activity or inactivity, completion of a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. Personalizing content based on triggers can lead to higher conversion rates.
23. Effective Inbound B2B Lead Scoring
Not all leads are the same – so they shouldn’t be treated the same. Inbound marketing strategies can effectively increase the number of leads visiting your website, however, they might not all be at the same phase of their sales cycle.
B2B companies using lead scoring experience a 77% lift in lead generation ROI, over organizations that do not use lead scoring. (Marketing Sherpa)
This is where lead scoring comes into play. Lead scoring is a strategy of ranking leads based on qualifications in order to determine their value and likeliness to purchase. The criteria for your lead scoring depends on the qualifications you put in place for your business.
- Marketing Qualified Leads are leads that are more likely to become a customer based on their demographic qualifications and activity on your site.
- Sales Qualified Leads are leads that your marketing and sales team agree are ready to be handled by sales. They have already requested to speak with a sales representative or have even accepted an invitation to meet.
- Highly Qualified Leads are somewhere in between MQL and SQL and why they are greatly impacted by proactive lead scoring. They meet the requirements to be marketing qualified and have shown interest in speaking with a sales representative.
Lead scoring grants you the opportunity to understand your leads better and to engage with them the right way at every phase of their buyer’s journey.
24. Proactively Test Messaging and Experience
It takes between 5-7 impressions for brand awareness to begin to resonate. Consistency is everything, especially when it comes to sales-ready messaging.
Below are benefits of proactively testing your messaging and position units, along with downstream messaging modules:
- Increase leads and close more deals with a strategic inbound marketing approach
- Attract the right customers with a message that speaks to their needs
- Differentiate your business from the competition by positioning yourself as an authority in your industry
- Stand out from the crowd with a unique brand voice that communicates your company values
At its core, inbound marketing is all about driving relevant traffic to your website and then converting that traffic into sales qualified leads and ultimately customers. When creating brand messaging and positioning framework, ensure measure the effectiveness of nearly every element of your messaging consistency throughout the inbound-centric buyer's journey.
In order to be successful with inbound marketing approach, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your target audience and what messaging will resonate with them.
Once you have developed your outbound demand generation vs inbound marketing strategy, it is important to test different messaging and experiences to see what works best with your audience.
Only by constantly testing and tweaking your inbound marketing strategy will you be able to maximize your results. Proactively testing messaging and experience is an essential part of any successful inbound marketing strategy.
25. Turning Customers Into Evangelists
Delighting strategies involve your team becoming advisors, experts, and problem-solvers. They must be prepped and willing to assist your customers at any point of their sales cycle.
Chatbots and virtual assistants on your website provide a way for potential and existing customers to reach out at any time of day. Surveys are a great option to receive feedback on your products, services, or customer experience.
Another best practice to implement into your delighting strategy is social media listening and interaction. Customers will often use social media platforms to reach out with questions and online reviews.
The delight phase of your inbound marketing strategy for B2B should be intertwined with every phase of your inbound strategy to ensure customer satisfaction across the board. Every interaction – big or small – should be handled with care and proper attention.
The linear funnel methodology that worked in the past describes the delight phase of the buyer’s journey as the final stage. However, marketing experts of 2023 understand now that the customer-centric inbound strategy encouraged by the flywheel structure is a much more effective approach.
In the digital landscape of today, customers are able to share their experience with a brand in an instant – with a simple push of a button. This rings true for fresh leads and paying customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. For this reason, it is crucial that a customer is satisfied and delighted throughout their entire experience with your business.
Thinking with the customer at the center of your inbound marketing strategy aligns your marketing, sales enablement, and customer service teams and gives them a streamlined goal. A happy customer is likely to turn into an evangelist or active promoter of your brand that spreads the word about their experience and drives more business your way. After all, word of mouth is one of the best marketing tools out there.
Inbound Marketing Strategy Takeaways
The inbound marketing strategy takeaways we’ve looked at can help any business, of any size. By understanding your buyer persona and creating relevant, engaging content, you can start to see a positive return on investment for your inbound marketing efforts. If you don’t have the time or resources to do this yourself, connect with a top inbound marketing agency that understands your needs and can help you achieve success. Thanks for following along with us on this journey through the world of the best inbound seo agencies or top inbound marketing agencies! We hope these insights will be helpful as you continue working to attract and convert leads into customers.
Prior to 2023, the paradigm shift away from traditional outbound methods is taking place more rapidly than most marketers expected, due to the fact that they are disruptive and ineffective.
Be sure the following three key objectives of implementing an effective inbound marketing strategy include:
- Convert website visitors into leads with effective lead capture forms and content offers.
- Nurture those leads with automated email marketing that provides value and encourages further engagement.
- Close the deal by providing top-of-the-line content marketing that speaks to the needs of your audience.
When you are diving in and creating an inbound strategy, input from your sales and marketing teams is vital. Ensure that you have a scalable approach to delivering effective marketing communications for your inbound demand generation generation, customer acquisition, and client engagement efforts and to meet your inbound marketing ROI goals.
65% of businesses say generating traffic and leads is their biggest marketing challenge.
Inbound marketing strategies are evergreen and provide the most brand value for years to come.
With an expanding following, a growing online presence, and an increasing number of satisfied and delighted customers, your company’s success is sure to grow faster in 2023.
