Inbound Marketing Age

Most companies struggle to talk about what they offer in a clear way.

Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework helps businesses simplify their messaging by taking a story-driven approach to communication that places the customer at the centre.

Nothing causes people to stop and listen like a great story. Stories can be used to teach, inspire, clarify and mobilise. In a world of information overload, stories can cut through the noise and influence people.

But according to Miller, the most crucial thing in telling your story is what your customers hear - not what you’re trying to say.

Conversational marketing; is it just the latest buzzword? Perhaps you’ve heard that a conversational strategy can be valuable for your business.

But what does it mean exactly?

What are the benefits?

And how does it tie in with inbound marketing?

We are in a digital era of marketing where increasingly impersonal interaction takes place online and marketing automation is seen as the answer to a range of issues.

In contrast to this, customers and marketing pundits are driving the need for personalisation and customisation of content and customer experience. 

These two driving forces in contemporary marketing are, at first glance, seemingly irreconcilable and imply a potential future in which customers relate only to pre-programmed algorithms.

Voice search is growing at a rapid pace. By 2020, 50% of all search queries will be initiated by voice.

This trend is hardly surprising. Voice search is fast (3.7 times faster than typing) and convenient. Plus, with the best systems now operating with 95-97% accuracy, it’s becoming increasingly reliable.

Most smartphones are equipped with some form of voice-assisted search function, such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. At home, smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are becoming integrated into family life.

Influencer marketing has become one of the big buzzwords of recent times. The rise of social media has changed the marketing landscape.

All types of buyers – both consumer and B2B, now make decisions based on information and opinions supplied by their peers, by websites and blogs and by influencers on social media. 

Influencers have become particularly important with the rise of social media channels such as Instagram, where conventional marketing is difficult, if not impossible to undertake. 

For a B2B business, there are two broad marketing strategies you can follow for gaining sales. You could pursue a traditional inbound strategy that involves creating a small number of buyer personas – fictional profiles of typical buyers. These buyer personas then form the target for all your content and marketing efforts, ensuring that your creations are attractive to your target market in order to bring in leads and engagement.

B2B Marketing can be tough.

Finding new leads, engaging them and converting them isn’t easy.

It requires a lot of work, a significant budget and a massive amount of time.

But what if you could double your sales force? Triple it? And all without spending huge sums of money too?

This is not a fantasy, it’s achievable. And it’s a goal you should definitely set your business.

In the past, the roles of Sales and Marketing have been fairly well-defined, understood and respected, but the changing nature of the market and buyers' behaviour has brought them into inevitable conflict.

Compartmentalised Departments

If we go back a few years, most companies had two, distinctly separate departments – Sales and Marketing.

In simple terms, Marketing would create all the sales materials and handle the brand positioning of the business. And sales would deal with the prospects and turn them into customers. It was more or less cut and dried.

Read the following sentence:

‘If people want to become more productive and efficient at work, they should implement the following habits into their working day.’

Let’s change one thing:

'If you want to become more productive and efficient at work, you’ll need to implement the following habits into your working day.’

Notice the difference? Which is more engaging?

As marketers, data analysis takes a firm seat in our weekly schedules. But so many of us are just skating across the surface of what can be achieved.

By shifting the focus from output toward outcomes, a business can maximise its performance and potential.  

Your output is the avenue you take to achieve outcomes; it’s the daily activities you use to generate exposure, connect with prospects and promote your business. Your output includes your newsletters, your emails, your website, your blogs.

You’ve spent hours producing content, publishing it and promoting it and now you have to measure its impact and prove Return On Investment (ROI) to the board as well? Isn’t just publishing it enough?

In a word, no.

If you can’t prove your marketing is working, then you are putting effort in for nothing.

• How do you know it is useful?
• How do you know it is the best you can do?
• How do you know your efforts are not making things worse even?

So measuring is essential.