What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing exists throughout every step of the buyer’s journey—this is true whether you are taking a highly-target Account-Based Marketing approach or are trying to get found by people who have no idea who you are. Hopefully, you are doing both.

Whichever approach you are taking, the idea is to turn people into customers through inbound marketing. This was previously visualised as a funnel.

The funnel was a great metaphor as it helped people visualise how customers went through their buyer’s journey.

Leads started at the top, and throughout the attract, engage, and delight stages, they were serviced separately by marketing or sales and then dripped out the bottom of the funnel.

While this worked for many years, the analogy now seems a little flawed. It saw only the marketing as important rather than the customers themselves. But if you do inbound right, customers become marketers. While the funnel sees customers as passive input, the new way of visualising this process sees them as a driving force.

Enter the flywheel. The flywheel is a way of driving your business forward. It is a comprehensive way of visualising the different forces at play that have an effect on how your company can grow.

The concept of the flywheel was coined by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. A flywheel is a huge metal disk that takes a lot of energy to move. However, once it starts to turn, the weight of the wheel itself helps build momentum. This means that the same effort can be put into the flywheel and it will turn faster and faster.

The underlying concept is that, regardless of the end result, great transformations never happen overnight. Increasing sales does not involve one single defining action. Instead, building a business is more like pushing a giant flywheel. With each new effort, you will continue to build momentum.

The flywheel doesn’t only worry about how to do inbound marketing. It recognises that what happens prior to a customer reading any of your content is becoming ever more important. According to HubSpot, 57% of B2B purchase processes are completed before buyers reach out to vendors. This means that to engage potential customers, your concern should not only be directing content at potential customers.

It is important to consider that your potential customers read third-party websites, look for peer recommendations, and listen to word of mouth. Simply put, to begin with, buyers trust other buyers rather than businesses. This change has been promoted by technology: the review sites and ever-more important social media instead of physical marketing materials.

The funnel is an outdated concept because it sees the buyer’s journey as a linear process that doesn’t use the built-up energy from previous customers to attract new customers. Conversely, a flywheel is in constant movement. It uses rotational energy for its speed and stores kinetic energy for later use. It’s dynamic, not static.

To continue the metaphor, the more energy stored in your flywheel, the faster it will spin, the more customers you will attract, and the more profit you will make. Think about the buyer’s journey and your use of the inbound methodology as something cyclical. A customer who is delighted by you giving them the right content will drive forward the Attract stage for a new customer, who then needs to be engaged by your great content.

Once you get it moving, your flywheel uses its own inertia to continue moving. Imagine how much more powerful (and efficient) this is than channelling all that energy back into a funnel—only for it to go nowhere and leave you back where you started.

When you visualise your business as a flywheel, you will start to make decisions that keep it spinning as fast as you can. Putting your customer at the centre of this process is what will make the difference. At the heart will be your inbound strategy that conceptualises your customer as the hero.

And just like the flywheel is circular, your inbound strategy also needs to be circular; both wheels turn around your customer—the central axle. Your inbound marketing needs to attract, engage, and delight customers to create a great customer experience.   

Lastly, the flywheel is a great tool to integrate sales and marketing—to avoid the division between the two teams that you can see in the traditional funnel graphic. Previously, customer experience was often a precarious affair, but the circular, integrated flywheel promotes seamless and frictionless experiences as the whole team is tasked with attracting, engaging, and delighting customers.

According to HubSpot, 57% of B2B purchase processes are completed before buyers reach out to vendors.

During this stage, the idea is for people to engage with you. So make it easy for new prospects to become customers. Let them engage with you on their terms and on their preferred channels whilst guiding them through the consideration and decision stage of the buyer’s journey. 

Focus on cultivating the relationship is key—not selling. Do this by using your content to provide useful insights that will help your potential customers resolve their problems. And while you’re at it, show them how to understand and implement the different solutions that are on offer. 

In this stage, trust is the name of the game. While the goal is for the customer to choose you, this is not the time to use tricks out of the Only Fools and Horses playbook. Remaining neutral and allowing the facts to talk will make you an authority and allow you to nurture trust—the customer is more likely to see you in a favourable light and see you as a potential problem solver.

The content in the engage stage  

• Incentives and offers
• Detailed articles and technical information (more complex products)
• Product and service demonstrations
• Guides (including video guides)

Your content should allow the potential customer to understand more about what you offer. Present them with objective information that showcases your product and knowledge and makes your brand stand out.

Don’t forget the CTA

You will also want to include a strong call-to-action (CTA) in your content—really you need one at every stage of the flywheel. The purpose of the CTA depends on your product, but, as a rule, it should stand out from a design point of view. You could include a prominent ‘Book a Demo’ in orange in the right-hand corner of a black header, for example. This allows the potential customer to walk down the path of their buyer’s journey. 

CTAs really make the difference. Instead of someone visiting your site and leaving no trace, they provide you with insight and permission to communicate with them in the future. When the customer clicks on the CTA, they are guided to the next step in the conversion path: the landing page.

Make sure you follow some best practices for CTAs to maximise the chances of conversion:

• Make your CTA action-oriented
• Make your CTA stand out on the page

The idea is to reduce friction as much as possible. You can do this by embedding forms in the CTA, for example. It is current good practice to only ask the customer for an email address, with a message telling them how it will be treated with respect.

A CTA can also be a banner that will give you more real estate and the opportunity to use images or graphics as well as text. CTAs at the end of blogs are more likely to work in this format than a simple button.

If you are a HubSpot user, you can benefit from: 

• A/B testing to check the performance of one design against another
• ‘Smart CTAs’ that recognise the persona, lifecycle stage, geography, and devise the visitor is using

Channels used in the engage stage

Google search: Ranking highly on a Google search and getting featured snippets is a way of engaging customers and showing them you are trustworthy. 

Email: Although some people say email is dead, sending a piece of content directly to a prospect’s inbox to help them throughout their buyer’s journey can still be a winner.  

Website: The place where you provide the customer with technical and in-depth details about your business to show them if you are a potential solution to their problem.

Blogs: Continue to blog on topics that answer customer questions, provide solutions, and show your company as a thought leader.

Review sites: Show the experience your existing customers have had working with you. 

Landing pages: This is a website page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead form. It’s here where you expand on the offer you made with that compelling CTA and capture information about leads that enables you to provide them with more content.

Here are some tips for creating a remarkable landing page:

Design: Landing pages should be uncluttered. Nothing should distract from the customer understanding the offer. Top navigation, sidebars, or any unrelated information needs to be removed.

Copy: As with CTAs, your landing page copy should use actionable, value-driven words. Copy should explain the value and benefits of your offer in a clear and unambiguous way. Convey empathy, write in the second person, be brief and to the point.

Images: Images should be indicative of what the visitor will get after filling out the form. There’s no need to get too artistic—that risks diverting the visitor’s attention.

Forms: Forms should be short and focused on gathering the most valuable information. Progressive profiling creates an opportunity to expand on a contact's profile on subsequent conversions. 

Some landing pages will convert better than others. A/B testing is a vital component of lead generation. And, whenever possible and appropriate, you should also include social proof, introduce scarcity, identify a knowledge gap, and promote exclusivity.

Tools that help conversions 

There are many touchpoints with potential customers before they become customers. There are also several tools that can improve the chances of a successful conversion, which involve automating the inbound marketing process. 

The HubSpot platform provides a suite of automated processes to deliver relevant content and personalised messages to leads when they are ready and receptive. For example, if a customer downloaded an eBook, you can send them several related offers.

Here are the top tools to help close the deal:

Lead scoring

Lead scoring allows you to give each lead a score based on the information they have given you and the actions they have taken. 

Here are areas that you could score (generally out of 100):

• Job title
• Company type and industry
• Company size
• How many pages of your website they read
• Offers downloaded

Through identifying the higher scores, you’ll be able to focus on the leads that are the most likely to make a purchase.

At a more advanced level, you can look at contacts who became customers and those that didn’t to see what they have in common to ascertain which attributes should be weighted.

If the information exists, you can calculate the lead-to-customer conversion rate, identify the characteristics of customers you believe were higher quality leads, and then calculate the individual close rates of each of those attributes.

Email

Email is a powerful tool to connect with customers.

You can make use of a subscriber’s lifecycle stage, list membership, or any of the information held in their contact records. This can help to create bespoke subject lines, personalisation, content relating to previous actions, associated links, and schedule campaigns to send at the optimal time, regardless of time zone differences.

You can also maximise campaigns with A/B tests and analytics to discover subject lines that get the most opens and content that gets you better engagement. And you can dig into your data to analyse the best times, days, formats and much more when it comes to sending re-engagement emails, newsletters, and any number of offers you may have.

Closed-loop reporting

Closed-loop reporting happens when sales and marketing work together and both know what’s happening with the leads. Understanding where leads are will allow you to target them with the most efficient marketing efforts. Using HubSpot is a simple yet effective way to automate the data generation needed for your team to keep up to date with closed-loop reporting.

Workflows

The Workflow tool in HubSpot enables you to set up any number of trigger conditions so that the right messages are sent to the right leads at the right time. And, Workflows can be tied to goals, so you’ll know if they are working.

You can use the advanced segmentation logic in the tool to determine who gets enrolled in your workflows, and when, then personalise emails for each recipient using details from your contacts database or CRM.

Workflows can be used to set up web-hooks, score leads, send leads to sales, update properties, copy values, and much more. And you can trigger notifications when a contact takes a particular action that matters to you.

Progressive profiling

This allows you to manage which questions appear in a form based on the data that has already been acquired. Each time a contact fills out a form, you can collect new information and keep forms short.

You will achieve higher conversion rates using shorter forms and avoid repetition. In this way, you can build a deeper, more comprehensive profile of each lead, which wouldn’t be possible if you had to use much longer forms.

You can reuse the same forms across multiple landing pages. By queuing up questions, you are constantly adding to the profile of a prospect, irrespective of the offer they are converting on.