Inbound Marketing Automation For Business Growth

  

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Is Your Company Taking Advantage Of Automated Lead Nurturing?

There's a lot of talk about inbound marketing and inbound marketing automation and all the 'if and how' questions that surround it as they relate to the potential for business growth from your corporate website. Some of its more appealing characteristics include the precise measurement of ROI because of it's integration with sophisticated analytics tools as well as the contribution it can make to the alignment of sales and marketing goals since it can break down the 'silos' between these two departments resulting in a cycle of constant improvement. Today we want to look further at inbound marketing automation and what separates it from some other internet based actions.

As it's core meaning, inbound marketing automation is the phrase that describes the process of developing leads at the top of your sales and marketing funnel and guiding them down through that funnel developing or extending that initial online relationship into a highly qualified prospect that's ready for your sales process, and all of this without having to lift a finger so to speak. How is this different from single source internet solutions like SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click ads), social media or email marketing? While these are important elements of a comprehensive inbound marketing program, they are individual inbound elements and if they're not integrated they don't achieve their full potential. As a result, many companies have spent time and money on these single solutions only to be disappointed by the results that have been achieved by way of measureable business growth and ROI. A well planned and executed inbound marketing automation program has reversed this frustration for thousands of businesses, is it the right time for your company?

What does it cost? As a general rule inbound marketing automation represents a larger investment than the single source solutions mentioned previously because there's more work involved but it delivers more. By carefully planning and implementing your corporate inbound marketing automation program you'll have put into place a powerful tool with full data capture for measurement purposes and that consistently and predictably delivers new opportunities that can then be turned into new business. On average companies who have adopted this approach achieve a 100-300% ROI. Two questions your company might want to ask:

1. How accurately can we measure our current marketing efforts and at what level of detail?
2. What is the ROI of our marketing efforts and are they sustained over the long-term or do they stop when the money stops flowing?

What's Involved In A Corporate Inbound Marketing Automation Program?

The short answer to this question is understanding. Your company needs to understand:

1. Who your company is and what solution you offer;
2. Who the target audience is both by the problems they have that you can help them with and further by the marketing or buyer persona;
3. What an ideally qualified prospect looks like for your sales process;
4. What the specific process that your target market goes through in selecting a solution provider;
5. What information they need as they go through their process that will support them;
6. What specific order or sequence best supports that inquiry and selection process;

(Note: We're not talking about general inbound marketing in this post. If we were we'd be including all the content, SEO, social media and other key inbound marketing elements that are incorporated in a comprehensive inbound marketing plan. Instead this post focuses on one aspect of such a plan, inbound marketing automation.)

Have you recognized the changes that are taking place in your target market behaviour? No matter what sort of sales and marketing funnel you've used to evaluate and process leads, the fact is that with more and more of your target audience using the internet for information gathering as part of their buying process, modern marketing strategies are using inbound marketing and automation for business growth. With this sort of understanding in hand you can now begin to create an inbound marketing automation program for your company that will gain website traffic from a more targeted audience, generate more top of the funnel leads that you can nurture in an automated way that delivers highly qualified prospects that are ready for the next level of contact with your companies sales process...and what company doesn't want that kind of result!

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