8 Ways to Improve Your Inbound Marketing Process
Is your inbound marketing process generating high quality leads? Is your marketing automation platform returning solid ROI? If your answer to these questions is no or not sure, you should read this blog post.
When I first started using marketing automation platform years ago, I just jumped into writing blog posts and white papers. I didn’t have a clear marketing plan, no strategy, no personas, no purchase journeys. I was creating, publishing and promoting content for a buyer persona that didn’t necessarily exist.
I like new technology. I was blinded by the cool things it could do and how much easier the marketing automation platform made my work. It was so simple. Rather than using separate tools for blogging, emailing, promoting and monitoring, I had one integrated environment with a uniform UI conventions. And, there was just one contacts database. But the forest was lost. All I could see was the beautiful waterfall.
The most important functionality of a marketing automation system is the ability to automatically trigger a large number of personalised messages. And, still the most common use case seems to be an annual or bi-annual campaign based email delivery. Something MailChimp could do almost for free. According to many studies and the interviews I’ve conducted most companies use only a small part of marketing automation platform’s capabilities.
This seems to be a challenge especially for subsidiaries of large global companies. They often get little advice or help from the head office on how to plan and design the inbound marketing program and how to run the marketing automation platform. Global inbound marketing team is busy and doesn’t understand the local language, cultural and business differences. Local inbound marketing professionals are left to sort the way forward by themselves.
I used these sources for this blog post: My own experience running a marketing automation program and creating all content for www.etuma.com during the past three years; Talking with the leading B2B integrated marketing agency in the Nordics www.idbbn.fi; Talking to multiple large B2B companies that use marketing automation platforms; And reading multiple B2B marketing automation market studies, especially by B2Bmarketing.net.
If you think that your marketing automation program and platform is not returning the results you desire, here is a list of eight things you should do to remedy the situation. I know that inbound marketing professionals should have these things in good shape but I’ve learned during the information gathering process that this isn’t necessarily true.
1. Create a comprehensive inbound marketing scoreboard. Companies often focus on lead statistics. That isn’t enough. The IM scoreboard needs to reflect how each email, landing page, and piece of content is performing. Make sure that your marketing targets are aligned with overall business goals, especially sales targets. At the end of every week you need to know what is working and what is not. You know exactly what to focus on the following week.
2. Conduct a contacts data audit. It is impossible to run an efficient and effective content marketing program without rich and clean data. Do everything you can to make sure that the data you’re working with is as clean as possible. Some marketing automation platforms like Hubspot have the contacts inside the system. Others like Eloqua are usually also integrated to a CRM platform. You, the IM professional, need to to have the authority and right to cross organizational boundaries, establish a solid real-time integration, and create the necessary additional fields that MA requires in the CRM platform. Rich and good data is paramount!
3. Create an inbound marketing (and MA) learning and development program. One of the biggest problems seems to be the lack of knowledge. You need to educate your own team by creating a holistic L&D program to ensure that your team (or your integrated marketing agency partner) have the required skills. You also need to spread the inbound marketing gospel. Keep the CFO in the loop. This will come handy when you need more resources.
4. Close the marketing and sales process gap. Sales professionals are used to generating leads from their own sources: by word of mouth, trade shows or by other traditional means. Now, when new leads pop up in their CRM platform (hopefully automatically), salespeople get suspicious. I’ve heard multiple stories about salespeople ignoring leads generated by the marketing automation platform. Most, if not all CRM platforms, have a data field for indicating the lead status. Ensure that the salespeople use this field also for leads generated in the marketing automation platform. Educate salespeople about the importance of letting you know which leads are valuable. Sell them the idea that in the long term you will make their work easier because they don’t have to generate their own leads and they can spend most of their time pushing prospects forward in the sales funnel.
5. Create (or review) buyer personas. This is something you’ve probably done, but if not, please do it now. Without this, it is impossible to create high quality leads and push prospects forward in their purchase journey. B2B purchase decision often requires buy-in from, not only the business owners, but also technical experts, procurement managers etc. You need to create a unique persona for all the people required in the purchase decision process because their information requirements are different.
6. Map each piece of content to one or more buyer personas. It doesn’t make sense to develop content (which is the most time consuming part of inbound marketing) without having the buyer persona in mind. Without the personas your content might not be relevant.
7. Map each piece of content to purchase journey stage. At minimum this means that you have content for the four main purchase journey stages:
- On top of the funnel: to increase awareness
- Middle of the funnel: for increasing the overall domain, technology, and solution understanding; and
- Bottom of the funnel: for assessing which vendor and product fits buyer persona’s requirements the best.
- Customers: increase satisfaction and loyalty so that customers can become your best marketing people.
8. Start by developing a few short automation loops and test them. It is difficult or even impossible to map a single buyer-persona-specific purchase journey. Personas often take their own paths to the purchase decision. It is easier to start with short automated loops.
For example, Email -> landing page with a call-to-action to download a white paper -> thank you email -> end. Develop a couple of loops like this and test them with different messages (but same premium content or event). Once you’ve learned what loops work, start stringing them together (thank you email with recommendation for next action).
