Do you want to build meaningful connections with website visitors and create content that will help you solve day-to-day problems? That is exactly what b2b inbound marketing aims at. B2b inbound marketing strategy focuses on making the most out of the user base you already have.

Instead of prioritizing and looking for new visitors and customers, in-bound marketers focus on strengthening the bond with people who already know about the company. 

There are plenty of tools to help teams build and succeed at b2b inbound marketing, but HubSpot is the most popular one so far. In this post, we will look at how hiring a HubSpot developer and using HubSpot tools help marketers improve customer acquisition and manage relationships with existing clients.

You’ll find out how a trading software development company can implement best practices of creating impactful bonds with social media audiences, blog visitors, and recurring clients. 

The Objectives of Inbound Marketing

Essentially, b2b inbound marketing is about tracking your customers’ successes, staying and touch, and solving problems after they’ve purchased a product or ordered service. By offering clients continuous service, business owners improve their reputation, facilitate future client acquisition, and increase the number of repeated orders.

“If your customers succeed, so do you” is the paradigm of inbound marketing.”

How to make sure that your b2b inbound marketing strategy is spot-on? Find out if it meets these objectives:

Engaging users

To engage website visitors and build a long-lasting bond with them, marketers create value-driven content.

B2B Inbound marketing strategy aims to design a communication strategy that encourages people to come back to your website, make orders, or hire your team for services once again. 

Practices marketers use to improve engagement:

  • Chatbots for 24/7 customer support.
  • Email marketing – newsletters, transactional emails, onboarding campaigns.
  • Lead flows – creating roadmaps of interactions that encourage users to place orders, download an eBook, or read a blog post.

Making customers happy with the purchase

Inbound marketing for b2b should help ensure that shoppers are happy with the product they bought and have a contingency plan for when they are not (refund, additional support, improved offer).

Practices marketers use to keep people happy with the product/service:

  • Refunding, special offers. 
  • Recurring customer support. 
  • Email marketing (follow-ups, surveys).
  • Social media communication.

Attracting new visitors

When designing a strategy inbound marketing for b2b, ensure it makes your product or service look more trustworthy and reliable to first-time visitors. By publishing data-backed, in-depth content, business owners gain trust and reliability in the industry.

That’s why a prospective customer, researching products or services, will be more inclined to visit your company’s website and make a purchase.

Practices marketers use to attract new visitors:

  • Active blogging and guest posting;
  • PPC and social media ads;
  • Creating a consistent content strategy.  

4 Inbound Marketing Practices for Software Development Companies

IT companies benefit a great deal from adopting b2b inbound marketing practices. Since choosing a vendor-based development platform or hiring a programming team is a decision that will define a company’s success, there are a lot of decision-makers IT service providers need to engage and manage.

To make sure your software development company isn’t losing prospective clients because it doesn’t leverage the inbound marketing potential to the fullest, consider investing in HubSpot business development salary:

Create content to guide users through all stages of decision-making

To make sure business owners and managers are confident in choosing your company for software development services, help them get more trust in your team. Add case studies that showcase your developers’ proficiency, client testimonials that prove your reliability, blog posts, eBooks, and white papers as a demonstration of your expertise.

According to statistics, most business owners need to look through at least 4 pieces of content to make an informed decision.

To understand what type of content project stakeholders are looking for during every step of decision-making, check out the infographic below.

b2b

Source: ironpaper.com

Use lead scoring

To understand how frequently you should communicate with a prospective buyer, take time to evaluate his involvement with the company. HubSpot lead scoring tools help you determine how close each of your prospective clients is to close the deal.

There are two ways to score leads:

  • Determining how well a person’s needs match with what you offer. For example, if a mobile development agency gets in touch with a business owner looking for web applications, this guy’s lead score will be low. Even if he’s interested in the website and explores it enthusiastically, at the end of the day, the odds of him changing his mind and choosing mobile development aren’t skyrocketing.
  • Tracking engagement. Marketers often use behavioral data (number of website visits, average time on every page, and the types of pages explored) to determine if a prospective client is serious about making a decision. When tracking engagement, it’s important to distinguish between top-tier (visiting the “Services”, “Case studies”) and lower-tier (“Jobs”, “Blog”) page visits.

Thanks to lead scoring, team managers will have a clear understanding of how interested in the company people actually are and will be able to build an effective communication strategy.

Track marketing metrics

To make informed marketing decisions, you need to know which strategies work and which don’t. That’s why keeping a careful eye on capturing metrics is the cornerstone of a successful inbound strategy.

What should an IT company’s marketing team track? There are thousands of metrics – here are the key ones:

  • A monthly number of newly acquired leads.
  • A number of closed deals per month.
  • Value per lead.
  • Prospect-lead conversion rates.

The conversion rate for top marketing channels.

Prioritize SEO

Search engine optimization is a long-haul investment – although it doesn't pay off right away, high-ranking content becomes a powerful lead generator over time. According to statistics, the average close rate of marketing activities is 1.6%, which is at 14.6% for SEO.

What are the first steps should a HubSpot development team take towards high-ranking content? Consider implementing these easy-to-follow practices:

  • Pay attention to tags: title, description, keywords, general, and alt. Make sure to add keywords to all tags you write. 
  • Write long-form content: according to statistics, 2000+ words long posts rank higher than shorter pieces. 
  • Create image names that describe the content – “Python_developemnt_benefits” instead of “image57”. 
  • Link blog posts on your website to each other – this way, every blog post you write will help the most important pages (homepage or services) rank higher.

Use HubSpot to Improve Inbound Marketing

As we already mentioned above, HubSpot is many marketer’s favorite platforms for inbound marketing optimization. Here’s how it helps teams connect with prospective customers and leverage the full power of their user base.

There are three chief ways in which marketers use the CMS to increase inbound marketing efficiency:

Attracting traffic

  • Ad Management tools – a centralized hub for tracking and managing all of your team’s social media activities.
  • Search Engine Optimization features – find out which keywords your competitors use to rank higher, collect keywords, and track the success of the content you release.
  • Blog management tools – HubSpot makes it easy to schedule, edit posts as a team, and publish them.
  • Content optimization tools – these help business owners create good-looking, mobile-friendly blog posts, and website pages.

Managing leads

  • Landing page creator – a tool that helps marketers build custom landing pages and track their conversion.
  • CTA button designer – HubSpot allows designers to create responsive and sleek call-to-action buttons.
  • Lead capture form builder – create and customize forms that prospective customers fill in to contact your team, download eBooks and white papers, or join the email subscriber list.

Conclusion

Although it’s common to think that b2b inbound marketing is all about acquiring new clients, in reality, making the most out of your customers a just as valid strategy. Maximizing your leads potential even has its own name and methodology, known as inbound marketing.

Through compelling content, continuous customer support, and personalization, you can make sure a one-time customer comes back to your business for a repeated order or long-term collaboration.

There are plenty of tools that help maximize the impact of b2b inbound marketing. HubSpot, for one, is a powerhouse platform with a range of sales automation, design, and conversion tracking tools. Take some time to explore the platform.

You can also hire a HubSpot inbound consultant or a b2b inbound marketing agency for excellent inbound b2b lead generation services or to integrate the tool’s best features into your b2b inbound marketing strategy. If you still have any doubts, feel free to ask!

Frequently Asked Questions

B2B inbound marketing is a strategy where businesses create valuable content and experiences to attract and engage other businesses as potential customers. It involves techniques like SEO, content marketing, social media, and email marketing to generate B2B sales and partnerships.

B2B outbound marketing is a traditional approach where businesses proactively reach out to potential customers through direct communication and targeted outreach. It allows businesses to initiate contact and target specific audiences, helping build relationships and address customer pain points more quickly.

There is no clear consensus on whether Google Ads is considered inbound or outbound marketing. While some argue it is more like outbound, others believe it can complement and enhance an inbound marketing strategy by driving traffic to content and generating leads.

An example of B2B delivery is a logistics company transporting goods from one business to another. This can involve shipping products, distributing inventory to retail stores, or fulfilling orders for a business's customers.

Danish Wadhwa is an entrepreneur driven by a passion for continuous learning. With over a decade in Data-Driven Marketing and certifications from HubSpot in Inbound, Content, Email, and Contextual Marketing, he specializes in driving business growth online. Besides, he writes extensively on topics ranging from digital transformation and SEO to customer engagement and business innovation.