How to plan a successful B2B inbound marketing strategy

Inbound Marketing is not merely another marketing approach; it is a revolution. It is a vision set to change the way you think of your customers and the way they perceive you. 

Previously, brands believed in pushing the costumes through the marketing funnel and limited their marketing efforts to converting their leads into customers. On the other hand, inbound marketing believes in a flywheel, where you never give up on your customers. 

Now the question is, how prospective is this theory? And, how can you implement it in practice? If you are facing the same dilemma, you have come to the right place. In this article, we will take a stepwise approach to inbound marketing implementation. So, let's roll.

Source: financesonline

Plan a successful B2B inbound marketing in six steps:

Establish a clear objective

The first step of figuring out the path is defining the destination. Similarly, the first step of planning a successful B2B inbound marketing strategy is defining an end goal. Planning an objective is the most essential part of executing an inbound marketing strategy.

So, sit with your team and decide what you would like to achieve with your campaign. Keep the following specifications in mind while setting the goal:

Don't set too many goals

While planning your inbound marketing strategy, create one primary and very few secondary objectives. If you set too many goals and run multiple campaigns simultaneously, you will fail to effectively measure its progress. 

Start small

Direct in connection to the previous point is how big a goal you are setting. We recommend starting with concrete and measurable goals. This way, you will be able to figure out the loopholes and quickly fix them to better your approach.

Creating a buyer persona

This is the second most crucial step in inbound marketing, specifically for B2B organizations or enterprises. Bigger is not always better, and inbound methodology is a big-time promoter of this concept. You may be an IT firm, providing HubSpot consultancy to businesses; a physically operational pizzeria hardly has anything to do with your services. 

Remember that inbound marketing is about helping people; if you can't help a group of people, marketing to them is baseless and a waste of your time and energy and their. Besides, by segmenting your buyer persona, you will be able to perceive what they like, how they can be engaged, how to communicate with them, etc.

Additionally, once the conversions start, you will craft different inbound campaigns for repeat customers and new clients. Even within these two broad segments, you will find small variations that need to be considered. Thus, to adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly, you must create small groups of your niche audience.

Attract the target audience

"Attract" is the first step of the inbound flywheel and that of executing a campaign. In inbound methodology, we do not believe in promotional content, but we do believe content is the king. What does it mean? It means that you need to publish engaging and valuable content that helps the audience in some aspect or the other.

Your B2B clients need many services, consultancies, and assistance to run their business smoothly; thus, they are probably looking for a company such as you or seeking solutions to problems relative to your field. Providing them with the answers without asking them to spend any bucks is the best way to grab their attention.

The following are the ways you can extend a helping hand to your target audience:

• Publish informative content on your website.
• Share brief but educational posts on social media.
• Create easy to digest content, like explainer videos and demos.
• Ensure your content is placed on a responsive platform that is friendly to mobile devices.

Continue to engage leads

One of the most significant challenges that we run into as marketers is the willingness to be patient. Publishing the right content on the right platforms at the right time will also take some time to yield the results you desire. This is where your audiences become your prospects or quality leads but are not ready to buy yet.

Remember that inbound marketing is largely about the buyer's journey, and how you nurture them through it determined your campaigns' success. Here is how you can do that:

Once you have connected to your leads, engage them through email, website, or social media, try to engage them by sending them follow-up emails, answering their questions, resolving their queries, hosting surveys and events, etc.

These innovative inbound marketing tactics will help you move your leads further in the sales funnel, from their awareness phase to the purchase phase. You can also understand how you can channel your next inbound B2B campaign to get the maximum output.

Delight after conversion

The most significant difference between outbound and inbound marketing lies here. While outbound marketing ends as you close the leads and draw conversions, inbound marketing continues to delight the customers to keep them coming back. We recommend you to pay as much attention to the delight phase as each of these previous stages. 

Just because they have handed their money to you doesn't mean they have nothing to offer anymore. Word of mouth is still the best form of marketing, and to utilize it, you have to build a healthy relationship with all your customers, whether long term or short term.

The following are some of the effective ways to achieve customer loyalty:

• Send follow-up emails to see if they are facing any issues
• Create smart content to engage them even after conversion
• Conduct A/B testing to see what they would like to engage with
• Use social media and other tools to respond to them promptly

Remember that existing customers invest more and cost ten times less, so building brand loyalty is a significant aspect of a successful B2B marketing strategy.

Measure your campaign

Source: 310creative

Not measuring your campaign leads to a substantial amount of revenue loss. However, not many marketers pay attention to this aspect of their campaign and miss out on valuable information and ROI. So, how can you make sure that your campaign was successful, and how can you make it better? 

This is subjective from business to business. However, there is one common factor, i.e., metrics. Organizations need to create small, campaign-specific metrics tied to their primary objective to measure their success. For example, if your goal is customer sight-ups, calculating website traffic will not help you.

Another great way to determine how well your marketing strategies are performing is A/B testing. This also helps you to keep pace with the changing industry and continually improve opportunities for clients.

Over to you

All of the steps mentioned above are integral to a successful inbound marketing strategy for B2B marketers. However, we don't want you to feel that your hands are tied. Inbound offers endless opportunities for improvisation and creativity. In fact, how you present yourself to your client is entirely up to you. 

What we recommend here is a basic skeleton that you can add to as per your choice and delight. At the end of the day, it's your brand, and how you want to represent it should be your choice alone.

For any assistance in inbound marketing, contact us. We are always happy to help!