Inbound Marketing: A Few Best Practices for B2B Marketers

Inbound Marketing not only helps you to drive engagement and purchase decisions from your target audience, it can help you drive relevant prospects towards your product or service. If done well, the impact can be profound and long-lasting. 

Inbound Marketing is an area that is under constant evolution. The basic plan for any inbound strategy is to attract (the right) visitors, generate (relevant) leads, and then boost final customer sales. The final step lies in the hands of the brand to delight the customers so that they can promote the company, bring more potential clients to its doors through various marketing tactics.

In an inbound marketing strategy, a deep understanding of your buyer’s persona is critical. A simple example could be a B2B tech company understanding where a possible client company is coming from, what the prospect needs, the main questions that need to be answered – the idea is to build a relationship that could turn industry associates into long-term and repeat clients.

Inbound Marketing Strategies for B2B companies

There are over 2 billion websites on the internet, with new ones being added daily, one cannot expect customers to find them without taking the appropriate steps to increase a brand or company’s visibility. 

The following inbound marketing best practices can help you target your audience: 

Set your Goals and KPIs

You need to know everything that you want to accomplish and you need to set a timeline within which to achieve these by. 

Answer questions like: 

• What you want to achieve with your inbound marketing? 
• Do you want to generate leads that your sales team can follow up with in person? 
• Are you going to move your sales funnel entirely online? 

Besides these, think of the key performance indicators such as the number of leads per period, conversion rates and cost per lead. 

Understand your Competition

When you start your inbound marketing plan, you need to understand your competition very well. Digital marketing always leaves a footprint and with a bit of simple sleuthing, you can unfold the marketing ecosystem of your toughest competitors. All you need is a robust plan to do it. 

Tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and MozRank will let you monitor your competition.

Identify your Target audience

All your hardcore planning will go in vain if you are targeting wrong prospects. It is important to identify your target audience before implementing any new inbound marketing strategy. Creating and understanding a buyer’s persons will give you a ‘face to speak’ when creating the content. These personas must include as many data-driven details as possible. 

Creating an effective marketing funnel

Your marketing or sales funnel is a process that takes your key prospects and target customers through various stages of the buying process, the typical journey: 

• Suspect
• Prospect
• Lead
• Opportunity
• Client

It is called a funnel because each stage will narrow down the group of people and give you only selected ones most likely to purchase at the end. 

Content Marketing and SEO

Inbound marketing and content marketing kind of goes hand-in-hand today. As inbound marketing relies more on organic marketing, it is impossible without updated and informative content. While brands create content, only fool-proof SEO strategies will help you get good ranks on SERP. 

Marketing Automation

Last but not least is to add the right automation to your marketing ecosystem. In today’s competitive world, brands cannot rely on conventional marketing techniques. Automation is the key, which is to be achieved by using the right tools. 

Planning and implementing an effective inbound marketing strategy can be tricky and challenging. It will require technical knowledge and the support of the right martech tools; some of the tools that you can use are: 

1. Mobile Monkey – Helps you in multi-channel chat marketing. It is one of the best chat tools, which increases the chat engagement by 5-10x or more. 
2. Google Keyword Planner – This tool is perfect to know the keywords that you should be including in your SEO Strategy and this is not all. As you can do a lot with Google Keyword Planner, it is one of the essential tools for inbound marketing for keyword research. 
3. Ahrefs – A matchless content marketing & SEO tool, this is one of the must-haves to cover up your inbound marketing strategy. It gives you awesome backlinking capabilities along with site audit for boosting organic traffic with SEO.