Whether you are a freelancer, consultant, independent trainer or chartered accountant, inbound marketing is the digital strategy best suited for your field of activity. Why ? Because the sales cycle for your services is relatively long and responds to complex issues, your customers need to inquire and inform themselves to find the most appropriate solution for their needs. However, all these online searches are an incredible opportunity for you to see yourself by providing useful and relevant information and to showcase your expertise. But how to implement such a strategy? Now that’s what we know.
Inbound Marketing, A B to B Oriented Strategy
The principle of inbound marketing is to find new customers by providing them with the right content at the right time according to different stages of the shopping journey.
Unlike traditional marketing, it’s about being visible to your audience through relevant and useful content that can help propel your prospects forward in their thinking and buying journey.
Actually, the B to B sales cycle consists of 3 main phases:
- Search Steps: This is the moment when your target detects a problem or opportunity and inquires about it.
- Thought stage: At this stage, your audience has defined their problem and is looking for the best solution for it.
- Decision making stage: This is the moment when your potential customer knows their problem and knows how to solve it. All he has to do is figure out who to set it up with.
Your content should always be built around these 3 steps and help your prospects move on to the next step.
To achieve this, you have to rely on 3 pillars: Natural Context, Content Marketing and Marketing Automation.
But how are these 3 elements interconnected? How can you concretely implement such a strategy for your service provider? This is what we are going to look at now, simply by following the inbound marketing conversion funnel:
To effectively build such a strategy, you must first clearly define your audience and analyze the different stages of your buying journey. To do this, rely on building buyer personas and create your content for them.
Next, you need to set SMART goals. To help them manage your activity, they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
Once this is done, we can get to the bottom of the matter and see how to implement an inbound marketing strategy in 4 steps:
1. Attract visitors to your site and your content
The first step is to drive traffic to your website and content. To do this, you must rely on the pillars of content marketing and natural context.
By creating a blog with educational articles that target a specific query and an SEO strategy to gain visibility on search engines, you will be able to generate a huge influx of traffic in the medium to long term.
But other traffic acquisition channels are possible and even recommended:
- Increase the visibility of your content through social networks
- Highlight your content and generate traffic instantly with advertising. But instead of promoting an offer, you highlight educational and educative content.
2. Qualify Visitors as Leads
Then you need to qualify your visitors as leads. In fact, it is unlikely that visitors will immediately convert into customers, given your field of activity. You do not sell products that are bought on impulse, but on the contrary that require time for reflection.
You must recover at least one email address by offering premium content to be exchanged for personal information. These premium content, called Lead Magnets, can be of any type: white papers, webinars, demonstrations, video trainings…
To promote your lead magnets, use banners and pop-ups on pages customized according to the topics covered.
3. Nurture Your Prospects
Once you have collected personal information about your visitors, you will need to work with marketing automation software.
Thanks to such a tool, you will be able to trigger scenarios that automatically email and other means of communication (SMS, publications, etc.) depending on the interests expressed by your prospects and the stage of the shopping journey. will send a series of in which they are located.
To find out where your prospects are on their shopping journey, you’ll have the option of rating your prospects based on the interactions they have with your content. For example: 5 points for reading a blog article, 20 points for visiting a pricing page, 10 points for downloading a white paper… When a point threshold is reached, a scenario is triggered automatically.
4. Make Your Customers Brand Ambassadors
Once you convert a potential customer into a customer, your work doesn’t stop there. We know how important word of mouth is when selling services. Be sure to provide information with high added value about your use of services, such as best practices, tutorials or case studies. Your customers will then be pleased with their experience with your company and will be your brand’s first ambassadors.
In addition, this will be an opportunity for you to increase your average basket and offer other services that you sell.
Thus, by following such a strategy, you will be able to establish yourself as a true expert in your field of activity, reduce average cost per lead and capitalize on a strategy with a long-term outlook.
And you, how do you generate new leads online?
About the Author
Jonathan Rothe: Founder of Appet, a digital marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing
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