Inbound Digital Marketing – A must for Generating Leads!
Organizations rely significantly on inbound digital marketing for their business. One of the most popular marketing channel used is Pay-Per-Click Campaigns, wherein inbound leads are captured as soon as a visitor clicks on sponsored landing pages/Google Adwords links and fills the details to access specific resources/offers. Direct inbound traffic leads are generated through Newsletters, Blogs, Contact Us, Demo Pages, Case Studies over website/ social networking sites where the visitor expresses an interest by filling their details over website to access the required information or request for a personal contact. Another way to generate direct inbound leads traffic is through organic content publication, SEO.
Getting an ROI from your Inbound Digital Marketing?
B2B companies invest between $25 to $500 for generating an inbound lead while B2C companies invest between $5 to $25 for the same. The money spent goes down the drain if inbound leads are not responded in an efficient way. The important questions for you to answer are – How many of your inbound leads are never contacted as they get lost during data transfer to sales team? As per the latest research done by Texo for SAAS companies based in India, close to 70% companies didn’t respond to inbound leads. How many inbound leads are loosely passed on to Sales reps to contact with incomplete or wrong information? How many of them are contacted when the prospect have lost interest in you or chosen a competitor? Based on Texo research, only 3.7% companies had a lead response time within 10 minutes and only 6.5% companies responded within an hour. How many prospects block you after your first sales contact?
The answers to these questions will define the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts. However, the good news is that if you are effective in inbound lead response management you are on the top of your business as chances are pegged on higher side in converting inbound sales leads rather than outbound leads for which investments are even on a much higher side.
Way to Efficiently Manage your Inbound Leads
We’ve all heard this popularly-quoted statistic: 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales (SiriusDecisions). What are buyers doing during this time?
Prospect gain awareness about their own need, and the vendors available in the market who may cater to the specific need. Buyers are usually looking for educational material, customer reviews, etc., at this stage. Prospect then considers the narrowed down companies and their products and services based on their requirements. They then perform a second level of research on company’s specific offerings to see how the companies can address particular pain points. This involves comparison of shortlisted companies’ products and services. Buyers generally consume MOFU content around features, case studies, and comparison charts. Prospect finally decides to choose a vendor. Prospect looks for more practical and on the ground stuff to substantiate their decision. They look for demonstrations, customer testimonials/ references, reliability of customer support to assess which solution suits their needs and budget. BOFU content drives the prospects to make a final contact for placing the request for buying interest. Marketers job involves understanding what their buyers are doing, and how they can engage with their buyers and help them move from one stage of the cycle to the next.
Inbound Leads are the prospects who have shown any kind of interest in your products/services by making a contact at any of the buyer stage. Marketers and sales reps have to align their engagement strategies with respect to the buyer stage. But what can they do about the 70% of the buyer’s journey that they’re missing out on? They are not able to correctly judge the prospect’s buying stage when they make a contact and hence not able to employ an effective engagement strategy.
And how can a tool like Sales Engagement Hub integrated with Marketing Automation Tools help marketers and sales reps keep pace with their buyers? The level of interest may vary depending on the buying stage the prospect is in, and hence different prospects need to be addressed differently. Factors to be considered for engaging with inbound leads are Response Time, Mode of Communication, Information to be shared, Frequency of follow-ups and so on. A prospect in the consideration stage would prefer information about products, solutions, services, and case studies, and would need longer follow-ups over email (preferably) or call. However, a prospect in the decision stage would be more interested in having information on solutioning and pricing, and would need consistent follow-ups (shorter) over call (preferably) or email. Sales Engagement Hub integrated with marketing automation tools help the sales reps and marketers in effectively engaging with prospects.