For years, inbound marketing has been the primary focus of marketers working to target B2B clients. And for the last few years, that reliance on this tactic has grown even more. However, in order for it to truly succeed it is important that marketers focus on a long-term goal, working to attract and convert leads over time. Longer sales cycles are a must here, and changing the way that you approach inbound marketing is important.
Strategy matters here, and identifying the advantages of an inbound marketing focus as well as the challenges it can bring will be vital for making sure that your team is able to continue moving forward and finding success.
Inbound Or Outbound?
It’s important to note that while you will see plenty of benefits when you begin to hone your inbound marketing efforts, you’ll also have to focus on outbound marketing as well. You don’t’ just have to use one or the other – you can combine the right tactics to create a stronger finished product within the marketing world. Think about a few things to help here:
- What are your overall goals?
- What is your timeframe for reaching those goals?
- What steps are you already taking to achieve the goals you have in place?
- How are you targeting your leads at the moment?
For long term success that sets up your business in a position that it will thrive in for years, inbound should be something that you’ll have to focus on. But, you can also combine it with outbound efforts to allow you the time to build up the right ROI on your inbound efforts. Consider using both so your business receives the full benefits of marketing in today’s climate.
Inbound Marketing Solutions For Enterprise Marketing Challenges
Those businesses that are involved in an enterprise tech will often be left facing numerous challenges. These include things like identifying and generation of leads, management of a large-scale marketing plan, and more.
But with a top-level inbound marketing strategy in place it is very possible to create solutions that work for you and your business. Just looking at the benefits of inbound marketing for B2B enterprise technology companies is enough to show you why it’s well worth focusing on:
- Better alignment of sales and marketing
- Better quality lead generation over time
- More relevant content for the sales team
- Brings disjointed marketing efforts into alignment
- Better ROI throughout all campaigns activities
- Closing the lead to sales loop
- And more
By focusing on inbound marketing, it’s much more effective when you’re trying to build up your bottom line and align all of your marketing efforts with your sales and business strategies.
Leveraging Your Brand For SEO
One thing that is important is for you to make sure that your existing brand identity is leveraged in a way that delivers better SEO results as well as better overall marketing results. A strategic pillar and topic design structure makes it easier to leverage your brand in a way that dominates topic areas and get you higher search engine results while also bringing in quality leads.
The pillar page is a vital part of this. It’s much more than just a long blog post that you use to lead out on. Pillars aren’t there for a single, stand-alone strategy. Instead, they are an integral part of a much wider content and SEO strategy. The goal of your pillar page is to establish your business as a leading authority in your field while also driving traffic back to your website.
Some other key reasons to focus on inbound marketing with attention to leveraging your brand include the following:
- Better insight for your sales team – When you use an inbound approach, you’re creating a stronger alignment between your sales and marketing teams. They’ll have stronger marketing data and as such can use the information to transform those connections into meaningful leads. Even if your sales team is using outbound tactics, the insight from the inbound results means that you get better results and better ROI.
- A greater understanding of your audience – Using inbound techniques allows you to create more touchpoints for easier nurturing of all your relevant prospects. You’ll be with them throughout virtually every step of the process, letting your sales team become more than just an endpoint. And along the way, you will be able to gain a clear picture of prospects including what their challenges and interests are, which in turn lets you develop better strategies for engagement, content development, and more.
In short, using inbound marketing allows you to create the perfect message for your business while also developing a strong understanding of them.
How Can Inbound Marketing Help An Organization Reach Success?
The easy answer here is that it takes hard work. But going beyond that, all inbound marketing plans will involve several different factors that combine into one large-scale solution. You’ll need to take the time to build your business case in a way that proves the value of change.
You can’t simply stop your current plan and do a complete 180 on it. Instead, in order to really thrive with inbound marketing, you will need to take a step by step approach to things. You’ll start with a pilot project that lets you see just what is working and what isn’t, then ensure that you create the right kind of plans for your business. Monitor everything and use analytics to get a clear picture of what is working and what isn’t along the way, and apply the info and data you gather to each aspect of your work.
With inbound marketing, you get stronger leads, better insight for your sales team, a deeper connection with your audience, and a long-term plan that ends up leading your business into the future in a major way. It can take some time to really get it set up and working properly, but once that it is your business will enjoy significant advantages that make it worth all the hard work.
