Be Findable & Convert Browsing into Buying
Inbound Marketing Definition: When prospective customers are already inbound toward a solution, these are the tactics to make your business easier to find, and convert these people into leads.
Why is Your Inbound Marketing Important?
For most businesses this is where marketing gets really exciting. It’s practical, measurable, and everyone agrees it’s effective. And therein lies the problem – everyone else is doing it too. If your businesses is looking for a competitive edge, the bar is high, and your customer’s discernment even higher.
Ideally, Inbound Marketing should act as a funnel, drawing interested individuals into your sales cycle. Just as all roads lead to Rome, all inbound tactics should lead to your sales team (or shopping cart). Your two objectives in Inbound Marketing are to:
- Be as findable as possible whether someone searches for your name, your services, or the problems you solve
- Once they find you, curate a journey that leads them straight to your door (online or in the flesh)
Your Inbound Marketing will also recapture many of your Outbound acquaintances. Think of it this way – whether you ran ads online, sent a piece of mail, or handed over a business card, where would the potential buyer go next? They’d look you up online. Whether they’re searching out where your shop is, or digging through your website, MOST of your Outbound Marketing will find it’s way into your Inbound marketing tactics. Then it’s time to convert them into a lead…
Outbound Marketing
Improving Conversion
Before we talk about making yourself more findable, let’s talk about conversion. When we say conversion, we’re talking about the transition from someone researching and browsing, into someone who is taking action. They’ve made the decision to reach out, call you up, fill in the form, book a consultation, hop in their car, or click “check out” on their cart.
While a few small businesses sell products right within their social media, and small percentage may call the number on your Google Business listing, the vast majority of your prospective clients will need to either visit your shop or browse your website before converting, which means unless your prospects are walking straight to your door, your website better be very good…
The Website
When it comes to inbound marketing and conversion, your website is your biggest asset. If you want your website to improve your conversion rate, you’ll need to assess three key areas: your message, your design and the website structure.
- The Message: We lean on two key tools within your content strategy. The first is your brand message – setting the customer at the center of your narrative and building emotional attachment to the outcomes you offer. The second is building your website content around the critical questions a prospective buyer needs to answer before they’d be willing to take action. Both of these are extremely customer-centric, and as such, have a profound effect on customer behaviour.
- The Design: Similar to the message, this also is a communication strategy. The design must connect your brand to how the customer thinks of themself – “people like me buy from companies like this”. If you can create a visual experience which aligns, customers will respond (think Nike, think Tesla, even Home Depot). The second role of the design is to build a seamless experience for the user – de-cluttering the journey, immediately seeing where to click, and intuitively flowing from one step to the next.
- Website Structure: Lastly, a lot of thought needs to be put into website structure. Design and message can’t overcome a labyrinth of pages and options.
- Make it easy for users to say “yes, that’s me” and build your navigation around your customer
- Reduce the options to only what the user needs in that moment (then open more options as they dive deeper)
- Use Calls to Action (CTAs) to continually draw the user closer to your goal
- Design your website as a funnel – no matter which path they take, it eventually leads to contacting you
This may sound daunting, but a great web agency will build all of these aspects into your strategy. If you haven’t found that agency yet, we’d be happy to fill that role.
Widening The Funnel
Once you’re confident in your website, you’ll want to consider how “findable” it is. Not everyone will discover you when they look. Whether they Googled one of your services, searched the problem they’re facing, or couldn’t quite remember your name, sometimes you need a wider online footprint in order to be found by buyers who are searching. For those who don’t immediately find your website, businesses have a number of options to widen the funnel and increase their online presence:
- Business Listings – Google, Bing, Apple Maps, BBB, Yelp, etc. — all of these help people find you more easily and are the first touch point in building trust (those star ratings really do make a difference!)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Think of this as all activities you do so that search engines can see what you offer, evaluate if people need it, and connect it with relevant searches. It doesn’t reach people who didn’t search, but it does capture the ones who do.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Also known as search ads, for all those search terms that you don’t automatically rank on page 1, Google is more than happy to take a little money and place you there. It’s not nearly as good as being #1, but it’s the next best thing.
- Social Media Presence – Keep in mind that this is not the same as social media ads (which reach new audiences) – your social media accounts are simply to connect with those who look for you and can help you connect with your audience in consistent, meaningful ways.
All of the above are part of your inbound marketing strategy – ensuring those who are inbound toward a solution will find you. In combination with your website, these tactics form your online presence and improve the volume of sales that “walked through the door” without you hunting them down.
It’s also important to note that each have elements of “conversion” as well – increasing the likelihood of converting a mildly interested visitor into a highly engaged lead. Improving the number of 5-star reviews you have, and bolstering your social media presence can be valuable trust-builders, and a high rank on Google can increase trust as well.
How Do You Measure the Success of Your Inbound Marketing?
In tackling this question we would typically divide up the efforts into those focused on generating traffic (ie. more people visiting) from those focused on increasing conversion (ie. more people contacting you). Each have their place in your strategy, and each carry distinct success metrics.
- Increasing Traffic – For tactics like SEO, SEM, and Business Listings, your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is going to hinge on how many qualified visitors come to your site/store for every dollar you spend. IE. Company A spent $200 and got 70 clicks to their website, so the cost per click is $2.86; whereas they spent $3800 on SEO and in the year following increased organic traffic by 3000 people, so this (indirectly) gave them a cost per click of $1.26. Comparatively the SEO was better, but if both methods are bringing in customers at a reasonable ROI, they’d likely continue running both.
- Increasing Conversion – For 80% of businesses your website will stand at the center of your funnel, and the focus here is on conversion. It is not your website’s job to attract visitors; it’s your website’s job to turn them into leads and sales. We would measure this as a percentage. IE. 10,000 visitors (who match our target market) came in; 5% contacted us. After our $28,000 website redesign, we now have 10% converting, which means the ROI of our $2000/mo ad spend just doubled. Our sales team is also reporting higher close rates, and cross selling our services to existing clients has gotten easier. So while the website sounded expensive, the 6+ year lifespan and increased ROI have made it an easy decision.
Without traffic, your website can’t build your revenue, and without a high-conversion website, your advertising and online presence can’t build revenue. Likewise, a sales team without leads will fail, and leads sent to a poorly equipped sales team will fail. This is exactly why silver bullet marketing is ineffective – you’re building a system which relies on every other part of the system working as well.
So let’s take a look at the whole picture again:
- Outbound Marketing (the previous article)
- Inbound Marketing (this article)
- Customer Experience Marketing (read this one next)
