In the world of business, nothing lives in a bubble. A hardware store purchases tools from a factory, the factory purchases steel from a metal refinery, the metal refinery buys ore from a mining company, and the mining company buys tools wholesale. All these companies work together in producing resources they all need, and this is called business to business, or B2B for short.
With understanding of what B2B is, how can your company take part in this symbiotic relationship? How can you market your business for other businesses to take notice? This is where inbound marketing comes in, a modern strategy for standing out from the crowd.
What is B2B Inbound Marketing?
When your business needs to target other businesses to make either a sale or collaboration, the best way to do so is by marketing your company to them. Flashy billboards and TV commercials would be ineffective in this situation, as you’re no longer advertising to the masses but rather other business owners or purchasing managers.
If another company needed a service or product that your company also happens to make, they would go through a search to find a business that offers those products and services. Where inbound marketing comes in is as a tool to be at the forefront of their search results.
Through clever use of search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword and phrase manipulation, an inbound marketing agency, such as LetsMarket.it, can have your company be among the first results the company would spot. There are methods to it and a lot of work involved, but inbound marketing is the best option for a B2B transaction.
How is B2B Inbound Marketing Done?
The business customer knows all the tricks of the trade when it comes to marketing, as they’ve likely done things similarly. Where inbound marketing comes in a B2B situation is that the marketing itself is subtle and feels natural, as though it was the customer’s voluntary decision to see your company’s webpage.
There are several stages to inbound marketing, each important and effective in making a successful B2B marketing strategy. From attracting the customer, to having them more engaged, then to have closed a purchase, and finally having them nurtured with delight to return. These steps are critical in a successful inbound marketing strategy.
Attract Stage for B2B Inbound Marketing
In this step, the inbound marketing team would be working tirelessly to fix the site with more content filled with keywords and phrases, making it more likely to reach the top of search results. Active social media with shareable content, blogs rife with information and keywords, and how-to guides that match the products also filled with keyphrases, all of this content would give your company a net gain in reaching the top of the search results.
After all of that work, the user who visited the page would be on their way to become a lead, a business owner or manager who has expressed interest in your company and submits their contact information.. With that, the first step is completed.
Engage Stage for B2B Inbound Marketing
The next step in inbound marketing is to convince the visitor to submit information about themselves to the company’s database. While they were users who have become qualified prospects, they would still need a nudge to take the extra step. Given that these are business owners or people high up in the ranks to obtain resources for their company, this can be a bit tricky, but it is very possible because they have already expressed interest in your products.
With content tailored to fit your company’s brand value and to match the target audience’s needs, all that would be left to do is wait for the right person. Traffic comes and goes, but eventually you will find individuals who have converted from visitors into leads..
Leads are individuals who have increased interest in your company and wish to know more, and have decided to hand over their email, number, and/or name. This becomes a prospect for more interaction, as they’ve submitted themselves to your contact list. Considering that these people are business owners or procurement managers, you’d have potentially made your company into a supplier for their own business.
Close Stage for B2B Inbound Marketing
When traffic has increased and when leads have been generated, the next step is to close a deal, converting the lead into a customer. This person has seen your page near the top and wished to see what you had on offer, then voluntarily handed over their contact information, and all that’s left is to make a sale.
Whether via newsletters, confidence in your company value from the content on the site, a sale will be made. Should your company sell tools, this carpentry company liked your business enough for you to be their supplier of saws. If your company offers accounting services, then this shipping business was confident in your skills to hire you.
These businesses need someone to work with, and with a sale made, all that’s left is to foster a symbiotic relationship that’s beneficial to both.
Delight Stage for B2B Inbound Marketing
After the visitor has been attracted to your site, after the lead handed over contact information to know more, and after the customer purchases your product, you might be wondering what could be left to do? Part of the inbound marketing method is that work is still done after a sale has been closed, fostering a relationship between both companies.
By nurturing the link and keeping the customer business happy, a continued relationship can be had that’s beneficial for your business.A form of delight for the business customer can be in the form of discounted prices, customized products, or listening to feedback and adjusting. What’s important is that the customer knows we have their benefits in mind.
Inbound marketing for a B2B deal isn’t just about selling once and moving on, it’s about retaining customers for long term gains. It’s not about benefiting once, it’s about being successful for years to come. A happy customer won’t just be brand loyal, they would also be your greatest defenders. Even more reason to implement inbound marketing strategies for your B2B goals.
Initial Ingredients of an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign
There are steps that must be taken to make an effective inbound marketing campaign. To make the Attract, Engage, Close, and Delight stages of inbound marketing effective, thorough effort must be done even before those stages begin.
Discovery
The first step is to research, research, and research. An inbound marketing agency like LetsMarket.it puts effort into finding the right information before conducting an effective inbound marketing campaign. After learning what the client produces and how they wish to portray themselves, the next step is thorough research of competitors, target audiences, and keywords.
Competitor Analysis
To assist the client to form an effective inbound marketing strategy, learning the quality of competitors, along with their similarities and differences with the client is equally important. With this information, we can exploit the shortcomings of rivals and strengthen the advantages of our client to have other businesses find your brand more attractive.
These advantages can come in the form of a more professional website, an active social media presence, or even a stronger SEO strategy when compared to competitors. All of these aspects that rivals can miss that an agency like LetsMarket.it can exploit to the client’s advantage.
Buyer Personas
As part of the research process, finding out exactly what the client’s target audience are looking for is a vital part of the discovery method. Considering they would be other business owners or procurement managers, these individuals would be separated from others for a clearer targeting plan.
With information on the type of would-be buyers gained, the marketing agency would make imaginary personifications of those would-be buyers. With this segmentation, a better understanding on how to conduct a plan of attack can be formed. Tailoring around the buyer’s values and standards, designing an inbound marketing strategy to be more effective becomes possible.
Keyword Analysis
The goal of keyword analysis is to learn exactly what the target audience is looking for, their searching habits, and to form a list of keywords and phrases. These can be used to have either your blogs, service pages, or landing page appear at the top of their search results.
With a better search ranking, users would be more inclined to visit the site that matches their search preferences. Hence the importance of keyword analysis and implementation.
Design
The second phase before implementing the inbound marketing strategy is to use all of the data gathered during the discovery phase to design the campaign. Would-be buyers would be overwhelmed by the number of providers that exist, but not all of them can have a well-designed website and understand their market.
Inbound marketing makes the best of the information gathered to make the choice easier for the target audience.
Brand Identity
A brand identity is an illustration of the company’s ideals, and will affect the tone in how they would like to present themselves to customers. Designing a brand identity to be unique would help make them stand out among competitors and would impact their customer’s opinion.
Part of the inbound marketing strategy would be to set guidelines to the client to set a proper tone to help their brand succeed.
Website
With how many people search for their answers online, it is vital to have a well-designed website for your brand, as it will be their first impression of it.
Even if your brand already has a website, the inbound marketing agency’s job is to help improve and enhance it. Should any shortcomings be found, the agency would fix it. Should any strengths be learned, they would be at the forefront of the brand’s website.
Social Media
Social media is vital in showing your brand’s identity and value. As part of the inbound marketing campaign, the social media can be designed to be used as a point of contact with customers, and increase traffic towards the main website.
Deploy
The final stage of the inbound marketing strategy is finally implementing the research-designed content into the world. The website would be full of SEO content, the design would be appealing and professional, and the content itself would be tailored to fit with the brand’s value and suit the customer’s needs and standards.
On top of deploying the campaign, part of this stage would be the continued interaction with customers and visitors as planned by the delight stage. These interactions would take different forms such as email marketing, social media events, or updating blogs.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing for B2B
In this digital age we live in today, all forms of marketing have adapted to include online marketing as part of their plans. One of the two forms that have been developed is inbound marketing, the cool new kid on the block with strategies for naturally growing an audience. The second form is outbound marketing, which is a traditional marketing approach that has been going on for years.
The differences between inbound and outbound are in their approach to customer acquisition and retention. They both have essentially the same goals for making a business successful, but the methods and strategies used are completely different.
Inbound vs Outbound: Acquiring Customers for B2B
When you first learn how both methods work in gaining customers, you can certainly tell the difference between the two styles. Inbound marketing uses keyword and keyphrase manipulation to have the user see your company as one of the top search results on google via SEO. Outbound marketing uses what you would expect traditional methods to use: billboards, TV commercials, digital advertisements, and other similar forms of media.
If we were to use examples, inbound marketing is like drawing in hungry customers via the smell of fresh bread from a bakery, while outbound marketing is like shoving a sign in a potential customer’s face.
Inbound marketing is targeting customers already interested in the product being sold, such as a carpentry shop looking for tools from your hardware store. Outbound marketing is going out and looking for customers, such as a hardware store looking if factories were interested in purchasing from them.
In terms of B2B, inbound marketing is more efficient as it draws in businesses that are looking for your products, whereas outbound marketing is looking for any business that may be interested in buying.
Inbound vs Outbound: Retaining Customers for B2B
When you compare marketing strategies and methods for gaining customers, you can also see the difference in customer retention.
For inbound marketing, retaining customers is one of the core parts of the strategy for continued success. It is so important that it is one of the core stages of inbound marketing, delight. This form of retention can come in the form of special discounts, customized products or services, or taking in feedback and adjusting accordingly to the customer’s specifications.
Customer retention is vital for inbound marketing, as one of the main advantages is strategizing continued success even after a sale has been made. Being a one-time supplier for a company isn’t enough; becoming one of the main suppliers is a goal worth pursuing.
Customer retention is not a core strategy for outbound marketing, which focuses on gaining as many customers as possible through exposure. Why retain customers when so many more are on the way? While continued sales are beneficial for outbound marketing, it can’t be said that is one of their main goals.
From analyzing both outbound and inbound marketing strategies on retention, the differences between the two is stark. Outbound marketing relies on gaining as many customers as possible for short term success, while inbound marketing works on retaining customers for long term success.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing Methods for B2B
For both acquisitions and retention strategies, how both marketing strategies raise your brand’s awareness are different as night and day. While outbound marketing has adapted new methods to fit the online world we live in today, inbound marketing was built around it for optimal use.
When businesses are aware of how to be targeted by marketing agencies, their guard is up, and skepticism is at an all-time high. Both marketing strategies try to go around or break through them in different ways.
Inbound Marketing Brand Methods
Part of the inbound marketing strategy for a client is to keep things natural and voluntary on the customer’s end. Through this method, skepticism isn’t removed or broken through, but rather subdued with a subtle marketing approach.
Where everyone has internet access at the palm of their hands, inbound marketing is built around finding and targeting an audience via the internet. Having other interested businesses know you can provide what they’re looking for, whether on social media or the brand’s own website, is a critical component of the inbound marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A core method of the inbound marketing strategy is SEO. When a company owner or procurement manager needs to hire an outside company to provide a product or service, one of the first methods would be to search for them online. This is where inbound marketing comes into play, where part of the method is to get your business on top of the search engine.
With the manipulation of keyphrases and keywords on the company website’s homepage and content, inbound marketing has your business appear as a top result on search results. Part of the research phase would be analyzing what the best words would be, what the target businesses would search for, and implementing them on the website’s homepage and content.
Content Creation
For inbound marketing, content is king. It’s a key resource for SEO strategy and is integral in raising the brand’s value within customers. It’s through the blogs, explainer videos, how-to guides, and service pages that SEO thrives.
When businesses look for who to hire or purchase from via a search engine, inbound marketing’s job is making sure that the appropriate content will be among the first they see. Once they learn of your brand’s capability through the content, this increases brand confidence, where they likely become a lead in the Engage stage of inbound marketing.
While content does attract visitors to the website and convert them into leads, it is also important to have consistent content updates. Whether to let visitors know the brand’s online presence is alive and well or as part of the SEO strategy to stay on top of the search results, updating content is important.
It is clear why content is important to an inbound marketing strategy. It helps in both brand awareness and brand confidence by the company for a B2B deal.
Social Media
The incorporation of social media into marketing tactics is one of a marketing campaign’s greatest tools. Inbound marketing utilizes social media not as an advertisement, but as a tool to connect with customers.
As inbound marketing focuses on being a subtle marketing method, social media will be used as part of the outreach to the target audience. Applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, among others, are useful to publish curated content, and can act as a point of contact for potential or established customers.
This makes social media a sort of multitool: it solidifies the brand’s identity, increases traffic to the main website, and also works as a customer service tool. For inbound marketing, social media has become an integral part of a B2B campaign.
Video Marketing
One of the best ways inbound marketing can increase a brand’s identity, product, or service is through videos. They can come in a variety of types, such as demonstrations, where a product is showcased to the audience, and testimonials, where customers can be shown talking about the product, among others.
Videos are one of the most popular mediums people consume for content, and it has become a useful tool in an inbound marketing strategy for a B2B campaign. Nothing builds trust more than showing a potential customer how their product benefits them.
Videos come in a variety of formats to suit the client’s needs, hence why you’ll often find videos on most business websites. From animated explainers to live demonstration videos, they are helpful in building the brand’s identity and value.
Email Marketing
When you hear about email marketing, you might think about those random promotion emails you find randomly in your inbox or spam folder, but these are not inbound marketing emails. Emails utilized for inbound marketing take on an informational role, not a promotional one, where the email itself is tailored to who received it.
Inbound marketing emails are not unsolicited; the user who voluntarily handed over their email address would be the one receiving these types of emails. The emails themselves would contain tailored content to the user, and would contain content on topics they are interested in.
For example, If a business owner handed over their information after reading about your company’s selection of hammers, they would receive an email tailored with the contact details and data gathered. The email would greet them by name, and the email would contain information about a recent discount on hammers. The email would then end with a call-to-action to give the best chance for a sale.
Inbound marketing emails are less about marketing and more about nurturing that B2B relationship. With a link made, consistent and timely newsletters show how useful your brand can be to the other business.
Chatbot Integration
One of the popular methods of having 24 hours of support for visitors to the website is through the use of chatbots. Simple artificial intelligence programmed to respond to commonly asked questions can go a long way in helping visitors to your website.
The chatbot can help in a myriad of ways, including giving the user an on-site article or blog that could help their search, the open hours of the company, or maybe information on upcoming events the company has planned. Chatbots can certainly make your website easier to navigate and more user-friendly for business owners who first come to it. In a way, the chatbot is part of the website’s content in of itself.
Outbound Marketing Methods
The methodology for outbound marketing is to go out there and find the customers. When comparing outbound with inbound marketing, it’s obvious to see that it tends to be the more aggressive method. Outbound marketing has been on the decline recently as consumer skepticism has been on the rise. People have begun to be more wary of advertisements, which have become easier to avoid.
The newer generation of people have begun watching less TV, and those that are tend to mute the TV when a commercial is on. People have been installing applications like Adblock on their computers to avoid advertisements online. Blocking email senders address to avoid promotional content. Registering on a no-call list to avoid telemarketers. People have taken advantage of any opportunity to avoid advertisements, which is outbound marketing’s main method.
Cold Calling
Also known as telemarketing, it’s when a company worker or robot calls a potential customer in hopes to sell a product or service. These calls are unsolicited, and tend to frustrate the one who receives the calls. As of 2021, 244 million Americans have registered on a Do Not Call list to avoid telemarketers, indicative of how today’s consumers are less inclined to receive cold calls.
Trade Shows
Large real life conventions and exhibitions where everywhere you look would be an advertisement. Brands would often showcase their products or services at these events and would be competing against other brands usually at the stall beside them. If a company owner was to find your business specifically, they would have to single you out among the sea of rivals around you.
These have been less common due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While trade shows have been making a steady recovery, the number of attendees have been greatly reduced from what they once were.
Email Blasts
One of the most common methods for outbound marketing is by sending an unsolicited email to a group of people on a list. This list would be formed by advertisers finding your email address from your social media, browsing forums, or even just happening to be in a collection of similar-sounding email addresses.
Busy business owners would most likely have this ignored in the spam folder of their emails, which are automatically deleted at a later date.
Cost-Efficiency of Inbound vs Outbound Marketing for B2B
To calculate the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, the cost of it must also be put into consideration. The return on investment is important to consider to assess how effective the campaign was compared to the funds and resources to put into it.
There is a difference between the amount of investment needed between inbound and outbound marketing. Outbound marketing needs tangible media such as billboards, TV commercials, a call center, and studio to prepare it all. Inbound marketing’s work is more abstract, but does have media used as well.
The Cost of Inbound Marketing
One of the main advantages of inbound marketing when compared to outbound marketing is that it is more cost-efficient. Everything inbound marketing needs for an effective marketing campaign can be done online on the computer, so there’s no need for a studio.
If your business hired an inbound marketing agency like LetsMarket.it, most of what is being paid will go to skilled experts researching, designing, and implementing the marketing plan. Website redesign, a social media content calendar, a consistent update to your articles and blogs, or even maybe a complete rebranding of your company, that is where the resources would go.
Prices differ depending on each agency, but they are noticeably cheaper than buying several billboards for a couple of weeks in a few locations.
The Cost of Outbound Marketing
Traditional marketing depends on very tangible media, either billboards or TV commercials, something that needs to be seen and/or heard. It has to be original content as well, which means newly produced and involves a studio, with a full crew of cameramen or photographers, editors, graphic designers, and catering There also can be costs such as renting the billboards, TV commercial spots, or the amount of time a digital advertisement stays up.
With all these factors, the costs compound on top of one another when combining the salaries of professionals and the cost of resources to make an effective outbound marketing campaign.
Return on Investment
When calculating the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, a company has to calculate the cost of its production with the gains produced. Whether it is increased sales, online traffic, or followers gained on social media platforms, it all depends on the goals set out by the company.
When it comes to a B2B setting, the goal of the marketing campaign is to catch the attention of other companies that are looking for the products your business provides.
With inbound marketing, everything can be calculated thanks to its feature of being attuned to online platforms, where traffic, sales, and feedback are all recorded. With outbound marketing, it relies on the methods used for advertisements through physical or digital mediums and a rough calculation of how much gain was the result of advertisements.
Inbound Marketing With Content for B2B
To increase a brand’s value, solidify a brand’s identity, and help with increasing brand awareness, the best way for inbound marketing to achieve those results is through content.
Content can take many forms, from blogs to videos. All are useful to an inbound marketing strategy in helping your company both reach potential customers naturally and show the brand’s identity.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
With inbound marketing, content is a key component to achieve the desired results set out by the company. Blog posts, how-to guides, and news articles, among others, are important for SEO to propel the website to the top of the search results. Thanks to this method, brand awareness is naturally grown with reduced skepticism by the visitor.
Another job content does for the company is that it solidifies the brand’s identity within the visitor’s mind. When your content shows how professional and skilled your company is, the brand confidence of a potential customer company skyrockets. When their own company is on the line, no business owner would risk working with a brand they don’t know, thus showing content about your own company raises your brand’s value.
The content produced would be tailored to both to suit the portrayal of the brand’s identity, and be customized to fit perfectly with the target audience’s values.
Blogs, How-To Guides, and News Articles
One of the most important methods for inbound marketing is through the use of text documents. These texts are informative pieces of content that talk about the brand’s services or products, and they are rife with keywords and phrases.
Part of inbound marketing’s strategy is through the use of SEO, and the way to do that is through certain keywords and keyphrases. These terms would be researched beforehand and sprinkled in the text documents to appear higher on the search engine results.
These blogs, guides, and articles show the potential customers how skilled your company is. On top of increasing the brand awareness, it also increases the brand’s value and brand confidence within potential customers. Where B2B is concerned, showing your company is skilled to the customer company is vital in an inbound marketing strategy.
Video Content
The most popular form of medium consumed today are videos. Whether it’s through YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram Stories, videos are popular on every platform online. This is why marketers find videos beneficial for any marketing strategy.
For inbound marketing, videos help as part of their content marketing strategy. Whether through animated explainer videos, product demonstration, or testimonials, videos are useful tools in generating confidence in your brand within other companies.
These videos also help show your brand’s identity to potential customers as found suitable by the client company. With the identity established, the company can show the type of ‘personality’ the brand can be known for.
Inbound Marketing for eCommerce Businesses in B2B
The proliferation of virtual marketplaces and technological breakthroughs have made it simpler than ever before to buy and sell products (and services) online. During the COVID-19 outbreak, as more companies went online, the worldwide shift towards digitization accelerated quickly. eCommerce activity continued to increase even as different regions started to reopen post-COVID. By 2024, it’s anticipated that global eCommerce sales will total 6 trillion USD!
This eCommerce progression can only mean one thing: even more companies are vying for the attention of a relatively-unchanging number of customers. In light of this, how can eCommerce stores, whether B2B or B2C, get the attention they desire?
If you came to this article looking for an answer to “is inbound marketing for eCommerce?” then the answer is yes!
Why Use Inbound Marketing if You’re an eCommerce Business
The challenge with traditional marketing has historically been attracting the perfect clients at the perfect time. Additionally, for years, client retention has come second to customer acquisition. However, it has been evidenced that it costs 5 times more to get a new client than it does to preserve an older one.
Inbound marketing for eCommerce does exactly that. If you’re still wondering, “is inbound marketing for eCommerce?”, read on!
Businesses are beginning to see the significance of retaining clients given the rising cost of client acquisition; a 5% improvement in customer loyalty rates could boost profitability by 25% to 95%. eCommerce inbound marketing has proven to be one of the best — if not the best — approaches for customer retention. Here’s why.
Inbound marketing for eCommerce places a strong emphasis on the value of positive consumer experiences. With eCommerce inbound marketing, your company will improve the way it interacts with consumers in order to boost sales and profitability. Your organic search ranking, brand recognition, and social media outreach will all improve if you incorporate inbound marketing for eCommerce into your strategy.
eCommerce inbound marketing strategies are multidimensional, multichannel digital programs that use several outlets, methods, and approaches to spread messages to consumers. Inbound marketing tends to move away from conventional, frequently expensive outbound marketing strategies that often impair the user experience and discourage people from interacting with your brand.
With the use of pertinent, interesting, and high-quality content, inbound marketing for eCommerce focuses on luring new customers to your company as well as retaining older ones — have you heard of the inbound marketing funnel? eCommerce brands frequently find success when they take the time to comprehend their core demographic in-depth. This allows the brand in question to consistently deliver the appropriate content to the appropriate audiences at the appropriate times.
For businesses to be successful online, inbound marketing is a need since it facilitates engagement with potential, existing, and former clients. Inbound marketing for eCommerce, which is a content-led approach, strives to simplify the process of connecting your company with potential B2B or B2C clients through search engines.
How does inbound marketing for eCommerce work?
Inbound Marketing Process for eCommerce
The important thing to keep in mind in this situation is that inbound marketing isn’t simply one instrument, one plan, or one campaign that a business does once and reaps all the benefits it desires. Inbound marketing is a collection of recurring activities, ranging from website optimization and SEO to blogging and social media marketing, that help your company build a repeatable income stream.
Inbound marketing for eCommerce aims to draw in potential clients by providing them with pertinent, authentically beneficial content that aids them in understanding and resolving issues they might face along their buyer’s journey. Your objective is to lead a prospect through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buyer’s journey.
Since they found your business through pertinent content, the prospects you receive through the inbound marketing process for eCommerce will already be qualified once they connect with you. By eliminating leads who are improbable to become clients, you will save precious time and money.
But how do you do it? What is the inbound marketing process for eCommerce? The four steps of this process are commonly acknowledged to be attract, engage, close, and delight.
Stages of the Inbound Marketing Process for eCommerce
Stage 1 of the Inbound Marketing Process for eCommerce – Attract
Optimizing and promoting your website are essential if you want to operate a successful online business. One advantage of inbound marketing for eCommerce is that, when done correctly, it will make accomplishing that goal a breeze.
How can you attract the ideal visitors? Simple, with the relevant kind of content. You will have a significant chance of drawing in the proper segments of visitors if you publish content for the different buyer’s journey stages.
To identify whom and what to target, build some buyer personas before you begin creating this content. Another crucial consideration is a competitor analysis — seeing what your competitors are up to and understanding how they are able to attract people to their brands will give you a huge boost. Don’t copy them! Learn from their mistakes and do better. We will help you with that, worry not.
Stage 2 of the Inbound Marketing Process for eCommerce – Engage
When a prospective client interacts with your business and gives you some of their personal information, they are converted into leads. To promote this, you must enable users to interact in a way that works best for them, which you will learn through your buyer personas.
Once you’ve gotten a visitor to engage with your content or website, you will then be able to nurture that new lead by answering any questions they have and providing them with more useful content to move them farther down your inbound marketing funnel. Given that it will allow you to keep record of your leads and all conversations you have with them, a CRM system is also essential.
Stage 3 of the Inbound Marketing Process for eCommerce – Close
At this point, your goal is to convert your qualified lead into a paying customer. Providing them with beneficial content and first-rate customer service will suffice to address their problem.
You ought to supply all the assistance you can to guide your lead to locate the best solution for their concern, as they should be at the consideration or even decision stage of their buyer’s journey at this point. Offering a blog article comparing different products, for instance (the consideration stage) or a video on the best methods to utilize a certain product that the client has determined will be useful to them are two examples of how to accomplish this (decision stage).
Stage 4 of the Inbound Marketing Process for eCommerce – Delight
Every step of the inbound marketing process for eCommerce must take the client’s experience into account, from the first time they visit your website to the instant they become a paying customer and well beyond.
It’s challenging to retain clients and cultivate brand advocates, so keep this in mind when you produce content, reply to inquiries, interact with users on social media, and follow up with current clients. You could also invest in a customer service video that answers all pertinent FAQs!
Long after they’ve made their initial purchase, inbound marketing for eCommerce delights your clients. By enabling your clients to experience fulfillment with their purchase, you will turn them into repeat customers and ultimately into loyal brand advocates.
Final Thoughts
No matter how big or small your business is, inbound marketing is 10 times more successful at increasing traffic to your website because it offers more chances for visitors to be converted into leads, and once prospects are obtained, they will be seamlessly groomed into qualified sales leads.
Thanks to its educational nature and the powerful effect that digital content has, inbound marketing for B2B also increases revenues by making the sales cycle much more efficient. Last but not least, B2B inbound marketing promotes customer loyalty by emphasizing that marketing never stops once an order is placed and that a company must constantly educate its clients. As a result, clients become loyal brand advocates and the brand becomes one of their suppliers.
Incorporating inbound marketing for B2B takes a lot of effort. Hiring an inbound marketing agency may be necessary for many businesses, and we at LetsMarket.it are here to help!
Attract, Engage, Close, and Delight are the four stages that form the backbone of the whole inbound marketing process for eCommerce and several other industries. While some might consider it to be a lengthy process, our funnel-based inbound marketing strategy has been serving our clients quite well.
As an inbound marketing agency, LetsMarket.it will strategically guide your business in order to effectively reach your target audiences, regardless of the industry that you operate in. The inbound marketing process is all about creating a marketing strategy that is sustainable, scalable, and repeatable.
Still asking “is inbound marketing for B2B?” Here are 5 reasons why the answer is yes, a thousand times yes!
