Inbound Marketing Insights

Marketing is a constantly evolving part of every business. The marketing function is continually adjusting and reacting to changes in technology that will help businesses better communicate with prospects and customers. While digital marketing has undergone a substantial transformation in the last few years, the technology that sparked these changes is growing faster.

To help you take your marketing strategy to the next level, you need to look beyond the usual channels to stay ahead of the curve and ahead of the competition. To help you in your quest for marketing success this year, here are three strategies that will be more important than ever.

1) Relationship Marketing
Relationship marketing aims to focus on building stronger loyalty and long-term customer engagement rather than short-term customer acquisition. This helps companies develop solid and emotional connections that drive word-of-mouth advertising. After all, we all know that word-of-mouth will always be your highest lead generating and, most importantly, your highest converting lead source. To do this, you need to leverage your customer and prospect data. Personalized, data-driven marketing will become increasingly important. Intrusive, mass-marketing approaches will continue to become a thing of the past.

One example of how you can adapt your marketing efforts to coincide with your data is communicating with customers and prospects on the device you know is most comfortable for them. There is an immense opportunity for brands to connect with their prospects and customers on the devices that people are using more frequently than ever before.

Another example is to make your website dynamic. Did you know that you can adapt your website content, images, calls-to-action, and more based on the data you have on that individual in your database? Your website is no longer just a static place on the internet for people to find your information. Your website can reconvert your visitors for you because it will be smart enough to know how that person has interacted with your website before. This is the next phase of your website and something that consumers are coming to expect.

2) Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is not something new but is undoubtedly something that is under-utilized. Did you know that only 37% of B2B marketers use marketing automation? As marketers today spend at least 50 percent of their time on content, content, and more, companies quickly realize that they need to find strategic ways to automate marketing, sales, operations, and more. If used the right way, marketing automation can genuinely act as an extension of your sales team.

One example that we’ve seen is that one of our B2B clients had a 5.5-month sales process from when a lead expressed interest to the time they become a customer. Through marketing automation and delivering the right content to the right person when seeking that information, our client was able to decrease the sales and conversion timeline by over three months!

Using marketing automation that integrates with your sales platform/CRM and other digital tools makes it easier to schedule emails, segment contacts, automate social media, manage your content, and track customers' lifecycle in your marketing and sales funnel.

With even more focus on marketing to deliver results, marketing departments around the globe should be evaluating their team’s skills, noting the gaps, and defining a robust automation strategy to help sales through engaging prospects, qualifying leads, and shortening the overall sales cycle.

3) Location-Based Marketing
What better way to engage a prospect than targeting users at their engagement point? Location-based marketing technology, such as iBeacons, help make this entirely possible. If you have a retail location, or if you frequently host or attend events, this is something you need to consider!

Let’s explore the technology. iBeacons are small transmitters that use Bluetooth Low Energy to detect nearby devices. These iBeacons can be housed in a retail location, a point of sale display, and more. In addition, iBeacons can also help event attendees make the most of conferences through sign-up and engagement in sessions and at trade show booths!

To tie in the marketing automation piece mentioned earlier, iBeacons also have a LinkedIn integration that allows you to request a connection and send a message, reducing the need for unnecessary emails (I’m sure we all agree we could probably use fewer emails in our inbox!)

It is all about location with this targeted marketing approach. Take advantage of the location-based information you have on users to help you connect with them at precisely the right time. This may feel slightly intrusive at first, but individuals welcome a more targeted approach to help filter through the clutter of unwanted, mass marketing messages.

These are just a few of the many new marketing technologies and trends to consider adding to your marketing toolkit. As marketing continues to change and adapt to the latest technologies available and the amount of data you have on your prospects and customers, it’s critical to stay updated on the latest marketing strategies to stay ahead of your competition.  Are you looking to evaluate your current inbound marketing strategy? If so, we invite you to request a 30-minute inbound marketing consultation with our team.