Inbound Marketing Insights

The Engage stage of the inbound marketing methodology is all about creating meaningful and lasting relationships with those prospects who have opted in to receive more information from your organization. There are various ways to do this through email marketing, personalized website content, marketing automation, live chat, and more. These prospects have virtually raised their hand to receive more information by opting in.

In addition, you can and should take your inbound marketing a step further to see how far along someone is in their decision-making journey. Through marketing technology and integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, you can start to customize the marketing journey by:

• tracking the website pages that the prospect has viewed on your website
• identifying the source, they originally came to your website from online
• determining how engaged the prospects are on your digital channels
  

For example, if the prospect has viewed the pricing page on your website, they are much further down the buyer’s journey than a prospect who has just viewed your home page. Through marketing and sales technology, you can use the analytics available to tailor unique content to these prospects based on the specific information they need to move to the next stage in the buyer’s journey.

Here are the best tools to use as part of the Engage stage of the inbound methodology:

• Email Marketing: Always remember that your prospects want to hear from you. I often hear from companies that are only focused on new leads. While that is essential to building your sales funnel, email marketing helps you stay in front of the individuals who have already expressed interest. Use email to send your prospects relevant blogs, your latest downloadable content, invitations to webinars, and much more.
• Marketing Automation: Leveraging your automation tool will help you maximize your team's efforts. Consider when someone enters into your funnel what type of content they would want to receive based on their buyer persona. You can automate a series of emails to them and even automate reminder tasks for your sales team to follow up with the prospect.
• Lead Management (CRM): Your CRM provides you with every data point on your prospect. As a marketer, you can use information that your sales team is inputting into the CRM, including the lead status, lifecycle stage, prospect responsiveness, and more, to automate the right marketing actions to move them through the funnel. 
• Personalized Website Content: By having the correct information in your CRM, you can customize the type of content on your website based on the prospect. For example, suppose you know that a prospect is in the healthcare industry. In that case, you can customize your home page content and downloadable offers to deliver content specific to the healthcare industry. This is powerful to help reduce the prospect's time to search for this information and increase their likelihood of recon reverting to connect with sales.
• Live Chat or Chat Bots: I'm sure you have used live chat or a chat bot on a website at some point. It's an incredibly convenient tool to give prospects the ability to connect with your team at the exact moment they are on your site. They don't need to fill out a form and wait. Instead, they can chat live or answer their questions through a bot. This is great for organizations of any size to capture these contacts when they are engaging with your content.
  
  

Making the marketing journey as personalized as possible should be at the forefront of your prospect and customer experience. Studies show that 50% of consumers are more likely to purchase again if they are presented with personalized offers and information by email and on your website. Also, 74% of consumers are frustrated when website content is not personalized. (Source: HubSpot.com) Today, technology is available to organizations of all sizes. Prospects expect a personalized experience, and you need to deliver that experience when prospects interact with your brand. Implementing the right technology tools makes the prospect and customer journey more meaningful and impactful.

Are you looking for ways to develop or optimize your inbound marketing strategy? The book "Mastering Inbound Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Building a Results-Driven Inbound Strategy," written by Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, covers every aspect of the inbound marketing methodology, including the revenue generation trifecta of marketing, sales, and the customer experience. Check out the book to discover how to most efficiently and effectively develop, implement, and maintain your inbound marketing strategy.