Comments from K2 Global Communications

Committing to inbound marketing means attracting and growing your leads and customer base via valuable and highly customized content and experiences. To successfully drive inbound marketing and sales, three things must happen:

1) Enhance team collaboration

Marketing, sales, customer service, and IT need to work together. Managing customer relationships entails different tasks throughout each phase - whether as a new visitor, prospect, customer, or promoter, so each group needs to be aware of their specific roles. The roles should be well defined to facilitate the inbound experience, with each team’s processes aligned to avoid friction and negative customer experiences. Ensure that team members understand how everyone needs to work together, especially the responsibilities, processes, and procedures. A strong internal communications plan strengthens collaboration and productivity.  

Hold consistent feedback sessions to avoid conflicts. Last, but not least, avoid these two productivity destroyers: duplicate efforts and multiple tools that accomplish the same thing.

Marketing must

• Generate qualified leads
• Create content and capture, nurture, and qualify leads until they’re sales-ready

Sales must

• Turn leads into customers by demonstrating your offering’s USPs
• Close the deal

Service must

• Convert customers into promoters
• Resolve customer issues to generate success - and positive word of mouth

2) Go from funnel to flywheel

Today’s customers are more skeptical, more informed, and more likely to harbor significant expectations. Therefore, businesses are now aligning their success around their ability to provide a remarkable customer experience - better business is built with better relationships.

To achieve this, companies must change their marketing approach from the funnel model - a business-centric, linear approach that breaks the customer’s journey from awareness to purchase - to the flywheel model, an approach that puts customers at the heart of the strategy. Happy customers drive more referrals and increase company sales.

With social media and word of mouth driving most purchase decisions today, it’s easy to see why an approach that views customers as a major sales driver wins over one that sees the same customers as simply an outcome.

The flywheel model:

• Keeps up the momentum of happy customers, driving repeat sales and positive word-of-mouth
• Motivates you to eliminate friction that slows down the flywheel - silos, poor communication, deficient processes
• Provides a more efficient way to attract and retain customers
• Ensures seamless handoffs of customers between teams, since every team is responsible for attracting, engaging, and delighting customers

3) Get all the tools you need in one toolbox

Here are your three main responsibilities as an inbound marketer: Become visible -- or get found. Nurture and convert leads. Measure revenue or success.

Increase your online presence with

• Content strategy - Reach your audience and boost conversions
• Blogs and whitepapers - Create useful content that appeals to your buyer personas
• Landing pages - Optimize landing pages to drive engagement
• SEO - Increase your site’s visibility and rankings
• Social media - Promote brand awareness
• Ads – Leverage Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. ads, including best practices and bidding strategies

Tools to nurture and convert leads

• Email - Strategy creation, list building, and results tracking
• Video – Use videos to drive your message home
• Marketing automation - Easily make content personalized, relevant, and aligned with customer needs
• Forms - Create, format, and embed web forms
• CTAs - Improve the website experience and conversion rates
• A/B testing - Don’t rely on assumptions. Use A/B testing before, during, and after data collection to drive decision making

Tools to measure revenue

• Campaign reporting - Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Use key metrics to delve into the data to measure efficacy.
• Website traffic analysis - Analyze where your traffic is coming from, which visitors go to which topics, content performance, and traffic in terms of UTM parameters
• Attribution reporting - See exactly which marketing efforts are driving the most revenue opportunities on your website and learn how to scale

Empower your inbound strategy with HubSpot

HubSpot optimizes your inbound power while saving time, effort, and resources. It merges tech, marketing, and sales in one platform, delivering all the tools you need to attract prospects, convert leads, and close customers. Manage all your marketing activities - from content creation to CRM to marketing automation - in one place. Benefit from ease of use, tons of effective features, and the comfort of 24/7 tech support.

K2 partners with HubSpot to help our clients achieve their business goals. Call us to help you optimize the HubSpot platform for your inbound efforts.