Inbound Marketing For Your Business

As much as we love and respect outbound marketing, it is also important for us to evolve and refine this vast landscape. Inbound marketing offers just that. Here's the 'why' and 'how' behind this methodology. 

You need to give us a high five for this one. Not a lot of marketing companies will break down their approach to a marketing school of thought like we're about to do. But, our take on business (and life, for that matter) is that together we can grow, and seeing as knowledge is power, let's dive into the building blocks of the Velocity Media approach to inbound marketing. 

What Is Inbound Marketing?
Why do you need a CRM system?
Chatbots - The Way Of The Future
Getting To Know TOFU, MOFU, BOFU
Marketing Automation & Your Audience
VM's guide to content marketing
The "Why" Of Buyer Personas
Breaking Down Pillar Pages

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Without seeming too trite, let's put a spin on this and run you through what inbound marketing is NOT. 

Inbound marketing is NOT “interruption” or “push” marketing, which uses tactics that get a message to a large number of people in an effort to make a sale (we like to call this the spray-and-pray method). Print/TV/radio advertising, cold calling, direct mail, mass emails, and other methods are aimed at large audiences of people, which forms part of an outbound marketing strategy... and not inbound, of course.

Now that we've got that out of the way, inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don't always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.

Explore The Differences Between inbound And Outbound Marketing

Why Do You Need A CRM System?

If you’re managing more than 10 clients or customers and have a strong focus on marketing and networking or any plans to grow and you don't have a management system in place, things might become a bit dicey.

Networking, marketing, and sales all generate interest and the need to follow up and without a system in place to help you and your team (if you have one) will maximise your chance of more business.

Forgetting to follow up, invoice, call, email or arrange another meeting could well lose you sales and clients – especially if your competition has a system geared up to do it all.

Chatbots: The Way Of The Future

Chatbots learn to do new things by trawling through a huge swath of information. They are designed to spot patterns and repeat actions associated with them when triggered by keywords, phrases or other stimuli. They seem clever, but they are not. They are adaptive and predictive in their learning curve. This means that if the input is poor, or repeats questionable statements, the chatbot's behaviour will evolve accordingly.

Many industries use chatbots to improve or streamline customer service and e-commerce. Consider these primary applications for chatbots:

• Customer service chatbots: Many businesses are using chatbots as a first contact when customers need help. In almost every industry, companies employ chatbots to help customers easily navigate their websites, answer simple questions and direct people to the relevant points of contact.
• E-commerce chatbots: Retail companies and telecommunication providers use chatbots as an additional interaction channel with their customers. The bot is designed to lead customers through a linear process flow to complete requests or transactions.
• Virtual assistant chatbots: Personal assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa have risen in popularity as their benefits have become readily available and easily embedded into the daily life of consumers. People use them to quickly retrieve information, schedule appointments and interact with smart home features.

Explore More About Mobile Marketing & Chatbots

Getting To Know ToFu, MoFu And BoFu

The best way to shape up your business's sales and marketing strategy is by fleshing out a marketing funnel. The hard and fast behind this methodology is to convert prospects into customers and eventually into brand evangelists. It is a journey that prospects take with certain steps and curated milestones along the way. 

ToFu covers the first third of the funnel, though it can sometimes overlap into the middle of the funnel slightly. So, ToFu marketing efforts are targeted at visitors, leads and MQLs.

The big goal in the middle of the funnel (MoFu) is to convert "problem-aware" and "solution-aware" prospects into leads. 

BoFu marketing is targeted at SQLs and opportunities and encompasses the fourth and fifth funnel stages.

Explore More About ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu

Marketing Automation & Your Audience

From personalised SMS reminders and cart abandonment emails to multi-channel campaigns that span social media and in-app messaging, B2C marketing automation can knock it all out of the park. It's all about saving time, money, and resources.

Marketing automation has many benefits. It can help save time and resources, nurture leads (with the help of a buyer's journey), and increase revenue — all at once and with minimal manual effort.

With that said, it’s important to mention that marketing automation shouldn’t replace human touch. This is especially true for B2C — unlike B2B, the B2C sales cycle is much shorter and the customer journey is much more personalised.

Explore More About Marketing Automation

VM's Guide To Content Marketing

You’ve just heard someone mention “content marketing” and you get the idea you should already know what it is, but you’re too embarrassed to ask anyone. Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Content marketing is important, not just because it works for building trust, generating leads, and cultivating customer loyalty, but because it has become the new normal from the consumer side. It is, in itself, helping to evolve what customers expect from the brands they interact with. Neglecting it is way more risky than investing in it.

Explore More About Content Marketing

The "Why" Of Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious enactment of the ideal client /customer based on market and trend research. This research can also be done on existing clients and includes customer/client demographics, behavioural patterns, motivations and goals.

The more specific the description of your persona is, the better for your campaign. It’s also important to know that companies usually have more than one buyer persona in their marketing strategy. This includes ideal and negative (the customer/client you don't want) buyer personas.

Download our Free Buyer Persona Template

Having buyer personas provide a vast array of insights and structure for your marketing plan. Having a detailed outline of your buyer persona will help you with time management and nurturing of any lead. A buyer persona requires constant contact updates and tweaking, as it helps you set a strategy aimed at attracting the most valuable visitors, leads and customers.

Explore More About Buyer Personas

Breaking Down Pillar Pages

Content cluster, cornerstone content, or pillar page. Whatever you call it, it is important to incorporate this into your blog's architecture. As the name suggests, it is a content piece that holds all the information on a topic which is broken down into sub-pillar sections that branch out into their individual clusters. Confusing? Don't worry, you'll snap into it in a moment.

Above and beyond creating structure and order for your site's architecture, a pillar page covers all aspects of the topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth.

Explore More About Pillar Pages