A successful inbound marketing program requires the right blend of technology and strategy. A great strategy combined with subpar tools or poor strategy combined with great tools will generally yield dismal results. Yet, the right strategy, with the right tools, will almost guarantee success with inbound marketing.
Marketing tools are the buzzwords these days, but the tools always don’t solve all your marketing problems. It’s important to understand which tool is important for you at the stage of your company's growth & buyers journey and how much value it can bring to your company & most important to your marketing efforts. Deciding on the right tools at an earlier stage will help you to build a robust platform as your company grows and scales over a period of time.
Before we jump on tools, let’s try to understand these concepts and how tools fit in this journey to make your inbound marketing easier.
What is Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by attracting customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. In simple terms, it is the process of helping potential customers find your company. This frequently happens before the customer is even ready to make a purchase, but making contact early can turn into brand preference and, ultimately, leads and revenue.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing—content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and more—to create brand awareness and attract new business.
“Inbound marketing is so powerful because you have the power to give the searcher/consumer exactly what answers they are looking for at the precise point that they need it. That builds trust, reputation, and authority in whatever niche you are practicing this form of marketing in.”
– Joshua Gill, Inbound and SEO Marketing Consultant, Inbound Authority
Difference between Inbound Marketing Vs Outbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing is more of a push methodology instead of a pull method in Inbound Marketing.
Outbound marketing uses tactics that get a message to a large number of people to make a sale. Print/TV/radio advertising, cold calling, direct mail, mass emails, and other methods are aimed at large audiences of people.
Key Differences
Inbound Marketing
Pulls in Interested readers
Draws in Customer
Interactive and suggestive
Outbound Marketing
Pushes at everyone regardless of interest
Seek out Customers Insert
One way
Buyer’s Journey Alignment with Inbound Methodology
With inbound marketing, the aim is to attract potential customers long before they might be ready to buy and guide them on their journey towards making that purchase. Understanding the buyer's journey is very important as it will help you to plan your strategy and align your marketing tools with the buyer’s journey.
What is a buyer’s journey?
Buyer’s journey is a process that buyer’s will undergo before making the final purchase decision.
There are many ways to understand a buyer's journey w.r.t to the inbound methodology. Your aim should be to understand that journey and implement tactics that will give you a competitive advantage.
Three stages of buyer’s Journey
Attract: drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
Engage: presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you.
Delight: providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchases.
Inbound Marketing Tools
Executing Inbound Marketing strategies is a tough journey for marketers, sometimes getting the marketing results proportionate to your marketing efforts can be tough. Tools can make your efforts efficient and help you to automate a lot of manual and tedious tasks. With the right suite of tools, you’ll be able to focus on big picture strategies instead of the minutiae of putting them into action. Your tools should align with the buyer's journey stage as discussed above also.
Tools at Attract Stage
You don’t want just anyone coming to your website. You want people who are most likely to become leads and, ultimately, happy customers. At this stage, it’s important for you to focus on
Content marketing- That attracts potential prospects that are on the web searching for the solution for their pain points.
Social Media Management - To publish the content on social media, reach a broader audience, engage with the potential prospects, social listening and maintaining consistency through social media automation techniques
SEO Strategy - It's important to optimize your site content and rank better than your competitors.
Here are the best recommendation of tools at attracting stages
Content Creation & Content Experience Tool
Content creation tools enable businesses to create content for their marketing initiatives. These content pieces can include written content, images, infographics, videos, and quizzes, among others.
On the other hand, Content experience platforms enable companies to create personalized experiences geared toward audience engagement. These tools first provide features focused on the centralization and organization of marketing assets via tagging and categorizing based on audience or use case.
Uberflip enables marketers to scale how they incorporate content into every touchpoint and remove friction from the customer journey by surfacing the right content at the right time. Uberflip’s platform empowers customer-facing teams to centralize and organize content, create personalized experiences and distribute those experiences to generate results at every stage of the journey.
SEO Tools
Search engine optimization (SEO) software or organic search marketing software, is designed to improve the ranking of websites in search engine results pages (SERPs) without paying the search engine provider for placement.
Products in the SEO category must offer one or more of the following functions: SEO audits, rank tracking, keyword research, content optimization, or link building.
From helping you to target the right keywords to creating custom reports for your SEO efforts, Moz helps you to remove SEO complexity.
It helps you to track your ranks against your competitors, crawl & audit your site to suggest SEO improvements, optimize your pages by auditing the content and recommending specific improvements.
You’ll get actionable recommendations on how to optimize your site for SEO, ranked in priority order to show which optimizations will have the most impact on your performance in search. See exactly which pages need to be updated, what actions should be taken, and watch as your site’s SEO improves.
In the process of building search authority, you’ll get topic suggestions based on relevance, competition, and popularity, as well as access to monthly search data so you can estimate how ranking for specific topics will translate to organic traffic gains.
Social Media Management Tools/ Social Media Automation Tools
Social media automation is using software tools to handle some of the time-consuming tasks involved in maintaining a professional social media presence. For instance, scheduling posts ahead of time, curating content for republishing, triaging routine customer queries, and producing analytics reports are all examples of social media automation.
Sprout Social’s all-in-one social management solution empowers our customers to do more with their social media strategy. Better connect with audiences, streamline publishing workflows, collaborate in real-time and turn social data into meaningful insights—at scale.
Sprout’s intuitive platform is designed with user experience in mind, simplifying social publishing, engagement, reviews, analytics and listening for their customers.
In attract stage, tools like Uberflip will help you to create and manage your content to bring prospects to your website. With the SEO tools like Moz or Hubspot tool you can optimize your content and rank better against your competitors and with Social Media automation tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social you can reach your audience at scale and maintain consistency in your efforts.
Tools at Engage Stage
Now you have generated enough traffic on your website, increased your social media following on your social media channels. It's time to collect leads and convert them into customers. It's important to manage the centralized database of your customer information and automate your marketing & sales tasks to reduce those manual and tedious tasks and focus more on executing strategy
At the Engage stage, you need to focus on
Designing Landing pages and integrating forms with them to gather leads
Focus on lead management strategies
Focus on Conversational Marketing & Sales Strategies
Managing contacts database and centralized customer information through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.
Automating Tedious Sales & Marketing tasks through Marketing Automation tools.
Strategies at Engage stage are critical and there is a very thin line between prospects at engage stage and converting those into customers.
These tools can make your life easier and increase the lead-to-customer ratio in the long run.
Landing Pages Design Tools
The whole purpose of the landing page at the engage stage is to capture lead information in exchange for the desired offer. Information exchange happens through integrating forms on landing pages and capturing that information in the backend of your customer relationship management system.
Unbounce is a drag-and-drop builder that lets you create and publish your landing pages, without needing a developer to code ‘em. It’s an easier and faster way to get more conversions from your traffic.
By using Unbounce you get access to customizable templates, integration tools and optimize your landing page results with its conversion intelligence feature.
Lead Management Tools
Once you start gathering leads, it's important to timely qualify your leads, nurture those leads and score them to pass them to your sales team. These processes aim to make lead management easy for your company and as your company grows and your leads database increases, these guidelines and best practices will come in handy for you.
Lead Nurturing & Lead Scoring Tools
Typically a prospect could become a subscriber for your content or exchange information with you to download a piece of content. It's important to nurture those subscribers/ Lead into potential customers by lead nurturing techniques. Most of the time, these are stages before lead converts into a customer.
Subscriber Has subscribed in exchange for an email to receive communication from you.
Lead Has given the information like company name, contact no in exchange for resources.
MQL ( Marketing Qualified Lead) Has been qualified by the Marketing Team to consider further to nurture these leads through marketing channels.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) Has been qualified by the Sales Team to consider further to contact them, provide them quotations.
Customer Onboarded as a customer.
These are the Lead Nurturing techniques you should follow to convert them into customers
Multi-channel: Reach and nurture your audience where they are — on multiple channels — rather than just email.
Timely Follow-Ups: Follow up with your leads in a timely manner to keep them engaged and interested as well as keep your brand top of mind.
Personalized Emails: Personalize your emails (and all lead nurturing tactics, when possible) to promote customer retention.
Lead Scoring: Implement a lead scoring strategy to help you determine which leads you should focus your time on.
Sales and Marketing Alignment: Align sales and marketing teams to improve your lead nurturing tactics and boost customer retention.
With these features embedded in the Hubspot tool, Hubspot becomes a preferred tool for Lead Management.
Contact Management: Add company and contact records, log sales activities automatically, and easily keep records up to date. See every interaction you've had with contacts, and use this data to build campaigns that close more deals
Email Templates: Easily build email on scale and personalize them to your contacts records
Contact Activity: See detailed interactions between a contact and your website in a single place, including page views, form submissions, sales activity, and more.
Pipeline Management: Add deals to your CRM with a single click, assign tasks to push deals forward, and track progress in your dashboards.
Conversational Marketing & Sales Strategies
Instead of forcing people to go through lead capture forms and wait days for a response, conversational marketing uses targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with people when they’re on your website.
Making it easier for people to engage with your business will help you convert more of the right leads faster. Which means happier customers and a happier company. It’s not a new funnel, it’s a new way to move people through your funnel
It enables you to build meaningful conversation as soon as lead/prospects lands on your website pages
It helps you to understand the lead requirements quickly without waiting to nurture those leads.
It helps to recommend the next steps to move leads through the funnel.
Drift’s sales and marketing software accelerate your entire deal cycle, from first visit all the way to close. By identifying each visitor, personalizing their experience, and helping your team engage more effectively than ever.
These features make it a preferred tool
AI-based Chatbot to make real-time chats and engage those site visitors.
Real-time personalization-based on-site activities and giving prospects the best recommendation.
Target Account Engagement to recognize high-value accounts and give them priority services.
CRM Tool
A customer relationship management (CRM) system collects, organizes, and manages all of your customer-related information so you can track the buyer’s journey for every individual you interact with, streamline communication, enhance the customer experience, and improve data management.
At the Engage stage, it's important to track the customer information, connect with the prospect at the right time, follow up with them and timely send them the communication.
If you are looking to get started with the CRM system in your company, you should check out this ebook crafted by Enidan Marketing.
Best for startups looking for an all-in-one CRM solution that fits their budget and is easily scalable.
It can make things easier on yourself by tracking your contacts and customers, and sending the bulk email — all using the same tool.
Marketing Automation Tools
Marketing automation is a technology that helps businesses grow by automating marketing processes, tracking customer engagement, and delivering personalized experiences to each customer across marketing, sales, and services.
At Engage it's important to automate these processes so that your offering can be personalized and leads can turn into prospects.
HubSpot’s automation tool is beyond email automation, so you can scale your growth and spend less time on repetitive tasks.
Put lead nurturing on autopilot with email drip campaigns.
Easily visualize, customize, and personalize your workflows.
Automate dozen of tasks beyond email.
Tools at Delight Stage
Delighting inbound strategies ensure customers are happy, satisfied, and supported long after they make a purchase. These strategies involve your team members becoming advisors and experts who assist customers at any point in time.
When a lead becomes prospects and subscribes to your product/ service. It becomes important to serve at the best at the time of subscription as it engages upsell, cross-sell and maintains positive word of mouth.
This is the ultimate test for your company and team members to act towards common organizational goals and focus on a customer-centric strategy.
At the Delight strategy, you need to focus on
Workplace collaboration tools
Workplace Collaboration Tools
Simplify processes, reduce busywork, and lay out clear goals and plans with Asana work management software—so you and your team can focus on the work you do best
Create a clear path of action with creating goals and expectations for your teams
Turn strategy into workable plans
Map out plans by keeping tasks and projects on track.
Balance workloads to see how much work is on each team member's plate.
What’s Next
At Enidan Marketing we bring all our years of knowledge and experience to set your Inbound Marketing tools right. We live and breathe in these tools daily.
Our priority is to set up the right processes, align your technology with your organization’s goals and help you to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
If you still have doubts about implementing these tools and you are not able to decide which tool will be right for your business, you can contact us and we will help you to get started.
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