By providing information to help educate the consumer when they ask about a product or a service and to offer content that answers their questions. Inbound marketing can convert visitors to your website into customers.
To assure the success of this process, visitors need to be supported throughout their journey. Taken as a while, it is possible to see four stages within this sales journey – attracting visitors, visitor conversion; from prospect to client and then to make the client loyal.
Do you want to know more? Here is our step by step guide.
1. Attract visitors to your website
The first step in this journey is to bring traffic to your website that is interested in your software or services, what is known as “qualified traffic”.
To attract these visitors you need to make useful and relevant content. Inbound marketing works when you have a clear vision of your target audience. Once these questions and needs have been identified, you may want to use a persona kit to help you out – you can position yourself as an expert with your target market, and distribute content that is useful to them.
The key is there: rather than trying to sell your product at any cost, you will offer your customers content that is useful to them. Rather than “Look at our great product and everything we can do with it!”, You will focus on the needs, pains and common interests of your target audience in order to bring them to your site.
People will then come to your site in a more natural way, more willing to receive information on your brand or your products. Make sure that the content you publish is well optimized for SEO search engines, shared on social networks and by email to your contact base for maximum impact.
2.Convert visitors into leads
The second step aims to turn those passive visitors into interested ones. Into leads. For this you have to gauge what will interest them and offer them something of enough worth for them to engage with your site.
Visitors come to your site attracted by your content, they’re maybe a little curious… and this is the perfect time to start promoting your brand. Here you want to know from those visitors who is the most receptive to your offer. At this point, for them to become a lead, you want them to provide their email address, company name, phone number, in exchange for high-quality content.
To attract visitors to this content, place CTA’s (Call-to-actions) linked to attractive landing pages on the bottom of your articles. They will allow the most curious visitors – or those most interested in your content to click.
To remember: call to action, landing pages, downloadable content, product demonstration offers…
3.Transform your leads into clients
For the third step, it is a question of feeding your prospect with information, educating and informing them about to heighten their awareness, as well as taking them through the buyer’s journey.
Your visitors have become leads with the helping hand of your salespeople. They’ve even become qualified prospects. Now you have detailed information on what they’re looking for, of who their company are and you’ve confirmed their interest in your product. So, let’s sell, right? Well, if you look at studies such as Gleanster Research did you’ll see that at least “50% of qualified leads re not ready to buy”. Ouch.
The challenge here is to gain the confidence of your prospects and to position yourself as someone of trust and expertise, their friend in all situations. In this way, you can bring them maturity, help them understand your product and surround them with themes that are relevant to them. This stage is known as “lead nurturing”, where you feed your leads with cutting-edge content, adapted to their needs and expectations, to support them as they gain knowledge. You can offer them case studies, product or brochure demonstrations, customer testimonials, etc. You must adapt this content to their expectations but also to their maturity.
This step is crucial, but the amount of work may seem a lot. Here’s where an automation tool can save the day. Many people think that they can cover this by creating “workflows” In fact, this often seems the answer – sending content automatically after creating certain scenarios, but it can quickly become an endless task. Creating a different scenario for every type of sale, with all the different there-in, as well as taking in new content, product changes, massive world changes!! Workflows can quickly become outdated. It’s impossible to predict the impossible!
At Plezi, we use Smart Campaigns. By tagging our content as soon we publish it according to our own criteria (buying funnel stage, type of persona etc) and cross-referencing it with the data we have on customers (their maturity, online activity) we can put in place campaigns that run by themselves, based on our parameters. This means that we can drip-feed our prospects, automatically, with messages that re relevant to them.
Best formats: newsletter, email campaigns, smart campaigns …
4. Build customer loyalty
So, you’ve successfully converted your visitors into customers, but your work isn’t finished! Helping your current customers to stay loyal to your brand and your products will cost you much less than acquiring new ones. These customers can even, if satisfied and enthusiastic, become ambassadors for your brand and recommend it to others: the holy grail of the marketer.
The support of your customers is excellent for your brand image and the organic development of your notoriety. It is therefore up to you to maintain this privileged relationship by offering specific content. You can offer them to improve their skills with content reserved for your customers, invite them to exclusive events, create a community on social networks … The means are varied and will mainly depend on your sector.
To conclude: don’t forget to set up indicators to be able to properly measure the success of your strategies and content at each point of your sale. This regular monitoring will allow you to adjust your model as you go along and calculate with ever greater precision the ROI (profitability, return on investment) of your marketing actions. In the context of inbound, it’s even simpler than outbound! By accurately quantifying each step of this cycle, you will be able to refine your model and follow it over the long term effectively.
