3 Critical Multipliers for Inbound Marketing Success

To make inbound marketing work for you, you need three other essential ingredients in addition to your inbound marketing programs, what we call the Inbound Marketing Multiplier:

1.            An outbound marketing strategy

2.            A corporate communications strategy

3.            A marketing automation strategy

Combine Outbound and Inbound for Greater Results

Outbound marketing is any paid marketing – both online and offline – used to acquire new leads. It includes everything from trade shows to pay-per- click marketing and is critical to growing inbound marketing. Why? Well, when a new piece of content is launched, inbound marketing supports that content, for example, by sharing it in social media channels, making it faster and easier for your content to be found. The paid advertisement or site sponsorship of an outbound marketing campaign helps you further spread the word about the content, ultimately multiplying the number of new views you generate, which in turn will increase the number of shares, thus further increasing the number of potential customers viewing your content.

In addition to generating more views, marketers can realize the following benefits through an inbound/outbound mix:

·      Create Brand Recognition – and Business: The greater the number
of outbound campaigns you execute, the more likely that people will recognize and get to know your brand. The more they know and trust your brand, the more likely they will be to respond to your inbound marketing, and ultimately, become a customer. 

·      Make Prospects Speak your Language: When you run paid promotions, you choose the language used to describe your product or service. Prospects who repeatedly see these paid promotions are likely to pick up on the terms you use and plug those in when they are searching for a solution. As a result, you are more likely to appear high in the search 
engine results. 

·      Capture Your Target: Knowing and appealing to your target   audience
is one thing, reaching them is another. Let’s say your target market
is Fortune 1000 companies. Through outbound marketing, you can target this group exclusively by purchasing lead-generation programs where you only pay for leads that satisfy your criteria. This makes your campaigns very efficient and keeps your database clear of names that will never purchase from you. In inbound marketing you can target specific groups in your content, but you can’t do anything to ensure that the content reaches and is consumed by your target audience.

·      The Personal Touch: When you meet a prospect face-to-face, or even talk to them on the phone, you establish a relationship that can be far more powerful than one developed via any email or tweet. With outbound marketing you can build the one-on-one relationships that are not possible to develop with inbound marketing.

Corporate Communication Gets You Recognized

Often inbound marketing specialists say press releases are dead or only good for paid SEO links. They also may suggest that because press releases aren’t relevant, corporate marketing isn’t needed at all. This is not true.

Corporate marketing is made up of much more than press releases. This area of marketing includes branding, analyst relations, product launches, programs to upsell to and retain customers, and communications, both internal and external – all essential components of a marketing program.

Inbound marketing doesn’t replace corporate marketing, but should
work hand in hand with it. By establishing a consistent brand and set
of messages, your company becomes recognizable and trusted. And
by conjuring feelings of trust, knowledge, and quality in the minds of prospects, you have the opportunity to stand out in the deluge of content available online. You may not be the only one doing what you do, but

you want to be thought of as the best. Think of it like the Pepsi-or-Coke argument. A Pepsi drinker chooses to drink Pepsi even though she is aware of Coke. That’s because brand loyalty is powerful and long lasting. Once you establish a strong brand image, inbound marketing can carry it far and wide. At the same time, you’ll see a greater return on inbound marketing because people will be more receptive to your content.

Marketing Automation Enhances Inbound

Marketing automation is the use of technology to manage and automate the process of converting prospective customers into actual buyers. By automating the various tasks and workflows involved in demand generation, lead management, and sales and marketing alignment, marketing automation contributes to shorter sales cycles, increased revenue, and better marketing ROI. And this is necessary for the success of your inbound marketing campaigns.

The leads you’ve generated via inbound marketing are often still conducting research and evaluating their solution options. That’s where lead nurturing comes in — you need to invest in the process of building relationships with qualified prospects, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready to buy. Marketing automation helps you deliver relevant information over time to keep leads interested, engaged, and educated until they’ve made that decision.

Marketing Automation supports inbound marketing in the following ways:

·      • Raises open and click rates: By tapping into email deliverability best practices and delivering multi-step campaigns aligned with prospects’ profiles, interests, and online activities, you boost the effectiveness of your emails.

·      • Enables A/B testing beyond just landing pages on your website: With marketing automation, you can test the potential effectiveness of your emails and offers.

·      • Creates new landing pages in minutes without IT: Marketing automation empowers you to create and launch relevant and optimized landing page whenever needed – and in turn, generate dramatically higher conversion rates.

·      • Shortens sales cycles: By identifying, prioritizing, and connecting with the best leads, you can close deals faster.

·      • Lets sales know when their prospects are engaging online: With insight into how much content prospects have consumed and how much time they’ve spent on your site, your sales reps can strike while the iron is hot.

·      • Automates repetitive tasks: By automating tasks that can be time consuming to handle manually – such as managing leads – you can spend your time on more strategic initiatives.

·      Delivers sophisticated reporting and analytics: As marketers are increasingly held accountable for the impact of their activities, they need tools that help them assess – and increase – their effectiveness and impact on revenue.

·      Wins more deals and generates higher revenue per deal: By driving a greater number of qualified leads, streamlining the entire sales cycle, and focusing on the most promising opportunities, marketing 
automation helps you generate better results. 
While each of these can make a big impact on your marketing, by combining them you can dramatically improve the results of your marketing program – and reduce costs across the sales and marketing organization.