Is building a slick website enough to attract customers and help your company make a respectable ROI
The answer is a resounding NO, there are several factors and a process, it’s Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation, both are relatively newer terms to a strategy being used by major players. Each one offers the potential to generate leads, combining both, can lead to great results. The traditional approach relied on sending mass emails and waiting for clients to react, it worked for a small percentage and yielded some results. Using an Inbound Marketing Strategy can turn this around by using well written and well presented content that attracts prospects due to their interest in the subject. Once there Marketing Automation nurtures those interested but are not ready yet to commit, so once they are, your site will be the first one they call on. The components of an inbound and automated marketing process
- Your Content Marketers agree that “content is King”. Remarkable content will make your website stand out and attract visitors. A great inbound marketing system depends on the quality of the content you share. This is the area that has the greatest effect on your success online. The following tools help display it, disseminate, promote and catalogue it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Tools Search Engine Marketing includes tools for Organic Search (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). There are also tools to help devise Keyword strategies and others to assist with advertising campaigns; score your website, analyze its traffic share, determine your Search Engine Results Page ranking, assess incoming and outgoing links, etc.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) Tools With Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter being all the buzz these days, SMM tools are a must to manage all of them. The tools help find authoritative or influential blogs and websites for your area. Others help with Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and the many social media platforms.
- Content Management Systems (CMS) A great way to manage your content is with a CMS. The benefits of a CMS is that whole content of a webpage will be incorporated into a database.
- Marketing Automation Software It’s great to have all these prospects coming to your site, but you also need to have a plan on how you are going to nurture them into a sale. Enter marketing automation software that can nurture your prospects from a general browser to paying customer. 6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) After your Marketing Automation has tracked your prospects and determined which ones have potential; leads are fed into your CRM system, allowing the sales team to conduct timely sales calls with prospects who are in a buying mode. The Process in Action
Marketing Automation Process – New Spark
Visitors arrive on your site, attracted by your keyword and SEO strategy and all that Social Media Marketing. They find that your site perfectly matches their keyword phrase. The site is such a perfect fit to their expectations that they begin exploring and don’t bounce away.
They register to get your content. They read it and return for more. Because they have given you their name and email address, they are assigned to the first of your drip-email nurturing campaigns and are now automatically nurtured and cared for, according to your best sales and marketing practices encoded in your system’s Business or Automation Rules. Your prospects are cared for flawlessly. Each automated drip-email element provides just the right response to nudge this person to the next step in their buying cycle.
Once they have entered a buying mode, your sales staff get a notice (in the CRM system) to call this prospect. Complete with a full history of this buyer’s behaviour and a targeted message, your sales person signs them up that day. This may sound like science fiction but this is the exact system that many successful companies are using. Their marketing people are released from the mind numbing process of managing leads and responding to routine inquiries, freeing them to create new campaigns with attractive content. Sales people concentrate their efforts on the prospects who are ready to buy now and leave the “just browsing” leads to the automation system. This is how the marriage of inbound marketing and marketing automation increases your revenues while lowering your costs and boosts profit significantly.
