Playing a digital marketing game is all about having your inbound marketing played online. If we are playing the game in the B2B industry, the creativity and complexity level to deliver the outcome from it are far greater than retail’s.
Inbound marketing especially to B2B obviously offers a whole lot of benefits in and of itself, but have you ever thought the positive impact your inbound digital marketing efforts can have on your sales success? There are several ways how it will assist your sales team to secure those orders:
Generating Genuine Leads. Inbound marketing is an art of how to sell by not selling. It’s by telling stories. Great stories being crafting on a daily basis either by articles, images, videos, infographics, and podcasts to attract visitors to read, listen and view them. The crafted storylines are so creatively created until the visitors do not feel that the content is actually enticing them to trust the brand. Visitors who can relate to the stories began to follow the brand. After following for a while and repeated ‘brainwashed’ by those stories, they began to fill in the online form to inquire more about the brand. From here, genuine leads are generated. The sales team will then take a lead to follow up further on the inquiry.
Turning Cold Calls Warmer. Cold calling will push you to spend most of your energy working your way through the various gatekeepers, explaining who you are and what you do, instead of actively selling. In most cases, its just hardly working. Instead, with inbound marketing designed for B2B companies via digital marketing, it enables to turn cold situation warmer. You see, with inbound marketing we collect emails and accumulate them in a database. The emails are not bought, but visitors themselves. And they willing to share their email address because they began to trust your brand and the content you’re producing. These people have explored the marketing content, then they already have some awareness of your products and services. They become your followers simply because they think you can add value to them and their life. This is the main reason why they are willing to share their email address to you. So, when your sales team were to contact them for some events, campaigns or promotions, these calls are warmer than the the cold ones simply because the recipients already knew who you are. Thanks to the inbound marketing effort.
Boosting Your Credibility. The foundation of an inbound marketing effort, is content creation. The value of creating insightful, engaging, relevant content is extremely crucial to attract visitors, make them to stay and read other contents and eventually follow the brand. A steady stream of such material can establish, maintain and deepen your authority and reputation as a respected thought leader in your industry. This wealth of high quality content not only helps you impress and persuade inbound leads, it can also provide great material for your sales team. They will have enough ‘bullets’ and points to impress their prospects. This process can be as simple as emailing all of your company’s latest white papers, blog or articles, reports, infographics, images and videos to their customers on a regular basis. Your brand will be seen as a credible brand in your customers’ eyes for helping them proactively with the latest information. At the same time, it also makes the opportunities stays warmer too.
Improving The Selling Cycle. Time is money in the world of B2B sales. The longer they spend time on each lead in the sales cycle, the more time and work they’re putting into secure a given ROI from that lead — and the less time and effort you have for cultivating other leads. By using the inbound marketing to pre-qualify leads on behalf of your sales team, you’re filling your sales funnel with prospects who are more predisposed to buy. This means they need less persuading and make their final decisions more quickly, allowing your salespeople to move on to the next lead. When selling cycles are shorten, the salespeople can add more volume to their sales pipeline and handle more leads and turn them into sales faster.
