The inbound marketing strategy has made great strides in recent years. It's pretty obvious why - it's a better process for marketers, a better experience for consumers and yields better conversions for salespeople. However, there is one inherent flaw in the inbound methodology - scalability!
Creating amazing content, personas, personalisation and bringing it all together with workflows can add enormous value to your process. But how feasible is this when you are marketing to thousands? Inbound takes time to find build and refine your audience - and when you are trying to pay wages and bills, your time and resources become very precious.
So what’s the answer? How can you scale up your inbound marketing activity and still find, nurture and convert consumers in a non-intrusive way? Simple, biddable media. Biddable is the logical progression of an inbound marketing strategy, enabling you to take all the goodness of inbound and spread it to millions who are receptive to your message. It means you can run a business at scale, without relying on cold calling or all that other nonsense that is about to become illegal.
If you want to achieve any marketing aim, then biddable media is a great way to boost activity. However, biddable is difficult to get right. If you want to get some solid advice on perfecting your campaign, read our blog 'What is biddable media, and how can it catapult your growth?'
Previously, we touched upon the potential weaknesses of an inbound marketing strategy. If you don’t have an existing set of followers or fans, then you start at a big disadvantage compared to established brands. You can be creating loads of great content, but it might not be getting the exposure you need to get your campaign off the ground. Basically, it mirrors the old question - if a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?
No, because sound waves need a receptor to create noise. If you share a post on Facebook and no one is around to receive and share it, does it make an impact and help your company? No. Nobody cares and you look like a loser, now hang your head in shame and get back in your cave.
When you are starting out, you need to build your audience as quickly as possible. A great way to do this is with biddable. One of the key tenants of any inbound marketing strategy is the creation of detailed customer personas. In inbound, you tailor your content around these personas, but you can apply this same method to biddable in order to create very targeted and highly engaged audiences.
Take one of our new clients as an example. After running our persona exercise, we determined that their targets should not only be high net worth individuals, but also hold key traits such as liquidity of assets, age and interests. We were then able to take this ideal audience and build a relevant profile across various channels. Then with no prior fans or followers, we began to broadcast our message with paid social and PPC. The result was an incredible number of follows, shares, retweets - and best of all, consumers who were now part of our nurturing and workflow cycles.
Applying biddable to your inbound marketing strategy (and vice versa) is like having a chef make you lunch. It may cost a bit more, but you will end up with something of much better quality quite a lot faster than you could make yourself.
The major benefit of integrating biddable and inbound is the refinement of leads . With biddable, there will always be endless amounts of optimisation to do, and normally not a lot of time to show clients results. This is where inbound can really benefit you. Inbound marketing requires a lot of background research and persona development around your target markets. If done correctly, this makes you an expert in your audience before you start throwing money into biddable. As a result, you can map out and build optimisation tests very easily, identifying key triggers within the target audience.
Another great thing about inbound (and especially HubSpot) is the workflow sequences that you can implement very easily. These are like a quality obstacle course for your leads, removing weak contacts and time wasters from your CRM until all you have left are people who actually want to buy. By setting triggers across pages and forms, you can gain a lot of information from innocuous interactions.
If Johnny goes onto your page advertising onesies for example, he is then put into a workflow and can be sent personalised emails. A day after looking at your page, he is also sent an email with a blog discussing the best types of onesies available. A few days later, he can be sent an email suggesting he follow @wunderonesie on twitter. All the while, your CRM is taking snippets of information from each interaction - such as who he follows on twitter, what colours he prefers, if he is buying for a friend or himself.
When he finally calls for the onesie, your sales team already know what he wants to buy. This gives them an easy entry point and the ability to build repertoire quickly, using the information gathered. In short, this enables the simplest of transactions for your sales team.
This is the beauty of the inbound biddable mix. You create a lot of traffic, inform that traffic with great content, top up your sales funnel, and then apply the research, data and logical workflows. This dissects actual buyers from tyre kickers, streamlining your sales and boosting your profits.
The great thing about this process is that it converts, and we can say this with 100% certainty. Why? Because we have numerous clients who are seeing the results firsthand. For one of our favourite clients operating in the high net worth space, we implemented the process outlined above. Starting pretty much from scratch, we built personas, accelerated the message with biddable, and then built a workflow process bespoke to their leads. No lead was left un-contacted, and no sales person went into a call blind. Within six months, their revenue went up 500% and they made 3000% ROI.
We believe there is a better way to build your business than cold calling and spamming strangers with the shotgun sell approach. It requires effort and thought, but the end result is lucrative for your business and produces engaged consumers who will advocate your brand.
If you want to achieve any marketing aim, then biddable media is a great way to boost activity. However, biddable is difficult to get right. If you want to get some solid advice on perfecting your campaign, read our blog 'What is biddable media, and how can it catapult your growth?'
