We regularly hear from channel businesses about the support they need to solve particular challenges they are facing. Those challenges broadly fit into three areas: getting click-throughs from marketing emails but no leads, needing to rebuild sales pipelines post-lockdown, and ways to fulfil a number of responsibilities with stretched capacity.
The good news is that these challenges are easier to overcome than you may think. The answer: inbound marketing. The method revolves around three key stages: attract, engage and nurture.
1. Attract
Just like leading a fish to bait, you need to be able to attract potential customers to your content. That could be an engaging blog that leverages strong SEO research to ensure it’s as far up Goggle’s search as possible, a whitepaper that provides robust insight, or anything else your typical customer finds useful.
Especially for whitepapers and guides, it’s best to ‘gatekeep’ the content behind a data capture form, this way you can attract leads from anonymous sources like social media and get their email address in exchange for the content you’re offering.
2. Engage
Once you’ve got those contacts, you need to keep them engaged with regular messaging and appropriate content as they continue along your sales journey until they’re ready for a sale.
This step is absolutely vital and planning the right messaging, automated workflows and lead scoring will all ensure you’re attracting the right leads, and engaging them at the right time when they’re primed for a sales conversation!
3. Nurture
Once you’ve brought a customer onboard, you need to continue nurturing them, especially in a market like the channel where there are so many future upsell opportunities once a customer is on your books!
And all those same steps are still required for best practice. Yes, your account manager will keep in touch regularly, but automated messaging can help keep your brand in your customers’ brain, with little resource required, to ensure you’re the first port of call when a new requirement emerges.
Those three stages of inbound methodology are complemented by three vital strategies. Regular messaging which keeps the brand in the mind of its base, automation that personalises outreach and saves marketers’ time and lead-scoring which helps identify leads that are ready for more sales-focused conversations.
Consistency and relevance
With regular messaging, you can be sure that some of the email addresses on your mailing lists are also on your competitors’, meaning if you’re not consistently reminding them of your presence, you won’t be their first choice when looking to find a new IT and telecoms partner.
What’s more, if your outreach doesn’t help the reader– offering links to educational blogs, explaining technical terms, or highlighting what makes your organisation unique, readers will soon ignore future emails, resigning you to the dreaded ‘’other’ inbox, or even worse… ‘junk’!
We all know the time-saving benefits of automation – as an industry, we sell it often enough to end users! But automation can also ensure personal and relevant content. By analysing behaviour – perhaps clicking a link to a security blog, rather than broadband, the right CRM could automatically move that reader into a security-focused workflow, sending regular emails that the reader finds relevant, with no input from your team.
This keeps your brand in their mind, but also raises your credibility and relevance with that reader because you’re sending them information that resonates with them, rather than blanket bombing them with every product you offer!
These automated workflows work hand-in-hand with lead scoring; every time a reader exhibits a behaviour – such as clicking a link or visiting your website – their score increases until it reaches a threshold.
You decide that threshold, attributing scores to each action. For example, visiting a website isn’t a clear buying action so will be given a much lower score than downloading a product sheet. Then, when their score has reached the line that you set, you know they’re ready for a sales conversation, based on where similar leads were in their journey, before leading to a successful sales conversation.
Growing your business
Inbound marketing is all about offering informative content to readers, making sure that further outreach is driven by the subjects and actions they engage with, and nurturing them until they show the same level of interaction as current customers did, back when they were leads!
This article appeared in our November 2022 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.