Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Welcome to the third installment of our “Inbound Out Marketing Versus…” series.

So far, we’ve compared Inbound Out Marketing to two other strategies:

1. Trade shows

2. Direct mail

Both have their merits, but Inbound Out Marketing makes for a formidable opponent.

This time, we’re putting it against a more modern adversary:

Social Media Marketing

I’m a big fan of social media marketing. The prospect pool is too great to ignore, and the paid advertising power of these networks (namely Facebook) is unparalleled.

However, there are some shortfalls to social media marketing that make Inbound Out marketing a smart addition to your strategy.

Here’s how this process compares to social media marketing:

• A more targeted approach. You promote your business directly to your target audience, rather than just on a network.

• You develop one-on-one relationships faster and more efficiently. The relationship begins as soon as someone from your company reaches out.

• Better reach. You can reach prospects who are not on social media or aren’t willing to engage your business there.

• Faster results. Results happen faster from initial contact to sale.

Let the battle begin!

Promoting your business on social media typically looks like this:

1. Create a piece of content

2. Share it on your social media accounts

3. Automate it to be shared multiple times

4. If it gains traction, do a paid promotion

This is an effective method for driving traffic, but it’s a blanket approach. You send your posts to the social network and attract whoever decides to click and engage (and whoever happens to be online at the time).

Only a certain percentage of the people who you want to see your post actually do see it.

Targeted Outreach is a key part of Inbound Out marketing. You promote your business directly to your target audience. It's prospecting through the web.

This lays the foundation for the rest of the process:

Inbound Out Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing — Building Relationships

Social media helps prospects and fans build connections with businesses that would never have been possible in the past.

Brands can come off as cool, hip, fun, smart, ambitious -- whatever brand managers decide. The level of transparency is higher on social media, allowing for stronger relationships to develop.

Those relationships end up as leads, customers, shares, and word-of-mouth—all valuable assets for any business.

This is one of the greatest benefits of social media marketing, but it also happens to be one of the greatest benefits of Inbound Out marketing.

Targeted outreach to your prospects is a key component of Inbound Out marketing. This outreach builds a one-on-one connection with your audience. You establish micro-rapport with each interaction, build a connection with your business, and prospects start trusting you more and more.

Social media marketing can achieve the same results, but due to its blanket approach, this result isn’t as targeted and it happens more slowly.

With targeted outreach that's part of Inbound Out marketing, that relationship builds immediately.

Inbound Out Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing — Reach

Social media allows you to reach a large amount of people at any moment in time. This is one of the reasons it has become so popular for building and growing businesses.

But here’s the thing:

What if your prospects aren’t that active on social media? Social media marketing becomes less effective.

Inbound Out marketing gives your business the ability to reach prospects no matter where they hang out online. And personalized contact through social media or email is much more likely to get a response.

Inbound Out Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing — Results

What are the results you look for when promoting your business online?

• Engagement with your brand

• Traffic to your website

• Lead generation

• Sales

With social media marketing, the time from initial contact to sale can take a while. Their emotional investment in your business starts off low and gradually builds over time.

Eventually, that emotional investment turns into a commitment (lead generation) and a conversion (sale).

With targeted outreach and Inbound Out marketing, their emotional investment starts off much higher. They’re interacting with a real human being. They’re getting a hands on look at your business right off the bat.

Any questions they have can be answered immediately. Any objections can be handled as soon as possible.

Your prospects go from emotional investment to commitment to conversion much faster with Inbound Out marketing. This gives you a leg up against your competitors who rely heavily on social media for their success.

Wrap Up

Social media marketing is an effective strategy. Prospects are waiting to engage your business—if you know how to do it the right way.

However, social media marketing lacks a few characteristics that Inbound Out marketing can make up for.

With the combination of Inbound Out marketing and social media marketing in your overall mix of tactics, your business becomes a strong force to be reckoned with.

Traditional marketing no longer works well because buyers have changed. You must learn to adapt. Download the CEO's 2016 Guide to Marketing now to learn and execute your own 2016 marketing strategy today. 

Takeaways

• Inbound Out marketing offers a more targeted approach to engaging your prospects

• One-on-one relationships develop faster and more efficiently

• You can reach the prospects who aren’t on social media or don’t want to be engaged there

• Combine social media marketing and Inbound Out marketing for a well-rounded, powerful growth strategy

Reaching your target audience on social networks takes time, effort, and quality content. You can cheat the time and effort involved by investing in social media advertising using targeted ad campaigns. 

Boosting, Promoting, & Sponsoring are the best way to ensure that your posts reach the audience you choose. Your post will appear in the news feeds of your prospects, giving you a better chance that it will be seen. 

Kristi Hines at the Social Media Examiner has written a great article "How To Increase Your Post Reach on Top Social Networks" that explores the top social networks that offer promoted post options and how they help you reach your prospects on each social site.

If you are curious to know what your leads are costing you, check out our Lead Cost Estimator.  

"Inbound Marketing will get you leads," they said.

"Start a blog and the leads will pour in," they said.

"This is a waste of time!" you said.

Have you noticed?

Doing business online has changed drastically in the last several years. With the growth of social media, search engines, and the information available online, buyers have become much smarter about why and how they spend their money.

They don’t want to be sold to anymore.

Many businesses have relied on commercials, print ads, tradeshows, and cold calls. Unfortunately these methods get less and less effective every year.

People have the power to research everything about a product or service before they buy it. They don’t want to hear sales pitches anymore. This changes the lead generation landscape:

How do you get qualified leads if prospects aren’t receptive to traditional marketing?

The answer is Inbound Marketing -- a marketing methodology based on providing value to customers first before presenting your products and services. It’s the best way to attract qualified leads online, and you’re about to learn how to do it.

Are you ready? Then let’s get started.

Step 1. Get to Know Your Ideal Customer

To market effectively, you have to know the prospects you’re targeting. This means gaining intimate knowledge of your audience’s personality and professional ideals.

Here are a few things you want to nail down:

1. Their goals. What are they aiming for? What are they trying to achieve?

2. Their biggest challenges. What’s stopping them from reaching those goals? (And how can your products/services help them?)

3. Their strongest pain points. What do they complain about the most? Which issues would they love to have disappear?

4. Common objections to your products/services. What is stopping them from pulling out their wallets?

Discovering this information involves diligent research. There are two types of research that you want to conduct: passive research and active research.

Passive Research

To conduct passive research, you want to dive into online hubs where your target audience hangs out. This is where they discuss their wants, needs, desires, and challenges -- the exact information you’re looking for.

Find forums related to your ideal customers. Head over to Quora and other Q&A sites. Hop on Twitter and search for conversations your prospects are having. Join Google+ communities and Facebook/LinkedIn groups.

In each of those online hubs, read through the conversations that are going on. Then jot down these three pieces of information: their goals, challenges, and pain points.

This information is marketing gold that will make your prospecting much more effective.

Active Research

Active research involves communicating with your target audience directly. You ask them insightful, open ended questions to find out all four pieces of information (especially common objections to your products and services).

Here are some methods to try:

1. Send a survey to your email list.

2. Respond to comments on your blog and ask people questions.

3. Create a promotional deal for your products and services. Afterwards, contact the people who didn’t buy and ask them why they decided not to. (This will uncover common objections.)

4. Contact people directly on social media and ask them if they wouldn’t mind giving their opinion on your product, service, blog post, etc.

Strategies like these will uncover your audience’s strongest pain points AND help prospects create a stronger bond with your brand.

Using all of this knowledge, you can create buyer personas that will permeate all of your marketing materials and lead generation.

For an example of a buyer persona and a complete guide to create your Precise Prospect Profile, download our kit.

Step 2. Create Content That Attracts Prospects

Too many marketers create content without thinking about their ideal prospects. They come up with articles ideas, write those articles, and publish them without considering which people they’re trying to attract.

But you won’t make this mistake. Why? Because in Step 1, you just gathered all of the information you need. By creating content that solves the same problems your prospects are having, you will naturally attract these people to your business.

All of your content ideas should be based around the goals, challenges, pain points, and common objections you found in the previous step.

However, you also need to base your content around your own products and services. Here’s the catch: your content should solve the same types of problems your products and services solve.

This is how you attract qualified prospects who are predisposed to want and need what you offer. If you help them fix the same types of issues your products/services do, these prospects begin to trust your authority in the space.

They trust that if your free content can help them solve this problem, your paid products and services will solve an even bigger problem they’re having.

Now you know how to create the right content, but how do you get it in front of your ideal customers?

This involves cunning content distribution.

Step 3. Distribute Your Content and Make Your Business Visible

It’s not enough to create content that’s targeted to your prospects. Not even close.

They won’t visit your website unless you distribute it in channels where they hang out. I mean, how else would they find it?

Distributing content the right way makes you visible on the internet. It makes it easy for your ideal customers to find you.

Your qualified leads are searching for solutions to their problems RIGHT NOW. These are solutions that your content, products, and services can solve. The #1 issue: they just can’t find you.

Yet.

Here are four types of distribution you should take advantage of:

1. Social networks

2. Forums

3. Search engines

4. The Inbound-Out style of outreach

Social Networks

At the very least, you should share your content on each social account you have. This is the bare minimum to make yourself visible on the internet.

However, you should be doing much more than that. You should be reaching out to influential people in your space who have large followings and present your content to them. Odds are, if they like it, they will share it with their audience.

You should be reaching out to those same prospects you found on social networks in Step 1 and present your content as a great place to get more information.

You should head over to the Google+ communities and Facebook/LinkedIn groups and share your content with those people (because you’ve already qualified them to want and need it).

Social media marketing methods like these tap into the true viral power of social media and the benefits it can bring to your business.

Forums

Forums can be packed with your target audience. They exist to bring people with similar interests together to discuss those interests and help each other out.

They want to find and share amazing content with the community. Your content can elevate the community. All you have to do is share it there.

Here are three ways to do this:

1. Create a thread that introduces your content. Then, link to your content at the end if they want to read more.

2. Create a thread describing the main ideas of your content, and link to your content at the end if they want to learn more.

3. Link to your content in the signature, then become active on the forum by answering questions and helping people.

Your content acts as the lure, but you have to cast the rod for it to attract people to your website.

Search Engines

Search engine optimization -- the process of creating assets that search engines like and want to rank on the first of their results.

This process still eludes many people, but it’s some of the highest quality traffic you can get. Where else are people naturally turning to again and again to solve the problems they suffer from most?

Here is a general process you can follow:

1. Base each piece of content you create around a keyword with a high search volume.

2. Scour the internet for link building opportunities. “Links” pages and weekly roundups are two of the best backlink sources.

3. Reach out to the site owner and present your content as a nice addition to the page.

If your content is of high enough value (relative to the content already ranking for that keyword), and if you can build a solid amount of authoritative links, you give your content the best chance to rank on the first page.

Once it ranks, you get to reap the benefits of long-term, qualified traffic for as long as your content remains there.

The Inbound-Out Style of Content Distribution

Inbound-Out Marketing is a new marketing philosophy that involves active prospecting and outreach. It takes the best parts of sales and incorporates it into effective inbound marketing.

To distribute your content this way, you actively reach out to prospects. You establish micro-rapport by communicating with them directly, and you get in contact by phone and through personal emails.

Then, you present your content to them. This is where they can get more information if they need it, which will eventually expose them to your products and services.

Steps 1-3 will help you drive qualified traffic to your website because this process is based on helping people with the same types of issues that your products and services do.

However, these prospects might be qualified, but they’re not leads yet.

That’s where Step 4 comes in.

Step 4. Convert Qualified Traffic Into Qualified Leads

Your site must be optimized to capture the traffic that’s coming in. These people may have a need for your products and services, but they’re not convinced quite yet. They’re still wondering if you’re the one to choose.

To convince them, you need to be able to establish long-term communication. You need their contact information.

This involves incorporating 4 crucial elements into your website:

1. Lead magnets

2. Sign-up forms

3. Clear calls-to-action

4. Landing pages

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are downloadable freebies that you give away in exchange for contact information. They typically come in the form of ebooks, but they can be checklists, free trials, mindmaps, spreadsheets -- anything that a prospect would find valuable.

These need to be sprinkled around your website to entice visitors to give up their contact information, join your sales funnel, and convert into leads.

But how do you facilitate this exchange?

You do it through sign-up forms.

Sign-up Forms

Sign-up forms are the gateways to your sales funnel. They facilitate the exchange between your lead magnet and a prospect’s contact information.

You need at least one of these for each lead magnet you give away.

Clear Calls-To-Action

A call-to-action lets a prospect know exactly what you want them to do and when you want them to do it.

“Sign Up Now For Immediate Access”

“Buy Now!”

“Download Instantly!”

These calls-to-action come at the end of each sign-up form. They let the prospect know that once their information is filled out, they must click this button in order to finalize it.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are the final piece of the conversion puzzle. They combine lead magnets, sign-up forms, and calls-to-action in one highly-optimized location.

These pages have one job: convert the traffic you’re generating into leads. Make sure your landing pages are easily accessible from every page of your website.

In Closing

Inbound Marketing is the best way to sell without selling. It leaves your prospect's lives uninterrupted by pushy sales pitches and ads. It allows them to slowly but surely build trust in your business.

By following this process, you become an asset to your prospects lives, rather than a burden. Not only that, but you attract high quality, qualified leads at the same time, which grow your business as well.

Takeaways

Follow this process to consistently generate qualified leads:

1. Do in-depth research on your ideal customer.

2. Create content that solves 1) the same problems your prospects are having and 2) the same types of problems your products/services solve.

3. Distribute your content in multiple channels and use various outreach methods.

4. Optimize your website to capture leads with lead magnets, sign-up forms, calls-to-action, and landing pages.

When you first sign up for LinkedIn, you are assigned a default URL that includes your name, dashes, slashes, and numbers that is really hard to remember. But LinkedIn allows you to customize your URL and create something unique and memorable.

I recommend you choose something that uses your first and last name and is easy to remember. Your name must be different from every other LinkedIn member, so use your middle initial or middle name if your name has already been claimed by someone else.

Your public profile URL is easy to change, and helps you look like an experienced LinkedIn user, so I don't want to hear any excuses!

Step 1: 

Move your cursor over Profile at the top of your homepage and select Edit Profile.

Step 2:

Click the gear icon next to your URL link under your profile photo. It will be an address like www.linkedin/in/your-name/92/510/448

Step 3:

Under the Your public profile URL section at the top of the right sidebar, click + Create your custom URL.

Step 4:

Type the last part of your new custom URL in the text box and click Save.

You will no longer look like a LinkedIn newbie and the URL will look great whenever and wherever you post it.

If you are interested in having us review your LinkedIn profile, click the button below, and we’ll provide you a Free LinkedIn Profile Review.

LinkedIn is the social network where business professionals are spending their time. You can generate leads, build relationships, improve your reputation, gain insights, establish thought leadership, build online communities, and so much more.

In today’s business world, relationships are more important than ever and professional networking has never been as critical and necessary as it is today. Here are a few reasons everyone should be on LinkedIn.

1. Show others who you are.

A LinkedIn profile shows people who you are, what you know, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and what you are interested in. Showcase your abilities and let people know why they should hire you or do business with you. A great profile lets others see not only your professional side, but your personality as well.

2. Get noticed.

To be found, you should be where other professionals are searching for you. That perfect company or perfect client could be looking for someone like you right now on LinkedIn. People change jobs, switch careers, and start new businesses all the time. Being active on LinkedIn will allow opportunities to come directly to you.

3. Connect with others.

LinkedIn was built for networking. Connect to the people you know from school or through work. You can also discover key people that could help you get your foot in the door or could potentially be great clients.

4. Share what you know and learn from others.

Join groups with the same interests, where you can share information and discuss ideas. Learn more about your specific niche from renowned people within that industry. Answer questions and demonstrate know-how to build your reputation and help others see you as an expert.

5. Generate leads.

Connect with prospects on LinkedIn. Research ideal prospects and then nurture the relationship by sharing content. Offer a free e-book or whitepaper and, using a call to action, direct them to download the information giving you a warm lead. Continue to provide them with great information to move them down your sales funnel.

LinkedIn is by far the most important social network for business professionals.It is the platform that is serious about business with people that are passionate about their professions. You need to be on LinkedIn to take full advantage of all it has to offer. So tell me...what’s stopping you from being on LinkedIn?

p.s. Feel like your profile isn't as good as it could be? Click the button below to get a FREE LinkedIn Profile Review.