Getting Customers from Inbound Marketing Campaign [Inbound Marketing]

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For companies, inbound marketing is as good as the revenue it can bring in. We want to create great contents for our audience, but we also want to convert our audience to customers.

Visitors, Leads, and Customers

People are different. Some are ready to buy now. Others could be ready to buy in, say, 6 months. In marketing, we usually convert audience into leads—potential sales contacts, and later convert leads to customers, i.e., getting them to buy. Inbound marketing is about letting people come to you, not shoving contents down their throat. Focus on engagement, rather than sales. Make a list of customers who are ready to buy, and send this list to your salespeople. Give those who are not ready to buy something to do and/or engage with, until they are ready. Classify people based on what they do, and take actions differently. For example, treat those who download your whitepapers differently from those who registered for your webinar. You may give away inspirational quotes, statistics, etc.

Call to Action

Call to Action is a feature on a page which helps your audience do a certain thing. Example are buttons like ‘subscribe to email’, ‘like’, ‘Digg It’, ‘Share on Facebook’, or a form to fill in for webinar. Have call to action on every page, not just your home page. Think VEPA when creating a call to action:

• Valuable: What value does a call to action give your audience? A good call to action involves giving helpful information, enabling them to do their job better/more easily, or helping them improve themselves. Examples are white papers, webinar, eBook, free class, demo, trial offers, or reserve a seat in a webinar.
• Action Oriented: Begin with verbs. Few of the best call to actions are ‘Test yourself against your peer’, ‘Get your ___  grade,’  ‘Win our ___ contest.’ Avoid using boring phrase like ‘contact us.’
• Easy to Use: Make it clear and simple. Indicate what action to take and expected result.
• Prominent: A call to action should pop out of the page. Put call to action near the top of the page. Make a clickable image with large fonts. Put white space around it and use highlight to make it stand out. Put your call to action in every page, and make them context oriented—meaning different pages should have (possibly different) relevant call to action.

Landing Page

Landing page is the first page your visitors see, coming from different channels (e.g., google, RSS feed, PPC).

• Use graphic to grab visitors’ attention.
• Tailor your landing page for each call to action.
• Make it simple but look trustworthy. 
• Offer one choice. Do not let your customers go somewhere else without doing what you want. If you want them to fill out the form, show the form only.

Form

Spend time to create a form for your audience. Don’t get lazy and let them email you. Forms don’t spam your mailbox. They have a specific structure which helps you process the information (e.g., how much percentage of your audience are male). Here are best practice for creating forms:

• Do not ask for sensitive information (e.g., Social Insurance Number). That can come later during the sale process.
• Make it short: Preferably in one page so that your visitors do not have to scroll down.
• Make it simple so that your visitors won’t have to think or find the information you need.
• Do not have clear form or cancel button
• Build up trust. show transparency. Tell your visitors your privacy policy, what exactly you need to collect, and why.
• Prepare auto responder. For example, send out a thank you email to everyone who complete the form. You might even try to ask for more information in the email.

You also need to process visitors’ information using CRM principles. For example, how often your visitors come to your site?, how long they spent at your site?, how often do them come back and so on. Develop strategy to deal with each class of visitors based on this information.

Grading Your Leads

Not all your leads are equal. You need to differentiate high quality leads from low quality ones. Here are some criteria:

• Website visits: How often did they visit your page? Which page did they visit?
• Referrer channels:  How did the lead find you? (e.g., Google, links),
• Call to action taken: What information did they give you: Email, phone number, address, social insurance number?
• Form responses: How many questions in your form did they answer? Which question did they answer?

80-20 Effort

Again, getting customers involves two main steps: Getting visitors and converting visitors into customers. As a rule of thumb, you should spend 80% of your time building up visitors and 20% of your time converting them into leads, not the other way around. Again, focus on engagement, not on sales.

Source:  Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs 
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Book or Audiobooks?

          Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].
          There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

    About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make  notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.