How to create more business opportunities with Inbound Marketing

By adopting an Inbound Marketing strategy we are creating the necessary conditions to generate more business opportunities. That's why we prepared this article with some topics that are essential for you to start developing a close and trustworthy relationship with your audience, based on a relevant and useful approach.

Knowing the business

Knowing the business means having 3 things well defined, that are the basis to generate more business opportunities:

1. What do we do and where are we going

Make it clear to you and your team what is it that you do best and focus on your core competences. Transmit this message in your communication to your buyer personas.

Define milestones and business goals (for example the revenue value, number of leads or new clients) and also define and analyse key performance indicators (KPI). Trace the path that your leads have to follow, the marketing and sales funnel, since attracting the client to closing the deal, and the content that best suits each stage of the buying journey. Depending on your business, determine how much time should this cycle last. One week? One month? 3 months?

2. Where are we?

In order to stay constantly up-to-date and demonstrate it to your audience and clients, you need to stay on the ball at all times. This means, following and keeping up with the news and trends of the industry (is there an event you should attend? Are there any case studies or reports about the industry with useful information for your business?) and also keep track of your competitors positioning.

3. Understanding clients

Knowing and understanding people with whom we want to build a business relationship is essential in order to be able to communicate and pass the message in an efficient way. If you haven’t done it yet, you’re lagging behind. Define your buyer personas now!

Blog and Content

Having a blog through which you can share knowledge and relevant information with your audience is fundamental to get more organic traffic – meaning being found by visitors through search engines without paying ads.

You should publish good content in a consistent and regular manner in your blog. Publish content that is able to respond to your client’s challenges, needs and motivations. Communicate a perspective and an approach that differentiates you from your competitors, show how you’re different.

Provide premium content - content with high-value such as webinars, whitepapers, eBooks and case studies – and encourage the conversion (download of these contents) using Calls-to-Action to gather leads and become a positive and relevant influence for your audience.

Prove your value with clients’ testimonials

The social proof and value recognition is crucial to gain your leads' trust. Share positive reviews and testimonials of professionals who already use your product or service. Sharing testimonials gives you credibility and proves the usefulness of the product or service you’re offering. The recommendation from third parties is a determinant factor to influence purchase decision.

Nurture your leads

Nurturing means conquering and building a prosper relationship with the lead. Therefore, lead nurturing has as its main objective making the lead trust you enough to buy from you. Seduce the lead with relevant and useful content, at the right moment when the lead is willing to interact with you to gain proximity and influence. The final objective is to be able to close the deal in the right moment, so when that moment comes hand the lead over to the sales team for them to contact the lead and close the deal.

Invest in a CRM that helps you sell

Using a Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) means increasing the productivity of your sales team, being more efficient in managing the relationship with prospects and having more chances to close news deals. A CRM software allows the sales reps to keep track of the leads and help them through all phases of their buying journey, making the sales reps’ work more efficient. Using this work tool may contribute to an increase of 41% in revenues per sales rep.

Analyse every action and adjust it as you see fit

As each business has its own characteristics and there are no equal businesses, there’s no unique success formula. Thus, what matters is to understand what works and what doesn’t work in your business, and having the ability to analyse results and adjust what needs to be adjusted. You should monitor all your marketing actions - email marketing to blog articles, website copy and design modifications, A/B testing and any other - and analyse the results with a Marketing Automation and Analytics tool, in order to understand what you’re doing right and what needs to be improved.

The path to turn a lead into an opportunity begins, usually, in the first contact with your website. Therefore, it's important that you work from this initial stage onwards with one objective in mind: generating more and better leads with higher probability of becoming good opportunities and eventually clients.

Having an inbound marketing agency partner on your side is a great way to get the most of an inbound marketing strategy.