There is no easy way around it. The Coronavirus has hit many industries hard and some will have to fight hard to bounce back.
But, here is some good news: we can get out of this together by providing high value to our prospects and customers. How? Enter inbound and content marketing.
Inbound marketing, at its core, is understanding what your buyer personas need to be better at their job and to help their company grow. It’s about providing the right value to the right person at the right time and place. As we enter this new world of business, working from home, remote meetings, and less in-person collaboration, we are left with more time to figure things out on our own. Do you know how most people try and solve a problem they have? That’s right, they Google it.
In the last 1-2 months, website traffic has increased by almost 25 percent according to HubSpot's COVID-19 Benchmark data.
What does this mean? People are still doing business and trying to solve the challenges they are facing. Your prospects still have challenges, but they may be changing and fast. You will have to adapt quickly to stay relevant to keep your market share. Which brings me to content marketing. If you are not adapting and continuing to provide value to your prospects, they will find someone who is. They need information and solutions now and if you are prepared, you will miss out.
4 Reasons Inbound Will Save (and Grow) Your Business.
It Creates Value
You may think you know your customer, but chances are you don’t know enough about them. You need to truly understand your customers. Their habits, motivations, and risks have changed since they started sheltering in place. The first step in an effective inbound campaign is understanding and documenting your buyer persona.
Here at Beacons Point, we do this by conducting market research, and interviewing 6-10 current and past customers. We aim to discover and understand the new challenges they face and how they will go about solving those challenges. They may not be 100 percent relevant to your products or services but once you understand their pain points, you can build a better content strategy.
Do you know who your customers are? Here are a few extra steps you should take to make sure you’re solving the right problems for the right people:
The only way to really understand your buyer personas is by talking to them.
Before Coronavirus, 71 percent of companies that exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas. The only path forward is to fully understand your customers and determine what value you can offer them.
It Builds Domain Expertise
Once you understand your buyer persona and you have a documented strategy outlining what content they will value, you can start producing this high-value content. This is when something magical starts to happen: you start becoming a domain expert.
When you start addressing the exact challenges your prospects are facing educational and valuable content, you will be that trusted advisor. When you write content that speaks to the heart of your persona’s challenges and understands the different solutions available to them, you will, in turn, become a trusted expert.
Provide value to your persona, be a resource, and gain awareness. To create content that elevates your business, collaborate with other experts in your field. Some ways you can do this are guest posting, co-hosting a podcast or webinar, recording a conversation, and converting it into a blog.
It Fuels Sustainable Growth
When you stop outbound marketing, your lead generation stops. For example, if your only source of leads was an SDR making calls. Once they stop making calls, your leads drop.
With inbound marketing, that high-quality article you wrote can continue bringing relevant traffic to your website and driving leads and engagement. In fact, the right article can continue to grow exponentially long after it was published, continuing to bring traffic to your website.
High-quality and extremely valuable content will live on forever. Once you identify content that performs well, you can find ways to repurpose that content. For example, if you have an article that gets 50-70 percent more traffic than the rest of your content, repurpose it into another form. Some examples include creating interactive videos, recording webinars or podcasts about that topic, creating an infographic detailing the key points within the posts, and many more.
Consumers consume content differently. Once you know something works, capitalize on it by reworking it and exposing it to as many eyeballs as possible. When you build a highly effective inbound campaign that addresses each stage of the buyer’s journey, it should include a content strategy that will continue to produce leads.
Forty-seven percent of B2B customers view three to five pieces of content before talking to a salesperson. They want to do their own research before even having a conversation with your team. If you don’t find the initial information they need, they will find another solution that provides it.
It’s Cost Effective (Cheaper)
If you have all the right pieces in your campaign in the right places, your inbound marketing costs will be 61 percent less per lead than traditional outbound tactics. You will not only elevate your brand awareness and become a domain authority, but you will also bring in more leads for less money. Inbound and content marketing help your business grow exponentially with the right content and distribution strategies.
Right now, we are all searching for our next move during Coronavirus, but, turns out, the solution was here the whole time. Provide enormous value, be helpful, and watch the leads roll in.
