That’s true; I just went on LinkedIn and noticed 5,000 sales jobs and 600 more business development jobs. Sales, of course, are the lifeblood of most companies, but marketing is what drives leads to those salespeople. If you’re relying on telemarketing and cold calling without a complementary inbound marketing strategy, the quality of your leads will suffer, and your close rates will be a struggle to obtain.
Outbound Marketing for lead generation covers those activities to reach audiences before they find you. This covers trade shows, email blasts to purchased lists, cold calling, and advertising. Messages are pushed to audiences, hoping an interested prospect responds. Nobody likes to be “interrupted” because they are crazy busy and they get tons of emails and solicitations throughout the day.
Inbound Marketing are those activities that when working together, encourage prospects to find you; rather than you finding them. This is where tasks such as SEO, Pay-per-click, social media, content marketing, and landing page/conversion tactics come into play. Audiences use the internet to search for information, and if your website, content, or solutions are found during those searches, then you are receiving exposure, and eventually those prospects come to you. Research shows that 75-80% of B2B buyers and influencers use the Internet to find information about vendors rather than responding to outbound efforts
An ideal business model is to combine both processes, monitor the amount of quality leads being received, and perform an ROI analysis on the approaches. I’ve shown examples of ROI benefits of inbound marketing and marketing automation in a previous blog post. Companies that incorporate inbound marketing has a key element of their lead generating process have shown a 60% lower cost per lead than outbound marketing dominated companies (Hubspot research).
OK. Let’s say that rather than hire another experienced sales person at $100,000 per year, we apply that figure towards a comprehensive inbound marketing lead-generation strategy. Here’s a sample menu that spells out how to utilize the reallocated investment:
- Market research: To get a better understanding of your audience’s pain points, needs, and messages that attract them, as a basis for website and content strategy.
- Search Marketing: Combine a better SEO and pay-per-click strategy so that prospects find you easily on Google’s first page when they have needs.
- Improved website and landing pages: By matching pay-per-click and email marketing efforts to specific landing pages designed for lead capture, prospects are captured easily.
- Content Marketing: By creating a pipeline of content matching your buyer’s pain points with problem-solving information, prospects will be attracted to your offerings. Content marketing coverings improved website content, downloadable lead-generating content, blogs, and lead nurturing content for further engagement.
- Social Media Optimization: Learning to utilize these tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn effectively will contribute to sales by learning to engage with prospects, plus the value of social media’s effects on SEO together is undeniable.
- Marketing Automation and CRM integration. By investing and managing marketing automation systems properly, you’ll begin to notice the effects of proper lead nurturing strategies, mainly shortened sales cycles, higher close rates, and higher revenue per deal.
- Analytics. Between platforms such as Google Analytics and Marketing Automation, you’ll quickly notice the success of your inbound marketing efforts by tracking where people come from, what keywords they use, what content they download, what landing pages work best, and the goal conversion rates. By combine goals with sales/lead conversion rates and average deal revenue, marketing ROI can be measured for each channel and your marketing investments as a whole.
In summary, maybe an additional sales person is not the answer. Maybe you finally need to reallocate your efforts to inbound marketing, a website that speaks to your audiences in a more compelling, persuasive manner that’s optimized for conversion, and better lead generation approaches. If you spend more on proper marketing strategy, the benefit is your company’s goals anyway- an increase in quality leads, and increase in sales, and additional revenue and profit. Agree?
