Inbound marketing can be a game changer for any type of business. Effective inbound marketing aligns your sales and marketing teams — leading to reliable lead generation. More and more businesses are relying on inbound strategies to solve common marketing problems. Here are three common problems and the solutions to overcome them:
- Getting found by search engines
- Tracking your ROI (return on investment)
- Combining sales and marketing efforts to close deals
Getting Found by Search Engines
A common question asked among companies trying to scale their business is, “How do we rank higher on Google?” The truth is, it depends.
Ranking on the first page of search results depends on many factors, including your competition. This proves to be a problem for many companies simply because most prospects don’t have the patience to comb through multiple pages of search results.
Inbound marketing helps establish your company as a credible source through search engine optimized content. Creating quality content is not only a great tool for your prospects, but also for search engines looking to categorize search terms.
The Solution
The most reliable way to enhance your SEO strategy and increase organic traffic to your website is to add more quality content that’s relevant to your target audience.
Useful content like blog posts, eBooks, social media posts, or case studies specifically created for your audience helps position your business as an industry leader. Search engines favor this, ranking these websites higher compared to businesses lacking original content.
HubSpot provides SEO recommendations in their blog editor for you to review before publishing each blog post. Important things like
- content length
- page title character length
- mobile friendliness
- meta description
- image size and alt text
Following these recommendations will increase your chances of your content getting found and indexed by search engines.
Related reading — How to SEO Optimize Your Blog Post with HubSpot
Tracking Your ROI
It seems that every inbound marketing team has the daunting task of “proving their worth.” More specifically, showing how the team directly contributes to company revenue. Determining one overall marketing ROI benchmark is challenging because each marketing strategy and the tactics used for each are different.
Yes, there are calculations you can use, like the Marketing ROI formula:
[((number of leads x lead-to-customer rate x average sales price) - cost or ad spend) ÷ cost or ad spend] x 100
You have to gather all the information needed before you are able to calculate your ROI. If you aren’t great at math, this could be a problem. Not to mention the time involved.
The Solution
Tools like HubSpot makes it easy to analyze which inbound marketing campaigns contributed to new leads and revenue. Metrics can be easily compared with sales numbers, making it easier to adjust expectations based on data.
For example, if you’ve recently received a new contact in your CRM through a paid ads campaign, you can attribute deals and revenue from that contact to that ad. HubSpot allows you to track a user’s activity down to the blog posts they have read to the pages they spend the most time on, giving you a reliable amount of ROI data.
Try this! HubSpot ROI Calculator
Combining Sales and Marketing Efforts To Close Deals
Once upon a time, a salesperson could simply tell or show a customer what they wanted and why. Times have changed. The digital landscape has made it easy for prospects to find the information they’re looking for without ever having to speak to a sales rep.
This is where your sales and marketing teams need to work together. Inbound marketing is all about building relationships — both internally and externally.
The Solution
Effective communication between both teams is key to the success of all inbound marketing initiatives. Marketing needs to have a clear understanding of the buying process: awareness, consideration, and decision-making. Marketers should be tasked with gaining insight into the buyer’s needs during every stage of their journey, including unique needs, priorities, and any objections customers have. That information can then be passed to the sales team to engage qualified leads with better insight and specific requirements to close deals.
You wouldn’t want a salesperson trying to close a deal during the awareness stage because that lead is only looking to find helpful information. Providing them with a relevant blog post or case study would be more appropriate. When both teams are aligned, sales helps marketing fully understand their qualified leads. Marketing helps sales by providing them with the information that would be most valuable to them.
Related reading - How to get your sales and marketing teams in alignment.
Inbound marketing helps solve business problems by putting your customers at the center of everything you do. If you're looking to be found through search, generate measurable results, and create an efficient team – inbound marketing is the route for you.
