To grow your business in today’s dynamic market place, the more attractive you can position your brand or company on how you will address your customers challenges, the more likely you will be able to drive qualified visitor traffic to your website, create leads and nurture sales opportunities.

Whether you are a start-up, an established or mature business inbound marketing should play a major role in your 2020 growth strategy and plans.

The Inbound marketing methodology works to attract rather than distract customers. It does this by growing your website traffic using educational and informative sales and marketing content that visitors are searching for to address a particular issue or opportunity.

Many business sectors are struggling with digital change management. They do not know how to reach the new generation of connected audiences or are not able to transform their organisation to fit the change needed for digital strategy and tactics.

The clock is ticking – B2B buying behaviour has changed.

• Companies are lulled into thinking they’re already doing everything right because they have a high volume of traffic to their website
• Not taking seriously enough the impact that the Internet has had on their buyer’s decision making process, how they self-research and build a position of “buyer-power”
• When a business eventually has contact with a lead they interpret the signal to mean they should sell when the prospective buyer is only looking for advice

What can businesses do to stay on top of their game and develop a long-term plan for growth? 

There’s no simple answer to this question: from the quality of your business’s products to it’s management style or business environment, there are many variables that can affect performance.

What we can say however, is that the way in which you communicate and engage with your target audience does have a major impact, buyers look to build rapport and a level of trust in the companies that they deal with. 

So implementing an inbound marketing programme is a wise strategy to attract, generate and nurture leads into the sales pipeline.

To help you understand more about the Inbound methodology today’s blog is full of useful resources to get you on the road to inbound or help remind you why you took that route in the first place:

Why Inbound Marketing?

Now I know from experience that the first question I always get asked is “Why do we need an inbound marketing programme?” So we have come up with 101x reasons, may be you can think of a few more – download the PDF to read and share with your colleagues. 

Planning for Inbound Marketing

Once you have your inbound marketing programme underway there is often a challenge in working how what you should prioritise to get the best return from your investment.

The recommendation to get the maximum number of leads from your efforts is to spend 10x hours per week on inbound activities, download a PDF of an activity framework on how to allocate those hours.

 Take Away

An important marketing lesson I’ve learned is that when you have a B2B product that is highly complex or technical in nature your customers may not actually realise or simply ignore the fact that they need what you’re offering.

So, instead of focusing on your own needs to close a sale, focus on what is the buyer’s pain that they need to address – talk about the problem. Start conversations around your buyer’s plans, goals and challenges. What options do they have, what are the consequences if they fail?

So when you start 2020 make sure you have reviewed all the resources available to you in order to create a sound marketing strategy with clear goals and objectives that can be measured.

Good luck in your planning for 2020 – let us know if we can help you ask those tough questions about why you do what  you do, and who your customers are.