Mastering Inbound Marketing: All About Inbound

The dawn of technology is here, it’s been with us for thousands of years and it’s still growing. We know that we as a species can’t survive without technology, without it we would become extinct. Many things have been given to us by using technology, it’s convenient, and it makes hard work become easy. Now in this day of age, people are attached to technology, it’s being used in our day-to-day lives. 

A form of technology is Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing makes getting our day-to-day needs much easier. So what is Digital Marketing? 

Well, it’s basically Online Marketing, it’s the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers utilizing the cyber world and other forms of digital communication.

Digital Marketing is here to stay, people all over the world are obsessed with technology and its niches.

 Inbound your business

 To make Digital Marketing easy and ensure for others, Inbound is used. So you might ask,  what is Inbound? 

Inbound is a marketing methodology for attracting, engaging, and delighting people, which draws in more people, builds their trust, and makes your business grow. Inbound makes your business more human and helpful to others. It’s a strategy for making your business customer-centered.

Using Inbound for your business can make your business a more empathic one, one that gives out relevant information while making the customer's journey a better one. The best way to implement Inbound to your business is by using a CRM, CRM is a Customer Relationship Management tool. It's a tool to make your customer's journey better and be more helpful.

I know it is a bit scary but it’s not scary at all, by embracing it you as a customer can get more helpful information faster, as a business you can give that information fast and free of hassle. 

To use Inbound you need to be able to adapt to different situations to handle the experience other customers want. 

Now let’s talk about an important factor to take into consideration in Inbound, The FlyWheel. You might be wondering what a FlyWheel is, is it a tool or a strategy? What does it look like?

The FlyWheel is a strategy that takes place when small wins for your business build on each other over time and eventually gain so much momentum that growth almost seems to happen by itself. It consists of 3 stages. Attract, Engage, and Delight, all just for customers.

So, How Does It Work?

It’s simple really, as I’ve mentioned above, to make it work your FlyWheel needs to depend on 3 things, listed below:

• How fast you spin it.
• How much friction is present.
• How big it is.

Let’s review the list, the Flywheel will speed up if you add force to areas that will impact the most, the strategies and programs are the force that will speed up the wheel. Social Media Campaigns, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content Creation, Video Ads, Relevant and Topical Blogs, investing in your Customer Service Team, etc are all forces which will keep the wheel spinning. But you have to be aware of the friction of the wheel. 

If you don’t notice that something is opposing the movement of the wheel it will slow the wheel down, and stop your business’s growth. You have to eliminate anything that’s giving the wheel friction.

Happy customers are the ones who are powering the wheel, they’re the ones who are buying from you or they’re bringing in more customers to your business. If you have an unhappy customer he or she will resist the flowing movement of the wheel, halting the process. 

So it’s best to make the whole buying journey for customers a happy and delightful experience, so they always come back or refer your business to their friends and family, which will keep the wheel moving.

Now let’s talk about Funnels and how they interconnect with the FlyWheel.

Over the years businesses all over the world have been using the Funnel, companies have structured their business strategies around the Funnel which worked but not anymore. The Funnel has a flaw that is overlooked sometimes, It views customers as an afterthought, not a force that keeps on driving. The Funnel produces customers but doesn’t consider how those customers can help you grow your business.

Not saying the Funnel is completely useless which it isn’t, you can connect the Funnel with the FlyWheel. 

Let’s talk about how you can connect both of them together.

Funnels aren’t going away, we can use them to fuel our FlyWheel. You’ll still have funnel-shaped charts and graphs representing the effectiveness of different processes within your company, and it’s important to make sure those funnels are fueling your flywheel. 

Using the Funnel and its data you can optimize your business. By taking the individual funnels within your business and positioning them inside the larger flywheel, you unlock all kinds of team collaboration opportunities. You will be able to optimize not only individual conversion rates but also activities that occur long before a one-on-one interaction and have a direct impact on how the interaction goes. With your entire company thinking of accelerating the FlyWheel as a whole rather than just improving their individual funnel stats, you will be able to make improvements that would have otherwise been impossible.

I know at this point it's getting quite complicated, but to make all this work uniformly is going to take time and effort, but where can you start? 

You can start by asking yourself what’s the purpose of our company/business? How can you identify your company’s purpose?

Well, there’s one thing to keep in mind and that is, that there are two aspects of your company’s purpose.

The first is your company’s purpose which is understood internally. For most companies, there isn’t much clarity on this point.

There is a framework called the Golden Circle which will help you understand your company’s purpose. The Golden Circle is an innovative concept presented by Simon Sinek in his TED Talk "Start with Why". It's super inspiring and challenges the status quo at its core for relating your purpose for what you want to do in business. 

The external ring of the circle represents what your company does-- the product or service you offer, the assiduity you operate in, and so on.

The middle ring is how your company does what it does, which includes the ways you separate yourself from all the other companies who have the same WHAT as you. 

At the center of the golden circle, you have your company’s WHY-- the reason for your HOW and WHY.

Most companies start from the outside and move inward. And that makes sense because the WHAT is extremely concrete while the WHY can be fairly abstract. Still, if you can nail down your company’s WHY-- the reason it offers what it offers, the reason it operates how it offers-- you’ll be in a much better position to grow better. However, the HOW and WHAT will fall into place naturally, If your WHY is well defined.

Do you know your company’s WHY? It’s easy for the leaders of a company to fall into the trap of allowing that growth and gains are the WHY, but that’s a dangerous road to go down. 

Don’t get me wrong, your company has to make funds if it wants to be suitable to sustain itself long term. But profitability should really be part of your HOW. You make funds and reinvest them so that your company can continue to do WHAT it does, but that doesn’t explain WHY your company is doing that.

So think about your company’s WHY. You can express it as a charge statement about what you hope to negotiate or as a vision of the ideal world you’re trying to get to, whatever makes the utmost sense to you. But you need to get clarity on this point.

Your company’s WHY also has an impact on your employees' performance as well. If everyone in your company is focusing on the company’s purpose then you’ll most likely succeed. But, how do you make everyone align with one single purpose?

It's simple really, one most effective way to do that is by fostering a culture that supports and holds up that single purpose. A company’s culture is the terrain that defines and informs how employees act on behalf of the customers and how the company hires, retains, and grows its people. Studies have shown that when employees are happy, efficiency, creativity, and productivity go up, making customers have. So remember, happy employees mean happy customers.

Another framework to make your business grow more is the Jobs Theory, the idea of Jobs Theory is that people have certain jobs in their day-to-day life which they want to do and they hire/buy the product which does that certain job.

To understand the job that your customers are hiring/buying your product for, all you need to do is just interview a handful of customers.

Ask them, why did they buy your product? 

Try to make a timeline of the thoughts and events that pushed them towards your product, no matter how long the timeline is, try to make it.

It doesn’t matter if you are a small business or big business, interview some of your customers and ask them, why did they buy your product? When they tell you why they bought it, ask them how long they thought about it before they made the decision. Ask what it was that made them finally go through with the sale. Maybe they think it was an impulse buy, but ask them what gave them the impulse. Had they thought about buying before and not done it? Were they making do with something else (or make do with nothing at all)? When did they realize they didn’t have to make do anymore?

What was the series of events that transpired from that first realization to the time they became your customer? Map that out for 10 or 12 of your customers and then try to come up with a story that describes them all equally well.

Once you have your story, ask yourself: Why are people going through this story? What job are they trying to get done? The answer will be their job to be done.

So figure out your company’s purpose and rally your teams around it, only then you’ll be able to guide your company to success. Making sure your Inbound strategies are lining up perfectly will give your company massive growth over time.

Now let’s discuss Business Goals.

Most successful Inbound businesses nowadays have business goals, business goals not only guide you to success, but they also make you achieve it faster and more efficiently.

To be a successful Inbound business, you and your team should always align with your business goals, so that everyone can work towards a shared vision. If you don’t push yourself or your team to innovate or push themselves, your business could quickly fall behind. Goals can help you establish a consistent standard for high performance and productivity.

So, how do you set Business Goals?

To know how to do that, first, make sure that your goals are realistic and easy to reach. If you set unrealistic goals which you can’t complete, it'll damage you and your employees' morale, which means lower productivity and less efficiency.

In HubSpot, we use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). OKR is a goal-setting system, it helps to ensure the company is focussing its efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization. OKR makes sure that everyone in the company is working on the same goals in a unified direction.

I’ll get on with how it works.

You should start with your Objectives.

Objectives are statements that define the qualitative outcome of your goal.

Objectives answer the question, where do you want to go? What are you trying to achieve? They convey your endpoint. Oftentimes, you can use your company’s purpose as a means to inspire meaningful objectives, without encountering the pitfalls of your objectives becoming a series of checklists or to-dos.

Then, there are key results. Key results are how you benchmark and monitor how you get to the objective.

The Objectives are about the desired goal, to create a great experience for your clients/customers. The objective can be long-lived, it doesn’t have to have a time limit. 

The Key Results are measurable and you could verify whether those results were achieved or not.  Key Results usually have a designated time, you should set KRs that span about a quarter but this can depend on the individual needs of your business.

Key results can be graded using two different methods: setting numeric

key results and binary key results. The first type is used to calculate the completed percentage of activity on a scale of 0 to 1.0. 

Now that we know about OKRs, let me tell you about the Three-Horizon framework.

This framework is a way to conceptualize what your business wants to accomplish in the short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Think of it as one of the initiatives you take to power present success. 

Here, you’re identifying your biggest assets and doubling down on them to ensure your business continues to be successful. Intuitively, the majority of your time and resources (around 70 percent) will be spent executing on the horizon one plays.

By contrast, the third horizon's goals and objectives focus entirely on the future. Taking up about 10% of your team’s efforts and resources, these plays are meant to create genuinely new business models. Horizon three initiatives support where you think your industry is headed and how you’re innovating now to invest in the future and remain one step ahead. Having a horizon three helps you stay connected with your long-term goals without sacrificing attention or connection with what needs to get done today.

Horizon two goals and strategies help bridge your first and third horizons.

Think of your horizons like a diversified investment portfolio. If one horizon starts to overperform or underperform, you do not want to reallocate resources from a different horizon. It’s important that you keep the balance: 70/20/10 to ensure sustainable, long-term growth.

The Three-Horizons framework is a means to visualize, allocate resources to, and conceptualize the priorities of your business. As a business, there will be points where you will need to make hard choices. Choosing to prioritize a particular goal or use a particular strategy above another doesn’t always devalue the other option.

Rather, having multiple options or sets of secondary priorities can help inform future decisions or directions you decide to take as a business.

Now let’s talk about another key takeaway for Inbound and that is your Buyer Personas.

If you want to grow your business better you need to have a deep understanding of your customer base, that’s where Buyer Personas come into play.

A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses.

To make your Buyer Personas more memorable a suitable name should be given like Commanding Harry or Dubious Olivia by giving them names will be much easier and helpful for you and your team.

While creating Buyer Personas you need to have your entire team present as they might have some key ideas you can use to create that persona. There’s a reason why you should have your entire team present.

If you create a Buyer Persona with just one team, let's just say your marketing team, and your servicing team has different criteria, your teams are going to be disjointed. 

With marketing talking to your customers in one way, sales rebooting the conversation when they take over, and then services having a completely different set of expectations about what your customers need and want, there’s going to be a lot of frustration internally and externally. And the results will be inefficient teams and unhappy customers.

So to grow your company you'll need a robust unified Buyer Persona created by your whole team.

Okay, I know all of this information is hard to take in all at once, but we’re at the last key takeaways for Inbound and that is your Buyer’s Journey.

A Buyer's Journey is a process that takes place when your customer is leading up to the purchase.

 A Buyer’s Journey consists of 3 stages.

• The Awareness Stage
• The Consideration Stage
• The Decision Stage

During the Awareness Stage, your customers are researching to get a more clear understanding, frame, or give a name to their problems.

During the Consideration Stage, your customers are committed to researching and understanding all the options they have to solve the problem.

During the Decision Stage, your customers have decided on a method or strategy, in this stage, they have a set of all the available vendors and products to solve their problems.

Using this we can use the Inbound Methodology: Attract, Engage and Delight to reel in those customers. Remember, the Inbound Methodology is a FlyWheel that fuels the growth of your business. You want the wheel to spin fast and have less friction.

In Conclusion:

Using all this stated above, your business can skyrocket. Remember Inbound is a way to be more empathic and be helpful to your customers. Inbound is all about building trust and creating human and helpful experiences throughout the stages of the inbound methodology.

Develop a buyer’s journey, and using this process stated above will have the topmost possible impact on your customer relationships – fueling your Inbound strategy and helping your business grow better.