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September 7, 2020
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Marketing Digital
To properly implement inbound marketing in your company, your strategic processes and communication parameters must also be oriented towards this philosophy. Not only the marketing or sales department needs to have the basic aspects of an inbound company, but your entire organization.
Below, we will explain the fundamentals that you must follow to holistically incorporate inbound marketing into your company :
Inbound Principles
inbound-marketing-principles
Inbound principles represent a series of actions or practices that must be present in your organizational culture. This is essential to achieve an ideal and pleasant experience between the user and the client. These practices are:
Standardizing communications means that the information that the marketing, sales and service departments handle about your company's products, services and schedules must be the same for all users, prospects and customers. In other words, there must be consistency in communications.
So if a customer asks three different people in your company the same question, even through different communication channels, the ideal is that the information they receive from all of them is the same.
What is the purpose of standardizing communications? To build trust in your brand and make users realize how well your communications are integrated.
Imagine a hypothetical case where Sofia, an 18-year-old girl, wants to know the opening hours of a clothing store and the sizes available for certain items. To do so, she writes a private message to the Instagram account.
Sofia receives the response that she can go to the store from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm and that the available sizes are S and M. When she arrives at the store at 9:30 am, she realizes that it is closed, but since she is very interested in buying, she stays to wait.
An hour later, the store opens its doors and she is met with the terrible news that the clothes are only available in size L. This makes her leave furious for all the time she lost thanks to misinformation.
The results? A lost sale due to inconsistencies in the company's communications, whose reputation is at stake if Sofia tells her friends and family about her bad shopping experience in the next few days.
Personalize to generate impact
However, standardizing communications as we have just explained does not mean that all customers will be addressed with a generic message and in the same way.
In contrast, inbound marketing philosophy, personalization of messages and content plays a fundamental role . This means taking advantage of the information in your contact database to make messages more personalized.
You may be interested in reading : Inbound marketing in building potential clients
Starting an email by greeting the person with their name is a great way to do this. If at some point in your interaction a contact made a comment about their personal life such as: “Excuse me, I’m just busy with my kids” you can save that family information in your CRM. This will help you achieve more personalized communication and, in the future, start a conversation like this:
“Hi Juan, how is your family? Today we want to talk to you about…”
Remember that the more personalized your communication with prospects and customers, the more inbound it will be.
Put yourself in the customer's shoes
Without empathy, inbound marketing loses its essence. But what does it really mean to put yourself in your customers’ shoes? It means understanding their problems and needs in order to create solutions and content that helps them deal with them.
From a young age, we are taught to be empathetic with our friends and family. In business, this value also has a very important weight, since empathy, being the ability to understand another person's emotional life almost in all its complexity, connects perfectly with this principle of putting ourselves "in someone else's shoes."
Here are some ideas on how you can put yourself in your customers' shoes:
Provide time management tips in case your audience is a senior executive with busy schedules and needs to complete all their assignments.
Provide Excel templates and tools for budget management to optimize resources, in case the audience is administrators or accountants.
Offer research on positive teaching and discipline models, if the audience is working mothers.
In this way, your company must act as a helping hand that provides solutions in environments as complex and changing as those we live in today.
Together, applying these 3 elements will change the way you communicate and bring your management philosophy closer to an inbound perspective.
Remember: your prospects and clients are people who have feelings and emotions, therefore, they will not always want you to sell them a product or service, but rather to listen to them and understand them.
Your company's goals
What is the true purpose of your company? Forget about numbers and germany whatsapp number sales targets for a moment, and instead focus on the experience or solution your products and services are providing: What is the main reason for them? What impact are they generating?
To answer these questions, the Harvard Business Review recommends:
“If you want to motivate your team to do the best work possible, find a way to express the impact your company has on the lives of customers, clients, users, students, patients or anyone you address. Make it tangible.”
So with a clear purpose, your marketing, sales and service teams can put themselves in your customers’ shoes and authentically connect with them, rather than focusing on the numbers they need to hit.
Ask yourself what you prefer: more sales or more satisfied customers? The philosophy of inbound marketing states that if we focus on the second option, the first will automatically take place on its own. A company that does not know its purpose and its impact, how will it make its buyers happy? How will it make them feel satisfied? That is why it is very important that you establish the purpose and the positive impact that your company wants to generate.
Your company's objectives
Now, let's focus a little more on your company's quantitative objectives. Why is this aspect still essential for an inbound company ? Simple! How are you going to guide your company on the right path if you don't even stipulate what the goals are to be achieved? Or how are you going to get your marketing, sales and service teams aligned with your company's purpose if you don't set common measurable goals?
These may be too many rhetorical questions in one paragraph, but the truth is that they are very useful in understanding the importance of creating objectives so that an inbound marketing strategy is effective when it is implemented for the first time in a company.
An example of a “common goal” for your departments that would fit perfectly with this perspective would be SMART goals, that is, goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
For example: reach 120 new leads on the website by the second quarter of the year.
In this sense, if your teams are not aligned in terms of objectives, you are losing one of the basic aspects of an inbound company, and you also run the risk of wasting time and resources.
You may be interested in reading : How to design SMART objectives in digital marketing?
Buyers personas and buyer's journey
We have dedicated two complete articles to the buyer persona and buyer's journey that we invite you to read. They explain in greater depth what these last two basic aspects of an inbound company refer to.
What is a buyer persona and how to create one?
20 questions to create a buyer persona
What is the buyer's journey?