Content marketing as a strategy for inbound sales
If you ask 20 heads of marketing departments from different companies “what is the main goal of content marketing?” - you will get 20 different answers. One of them will definitely be “to increase sales”.
How does it work? And what exactly is inbound marketing?
We’ll start with inbound sales - sales to a potential customer who was the first one to contact you. Whether it’s a website form, a phone call or a message on Facebook doesn't matter. It is important that the person is interested in your company or service, and contacted you. The marketing strategy is called the inbound marketing strategy. As you might guess, the challenge is to engage people through content or other marketing tools. These can be useful blog articles, newsletters with interesting content, social media posts, research and surveys, videos and case studies. However, it’s not that easy. In addition to attracting attention, it is important to remember that your content should accompany a potential client from the moment he first hears about you until the moment he becomes a loyal client.
How to make this happen?
1. Let’s return to the beginning and ask ourselves “Why is this needed?” Try answering like this: “Our content serves to (insert your audience’s goals here).” For example: our content serves to create a high perceived value for the industry. Or: our content serves to tell what problem a particular product solves.
2. See content as a product. The comparison is interesting .. but it makes sense. The product solves some consumer problems - so does the content. It's just that most consumers don't know about their problem yet :) What problems are we talking about? Ignorance of the industry, lack of understanding of the benefits of the product for society, and lack of life hacks for using the product.
3. Be prepared to invest various resources into the strategy. Especially at the beginning. This is explained by the fact that the results grow exponentially. Capturing your primary audience is very difficult, and it grows slowly. You’ll need to use different tools and be ready to face paid advertising. However, when reaching a certain level of subscribers, reach and reactions, the account becomes promoted, and further growth is much faster and easier. After all, one of your tools is your audience which shares posts, puts reactions, writes comments and thereby helps the content manager to promote.
4. Be patient and remember the goal. We have already mentioned that the result of such a strategy is long-term. You didn’t think that a person would read an interesting post and write to you right away. Although this also happens sometimes. And yet, it’s necessary to work with the audience - meaning, provide interesting content, show yourselves as a company, and talk about the industry and the product. Part of your target audience will not need your service or product. But when such a need arises, people should think about your company.
Inbound sales are very important for the company - they help to quickly expand the customer base. Besides, content and social media marketing reveal your company and its values to the market.