Along with other methods, inbound is one of the best ways to consistently bring in high-quality prospects and build out your sales pipeline. But if your organization has never used inbound marketing before or if you’re unsure what it means, you’ll find the answers you need here. And, you don’t need to build out a large internal team to tackle it for you.
First, What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is an approach to attracting, informing, and converting prospects online. Unlike the more traditional tactics of years past, inbound takes a more targeted approach to position your business where customers are looking for information — i.e. highly qualified prospects that are already looking for what your manufacturing business does, whether that’s metals, plastics, corrugated, labels, packaging, or another sector.
Inbound brings together tactics such as search engine optimization, content marketing, web development, paid media, targeted email marketing, and more. However, it molds all of those around a core strategy that’s aligned with your sales focus and goals — and that’s how it works best.
- Bottom line: Does inbound marketing have a strong ROI? Find out here.
How Does It Differ from Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is a proven methodology for growing new business. It introduces your company to new prospects through consistent, proactive outreach efforts such as direct calls, one-to-one emails, social engagement, direct mail, and more.
The advantage here is that while inbound marketing is working to engage prospects looking for solutions, outbound marketing informs and engages potential customers to help increase awareness — and the top of your sales funnel.
Outbound marketing in particular tees up a proven sales methodology that many manufacturing businesses need today amid challenges with finding strong sales talent and navigating constricting economies. You can learn more about this here.
What Goes Into Inbound Marketing?
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — The core focus of an inbound marketing strategy is SEO, or ensuring your website and other online assets are tailored to how people are searching for specific services or products and winning their clicks. SEO is not a one-time effort — it’s an ongoing process that requires time, patience, and consistent monitoring. It also consists of ongoing content marketing through the creation of helpful assets such as blogs, video, new web pages, and more. As the performance of these assets is understood over time, it should also include ongoing optimization work that keeps everything you’ve built performing optimally.
- Targeted Email — While outbound is working its magic through email outreach to introduce people to your company and capabilities, inbound email efforts are designed to nurture existing prospects and move them deeper into your sales funnel toward the sale. With these emails, the content should be helpful and engaging versus introductory and provide useful assets, details, case studies, and other information. These assets help prospects become more comfortable with your manufacturing business and further position you as a resource they can trust.
- Paid Media — While this might seem like an outbound function, it differs from broad-scale advertising in that every ad is targeted specifically to the ideal customer using keywords and other variables that they’re likely to want, use, consider, etc. Examples include Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn advertising, and the like. It’s important to constantly monitor performance and make adjustments to ensure the budget you assign to these campaigns is maximized.
- Paid Social — Similar to the above, paid social content and ads are intended to be hyper-focused on your ideal prospect. People who are already in your sales pipeline benefit from receiving this content and being reminded that you’re ready and able to help them with their manufacturing needs.
- Reporting — Last but not least, reporting and analysis are necessary to learn from everything you’re doing with inbound. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so understanding whether the above assets are working well or coming up short helps you to identify next steps and determine what works best for your audience. Examples include using tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, third-party SEO analysis tools, CRM analytics, and more.
Combine Both Programs Into One Holistic Strategy That Maximizes Sales Performance
Earlier we mentioned that in order to understand how to use inbound for your manufacturing company, you need to align both inbound and outbound with your overall sales strategy. This is critical and can’t be emphasized enough. When sales and marketing are in alignment, you get the most out of every effort — and every opportunity that comes your way. If there is disparity between any of them, performance will suffer and the return on your investment will be reduced.
At Athena, we combine a proven front-end sales approach with holistic marketing (integrated inbound and outbound) to generate superior results — and returns — for our manufacturing clients. We’ve been working with manufacturers across numerous sectors nationwide for years, and the results have been significant.
Whether your current processes haven’t been performing, or if you’re looking for a new approach altogether, our team is ready to help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our model and how we can put it to work for you.