Understand what it is and learn about 4 Inbound Marketing and Sales strategies that work
Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2024 6:25 am
Are you looking to steadily increase your sales? Discover inbound marketing strategies that can help you achieve even better results!
Key takeaways from this article:
The inbound marketing strategy aims to attract potential customers to convert them into paying customers.
Inbound Marketing allows the development of so-called “ personas ”, fictitious profiles that represent the company’s ideal and most profitable consumer.
The information obtained through the inbound marketing strategy helps to better understand the needs and expectations of customers , so that they can create more efficient approach strategies.
A successful inbound marketing strategy must be aligned with the sales team’s sales approaches. To do this, the salesperson must create sales funnels, which can increase their results. Learn more about the sales funnel by checking out the e-book “ Sales funnel in practice ”.
I wrote this article with the intention of presenting an entrepreneur's perspective to entrepreneurs.
I want to show you how it is possible to put these inbound marketing concepts into practice and scale sales from the beginning.
Let's understand more clearly what inbound marketing is?
Before we start talking about inbound marketing strategies, I would like to give you an idea about my entrepreneurial background.
I'll show you how we expanded our startup's sales, so you can see how this model can be replicated in your business, right from the start.
Next, I will show how we scale our sales today, applying both practices and defining inbound marketing strategies.
Ready to learn how to do inbound marketing? Let’s go!
What is inbound marketing?
In short, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to attract potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
To achieve this, inbound marketing uses the production of relevant content to attract the attention of an audience that is interested in certain topics, products or services.
This content is presented on channels of interest to this target audience. And since we are dealing with a highly connected world, digital channels are the most used for this purpose.
Thus, in a more “organic” way, a potential customer begins to relate to a company even without having purchased from it, as this is a source of learning, knowledge or entertainment.
With this content, it is possible to educate customers gradually, until the moment when they realize that it is necessary to take another step and, finally, start a commercial relationship with a brand.
How does it work in practice?
Inbound marketing is about getting found by customers and moving them through the sales stages in their own time.
However, we've learned over time that you don't always need a blog or an editorial calendar to do inbound marketing.
The great advantage of the inbound marketing strategy is reaching potential customers who have not even identified that they have a problem, even though that problem exists.
These potential customers may be researching how to do something differently or finding an article of yours on a portal they already browse.
Once the customer is interested in the subject, you can gradually provide more information that will make it easier to solve any problems.
Ultimately, information that can help you move from situation A to the desired situation B.
How do we use inbound marketing at Agendor?
How about learning a little more about our history and how we evolved our inbound marketing strategies?
In 2012, together with my brother and partner Gustavo Paulillo, I founded a startup that believes in the impact of productivity on people's lives and, especially, on sales.
The idea came from the need that our father, Pedro Paulillo, faced daily as a commercial manager of a company that resells industrial automation equipment.
From the beginning, our focus was on bringing customers in a scalable way and at reduced costs .
After all, if our product were offered over the internet, why should we go door-to-door visiting customers?
With this insight, we went looking for materials and began to understand what Inbound Marketing is and its potential (we started with the Resultados Digitais blog – highly recommended).
It was something new for us, but we immediately embraced the idea and started writing articles telemarketing leads, egypt telephone number data for the blog, which, until then, had practically no visitors (there were days when we received 10 visits – and we celebrated!).
So, we realized that we wouldn't get a short-term return with the inbound marketing strategy and we attacked with the traditional model, looking for contacts in email lists, LinkedIn and referrals.
This way, we were able to “take Agendor off the drawing board” and get the project up and running.
Well, time passed and we continued to continually share the articles we created in LinkedIn groups , on the Facebook page , on Twitter and to everyone we knew.
With the content work, we made paid ads on the Google Adwords network.
In this way, customers started to appear directly through the internet, without any interaction from us!
This really surprised us and was a validator of the inbound marketing strategy.
Over the years, the creation of articles continued, we involved more people in the marketing team and invested in partnerships that helped us achieve better results with digital marketing strategies.
Now, thanks to the partnership with Agência Papoca, a global SEO company, the Agendor Blog is a reference in CRM and Sales.
You can check out all about this achievement in this Semrush article: SEO agency helps Agendor generate US$500,000 in MRR, and enter the top 3 CRM platforms in Brazil
The paradigm of what is Inbound Marketing & Inbound Sales
Understanding what inbound marketing and inbound sales are requires a paradigm shift in actively impacting customers.
The best way to start creating an inbound marketing strategy today, in my opinion, is by taking advantage of Linkedin Pulse.
You don't need a structured blog or website, but you can use your profile to reach potential customers through the content you publish on that channel.
Inbound Sales, despite the elaborate name, is about selling while respecting the customer's purchasing time.
The customer comes to your company interested in knowing what you are willing to resolve and is guided through the sales stages .
The idea is that your content teaches you more and more about your product or service until the sale is made.
To better understand what inbound marketing is, think of a doctor-patient relationship – your goal is to help customers solve a need.
And for this, trust is the key word: have you ever asked your doctor for a discount or an additional benefit?
Gain your customer’s trust and you will no longer need to “sell”.
The goal is for your content to teach you more and more about your product or service until the sale is made.
Structuring an inbound sales process
To understand the inbound marketing strategy, you need to create inbound actions, spread content on social media and start bringing in potential customers through these materials (we call these potential customers Leads ), how do you convert them into sales?
Before thinking about any action, stop and reflect on the following questions:
“What problems can my product or service solve?”
“How do Leads (potential customers) reach my company? Social media, Google searches, events, referrals?”
“What does my customer need to know, analyze or experience to purchase my product or service?”
“What do we offer as a differential in relation to what currently exists on the market?”
With these questions answered, create a step-by-step guide to your customer's journey.
Should they get a call as soon as they visit your website, or would it be better for them to understand more about what problems your company solves?
Wouldn't it be interesting to suggest that he download some material so that, after that, he is better prepared to receive a call?
Your customer journey is precisely your structured sales process.
In other words, your role is to guide him through the steps until he buys what your company offers.
At this point, you will no longer be “selling”, but helping your client.
And what is inbound marketing if not helping people solve what they need through content they are looking for and need?
Put your inbound sales process into action, monitor it and refine it, always seeking to shorten the steps and purchase time.
At a certain point, bring in people to handle sales for you, create a team and specialize, letting each person be responsible for some stages of the sale ( the market usually divides them into SDRs and closers ).
There is no way to sell with inbound marketing without being lean and growing little by little.
Keep track of the total cost of sales per customer (including salary, commissions , telephone expenses, visits, meetings, machines and salespeople's cell phones) and the total return per customer to know when you can invest more and when you should hold back a little.
Take advantage and learn about 8 more lead capture strategies:
inbound marketing strategy
What is inbound marketing right now?
He is the future and present of digital marketing.
What many managers still fail to measure is the direct importance of this tool for the sales sector.
And more: how web strategies can lead the sales team to sell more in the company's physical area.
Well, that's exactly what we're going to talk about now.
Also check out: CRM and Inbound Marketing: 4 reasons to integrate them
How to do inbound marketing?
Now that you have a better understanding of what Inbound Marketing is and discovered that it is based on four phases of communication with the customer: attraction, conversion, sale and monitoring, note the following:
For an Inbound Marketing strategy to work even better, you must integrate it into the work of salespeople, helping the team sell more!
How? Below we list four surefire inbound marketing strategies to achieve this goal.
4 Inbound Marketing Strategies You Should Be Using
1. Integrate Inbound into prospecting
As you already know, the Inbound Marketing strategy is quite advantageous because it helps your company find consumers with the exact profile of the business.
In other words, they are qualified contacts, interested in your product/service and with enormous purchasing potential. Through the generation of segmented and quality content, these people will be transformed into leads.
The salesperson must have access to the lead bank and use it for prospecting.
That's right! The registrations captured on the internet by Inbound Marketing tools will save time for the sales team , who will no longer need to carry out prospecting research .
Salespeople will be able to make direct contact with people who already know the brand.
We don’t even need to say how much easier it will be to sell, do we?
2. Use Inbound to understand your audience and serve them better
One of the biggest advantages of the Inbound Marketing strategy is the possibility of an in-depth understanding of the company's target audience.
Through the registrations completed by consumers (converted into leads), it is possible to obtain important data about the profile and purchasing behavior of your audience.
Inbound Marketing even allows the development of so-called “personas”, fictional characters that represent the company’s ideal consumer.
And salespeople must use all this information to better understand customers’ needs and desires, so that they can develop more efficient approach strategies!
In practice, what does this mean?
Best customer service !
Information in quantity and quality will be the difference that will lead your team to provide better service and sell more!
3. Use Inbound to captivate and retain customers
Inbound Marketing can help your salespeople not only convert visitors into leads , prospect and better serve customers, but also deepen relationships with them.
It can help your sales team build loyalty to sell more .
All content produced for the Internet in the form of rich material — such as e-books, guides and video presentations — can (and should) be used by the sales team.
Sellers will be able to send items via email to customers, with the aim of captivating them and drawing their attention to new products/services sold.
In other words, this is an intelligent way to carry out follow-up and loyalty work .
The customer will not feel that the salesperson is a “bore”, on the contrary, they will like to know that they were remembered by the salesperson and that they are receiving quality material about a topic that interests them.
Remember what inbound marketing is, its concept in this context: Making it easier to captivate customers and close future sales.
Key takeaways from this article:
The inbound marketing strategy aims to attract potential customers to convert them into paying customers.
Inbound Marketing allows the development of so-called “ personas ”, fictitious profiles that represent the company’s ideal and most profitable consumer.
The information obtained through the inbound marketing strategy helps to better understand the needs and expectations of customers , so that they can create more efficient approach strategies.
A successful inbound marketing strategy must be aligned with the sales team’s sales approaches. To do this, the salesperson must create sales funnels, which can increase their results. Learn more about the sales funnel by checking out the e-book “ Sales funnel in practice ”.
I wrote this article with the intention of presenting an entrepreneur's perspective to entrepreneurs.
I want to show you how it is possible to put these inbound marketing concepts into practice and scale sales from the beginning.
Let's understand more clearly what inbound marketing is?
Before we start talking about inbound marketing strategies, I would like to give you an idea about my entrepreneurial background.
I'll show you how we expanded our startup's sales, so you can see how this model can be replicated in your business, right from the start.
Next, I will show how we scale our sales today, applying both practices and defining inbound marketing strategies.
Ready to learn how to do inbound marketing? Let’s go!
What is inbound marketing?
In short, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to attract potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
To achieve this, inbound marketing uses the production of relevant content to attract the attention of an audience that is interested in certain topics, products or services.
This content is presented on channels of interest to this target audience. And since we are dealing with a highly connected world, digital channels are the most used for this purpose.
Thus, in a more “organic” way, a potential customer begins to relate to a company even without having purchased from it, as this is a source of learning, knowledge or entertainment.
With this content, it is possible to educate customers gradually, until the moment when they realize that it is necessary to take another step and, finally, start a commercial relationship with a brand.
How does it work in practice?
Inbound marketing is about getting found by customers and moving them through the sales stages in their own time.
However, we've learned over time that you don't always need a blog or an editorial calendar to do inbound marketing.
The great advantage of the inbound marketing strategy is reaching potential customers who have not even identified that they have a problem, even though that problem exists.
These potential customers may be researching how to do something differently or finding an article of yours on a portal they already browse.
Once the customer is interested in the subject, you can gradually provide more information that will make it easier to solve any problems.
Ultimately, information that can help you move from situation A to the desired situation B.
How do we use inbound marketing at Agendor?
How about learning a little more about our history and how we evolved our inbound marketing strategies?
In 2012, together with my brother and partner Gustavo Paulillo, I founded a startup that believes in the impact of productivity on people's lives and, especially, on sales.
The idea came from the need that our father, Pedro Paulillo, faced daily as a commercial manager of a company that resells industrial automation equipment.
From the beginning, our focus was on bringing customers in a scalable way and at reduced costs .
After all, if our product were offered over the internet, why should we go door-to-door visiting customers?
With this insight, we went looking for materials and began to understand what Inbound Marketing is and its potential (we started with the Resultados Digitais blog – highly recommended).
It was something new for us, but we immediately embraced the idea and started writing articles telemarketing leads, egypt telephone number data for the blog, which, until then, had practically no visitors (there were days when we received 10 visits – and we celebrated!).
So, we realized that we wouldn't get a short-term return with the inbound marketing strategy and we attacked with the traditional model, looking for contacts in email lists, LinkedIn and referrals.
This way, we were able to “take Agendor off the drawing board” and get the project up and running.
Well, time passed and we continued to continually share the articles we created in LinkedIn groups , on the Facebook page , on Twitter and to everyone we knew.
With the content work, we made paid ads on the Google Adwords network.
In this way, customers started to appear directly through the internet, without any interaction from us!
This really surprised us and was a validator of the inbound marketing strategy.
Over the years, the creation of articles continued, we involved more people in the marketing team and invested in partnerships that helped us achieve better results with digital marketing strategies.
Now, thanks to the partnership with Agência Papoca, a global SEO company, the Agendor Blog is a reference in CRM and Sales.
You can check out all about this achievement in this Semrush article: SEO agency helps Agendor generate US$500,000 in MRR, and enter the top 3 CRM platforms in Brazil
The paradigm of what is Inbound Marketing & Inbound Sales
Understanding what inbound marketing and inbound sales are requires a paradigm shift in actively impacting customers.
The best way to start creating an inbound marketing strategy today, in my opinion, is by taking advantage of Linkedin Pulse.
You don't need a structured blog or website, but you can use your profile to reach potential customers through the content you publish on that channel.
Inbound Sales, despite the elaborate name, is about selling while respecting the customer's purchasing time.
The customer comes to your company interested in knowing what you are willing to resolve and is guided through the sales stages .
The idea is that your content teaches you more and more about your product or service until the sale is made.
To better understand what inbound marketing is, think of a doctor-patient relationship – your goal is to help customers solve a need.
And for this, trust is the key word: have you ever asked your doctor for a discount or an additional benefit?
Gain your customer’s trust and you will no longer need to “sell”.
The goal is for your content to teach you more and more about your product or service until the sale is made.
Structuring an inbound sales process
To understand the inbound marketing strategy, you need to create inbound actions, spread content on social media and start bringing in potential customers through these materials (we call these potential customers Leads ), how do you convert them into sales?
Before thinking about any action, stop and reflect on the following questions:
“What problems can my product or service solve?”
“How do Leads (potential customers) reach my company? Social media, Google searches, events, referrals?”
“What does my customer need to know, analyze or experience to purchase my product or service?”
“What do we offer as a differential in relation to what currently exists on the market?”
With these questions answered, create a step-by-step guide to your customer's journey.
Should they get a call as soon as they visit your website, or would it be better for them to understand more about what problems your company solves?
Wouldn't it be interesting to suggest that he download some material so that, after that, he is better prepared to receive a call?
Your customer journey is precisely your structured sales process.
In other words, your role is to guide him through the steps until he buys what your company offers.
At this point, you will no longer be “selling”, but helping your client.
And what is inbound marketing if not helping people solve what they need through content they are looking for and need?
Put your inbound sales process into action, monitor it and refine it, always seeking to shorten the steps and purchase time.
At a certain point, bring in people to handle sales for you, create a team and specialize, letting each person be responsible for some stages of the sale ( the market usually divides them into SDRs and closers ).
There is no way to sell with inbound marketing without being lean and growing little by little.
Keep track of the total cost of sales per customer (including salary, commissions , telephone expenses, visits, meetings, machines and salespeople's cell phones) and the total return per customer to know when you can invest more and when you should hold back a little.
Take advantage and learn about 8 more lead capture strategies:
inbound marketing strategy
What is inbound marketing right now?
He is the future and present of digital marketing.
What many managers still fail to measure is the direct importance of this tool for the sales sector.
And more: how web strategies can lead the sales team to sell more in the company's physical area.
Well, that's exactly what we're going to talk about now.
Also check out: CRM and Inbound Marketing: 4 reasons to integrate them
How to do inbound marketing?
Now that you have a better understanding of what Inbound Marketing is and discovered that it is based on four phases of communication with the customer: attraction, conversion, sale and monitoring, note the following:
For an Inbound Marketing strategy to work even better, you must integrate it into the work of salespeople, helping the team sell more!
How? Below we list four surefire inbound marketing strategies to achieve this goal.
4 Inbound Marketing Strategies You Should Be Using
1. Integrate Inbound into prospecting
As you already know, the Inbound Marketing strategy is quite advantageous because it helps your company find consumers with the exact profile of the business.
In other words, they are qualified contacts, interested in your product/service and with enormous purchasing potential. Through the generation of segmented and quality content, these people will be transformed into leads.
The salesperson must have access to the lead bank and use it for prospecting.
That's right! The registrations captured on the internet by Inbound Marketing tools will save time for the sales team , who will no longer need to carry out prospecting research .
Salespeople will be able to make direct contact with people who already know the brand.
We don’t even need to say how much easier it will be to sell, do we?
2. Use Inbound to understand your audience and serve them better
One of the biggest advantages of the Inbound Marketing strategy is the possibility of an in-depth understanding of the company's target audience.
Through the registrations completed by consumers (converted into leads), it is possible to obtain important data about the profile and purchasing behavior of your audience.
Inbound Marketing even allows the development of so-called “personas”, fictional characters that represent the company’s ideal consumer.
And salespeople must use all this information to better understand customers’ needs and desires, so that they can develop more efficient approach strategies!
In practice, what does this mean?
Best customer service !
Information in quantity and quality will be the difference that will lead your team to provide better service and sell more!
3. Use Inbound to captivate and retain customers
Inbound Marketing can help your salespeople not only convert visitors into leads , prospect and better serve customers, but also deepen relationships with them.
It can help your sales team build loyalty to sell more .
All content produced for the Internet in the form of rich material — such as e-books, guides and video presentations — can (and should) be used by the sales team.
Sellers will be able to send items via email to customers, with the aim of captivating them and drawing their attention to new products/services sold.
In other words, this is an intelligent way to carry out follow-up and loyalty work .
The customer will not feel that the salesperson is a “bore”, on the contrary, they will like to know that they were remembered by the salesperson and that they are receiving quality material about a topic that interests them.
Remember what inbound marketing is, its concept in this context: Making it easier to captivate customers and close future sales.