Zoho Marketing - Inbound Marketing Strategy

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Zoho Inbound Marketing Strategy

The inbound marketing methodology is a tried and tested marketing methodology where a business engages in marketing efforts that position it to draw its prospects into its buyer’s journey, nurture them, convert them into clients, and continually delight them, thereby turning them into brand loyalists.

When Zoho’s marketing software is powered by an inbound marketing strategy, real results are realized!

Inbound Marketing with Zoho Technologies

Has your business struggled to gain clients? Does it seem like your target and ideal customers aren’t even out there at all? Have you tried several strategies, so much so that you’re worried?

If you’ve found yourself in this position, then, it’s time for you to rethink your strategies. There’s a tried and tested methodology that puts you in a position where you do not actively go in search of clients, yet you generate leads. How’s that even possible? The methodology is the inbound marketing methodology. In this piece, you will learn what inbound marketing methodology is, and how to craft your own inbound marketing methodologies that work.

What is the inbound marketing methodology?

Simply put, the inbound marketing methodology is one where your marketing efforts bring prospects to you, instead of you going in search of them. At the heart of inbound marketing are some fundamental characteristics, and they include trust, authority, personalization. These three characteristics are the core of any successful inbound marketing strategy.

Trust

Inbound marketing is all about getting your prospects to trust you and building on that trust till they can buy from you, continually buy from you, and also invite their friends and others to buy from you.

From the get-go, an inbound-focused business builds its customers’ trust in its expertise in its field. Way before you make your product or service offering known, prove that you’re an authority in your niche, and help your prospects trust you. Then, you can introduce your products. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Report states that 81% of customers buy from businesses they trust. Here is why it’s important to build your prospects’ trust in your brand.

Authority

This is related to the first characteristic. It’s an age-old sales principle to position yourself as an authority if you’re aiming for a good sales call. Because buyers want to make the right buying decision, they will be more inclined to buy from a business that comes across as an authority. That lessens the risks of buying wrongly.

Therefore, it is important to your inbound marketing strategy that you position yourself as an authority. This can also help you build the prospects’ trust in your brand.

Personalization

Personalization as it concerns inbound marketing goes beyond addressing prospects with their first name and using the “you” pronoun. It’s more about being client-focused. Make your marketing efforts about your prospective buyers’ needs, pain points, and buyer’s journey.

When you have successfully balanced all three characteristics in your inbound marketing efforts, then, it would be said that you have a solid strategy.

Why Does Your Business Need Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is important to your business for many reasons, which are interrelated. Some of the reasons are:

You are considerably in control of the type of leads and prospects that come your way. Inbound marketing is like cooking a big pot of a delicious meal, and then sending out an invitation with some criteria. This guarantees you, to a great extent, that only the people who meet your criteria will come in through your door.
Inbound marketing is more long-term than outbound marketing. While it might take you some time before you start seeing meaningful results, the inbound marketing methodology is one that guarantees you good results over a long time.
Another perk to inbound marketing is its excellent ROI. For every dollar you spend on your inbound marketing efforts, you can rest assured that you’ll earn back in multiple folds. The reason is that inbound marketing helps you spend efficiently. That means you are spending the bare minimum on the best quality leads, which gives you a higher chance at an excellent conversion rate, thereby bringing an increase in revenue.
Inbound marketing also allows you to build your brand’s trust and credibility, which would invariably boost your brand’s intrinsic and extrinsic worth.
A higher client retention rate is another advantage of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing doesn’t stop at attracting and converting leads. You also need to take the next step, which is delighting your customers. This is the aspect of inbound marketing that helps you maintain a higher client retention rate, as a happy client remains a client.

These are some of the advantages of inbound marketing to your business. Whether you’re at the early stages of your business or have been around for donkey’s years, charting an inbound marketing course is an excellent way to turn the tides and get the best out of your marketing efforts.

The Principles of the Inbound Marketing Methodology

HubSpot has proposed its Flywheel Model as one of the aptest illustrations of the inbound marketing methodology. The Flywheel Model is a sphere of the three inbound marketing principles, attract, engage, and delight.

It is important to note that the inbound marketing methodology is neither salesy, nor forceful, nor desperate. If you’re impatient to see results, then, you cannot follow through with inbound. The reason is that inbound marketing is founded on how to create and solidify relationships with your web visitors, who evolve into your prospects, then leads, then clients or consumers. Let’s look into the three inbound marketing strategies and how they’re related:

Attract

The first principle that backs any successful inbound marketing strategy is the principle of attraction. It is the first stage in your inbound strategy, targeted at strangers and the first few timers to your blog, website, social media page, or any other means of contact. The attract principle puts you in a position to meaningfully help people who are in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, thereby gaining their trust. Their attraction to your brand must not be forced. Don’t chase them all over the internet with intrusive ads. Rather create content that answers their fundamental questions in relation to what you will eventually offer them.

Engage

This is the second principle of the inbound marketing strategy. As the name suggests, you need to continually engage your prospects meaningfully, every step of the way, till they complete the buyer’s journey. There are many thought processes that lead up to a buying decision, and the journey might become arduous and winding if your business cannot effectively and efficiently attend to the questions of your prospects.

The engage principle is one that sees you deploy all the marketing efforts in your arsenal to further solidify their trust in your brand. You must also be there to reinforce their convictions at those times when they start to doubt.

Delight

One reason why the inbound marketing methodology is a flywheel is that inbound marketing is a cyclic model; never-ending. Even after you might have meaningfully engaged your prospects till you convert them, your inbound marketing duties still continue. A business doesn’t survive on one-off sales to several clients.

The key to sustainability lies in having a very high retention rate. You have a 60 – 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, while at best, all you have is a 5 – 20% chance of selling to a new customer. Yet, customer acquisition costs are far greater than customer retention costs, since the customer acquisition process is more arduous than the customer retention process.

While you have to go through the process of attracting, engaging, nurturing, convincing, and converting during the acquisition process, all you need to do in most retention processes is to delight and offer. If your product is good and you make it a point of duty to continually delight your customer base, then, you will retain them.

Must-Haves For A Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

Multi-channel marketing

For your inbound marketing strategy to thrive, you need to operate a multi-channel marketing strategy. Combine both paid and organic marketing efforts. Never forget that your inbound marketing strategy is one wholesome strategy with several components. Ensure all aspects of the strategy are synced, aiming for the same goals. Search Engine Optimization, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing are some of the marketing channels you can combine to get solid results.

Buyer Persona(s)

A buyer persona is important to the success of your strategy. Inbound marketing is primarily about helping your prospective clients and gaining their trust in the process. Thus, you need a buyer persona to conceptualize the details about your prospective buyers, thereby understanding them, their needs, pain points, and interests.

A buyer persona is a profile makeup that gives details on your ideal buyer. A comprehensive buyer persona contains both demographic and psychographic data. You can segment your target audience using buyer personas, and this will help you enhance your personalization efforts.

Target Audience

Your target audience comprises your buyer personas. It is the comprehensive description of all the categories of people your product is targeted at. Your target audience can be just one simple audience, or several compartments in one target audience, in which case, you would have more than one buyer persona.

Buyer's Journey

The buyer’s journey is a chain of events that form the prospect’s initial contact with your business until their first purchase. Beyond the first purchase, the buyer’s journey also extends to the chain of events that either ensure your buyers continue to patronize your business, or move on to your competitors.

Inbound Marketing vs. Traditional Outbound Marketing: The Inbound Leverage

What advantages does inbound marketing have over traditional outbound marketing? The advantages of inbound marketing over outbound marketing are so numerous that you start to wonder why businesses often opt for outbound marketing.

More often than not, businesses that operate on the outbound marketing model do so because they want to see quick results. So, they go after their leads and chase them everywhere with their ads and products, sometimes being intrusive and obstructive. Here are some of the advantages inbound marketing gives you over outbound marketing:

A higher chance of generating quality leads: You have a higher level of control over who comes in as a lead for your business if you rely on inbound marketing strategies. This, in turn, gives you a higher chance of generating quality leads, as against outbound marketing methods where various factors such as pity and incessant disturbance could be responsible for the leads you generate.
Sustainability: Inbound marketing offers you sustainability. It is a model founded on you catering to the needs of your prospects and gaining their trust through this means. Any client-focused, solutions-oriented model has sustainable attributes. Prospects will continually be drawn to a business whose primary focus is helping them solve their problems.
Cost-effectiveness: Inbound marketing gives you a higher chance of generating relevant leads, which translates to a potentially higher conversion rate than what outbound marketing offers. Thus, you’re more likely to have a higher leads = customers rate using inbound marketing strategies, as compared to outbound marketing strategies.
Prospects are more predisposed towards inbound marketing: Your prospects are more predisposed towards inbound marketing, as against outbound marketing, which makes inbound marketing a better option than outbound marketing. Inbound will help you have a smoother customer acquisition process because you will face less resistance

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t have uncertain prospects. However, you will continue to use inbound marketing strategies to convince these uncertain prospects and strengthen their trust in you and what you have to offer.

Ease of management: Another plus of inbound marketing is that it can be easily managed using a Customer Relationship Management tool. Not only does inbound unite both marketing and sales, it can also be effectively managed via a CRM. This will make it easier to unite all your marketing efforts on a single platform for efficiency and effectiveness.
Enhancement of brand position: Once you can successfully solidify your clients’ and prospects’ trust in your business, your brand position elevates

You become an authority in your niche, and you start to get earned media; recommendations, and brand promotion via client testimonials, also known as word-of-mouth marketing. This is one of the most potent forms of marketing. Social proof will get you more results than any of your marketing efforts.

In conclusion, your ability to conceptualize, plan and implement an inbound marketing strategy for your business tells of your readiness to take your business to a whole new level.

When you choose to do inbound, you are telling yourself and your team members that you are ready to prioritize clients’ needs and problems, and also adopt trust as the core of your rule of engagement. Then, it can be said that your business is truly ready to massively scale up and maximally explore its profit potential.

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How Can Zoho's Martech Apps Help With Inbound Marketing?

Zoho’s customer relationship management (CRM) software for inbound marketing:

Acts as a data hub for all your leads and contacts
Assign profile attributes such buyer personas and lifecycle stages
Align sales and marketing through CRM and Marketing integrations
Create automations and workflows to make your inbound marketing automated and contextual

Email marketing is still king when it comes to customer and lead engagement and nurturing. Build email journeys consisting of multiple emails which helps to keep your brand top of mind. Pack the emails full of helpful information and your well on your way to a positive relationship with customers and leads.

Create email campaigns to target your buyer personas in their unique buyer stage
Connect your Ecommerce store and nudge cart abonnements
Segment and target your contacts and leads
Integrate with other Zoho software apps to send email campaigns with data from the selected Zoho app(s)

Marketing automation is just what you think it is. Marketing on auto pilot. Using behavioral marketing, we can send the right message at the right time. Zoho Marketing Automation platform has more capabilities around lead management and nurturing.

Where Zoho campaigns falls short, Zoho marketing automation fills in the gaps
Identify hot leads through behaviors with email, sms text and your website
Leverage lead stages to push leads along their engagement journey
Create web forms and contextual popups
Push leads to CRM after marketing journey(s) completed for Sales

PageSense can customize your websites CTA’s, change text and images based on who and from where the visitor came from. Personalization is a major part of inbound marketing.

Pagesense puts web analytics and conversion tracking to work in the Zoho realm
Personalize webpage content and pictures based on demographic data
Use with Zoho marketing automation to create personalized and targeted webpages
Record website visitors sessions to review and improve customer experience
Ditch Hotjar and use PageSense's heat maps
Customize CTA's buttons and webpage sections

Tracking lead and customer whereabouts on your website helps surface hot leads by lead scoring, can proactively start web chats and aid in creating ‘sales signals’.

Chat with website visitors via live chat or a chatbot
Track lead and customer website usage
Score leads based on web behaviors
Integrate with third parties software to know who is on your website even if they are not in your CRM
Insert chat buttons in your email signature
Proactively chat based on email campaign goals

While you may use Zoho Sites for your main website, others may use it to create only marketing landing pages. Having a web platform included in Zoho One gives you a web platform that can be leveraged for your inbound marketing.

Everyone needs a website or landing page host
Create landing pages for each buyer personas and your services. Social post with links to landing pages
Easily integrate with Zoho apps
No site maintenance needed so no downtime or errors
Select a webpage template to easily start building a website or microsite

Social is an imperative part of inbound marketing. Scheduling future content posts which resonate with your buyer personas in the specific buyer stage is paramount. Publishing content is made easy using Zoho Social.

Leverage social listening tactics to see what your competition is doing right
View engagement reports and metrics
Integrate with CRM for automate lead creation
Schedule your social postings
Integrate with Facebook and lead generation campaigns

Whether your building webforms for your website, internal data collection or landing pages with lead capture, web forms are an integral part of an inbound marketing strategy. Zoho has several applications which offer web forms, the question is which to use and when!

Capture leads and feedback on your website and put into Zoho Apps or Zapier
UTM parameter tracking
Capture GCLID for lead conversion tracking
Create internal and external forms
Drag and drop form builder with payment gateway integrations

Zoho Analytics

Analyzing marketing data is paramount in continuous marketing improvement
Build dashboards to show at-a-glance dashboards for executives
Mashup and blend data sources for custom insights
Surfaces business metrics and KPI's
Visualize customer journeys via dashboards

Zoho Flow is Zoho’s Zapier equivalent. Integrating your external data with Zoho is essential in marketing automation and marketing workflows.

Zoho Desk is responsible for customer success and customer service. Desk is used in the ‘Delight’ stage of the buyers journey

Zoho Survey is used to collect feedback from leads and contacts. Systems setup to foster feedback goes a long ways when trying to delight your existing customers or get a pulse of new leads.

Zoho WorkDrive is Zoho’s Dropbox or Google Drive alternative. This works great as a place to house all your marketing materials.

Inbound Marketing Powered by Zoho MarTech

If you have experience with Zoho’s marketing software stack ( MarTech ) and understand this inbound marketing strategy foundations, you have a very powerful marketing starter pack ready to be configured and unleashed!

QuakeCinch can always help with your Zoho Marketing initiatives, just reach out to us!!

Zoho Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound Marketing with Zoho Technologies