Why You Should Have a Data-Centric Approach to Inbound

Inbound Marketing is the practice of drawing customers to your website, by creating various forms of quality content, to gain authority on the internet. Your credibility, and SERP ranking, is the result of content that promotes original thought leadership and ultimately, how useful your brand or product is to real people trying to solve real problems.

The inbound approach places the customer in the centre, to best understand their needs, desires, and pain points. Only after recognising the wills of the customer can a company approach them with a solution; the solution being your product or service.

Inbound also recognises that every customer is on their own specific journey. Understanding the customer journey path, or the buyer’s journey, allows you to create the best content for your audience. Whether the customer is in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage, your company can personalise its messaging to fit their particular needs and to help guide them along your sales funnel. Inbound marketing emphasises that customers are in fact, contacts; they are not simply names or email addresses in your system, but rather real individuals who you’re creating and sustaining relationships with.

In order to build client relationships, companies need to follow the four steps of inbound marketing to effectively convert leads into loyal customers. The stages are: attract, convert, close, delight.

Attract: First you need to get the attention of your audience

Convert: Once you have attracted interested site visitors, you will need to convert them into leads using a dynamic call to action

Close: Leads who responded to the call to action are ready to be nurtured and sold to – but keep in mind that your business should always practice solution-selling as opposed to product-selling

Delight: Strategies ensure that customers remain satisfied and supported long after they make a purchase to turn them into brand promoters

These steps will help you understand where your prospects lie, and which tactics allow you to best convert them. Once you’ve converted a prospect into a lead, your organisation will need to further categorise them into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) or Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) to gauge their sales-readiness, or determine which leads need further nurturing.

BANT

Understanding your leads is also an important aspect of the BANT model of inbound marketing. When considering your customer, you should examine their Budget or their ability to spend, their Authority, or who is making the purchasing decision, their Need, or how urgently they require the product, and their Timing or the timeframe needed to find a solution.

Data Centricity

Inbound marketing, however, can confuse companies given its relationship with digital transformation and the plethora of channel-centric operations it entails. Traditionally, companies gather their data through different channels or CRMs and struggle with the consolidation of said data. Utilising tools like Datatrics enables your company to easily connect your channels into an overview of all your internal and external data on one dashboard; integrating your data all in one place. This grants you the freedom to navigate all of your data at once, reducing error and boosting data resiliency.

Data-Driven Customer Profiles

With all of this data, Datatrics enables you to build 360-degree customer profiles, which can aid you in understanding customer need and intent. Its powerful algorithms and machine learning capabilities can predict customer interest and formulate an accurate customer profile that recognises the customer’s position within their buyer’s journey. With this information, your company can create complete and customised experiences throughout the whole journey and select specific marketing tactics to convert individual leads.

Create Relevant Customer Journeys

Datatrics serves relevant and personal content along your customer’s journey. When you provide your customers with information about your brand or product, at the exact time they are looking for it, then you can secure a competitive advantage, and successfully convert more leads. The more you work with Datatrics, the more the algorithm learns about the behaviour of your target audiences and how to persuade them. The platform not only tells you what to post, which channel to use, and who to contact but also when to do so. This enables you to collaborate more effectively with your team, plan actions, and meet your marketing goals – without being a data analyst.

Websfarm and Datatrics

Using data to enhance your marketing skills will grow your business in an informed and streamlined way while making your brand more relevant. When combining an inbound methodology with data (platforms), we can show you what your next best action is. Datatrics, along with Websfarm’s digital expertise, can guide your inbound marketing efforts in the digital transformation age, to get real results, from real people.