How Inbound Marketing Works [INFOGRAPHIC]

In a previous post I explained and included an infographic on what inbound marketing is, in this post I’ll show you how it works through an example of how you came to this blog post and how a typical customer may come to your website if you were to use the same methodology of inbound marketing through blogging, SEO, lead nurturing and social media.

Allow me to speak to the business owners first. If you’re like most small business owners without a marketing department, you’ve probably felt a bit of a decline last year in online sales or in offline sales depending on what industry you are in. This year you’re wondering if it will be the same? Depending on what kind resources you have, you know that 8% to 10% of your budget should be allocated to marketing.  At this point you’ve probably thought through what your goals are and how you’re going to go about moving the needle forward this year. Before you sign up for another 12-month contract with that trade mag or siphon off more money for pay per click, please consider what it would look like if you had a method of marketing to truly measure your efforts and that it was able to show you what was working and what was not—in real time—for less money.

Now to the Marketers. We all know that content is king in this digital age. You are an expert in something and have plenty of things to talk about concerning your industry and how you could use your knowledge and the collective intelligence of your company to change the marketplace for the better if you had a mechanism in place to do so. Why not use those ideas to create content and begin pushing those ideas out to potential prospects and customers? This content would begin boosting your SERPs, build thought leadership, acquire more leads and build your brand.

If you’re still evaluating whether inbound marketing is right for your company, consider these facts taken from State of Inbound in 2013 by Hubspot:

Inbound is real, and it shows remarkable traction for such a new industry: While inbound marketing is a relatively new industry, it shows sizeable market share and impressive budget growth rates.

• Sixty percent of companies will execute inbound marketing strategies in 2013
• Marketers allocate 34% of their overall budgets to inbound tactics – 11% more than they
  dedicate to outbound strategies, like banners, direct mail, and more.
• This year, 48% of marketers plan to increase their inbound marketing spending – the
  third year in a row that inbound budgets are increasing at a near 50% pace.

I believe inbound marketing is here to stay and if you’re not doing it yet, you’re competitors most likely will be. Below we’ve included an infographic to explain to you how inbound marketing works and how its working for us. The process is broken down into 8 steps of what a typical inbound marketing program works from Stranger > Lead > Close > Customer/Client  > Delight.

Click here to enlarge graphic

Interested in learning more about inbound marketing and how it can grow your marketing and sales? Take a look at this next article on How To Implement Inbound Marketing.

1. You’re a business owner or a marketer that has a few problems. It sounds looks
   something like this:
   • Traffic on my website is going down!
   • How do I acquire more quality leads?
   • Can I align my sales and marketing teams ?
   • I need to redesign the website.
   • How do I get my employees more engaged?
   • How do I build my brand?
   • How do I grow my business!
2. So you head out to Google to search for some ideas on how to accomplish these tasks because that direct mail campaign last month — well lets just say it didn’t work out very well this time around.
3. You quickly scan through the first page of results and find something from a blog that is titled “How to turn your website into a lead generating machine.”
4. The blog post has some great advice on how to increase traffic and get more leads to your website. The site also offers a whitepaper on “How to build a better brand”. So, you click on the call to action, fill out a form and type in your name, email address and phone number and download the whitepaper.
5. In a few more days, you return to the blog because you thought the whitepaper you downloaded was really great. So you read some more helpful articles like “How to acquire more website leads” and downloaded another whitepaper “How to hire right” and decide to go ahead and give them a ‘like’ on Fecebook. You then notice that the firm offers branding and marketing services. You think, hmm… they look like a group I could work with and you begin to warm up to the idea of contacting them to see if they might be able to help you.
6. You then receive an email from the agency suggesting two free ebooks for you to read. The agency’s website is intutive so it adjusts to your interests and asks you if you would like for someone to contact you. You select, Sure! ‘This agency is pretty cool and I think they can help me.’
7. The next day, a representative calls you, explains a bit more about the agency’s  services and sets up a Prezi to help you learn more. Next you ask for a proposal and before you know it, you’ve hired an agency to start helping you grow your business.
8. Its been about 3-4 months, after a short web redesign, some additional brand development consulting and implementation of an inbound marketing program. Your beginning to see traffic on your website pick up and leads are beginning to come in. You have to hire some more people to handle it all and things are looking pretty dang good! Welcome to Inbound Marketing.