Marketing Cloud for Inbound Marketing: A Quick Guide
In order to succeed in the current digital age, it is imperative that businesses use inbound marketing techniques to reach their target audiences. With inbound marketing, businesses are able to attract customers to their products and services through helpful and valuable content.
There are 7 main components of inbound marketing: attraction, conversion, closed-loop analysis, lead nurturing, sales enablement, management, and ROI measurement. In this quick guide, let's take a more in-depth look at each one of these components and how Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you excel at them.
1) Attraction
The first step in inbound marketing is attracting visitors to your website with helpful and relevant content. This can be done through SEO-optimized blog posts, social media posts, e-books, infographics, etc. Once you have attracted visitors to your website, it is important to then convert those visitors into leads. Marketing Cloud provides a platform to roll out new content to your online audience according to their interests and desires.
2) Conversion
There are a number of ways to convert website visitors into leads. Some common methods include offering gated content (like an e-book) in exchange for an email address or using forms to capture information like name, phone number, job title, etc. Once you have captured a lead's information, it is important to start nurturing those leads, so they move further down the sales funnel. You can devise actionable lead capture forms and landing pages in Marketing Cloud, making it easy to keep your sales pipeline running.
3) Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with leads through timely and relevant communication. The goal of lead nurturing is to move leads further down the sales funnel so that they eventually become sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Marketing Cloud provides a number of features that can be used for lead nurturing such as email automation, scorecards, list segmentation, etc
4) Sales Enablement
Once you have converted website visitors into SQLs, it is important to provide your sales team with the tools they need to close deals and drive revenue. Marketing Cloud's Salesforce integration enables sales teams to have visibility into customer journeys and provides them with the ability to quickly act on new opportunities. Additionally, Marketing Cloud's Einstein behavioral scoring can be used to prioritize which leads sales should focus on first.
5) Management
It is important to have a centralized place where you can manage all of your inbound marketing activities. Marketing Cloud provides users with a single platform where they can create and track all their marketing campaigns (email campaigns, social media campaigns, etc.), analyze their results, and collaborate with team members.
6) Closed-Loop Analysis
In order for inbound marketing to be successful, it is important to continuously analyze your results and make necessary adjustments along the way. Marketing Cloud provides users with comprehensive reporting capabilities so that you can see what's working and what's not. Additionally, Marketing Cloud Einstein also provides users with predictive intelligence so that you can make even better data-driven decisions going forward.
7) ROI Measurement
Last but not least, it is important to be able to measure the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts so that you can justify your spend and show senior leadership the value that marketing is bringing to the business. Fortunately, Marketing Cloud makes it easy to track ROI by providing users with built-in attribution models as well as the ability to integrate with third-party attribution providers like Full Circle Insights.