How to benefit from Inbound Marketing

B2B inbound marketing ideas for services

Inbound marketing is well-positioned to cope with the realities of marketing B2B services (e.g. selling things that don’t exist, long buying timelines), because instead of actively pursuing potential customers, you’re positioning yourself ahead of time with the right information so that you can be found for the right reasons at the right time.

So how can inbound marketing help? Two main ways:

  1. Sales ready lead generation
  2. Building awareness of your company (i.e. “brand awareness”)

There are also some indirect benefits of inbound.

Using inbound marketing for sales ready lead generation

Between the two choices of how to leverage inbound marketing, lead generation will probably be your primary focal point.

Why?

Because most B2B services businesses can survive without a strong level of company awareness, but hardly any can survive without sales ready leads. It’s worth noting that “brand awareness” is becoming more important due to generative AI-based search.

While there are a couple exceptions, an inbound sales-ready lead generally possesses these 3 characteristics:

  1. Appears to be a reasonable fit for your company.
  2. Has a reasonably defined need (large or small).
  3. Has expressed interest in talking to someone from your company.

For inbound sales-ready lead generation to stand a chance of working, your main goal is to match market needs to your capabilities, and position your company so that you can be found when the potential customer needs help.

See here to learn more about sales ready leads, how to obtain them, and what happens after they raise their hand.

Using inbound marketing to build company awareness

Building company awareness is also referred to as “brand awareness”. I don’t like that terminology for a couple reasons:

  1. It creates mental separation for you between your company and reality. This tends to create the perception that there are magic wands, silver bullets, and other forms of tricks involved. There aren’t. It’s hard work.
  2. It evokes feelings of large household brand names that most companies shouldn’t be striving for. Why? because it’s not realistic to think that your sub-100 employee company can be perceived in the same way as a multi-billion dollar consumer company with international reach.

Having said that, there is value in people being aware of your company within your sphere of influence (especially as generative AI based search gains traction), but the associated value is harder to attribute than for sales-ready lead generation.

In a nutshell, your goal here is to provide useful information that teaches your potential customers about something they want to know about well enough that you make a good impression upon them. Over time, as they continue to engage within your subset of the world, they recognize you more and more as someone they can trust.

Where I think a lot of companies go wrong is by putting too much effort into trying to convince potential customers that are currently in learning mode into potential customers that are interested in buying.

Why is this a mistake?

Because they’re not ready yet.

Since you’re not trying to sell them something like a new health drink or a more comfortable pillow, you’re not going to significantly alter their buying timeline.

If they’re learning, help them learn.

Your focus should be on making a good impression to be memorable so that over time they get to know your company and develop trust.

If you do a good job teaching, you may end up with a tiny fraction of learners that decide they’re ready to consider buying from you (i.e. they become sales-ready leads), but that shouldn’t be your focus.

If you create content that your potential customers like, Google will reward you as well, increasing your rankings and giving you more traffic on related topics.

Being findable for certain topics also encourages authoritative sources to naturally link to your content.

Some important indirect benefits of inbound marketing

While the majority of inbound efforts are focused on SRLs and building awareness with your potential customers, it would be shortsighted not to keep in the back of our mind some other indirect benefits of inbound marketing:

  1. Building up authority on a topic will likely make it easier for you to engage potential customers on related topics in the future. Your building a machine for the long run.
  2. Being found topically by companies you partner with elevates your credibility in the market.
  3. The follow-on benefits that result from new customers obtained through inbound marketing:
    • CLV (Customer Lifetime Value),
    • strategic capability development,
    • Google reviews,
    • testimonials,
    • case studies,
    • backlinks,
    • referrals,
    • and customer movement

See How to determine the true value of a new customer for details.

Next Steps

If you’d like help with inbound marketing, feel free to reach out (and be sure to check out this FAQ).

If you’re deep into learning mode, you’ll probably find some of these useful: