Inbound marketing FAQ
for B2B services

Just starting to think about inbound marketing?

Below are answers to some foundational questions.

This FAQ is geared toward the B2B world (software development, engineering services, etc), but much of it applies generally as well.

Why does inbound marketing fail?

Inbound marketing will likely fail if no one is searching on the internet for things related to the services you offer.

The next most likely reason that inbound would fail is due to lack of market fit. What do I mean by that? I mean that the services that you offer don’t stack up against market expectations. Those expectations could tie back to:

1. Lack of ability relative to market expectations.
2. Lack of authority relative to the market.
3. Lack of trust relative to market expectations.
4. Price relative to market expectations.

For more on this topic, check out Why inbound marketing experiments fail.

Why does inbound marketing work?

Inbound marketing doesn’t always work. But when it does, it’s likely got a lot to do with these 4 factors:

1. Your capabilities relative to the market – How good you are. What proof points you have. Your authority.
2. Your ability to express your capabilities and experience relative to the market. Less common perspectives are often better.
3. How patient you are.
4. How passionate you are about what you do.

Why is inbound marketing necessary?

It’s not. If you don’t want to do inbound marketing, you can try outbound marketing. It’s more of a “does this fit me” sort of choice. Check out inbound marketing vs outbound marketing and pros and cons of inbound.

Once you select outbound or inbound (you don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but you probably want to focus on one or the other), you’ll want to drill down into specific marketing methods:

1. Organic search
2. Paid search
3. Social media
4. Email
5. Networking
6. Trade shows
7. Referral

What are the main elements of inbound marketing?

1. Understanding what problems people are actively looking to solve.
2. Content aligned with the problems people are actively looking to solve.
3. Various analytics tools to understand behavior and gather feedback.
4. A thoughtfully structured website high on empathy, UX and authority.
5. Paid advertising platforms (eg. Google Ads).

How does B2B inbound marketing work?

Inbound marketing re-focuses marketing energy from pushing your product/service on people, to positioning yourself so that you can be found when people are actively looking to solve a problem that can be solved with your product/service.

The idea is that you create content ahead of time to position yourself so that you are found when someone needs you for the thing they need. When they view your content, they’re impressed by how well you address their needs. They then either reach out to you for a chat or to buy the product that they feel meets their needs. From there you treat them well like you should and continue to build a relationship with them over the long run to continue to earn their business by being helpful.

This is a huge (and much welcome) psychological shift for both the buyer and the seller. From a buyer’s perspective, ideally inbound marketing should drastically reduce the number of irrelevant marketing messages that we the buyers have to put up with. From a seller’s perspective, we get to focus on being more helpful and aligning our efforts with the problems people are looking to solve, whether we’re looking for some basic information on a particular topic, comparing options, or trying to make a decision on which product/service to buy.

In the long run, inbound thinking should create more specialists and less generalists. There’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop taking place, where searchers get more specific with their inquiry, and sellers get more focused on the products/services they offer. It’s actually a pretty cool phenomenon.

Content marketing vs inbound marketing

This may be an ill-framed comparison. Why? Because the two methods operate at different levels, and are different pieces of the overall marketing puzzle. Content marketing is all about creating useful information that people want. Inbound is all about positioning yourself to be found when someone is looking for something. You can do content marketing without inbound, but you can’t generally do inbound without content.

Content marketing doesn’t explicitly require you to attract people to your content like you would with inbound. You could use various outbound techniques such as social, email, tradeshow, webinar, live presentations, all of which will contain content, but don’t need to utilize inbound thinking.

With inbound marketing, you’re not going to attract people without some form of content, whether that’s articles, landing pages, case studies, videos, or ads.

Where do conversations fit into your B2B inbound marketing strategy?

There are three ways to answer this:

1. If you sell complex services or products that require a conversation with someone from sales before a purchase, the start of the conversation is likely to be after someone:
   1. Searches for something,
   2. finds potential on your site,
   3. pokes around to see if it looks like you’re a good fit to help them (validation),
   4. and then reaches out (usually by filling out a form on your site, but also could be via chat or phone).
   5. A sales conversation is then initiated, and the sales process looks similar (though not the same; look up inbound sales for more) to other methods.
2. If you sell products, you want people to be able to get in touch with you quickly in a conversational format (chat, phone, maybe email):
   1. if they’re in need of support, or
   2. if someone’s trying to make a decision about a purchase and they need to ask a detailed or clarification question.
3. Throughout the entire lifecycle of the buyer. You should always be having conversations with your potential customers and customers. Some examples:
   1. Your website messaging should be conversational in general (less formal, more like I’m talking to you right now).
   2. You should make it easy for people to get in touch with you through whatever method they want, whenever they want to, whether this is through:
      1. filling out a form on your site,
      2. live chat,
      3. chatbots,
      4. email,
      5. text,
      6. or phone.

What should a B2B inbound marketing plan consist of?

I hate the word “plan” in this context, because it generally:

• lulls people into a false sense of security,
• discourages rapid iterations,
• and puts the focus on activities over progress.

That being said, there can be value in going through the process to get everyone on the same page (especially if you’re new to inbound). The main elements of an inbound marketing plan should consist of these topics:

1. Competitive landscape
2. Problem(s) solved by solution
3. Solution that solves the problem(s)
4. Description of your target customer (persona’ish)
5. Baseline content needed
6. Testing metrics

Check out The problem with marketing plans for small B2B companies – and what to do instead for more detail.

Is SEO the same as inbound marketing?

No. it’s not. SEO is a subset of inbound marketing. But you don’t have to do SEO to do inbound. I wouldn’t recommend that, but you could. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is focused on trying to rank well in organic search results for a particular topic.

Inbound is focused on attracting people to your company.

To do either inbound or SEO well going forward you should consider very similar challenges revolving around content quality, UX, and site quality.

What are the best B2B inbound marketing strategies?

The best inbound marketing strategies will include these elements:

1. Highly empathetic content that aligns with things potential customers are looking for.
2. Solid analytics
3. Good product-market fit.
4. The ability to test and iterate

Some articles that you may find useful:

• How to market a B2B service – B2B service marketing strategy tips
• Marketing strategy for custom software development services companies
• Digital Marketing for Engineering companies
• The problem with marketing plans, and what to do instead
• Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing
• Assessing the health of a B2B services business

Does B2B inbound marketing work?

Sometimes. Much of it depends on how well you understand and can align with the market.

Check these out for more detail:

1. Pros and Cons of inbound marketing
2. Inbound marketing for engineering companies
3. Inbound marketing for software development companies
4. Inbound marketing – the risk of waiting to get started
5. How to benefit from inbound marketing

Check out these case studies for examples where inbound was utilized:

What is “quality content” in inbound marketing?

This is a super-important question for inbound marketing, and will become more important in the coming years.

Quality content means content that satisfies the search intent of the searcher. Pretty straightforward, right? That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s not at all. A lot of blood, sweat and tears goes into this. Generally, quality content will have these attributes:

1. Fully answers the question that the searcher was looking for an answer to if they were asking a question. If they are looking for a solution to their problem, good content provides a potential (or multiple potential) solution to their problem.
2. Doesn’t include a lot of fluff/extraneous information.
3. Aligns with the way the searcher views their world, not the way you view your world.
4. Anticipates what the next steps would look like and makes it clear how to take those next steps.
5. Anticipates what other information might be desired and provides links to that information.

Account based marketing vs B2B inbound marketing

These two strategies are quite distinct. While inbound marketing is typically focused on attracting people that are looking to solve a type of problem, account-based marketing is focused on approaching a very small number of select companies or even a particular division at the select companies (accounts) with a strong and differentiated value proposition. In other words, you can name a small number (say ~a dozen or so) companies that you believe are so well-aligned with how you can help, that if you can just get in front of them, they’ll understand why you should work together at some point (even if they’re not currently looking).

You can utilize some of the inbound marketing philosophy to do account-based marketing, but account-based marketing generally ties in more closely with content marketing, because you’re going to want to create and utilize very tailored content to share your unique value proposition with your target accounts and get their attention and engage them. Since you’re not necessarily waiting for them to come to you, you may be utilizing more outbound vs inbound as part of your account-based approach. See this article on account-based marketing vs inbound marketing for more detail.

What are the pros and cons of inbound marketing?

You’re probably getting the idea at this point that there are positives and negatives to inbound marketing. If you’d like to see them succinctly laid out, check out the Pros and cons of inbound marketing.

How do social media and inbound marketing work together?

The vast majority of social media marketing runs counter to the inbound philosophy IMO. Why? Because you’re often shoving your content in people’s faces when they aren’t necessarily looking or asking for it. That’s not inbound. Inbound is about being ready for when someone does want something from you.

Having said that, social media can augment an inbound strategy by gently and conscientiously sharing content with a targeted group of people within a particular affinity group (hashtag or group-based) or based on those that follow you (and thus are more likely to be interested in your content).

What is an inbound marketing sales funnel?

First, remove the word “funnel” (and the corresponding visual) from your brain. The sales process for inbound marketing shares a lot of similarities to typical sales processes. Probably the two biggest differences are:

1. The potential customer (at the beginning of the relationship) is usually going to be very focused on solving their problem. They don’t generally want to hear about all the other ways that you can help them. Focus on how best to solve their problem. This builds trust.
2. Since they found you by looking for a solution to their problem, they may not have a clue who you are. This is in contrast to being referred to you by someone else, where there is a built-in trust factor.

So where to next?

Looking for help with your B2B inbound marketing? Reach out here to chat.

Deep in learning mode? Check these out:

• The risk of waiting too long to start inbound marketing
• Inbound marketing readiness – self-assessment
• How inbound and content marketing can help if you’re tired of your traditional sales methods
• Good and bad reasons to overhaul your website
• How to market a B2B service – strategy tips
• How to sell software services