The BL[OZ]

If you’re a fan of hummus, you’ll know that it goes great with pita. While you can eat them separately, they are quite simply, better together. The one really complements the other. The same can be said of HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing methodology and Account-Based Marketing (ABM). To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start by defining these methodologies:

Inbound Marketing

Attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. It’s about building meaningful relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers.

Account-Based Marketing

A B2B strategy in which marketing and sales work together to create personalized buying experiences for a select set of high value companies.

Inbound lays the foundation for a strong ABM strategy

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing helps you attract contacts associated with your target accounts. ABM accelerates the flywheel (the cyclical marketing funnel comprising attract, engage, and delight) so you can win and delight your target accounts by providing a standout customer experience. By using inbound, you’re able to carry out highly-targeted allocation of the most relevant resources to your high-value accounts. As a B2B marketer, by using this combined approach you can attract a broader group of prospects than you would if you were only using one method.

Double up and deliver value

Your carefully crafted content has a two-for-one value. You can create and use content that serves both your ABM and inbound strategy. As an example, once you’ve created a personalized case study for a target account, you can also share on your website.

Leverage account-based marketing tools

HubSpot’s ABM tool makes it easy to implement ABM and inbound strategies in a complementary way. Its CRM platform connects all of your sales and marketing data and allows enables customer-centric automation and personalization. It makes it easy to use data to segment and target your accounts and marketing automation to nurture your buyers or buying committee and hand over your leads to sales. 1. Set up ABM strategy quickly and smoothly

• Use workflow templates to define your ideal customer profiles and identify good-fit target accounts
• Set up default properties to tag accounts and buying roles
• Leverage AI-powered recommendations of target accounts

2. Allow sales & marketing to easily collaborate

• Use shared tools that unite your teams around the same data in the same place
• Use the Target Accounts feature to obtain a bird’s eye view of progress across all target accounts
• Use Slack to support high-value target accounts, post KPIs, and share notes

3. Attract high-value accounts & build deeper relationships through personalized engagement

• Personalize content and tailor how you engage with stakeholders within an account
• Use account-level targeting in LinkedIn Ads integration to target companies by account status or tier
• Deepen your relationships over time & build connections with stakeholders within each account

4. Track and measure key milestones on an account’s journey

• Use the account overview feature to understand what’s happening at an account level
• Employ out-of-the-box ABM reporting dashboards to get a higher-level view
• Obtain a higher level view using company scoring to identify the highest value accounts and prioritize reachout

As an added bonus, HubSpot’s apps and strategic partners including Slack, LinkedIn, Sigstr, Madison Logic, RollWorks, and Irioblio help you easily customize your ABM strategy. ABM helps you communicate with high-value accounts as if they’re individual markets. HubSpot’s experience shows that if you do this, along with personalizing the buyer’s journey and tailoring all communications, content, and campaigns to those specific accounts, you'll see greater ROI as well as a boost in customer loyalty. This is borne out by an ABMLA study, which shows that compared to other forms of marketing, 76% of B2B marketers who used ABM in 2020 reported increased ROI. Using HubSpot inbound marketing and ABM tools to power your ABM strategy helps you identify your high-value targets, communicate effectively through the right channels, and deliver the results you need.

When I just started my career, an intelligent woman told me that only when I understand that the customers of the company pay my salary and not the company owners, will I be able to call myself a marketer. So when you think about the future of marketing, you need to first consider what kind of customers we will meet. Let’s talk about how you “consumerize” the customer journey; how you look at the B2B (Business to Business) customer a bit like a consumer.

The new B2B customer is a digital native

Our childhood determines our future behaviors as adults, the people we become, and the decision-makers we grow up to be. It is also true of the technological environment in which we were raised. The millennials, also known as Generation Y, were born after 1980. They are now in their 30’s. Generation Z, as you can see in the table, is still young, but we will soon see them influencing our businesses. Since technology is changing very quickly, a sub-generation was born between the Millennials and Generation Z. Zillennials were born between ‘93-‘98 and were influenced by more advanced technology than the Millennials. For their entire lives, digital natives have been surrounded by technology, social media, mobile devices, computers, and the internet. They speak this digital language as their mother tongue. They did not learn this language in their 20’s, 30’s, or later. They do not have an accent, so to speak. This impressive figure tells the whole story: More and more millennials and gen zers are entering the B2B decision journey, some as technological or professional influencers and others as decision-makers. It is important to note that among the people involved in decision-making, you usually meet several generations. A few months ago, we at Oz Global B2B did a project for the American agricultural market. The intergenerational integration in the decision-making process that arose there was very prominent.

• • A family business where the younger generation initiates a decision, and the founding generation approves it. Sometimes the founder initiates the decision but immediately passes it on to the younger generation to check online what the options are.
  • A senior manager at a big business closes a deal, but the people in the field - professionals or salespeople - do not “speak” the same language. This will greatly affect the next purchase.

Even if you think your business is less exposed, check again! It does not matter if the decision-makers are digital natives or digital immigrants. Within the process, there will always be a mix of generations.

The Millennials and Gen Zers highly influence who will enter the decision funnel

About 50% of all product searches on the web are conducted by digital natives. The customer journey is long, complex, and involves many stakeholders. By the time the customer recognizes that he has a problem, we are, in most cases, not there. Identification is an internal stage from which someone is appointed to start researching information to find options for a solution. 50% of those who conduct the research and seek alternatives regarding a product or service, may not take an "official" part in decision-making but are the ones who put the relevant suppliers in the decision-making funnel. They are the ones who build the long list. They are the ones who decide whether or not you will be included in the “consideration group,” which is of critical importance.

Two tips to gain the trust of digital natives:

1. Be authentic!

The generation that grew up on social networks, fake news, and unfounded marketing does not believe in marketing messages and does not believe in unproven statements. They have developed a hypersensitivity to online messages - they suffer from a blatant lack of trust in what is being said online. They continue to consume information online, but with a very large firewall. The bright side of it is that digital natives recognize authenticity when they see it..

So what does authentic marketing look like?

• 1. Get your executives to use social media Customers want to know the people behind the executives or the company representatives that they are in contact with.Make sure your site reveals who you are beyond your formal title. What topics do you choose to share? Who are your friends, what groups do you belong to, and to whom do you respond to?LinkedIn is not everything. Feel free to diversify to other social networks - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Tik Tok.

• Share user-generated content from real people Show real things, with real customers behind them. If you trust your product, let it tell your story.
• Go live on social media platforms Talk without filters. To digital natives this sounds obvious, to digital immigrants, it is less trivial. At first, the digital immigrants posted posts after editing them numerous times. Then they agreed to post an edited video. The transition to live video is scarier, but this is exactly the meaning of authenticity.
• Promote employee advocacy Empower your employees to share smart, quality content with their own social networks. On average, employee networks have 10x more connections than a company has followers. Plus, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, people are 3x more likely to trust company information shared by an employee than that shared by a CEO.

2. Consumerize!

This word does not exist in the dictionary yet but already stars in the literature that follows trends in the B2B world. As Mona Akmal, Falkon CEO and Cofounder, once said, “As work and life flexibly intertwine, so must our approach to reaching our target users.” Gone are the days when the customer was a business person between 9-17 and a consumer on evenings and weekends. Studies show that the business customer is very much influenced by his consumer experience and expects to have a similar experience in business purchases. The customer experience touches on all stages of the journey - collecting information, placing an order, contacting the company up to paying.

• More than 80% of B2B customers stated that they will look for a new supplier if their expectations in terms of customer service and user experience are not fulfilled.
• According to McKinsey & Co, B2B brands score below 50% on customer experience index ratings on average, compared to 65 to 85% for typical B2C brands.
• Gartner illustrates that 77% of B2B buyers report that their last purchase was very difficult or complex.

The conclusion is that as customer experience improves in the consumer world, B2B buyer expectations will rise as well. In short, do not compare yourself only to competitors in your immediate area. The customer or client expects from you the same experience as on Amazon, Netflix, or Uber.

To sum up…

1. The digital natives are digital animals. They were born into it, and it is their playground. It requires us to be present and comfortable in the digital space. Allow them to find us easily and learn about us in a convenient way that interests them. Allow them to easily consult, purchase and pay online.
2. Life in the digital arena has taught them to be suspicious, not to believe everything they are told. They have developed the skills and expertise to recognize fake news when they see it. This requires us to be authentic in interactions with them, without filters and edits.
3. Remember, before they are decision-makers, customers, or partners, they are first and foremost human beings. Their personal lives have seeped into their business life and it is very difficult for them to separate the two. So, we have no choice but to "consumerize" the way we treat them.

The different characteristics between the B2C and B2B worlds are getting blurry. Whether we are marketing to a B2B customer or a B2C consumer, we are actually humans who sell to other human beings. So let’s all agree that it is really H2H marketing. Want to talk to Nirit? You can reach her at nirit@ozglobalb2b.com

The first HUG Haifa was a complete success where we learned from Stephen Fuery, principal Implementation Specialist at HubSpot and Ofir Marx, Marketing Manager at BERMAD fascinating topics that will take our Marketing and sales project to the next level. The first part of this extraordinary event started with Stephen defining Sales & Marketing alignment (SMarketing) as the practice of bringing a company’s sales and marketing departments together to achieve better communication, greater efficiency and as a result increased profitability. This is one of the premises of most of the companies that have both departments interacting with each other on a daily basis. But, why is aligning Marketing and Sales difficult? Here we have some facts that can help us with these answers:

• 87% Of the terms sales & marketing use to describe each other are negative
• 20% - The amount of revenue increase companies with strong sales & marketing are able to achieve.

If you hear… 

• I don’t know if the sales team is working my leads
• I don’t know the ROI of my marketing campaigns
• I’m getting too many leads and can’t prioritize them
• I don’t know what to do with these Marketing leads.

This indicates that your sales and marketing teams are not aligned. The following tips will help you to solve this:

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

This is a commitment between Marketing & Sales to deliver on specific goals. How do you create an SLA? Glad you asked ?. Use Historical data to understand your goals, putting into consideration the common goals between the two teams. Ask yourself these questions as a roadmap to creating an SLA that serves both the marketing and sales teams:

• How many MQL’s is Marketing creating?
• Are Sales working MQL’s?
• At what rate are MQL’s converting to Customers?
• What % of deals are attributed to Marketing?

Decide on future SLA’s and build reports to measure them, presenting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Timely) goals.

Let’s compare: Goal 1: I want more website visitors, leads and sales. But this is too general, what about? Goal 2: I need 20,000 visitors, 500 leads, 12 customers within 12 months in order to achieve our revenue goal of $600,000 from Inbound. Goal 2 is a SMART goal. It will give you a complete picture of what you want to achieve.

Agree on Fit 

This is a measurement of how well you could serve a lead if they were to become a customer.

Segmentation: 

Let’s divide segmentation into two parts:

• Lifecycle stage: a way of categorizing where any given contact or company is within your marketing and sales flywheel.
• Lead Scoring: Lead scoring is a methodology used by sales and marketing to determine the worthiness of leads or potential customers by attaching values to them based on performance.

These steps are just the beginning of any successful and satisfying alignment between Sales and Marketing as was explained impeccably by Stephen. It’s astonishing how many things we can learn from two experts aiming to achieve your marketing and sales goals. Ofir Marx took over the second part of the event where he talked about how to communicate with end users and get feedback and its importance. One of the most important topics that he mentioned is how the rules of engagement have changed. The following Marketing activities will help you to understand your end user:

• Publishing professional blogs, case studies, and white papers
• Sending out nurturing emails to leads
• Posting on social media
• Using marketing automation to convert a lead to SQL

But wait, why talk to end users? Ofir explained that it is paramount to get the real market perspective from the end users and not from someone in the middle. This allows you to understand the real need for solutions, giving you, the businessperson an opportunity to evaluate the real potential in any specific market or territory. You need to always add value to your end customer. Ofir went further to demonstrate how BERMAD shows an increase in awareness and quantity of leads from places where they don’t have representation. They give specific solutions to clients to the extent of flying over to different countries to understand all the technical requirements that were involved. These efforts eventually translated into actual sales. This is definitely how you should know your end customers! From the HUG Haifa to you, these were the recommendations on how to take your marketing efforts to the next level:

• Increase involvement in LinkedIn discussion groups
• Target campaigns in specific locations
• Blog in other languages
• Introduce Account Based Marketing activities.

Truly, HUG Haifa speakers gave a great amount of knowledge and tips that you can implement to ensure satisfactory relations with our end customers and give a boost to your Marketing efforts as well as align your Sales and Marketing teams for the overall success of your clients. This was the first of a series of HUG events that are going to take place in Israel. This HUG was brought to you by OZ Global B2B and Cacao Media Marketing Agencies, HubSpot Partners and experts in B2B marketing.

Bermad, a kibbutz-based company manufacturing water control valves, built itself into a successful global concern from the ground up. Here’s what Ofir Marx, VP Marketing at Bermad had to say about inbound marketing and what it’s done for the company’s business.

The conversation has changed: From top down to two-way communication

“Today, we can communicate directly with customers,” says Marx. “In the past, our way of communicating with customers was top down. HQ communicated to its subsidiaries, who communicated to the dealers, who in turn, communicated to the end users. We never got direct feedback, and even if we did, it had passed through three to four different hands and got filtered along the way. That’s changed. Now by publishing blogs, case studies, and white papers, sending out emails, and posting to social media, we have the ability to deliver messages directly to the end user and get feedback.“

Generating leads, assessing quality

Leads are collected on landing pages with targeted calls to action (CTAs). By asking qualifying questions, Bermad is able to assess the quality of the leads received. The results show that 35% are sales qualified leads (SQL), 30% are marketing qualified leads (MQL), and the balance are service requests, spare parts or vendors looking to sell the company something. In short: More than 60% leads are relevant enquiries.

Key goals versus results

At the beginning of the process, Bermad set some goals:

• Increase site traffic to 20,000 Moved from 12,000 to 20,000 website visitors per month in less than 2 years
• Generate 500 leads per month Approximately 200 leads per month now and it’s rising
• Added Revenue of $1,000,000 per year Reached $700,000 in 2017; anticipate higher in 2018

Are we getting it right?

The ability to speak directly to the marketplace and understand what they are interested in and what questions they ask, enables the company to understand whether they need to do anything differently.

What’s next?

Marx believes that the awareness and exposure that is being gained is very important, and it’s only the beginning. There’s still much to be done, from increased involvement in Linked In discussion groups to targeted campaigns in specific locations, as well as blogging in other languages such as Spanish and Portuguese.

Leveraging the power of marketing automation

The company is just beginning to benefit from the powerful marketing tools available on HubSpot including lead scoring and nurturing. Having tripled the amount of contacts, there is a wealth of potential customers to cultivate, taking them from the awareness and consideration stages through to making the decision to purchase.

It takes time, effort and investment

Today, all Bermad’s divisions are involved, with 4-5 people at HQ contributing to content creation as well as support from professionals at the company’s various subsidiaries. Blogs are published on a monthly basis for all four segments (waterworks, irrigation, fire protection and building & construction), supported by email blasts, newsletters and ongoing social media posts. Campaigns are run to support product launches, exhibitions and special events. All marketing activities are integrated into Bermad’s CRM system, allowing the sales team to see a 360° view of potential customers and enabling them to close more deals. “Today, nobody asks why we are doing it,” notes Marx. “We’re just beginning to see the benefits.”

Think about the last time you made a major purchase. Chances are, you researched the product online. Maybe downloaded a brochure. Read reviews. Asked the opinions of people you trust. And, if possible, took it for a trial run before you went ahead and made the purchase. << Are you ready to jump start your B2B business? Find out how! >> Our customers carry out that same process, all the time. But the quality of their journey and their level of satisfaction often depends on their experience as they move through the funnel. You’ve probably seen the funnel before, which represents the three stages customers go through from their initial awareness of the product or service, learning more about its features and benefits, and the decision to purchase. Simply put, the top of the funnel (TOFU) is where you build awareness about your company and the problem you address, the middle of the funnel (MOFU) is where you teach people how to choose a solution, and the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) is where you explain why your product is the best solution. The funnel has a major weakness: It doesn’t take into account that the people coming out of the bottom of the funnel can have a major impact on the people going into the top of it — in fact, people at the bottom of the funnel can feed those going into the top of the funnel. Conversely, the people leaving the bottom of the funnel can prevent other people from entering the top of the funnel. The attitude of people when they come out of your funnel has a direct impact on the number of people who are willing to enter the top of the funnel.

The Flywheel as a Growth Engine for Your Business

Funnels produce leads. What they don’t do is help you close the leads, keep your customers happy, or take advantage of the customers you’ve already acquired to help you grow. That’s where the flywheel comes into play and the inbound marketing methodology helps it spin.

  It’s all about crafting relevant content and carrying out structured activities at every stage of the flywheel. Through scoring and lead nurturing, efforts are focused on the strangers who can be converted into satisfied customers. The rotating flywheel represents the growth of your business. Happy customers help fuel your growth. How? By buying from you again, or bringing new customers to you by promoting your product to their extended network of colleagues, friends or family. “The rotation of the flywheel represents the growth of your business, and happy customers provide the energy that fuels that growth.” Kyle Jepson, Hubspot Academy All your marketing activities should be focused on creating customers who will inject good energy into the flywheel and speed up your company’s growth.

Combining Funnels and Flywheels

While the flywheel represents your company as a whole, funnel charts can help you improve a particular aspect of your business performance, for example, your sales funnel. Analyzing it can help you understand where you’re losing customers along the way. When your entire company starts thinking about accelerating the flywheel as a whole instead of focusing on improving individual funnel metrics, major strides can be made. That’s when the real growth happens.  

Trendlines Group case study: rebranding and visual identity As our clients grow and expand their global reach, we are committed to helping them tell the story that sets them apart while staying true to their authentic corporate values. In the case of Trendlines Group – an innovation commercialization company that invents, invest in, and incubates innovation-based technology – global expansion and going public on the Singapore stock exchange were the main catalysts for looking to OZ for rebranding. As we've been partnering with Trendlines for the last 20 years, it was natural that the company turned to us for support at this significant point of growth. Against the backdrop of our long-term relationship, we worked together to develop a new visual identity that stands out in today's global market and is also centered around Trendlines’ two foundational principles:

It’s about the people AND building relationships

Because Trendlines Group’s hands-on investment approach and commitment to improve the human condition through innovation are inseparable parts of the company's character, the refreshed visual identity rests strongly on these principles. The result – a new compelling brand and visual identity – was launched at Trendlines’ 7^th Annual Trendlines Company Showcase attended by hundreds of biomedicine industry professionals from around the world, and sponsored by companies worldwide.

On 21 June 2017, we held a successful Inbound for Medical & Healthcare Companies event for over 50 attendees. At the event, industry experts shared the following insights on marketing for medical & healthcare companies:

• Matt Brown, HubSpot Specialist from Boston – US Trends in Healthcare Marketing
• Dina Gidron, VP Strategy at OZ – Opening New Channels of Communication
• Mickey Nave, Corporate Marketing Director at Lumenis – Medical marketing: generating leads that your sales team will love
• Bat-chen Grinberg, Founder of MC Forum – Digital tools that reduce your work overload

Here are some important takeaways from the event:

1. The age of “Social Health”. The combination of healthcare reforms, the age of consumerism and mobile technology is creating the perfect climate for change in healthcare.
2. We see YOU, we know YOU, we understand YOU, we want to help YOU. The digital revolution is transforming the way we do business as we shift from a Business-to-Business (B2B) to a Business-to-Business-to-User (B2B2U^©).
3. Patient-consumers are the center of the universe. As patient-consumers become the single most important factor in this new era, we need to open up direct channels of communication with them to understand their challenges, increase brand awareness and create bottom-up demand.
4. Trends in medical and healthcare. Patient-consumers are avid researchers; marketers are targeting patient-consumers AND payers; digital channels are overtaking traditional marketing channels; and digital content is key to the decision process.
5. Brands must recognize social health and deliver value across the full spectrum to drive leads, convert prospects to customers and keep them loyal.
6. Inbound marketing and content marketing are well-suited to the medical and healthcare industry as it promotes targeted communication, trust-based decision-making, long-term relationships, and thought leadership and industry expertise.

 

Preparing for the age of “Social Health”

As healthcare reforms, the era of consumerism and mobile technology create the ideal climate for positive change in the medical and healthcare arena, we’re ushering in a new age – the “Social Health” era. As we transition into this new era, patient-consumers are becoming the single most important factor in the medical and healthcare eco-system; and as they research and shop online for medical services, products and insurance plans, the medical & healthcare industry increasingly resembles a retail industry. The impact of this shift on medical and healthcare providers is huge as it means they need to open up direct channels of communication with patient-consumers to understand their challenges and offer services and products with real value. Or in other words, there is a need to move from a Business-to-Business (B2B) to a Business-to-Business-to-User (B2B2U©) approach. As we enter this age of “Social Health”, brands need to recognize the need to deliver value across the full spectrum to drive leads, convert prospects to customers and keep them loyal.

It's time to attract your prospects instead of bombarding them.

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on attracting customers to your business through content and interactions that are valuable, helpful, and trust-building.

It’s all about using remarkable content to develop and nurture long-term relationships with your prospects so they ultimately build trust in your brand.

In comparison, traditional marketing, which is marketer-centric, uses more interruptive methods to vie for the attention of prospects.  

	Inbound	VS.	Outbound
Definition	Inbound marketing uses customer-centric tactics to attract prospects, address their challenges and goals, and build trust in your business		Traditional marketing uses more interruptive methods to push products and services and get the attention of prospects
Communication	Based on interactive communication that engages prospects and attracts them to you		Based on one-way, outward communication
Tools/techniques	Educational content such as blogs, videos, eBooks, white papers, SEO, and case studies		Print and TV ads, banner ads, direct mail, cold calling, and mass email campaigns
Goals	Offer prospects value through educational content and earn their trust		Drive sales through product-centric marketing

 

In one of our last blogs, we spoke about how content is the fuel behind inbound marketing. The question now is where do you start and what do you focus on? Let’s start with a quick recap of the recommended process for creating content for inbound:

1. Consider the content’s purpose, format and topics.
2. Create content that builds trust amongst your prospects.
3. Get your content in front of the right people at the right time.
4. Analyze & repeat. Determine what worked and what didn’t, and repeat your successes.

In this blog we’ll focus on the first stage: Plan. But stay tuned for future posts on the whole process. In the planning stage, you’ll need to decide on the content's purpose, format, and TOPICS. And that’s where you’ll need to get your creative juices going. Because you’ll need to come up with ideas that attract potential customers and keep them coming back for more. But how do you get out of your own head and into your potential customers’ heads to find inspiration? The most obvious place to start would be by ASKING THEM. Yes, we know it sounds trivial but when was the last time you actually spoke to your end users and customers about their actual challenges? Another great source of information is your field sales team who frequently interact with your end users and customers.

Lead nurturing is the process of engaging with contacts via automated workflows to build a relationship with them. The end goal is to close more educated and qualified customers faster and to delight customers to become promoters of your brand. Because the reality is that not all leads are ready to talk to the sales team at the beginning of their interaction with your company. In fact, most aren't, and according to HubSpot, research shows that only 5-25% of visitors that come to your site are ready to close the deal. This means that in order for inbound marketing to be effective, you need to engage with your leads along every stage of the buyer's journey until they are ready to do business with you. Which is where lead nurturing comes in. As a key component of your B2B marketing strategy, lead nurturing utilizes automated email campaigns that are timely, offer valuable content, and address your prospects' specific interests to nurture them until they're sales ready. And, because the emails are automated, it saves you a lot of work by qualifying leads and pushing them through the sales funnel quicker, meaning a higher return on investment. In fact, DemandGen Report found that nurtured leads increase sales opportunities by an average of 20% versus non-nurtured leads. As you begin to develop your lead nurturing workflows, always remember these foundational principles:

• Grow and nurture relationships
• Offer educational content
• Use hyper personalization

This means you should constantly consider whether you're offering your customer value, and ensure your content isn't promotional but rather informational and educational. Also, don't forget to target and personalize your communication based on your buyer persona's questions and interests and where they are in the buyer's journey. This keeps your communication efforts relevant and consistent – which is ultimately what produces results.

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on attracting customers to your business by offering valuable and informative content that speaks to theirs needs and builds trust in your business. As opposed to more traditional, marketer-centric marketing, which uses interruptive methods such as emails, cold calling, and printed ads to get the attention of prospects, inbound marketing creates positive interactions that empower prospects with the information they need to make decisions for themselves.

Why inbound marketing?

We live in an age where people are bombarded with advertising wherever they turn, and for this reason, have become increasingly skeptical of standard interruptive marketing methods. In fact, Harvard Business Review reports that 90% of B2B buyers never respond to cold-marketing. For this reason, instead of competing for consumer attention, inbound uses the fact that prospects seek out the information they need on their own terms. By developing valuable and relevant content with the expectation to be found, potential customers will come to you, become new clients, and ultimately be delighted by their experience.

How does inbound marketing work?

Inbound marketing is based on four phases: attract, convert, close, delight

ATTRACT

First, attract visitors to your website using tools such as blogging, website optimization, and, social media. Tools: blog, social media, keywords, pages

CONVERT

Once you have new visitors, you can convert some into leads by gathering their contact information, the currency of inbound marketing. To do this, it's important to offer them something valuable, usually in the form of additional information or useful content. Tools: calls-to-action, landing pages, forms, contacts

CLOSE

Once you’ve converted some visitors into leads, you need to nurture their interest by providing them with relevant information. In this stage, tools like email and CRM are helpful in selling to the right leads at the right time. Tools: email, workflows, lead scoring, CRM integrations

DELIGHT

Once you close a sale with a customer, your relationship is just beginning. At this stage, you need to continue to delight and engage them so they become happy promoters of your brand. Tools: social media, smart calls-to-action, email, workflows Analysis is critical to making inbound marketing work. Every strategy and technique you use, and content you create, should be analyzed regularly to see if it's working, and adjusted as needed to make it better.

Attracting customers with inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on attracting customers to your business. Unlike traditional interruptive marketing that vies for attention through cold calls, purchased ads, and email blasts, inbound marketing responds to prospects’ needs and interests by offering them valuable content in the right place and at the right time. “By publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive.” - Hubspot Read more about inbound marketing here.

So how does inbound marketing work for B2B?

It’s often assumed that inbound marketing is better suited for businesses that sell directly to consumers (B2C); and, in the recent “push” to “pull” marketing shift, it appears that B2C organizations have more easily adopted this new marketing model. In contrast, B2B or B2C organizations appear to be more skeptical and adopt the new approach with more caution. The main reason for this is that a lot of B2B and B2B2C organizations are still trying to figure out how inbound marketing can work for them; and they often question whether this new approach is even applicable to business customers.

The answer is — of course — YES!

Because the truth is that it doesn’t matter what you’re selling or to whom, the majority of your prospects are usually partially through the buying cycle before they even consider talking to a salesperson. And that’s where the emphasis needs to be — ON YOUR PROSPECTS. In order for inbound marketing to work, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your value chain and your sales model. Once you have that, you can then create valuable content that attracts visitors to your business, converts them into prospects, engages them until they decide to purchase your product or service, and then delights them so they become promoters of your brand. In this manner, you can use inbound marketing to create a win-win situation where you get closer to both your distributors and your end users, and in the process, increase brand awareness to enhance end-user demand for your brand (even if you they are not buying directly from you). But here’s the thing – you need to be in it for the long haul. Inbound marketing takes time, effort, and patience. But it’s definitely worth the wait!

Inbound marketing is not just about attracting people to your business; it's about attracting the right people to your business – those who will become leads, and then customers, and ultimately happy promoters of your brand. There are tools for every stage of the inbound marketing process, and the first phase — attract — is all about getting suitable prospects in the door. This is usually done by offering valuable content and using a variety of marketing techniques to ensure that B2B buyers find your business, including blogging, SEO, and social media — but for the moment, let’s leave that for another post. Because before you start anything, in order to attract the right customers, you obviously need to know who your ideal customers actually are — right? Understanding who your customers are and what they want For the inbound customer-centric approach to work, you need to know who you're actually trying to reach. The best way to learn about your ideal customers, their interests, and their buying habits is to develop buyer personas, which are simply representations of your ideal customers. Buyer personas are based on three essential practices – research, identifying trends, and creating persona profile stories. This research and analysis allows you to uncover the mindset, goals, challenges, and motivations of your potential buyers. Once you've determined who your ideal customers are, the next step is understanding the buyer’s journey — which is the active research process your potential prospects go through before making a purchase. This journey, which is usually divided into three stages – awareness, consideration, and decision--, helps you tailor your inbound marketing and content to create meaningful interactions with your ideal customers (buyer personas) at every stage of their process (buyer's journey).

Content is what sets you apart

It’s the fuel behind inbound marketing – it carries the message your company wants to deliver to your customers at the right time and in the right place. It’s what powers a successful inbound strategy by pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another and addressing their challenges and questions. It’s what attracts the right visitors to your site, converts them into leads, nurtures them, helps close them into customers, and then delights them into promoters.

If we were to tell you that the world is in the midst of another major digital revolution, would you be surprised? We wouldn’t — because technology is seriously rocking our world, and it’s creating unprecedented disruption in its wake. It’s completely changing our methods of doing business and transforming the business models of each and every industry. Soon, almost anyone will be able to invent new products cheaply and quickly. And to make things even more challenging, the new competition is selling directly to the end user. So where does that leave us? We can bury our heads in the sand and rely on existing methods that have worked until now, and hope for the best. Or, we can accept the fact that we need to adjust, challenge the status quo, and take advantage of these changes to not only survive but actually boost our businesses. But where do we start? First, it’s important to understand that the single and most important factor in this new era is the customer who actually uses your product or service. Not your product/service, or your technology, or your market — your customer! At the end of the day, your success is determined by how well you know your customers and how well you meet their needs or solve their challenges.

This means that before you do anything else, you need to identify, understand and talk to your customers.

This involves meeting customers at different points on their journey, mapping their journey and fully understanding their needs. Once you’ve done this, you can go on to define your potential buyer personas; identify how you meet their needs, motivations, pain points and challenges; create relevant offline and online content and tools to communicate with them; reallocate marketing and sales (and other) resources to match the real needs of your customers; and create collaboration between your marketing and sales (and other) teams. But first, get to know your customers! From there, the rest will follow.

We speak a lot about branding — adding value to B2B brands, building global brands, marketing in a digital world, employee branding, etc. Yes, they are all absolutely vital to business growth and success. But we often tend to speak less about or even ignore a less “sexy” component— lead generation. Most people just hear the term and get overwhelmed, which is a major problem as despite the challenges involved, lead acquisition and tracking is a crucial part of any business. And in a world where the heat is always on to win (or maintain) market share and stay ahead of the competition, traditional methods are no longer enough. More of the same just doesn’t cut it anymore and creativity is key! In the case of Amiad Water Systems, a world leader in water treatment and filtration solutions, the marketing team decided to try something different to support and improve the sales process. This came after the company successfully underwent rebranding; and with a solid foundation in place, it was time to get the word out and translate all the efforts into revenue. After getting the go ahead from the sales team and researching potential buyer personas, the team created Amiad FilterIT — a digital tool (app) to help end users understand which of the company’s solutions best suited their needs. The idea was simple. The user would sign up and download the app, add the criteria, and receive information on the products that met these criteria. In addition to helping the end user and collecting highly-qualified leads, the Amiad FilterIT app could also be used to promote new and innovative products, push notifications to customers, track data and optimize products and services based on user behavior and needs. Once the app was implemented in one specific market, Amiad used a digital campaign to promote it and as a result, the sales team received hundreds of qualified leads that could then be nurtured through direct communication. Based on this success, Amiad is currently in the process of implementing the app in additional markets globally.

We’ve all heard the term Inbound marketing thrown around a lot lately. It’s become the latest catchphrase in a field that’s already packed with catchphrases. But what does it actually mean and can it help B2B businesses grow?

What is Inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of attracting potential customers and getting them to reach out to you. This is different to more traditional marketing (also known as push marketing or outbound marketing) where you actively reach out to potential customers through methods such as cold-calling, printed magazines, and traditional advertising. But how do you attract potential customers and get them to trust you before you’ve even pitched them your product? The answer lies in content —the foundation of the Inbound methodology. By creating carefully curated content, you’ll establish yourself as a trusted source of knowledge and attract the ideal visitors to your site, convert them into leads and then customers, and keep them engaged so they go on to promote your brand.  “By publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive.” - Hubspot

Inbound marketing in a nutshell

Inbound marketing is filled with complexities, but the following four steps (based on the Hubspot Inbound methodology) summarize the main Inbound stages:

1. Attract. Before you do anything, you need to fully research and understand who your ideal customers or buyer personas are. Once you have identified them, you can get them to come to you.
2. Find creative ways to “convert” these potential customers into leads by offering them something valuable in return.
3. Turn your leads into customers.
4. Continue to engage with your customers so they become promoters of your brand.

Inbound marketing in B2B

At this stage, you may be wondering whether Inbound marketing works in the world of B2B. The answer is a big loud “Yes!” In fact, Inbound marketing creates a win-win situation for you where you can get closer to your direct customers and distributors, and also increase brand awareness amongst end users to enhance end-user demand for your brand (even if you they are not buying directly from you). Read how Elcam used digital marketing to increase brand awareness>>

Combining Inbound and offline marketing

We’d like to emphasize that Inbound marketing does not replace the need for interpersonal interaction with your customers – especially in B2B industries where the customer model tends to be more complex and is often based on long-term relationships. The goal is to find the right communication mix for your specific B2B business needs, market and customers. By promoting your brand through a digital dialog and an inter-personal dialog, you can achieve a more effective and efficient sales and marketing process for better business results. For example, you can combine a compelling digital campaign to encourage potential customers to visit you at a trade show, and then meet them at the event to continue a direct dialogue with them. Look out for our next blog post on the need for face-to-face communication with your customers and creative ways to combine digital and interpersonal communication (coming soon).

Inbound marketing – here to stay?

Another big loud “Yes!” It’s quite simple - as more and more potential buyers turn to the Internet for answers to their challenges, they look to buy from suppliers who instill trust by answering their questions and offering solutions to their problems. This means that in order to stay relevant in the marketplace, you have to be present where your potential buyers are looking for answers - online. And that’s why everyone is fussing over Inbound marketing.

In today’s digital age, we tend to focus a lot on online marketing (also known as Inbound marketing), which includes the use of social media, email marketing, and other online platforms to communicate with our customers.

Integrating online and offline marketing

With all of this focus on online marketing, we tend to think that we should invest all of our energy in our online presence. But it’s not that simple as customers don’t only spend their time online. While online marketing is crucial to growth and success, you need to also engage your customers using offline methods – especially in B2B industries where long-term relationships with customers are crucial to success. A good way to understand this is to compare it to the use of social media in our personal lives. Most of us frequently share personal information about ourselves, our families, our hobbies, and more, on social media platforms. Despite the fact that these platforms seem to “replace” direct relationships, that’s not usually the case, and most of us still make a lot of effort to meet with our families and friends on a regular basis to nurture our inter-personal relationships. If we apply this example to business, we can build well-balanced marketing strategies by combining the use of social platforms to share knowledge with potential customers and build their trust, with inter-personal, offline interactions.

Not mutually exclusive

Using both online and offline marketing doesn’t mean that you need to create separate strategies for each. Instead, you need to create the right marketing mix for your company and field where your offline marketing strategy is actually complemented by your online strategy, and vice versa. Here are some examples:

1. Trade shows

Trade shows may be traditionally associated with “offline” marketing, but you can leverage your investment in them by using a digital strategy to promote your company’s presence at the event. This can be done through digital ads, social media campaigns, landing pages, calls-to-action, and even webinars or videos talking about the upcoming event and where to find you. These promotions can be used to both promote your business in general, and to set up meetings or collect quality leads.At the event, you’ll be able to meet these potential customers (and other) face-to-face and most importantly, to follow up after the event based on what they told you about their specific needs. Again, the follow-up communication can be done through both direct communication and digital communication such as newsletters.

Read here about the online approach to event marketing>>

2. Samples to customer

Offer potential buyers and distributors that leave their contact details via digital platforms free samples of your products (where relevant) or promotions. In this manner, you can collect quality leads from customers, communicate with them directly to get them to try your products, and continue to engage with them through online campaigns. You can also use geo-driven campaigns to attract potential buyers and then refer them to local points-of-sale.

3. Digital campaigns and demos

Use digital campaigns and landing pages to encourage potential buyers to leave their information and then call them to set up a live demo of your product. You can continue to nurture the relationship with these potential buyers after the demo through a combination of offline and online marketing techniques.

4. Join social media groups

Join and contribute to social media groups in your field, use them to increase your brand awareness, and look out for offline networking initiated by these groups, including impromptu meet-ups and offline conversations. You can also initiate such offline events in order to meet potential leads face-to-face.

The best of both worlds

So the answer is yes – you should DEFINITELY still speak to your customers face-to-face, and communicate with them in every way possible to secure and nurture long-term trust and relationships, and meet their specific goals and needs. To get the most out this combined approach, make sure your brand promise, messaging, and visual language is consistent across all platforms so that your potential buyers and promoters recognize you wherever you are.