“Inbound marketing generates 3x more leads per dollar than traditional methods”-(Content Marketing Institute).
Inbound marketing has proven to be a powerful strategy to connect with your target audience.
In times when consumers are becoming more conscious of the purchases they make or the products they subscribe to, no one wants to be bombarded or disturbed by those traditional commercials.
Discounts and deals are not the only motivation behind a purchase. It’s the value that your B2B business brings to them that makes or breaks whether they’d engage with your brand at all.
And the only way to present value isn’t just creating content for them to consume – it is creating the right content; and that’s where having the right inbound marketer on your team comes into play.
In this blog, we’re going to share:
- Who is an inbound marketer?
- Why is inbound marketing important?
- 12 qualities of a good inbound marketer
- Examples of good content inbound marketing in B2B
- Benefits of hiring an inbound marketer
Who is an inbound marketer?
An inbound marketer, also referred to as an organic marketer/content marketer is responsible for getting your brand in front of your target audience and converting them into leads and customers by creating marketing strategies that are focused on educating them with the help of content.
Some of the major responsibilities of an inbound marketer are:
- Understanding your target audience
- Identifying their challenges
- Creating documented buyer personas
- Creating a content marketing strategy
- Distributing and syndicating content
- Understanding how your audience consumers content
- Converting traffic into leads
- Using content as a strategy to continually nurture the audience
Why is inbound marketing important?
Companies with inbound marketing generate more leads than those without— and you’re missing a major portion of sales if you aren’t thinking about this.
Here are some statistics that back our statement:
- The cost for lead acquisition for inbound is at least 67% less than that of outbound.
- Companies generate 126% more leads that prefer inbound marketing strategy over outbound.
- 95% B2B consumers say a business’s content helps them trust it more.
- Businesses that prioritize inbound marketing save more than $14 for every newly acquired customer.
- Businesses generate 3x more leads on each dollar spent on inbound marketing than outbound.
- When executed properly, inbound marketing is 10x more effective for lead conversion than outbound.
- A well-designed inbound marketing strategy can provide an impressive ROI of 1270%.
But good results come only when you have the right marketer by your side. Based on our conversations with B2B startups, we found that more than 50% of companies face a challenge in hiring the right inbound marketer for their business; most of them not being sure about the qualities/ skills they should be on the lookout for.
12 Qualities of a Good Inbound Marketer
After being inbound marketers for the last decade, here are some important characteristics we believe an inbound marketer must have:
1. Good communication skills
Marketing is all about communicating the brand’s message to its target audience. That’s why communication is one of the non-negotiable qualities of an inbound marketer.
Good communication skills are not only about professional language speaking, it’s about showing empathy, having professionalism in their voice and attitude, ability to listen effectively and connect with transparency with the audience.
2. Good research skills
A good inbound marketer should be a good researcher as well.
An inbound marketer needs to continually conduct market research, analyze competition, adapt to changing consumer behavior and create content that they truly need – which changes by the minute, owing to the ever-expanding digital landscape. That’s exactly why it’s important for them to be able to roll up their sleeves and do the research.
3. Critical thinking
The ability to question an idea or examine why a problem exists— a “must-have” skill for inbound marketers to tackle challenging issues.
Basically, critical thinking is a combination of skills like market research analysis, case analysis, data interpretation, and decision-making that can overall affect the marketing strategy if done right and vice-versa.
4. Good writing skills
As an inbound marketer, it’s important to understand how to highlight the crucial aspects of a product or service when you have only seven seconds to get your audience’s attention.
While most people have writing skills— only some can write “good” marketing content.
Think about the last time you read a long article from start to finish, and the time when you read the first sentence and decided that the content wasn’t good enough.
5. Leadership Skills
In the era of digital marketing, influencing your target audience, ensuring alignment, and effective communication is a stepping stone to the success of a business.
A good inbound marketer with great leadership skills can work with the team members effectively while handling everyone’s feedback.
6. Understanding every aspect of content marketing
91% of marketers use content creation strategy to approach their customers. However, 61% of them don’t have a defined strategy.
This is because content marketing is not just about writing anything gibberish, it’s about understanding the goals of the business, creating a strategy tailored to the business’s needs, trying multiple content formats like blog posts, social media copies, email copies, videos and so on while also maintaining the brand’s voice and identity.
7. Learning mindset
Marketers with a growth mindset understand that putting in hard work is often necessary, and finding satisfaction through gradual improvement is even more important.
Having a growth mindset does not mean excelling at everything but putting in the work to get better, which is highly beneficial in the early stages of a marketer’s career.
8. Initiative taker
An inbound marketer is the one who initiates the entire inbound marketing strategy and takes the responsibility to drive results.
And it requires a distinct skill set that helps to assess a situation and execute any strategies independently.
This also increases the marketer’s value as a team member or an employee while broadening their skillset.
9. Able to show results
All your marketing efforts mean nothing if you are not getting the desired results. An inbound marketer must provide you with positive results.
Having a good inbound marketer to look into the search console and tell you what’s working for your SaaS content marketing and what’s not is a life savior.
10. Motivated
There are two types of content marketers- one who just considers marketing as a job and another who is highly motivated towards marketing and always ready to face new challenges and help clients reach their goals.
A motivated marketer is always ready to experiment with different strategies, content types, writing styles, and formats- because their sole purpose is to get the most out of their efforts.
11. Collaborative
When a group comes together to collaborate, it inevitably results in the sharing of knowledge and experience.
That’s why content marketers need to be collaborative and work with other team members to get more insights and use them to create more successful strategies and write more engaging content.
12. Feedback
Effective feedback is very helpful— be it positive or negative. It’s beneficial for everyone, be it the giver or the receiver.
An inbound marketer should be able to take feedback and also incorporate it because this not only helps the marketer in sharpening the skills but also helps the organization to improve as a whole.
Examples of Good Inbound Content Marketing in B2B
Freshworks
Freshworks is using blogs and webinars together in their inbound marketing strategy.
In their blogs, they share useful insights from thought leaders of big-league companies like Zoom, Evernote, and Quora while they are using webinars to connect with industry leaders to increase their visibility through their audience pool without much spending.
Drift
Drift is using the power of blogging- one of the greatest content marketing strategies to get inbound leads.
According to HubSpot, businesses that publish 16+ blog posts a month get almost 3.5x more traffic than businesses publishing 0 to 4 posts.
The Drift team publishes a new post almost every day religiously to keep their blog fresh for new visitors which ultimately increases their ranking on search engines- hence generating more leads and conversions.
Buffer
There are over 1 million active podcasts and more than 30 million podcast episodes.
And Buffer is leveraging podcasts at its best. Buffer’s “The Science of Social Media” is a weekly podcast that shares social media tips, best practices, experimentations, inspirations, and stories for brands.
The crew of Buffer’s podcast invites industry experts every week to share their social media views and experiences and that’s why this educational podcast has become a great channel to promote their product.
As of now, this podcast has crossed 1.5 million downloads.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most common social media managing tools out there. They’re using blogs and videos to promote their products and build authority.
While they use blogs as a content resource library to share insights on social media management and strategies, it’s leveraging videos to share the case studies, testimonials, and results it has gotten to show its expertise.
Shopify
Shopify, a CMS that enables businesses to set an online store, is a great example of companies using inbound marketing to reach their audience. Based on the different segments of their target audience, they have included a number of different content formats in their strategy:
- Blog posts
- Guides
- Free resources
- Courses
Shopify publishes new blog posts religiously and apart from that, it has plenty of in-depth and value-packed guides and free tools like logo makers and slogan generators listed on its website.
Not only this, but it also offers courses (starting at $29 per month) that anyone can buy and learn everything about starting a new experience commerce business. This establishes authority among their audience which clearly shows that they know about the industry and craft.
Benefits of hiring an inbound marketing agency
It’s not easy to hire an in-house marketing team in terms of both cost and time, that’s why it’s a good option to hire an inbound marketer or even better, an inbound marketing agency.
Let us tell you why you should hire an inbound marketing agency:
- They have more experience – If you look for a niche agency for your B2B business, you can be assured that you have the right set of experts working on your inbound marketing strategy.
- You cut down the overall costs – When hiring a full-time in-house team vs hiring an agency; the latter wins. Agencies work as independent contractors, so you don’t need to worry about payroll taxes. You also don’t need to spend on additional benefits like health care costs and perks either.
- More openings to partnerships – Since they are working with other SaaS products as well, they might just be able to open partnership doors for you, helping you work with other products and reach a greater audience.
Do you need to “leverage” inbound marketing?
The simplest answer is- Yes!
In times when anyone can offer a lucrative discount and a powerful feature set, be someone who is able to establish a connection with the audience and leverage the trust they put in you to drive them towards converting or engaging with your business.
Unless of course you want to endlessly compete on discounts and ever-increasing costs of running advertisements.
Want to learn more about inbound marketing and how it can help your business grow?
