Learn How Inbound Marketing Business Processes Can Help Specialty Service Companies

  

Display Your Expertise

Since 57% of the purchasing decision is complete before any company is even contacted, wouldn’t you say you need to be in preliminary race in order to compete?  The only way to do this is by having an inbound marketing process in place.  If you are unfamiliar with inbound marketing services (http://www.overgovideo.com/inbound-marketing-service-features/) then follow that link and learn more.  The inbound marketing process is all about showing off your expertise.  This way a potential customer that comes to your site will see that you are the best option.  You can inform potential customers through blog articles, presentations, videos, webinars, ebooks, etc. These are the best ways to demonstrate your mastery of the industry and your ability to solve the buyer’s problem.  But this race is not a 40 yard sprint, it is a marathon.  You can’t just post a few blogs and create a webinar and expect leads to come pouring down like a waterfall.  Inbound marketing is an on-going process where you have to constantly produce content in order to develop domain authority with Google.   

Long Buying Cycle

Not all specialty service industries have long buying cycles, but for the ones that do, inbound marketing is a perfect way to help shorten your sales cycle.  There are two main things that inbound marketing can do.  First off, after you make your first contact with a potential customer online, you can instantly start nurturing this potential prospect.  Using lead nurturing campaigns based around the lead’s interest can develop their interest into a desire or need.  Lead nurturing campaigns are a set of emails sent over a period of time to educate the lead about their interest.  If you build out the emails correctly, you will be able to increase their interest without even speaking with them directly.  You can also judge their interest level by keeping track of what content they view and which emails they have viewed which can help you judge their interest level.  So by the time your lead nurturing campaign is done, you can send your sales representative in to hit a home run.  Lead nurturing will help your sale representative from wasting all their time educating or qualifying this prospect.

The best way to qualify these potential leads are by using lead scoring.  You never want a sale representative to waste his time on unqualified prospects, so make sure they are worth their time.  If you use automated marketing software like hubspot you can set up lead scoring.  Depending on the behavior of your leads on the site, you can assign a specific score to each action.  So you will need to decide which actions on your site are the most valuable like watching a specific webinar or signing up for an ebook.  Other things you can assign points to are smaller actions like how many times they visited your website, specific page views (pricing page, etc), the emails they viewed and so on.  Then, once a contact’s lead score reaches a target number, you can set up alerts so your sales rep will be informed. Check this blog out if you want to know more about how to shorten your sales cycle using lead scoring.

Existing Customers

The potential revenue that lies in your existing customers can be astonishing.  They are also a great way to increase profits quickly.  These are the people that have already built trust with your business after spending their time and money with you.  There is a greater amount of time and effort needed to get a new customer to purchase from you compared to an existing customer.  So using inbound marketing business processes to keep a constant connection with your existing customers can really help improve your revenue stream.  First you need to segment your customers into specific categories.  This will vary depending on your business, but an easy way to do this is categorizing them by the service they bought.  Of course if you don’t offer more than one service than this is impossible.  Either way you will know what they bought from you before and then you can either try to push that product again, if it is a recurring service, or you can push other offers.  These clients may not even know the full scope of your business and they may already be looking for or receiving one of your services elsewhere.  A client of mine in the IT services had this problem at one time.  They started realizing they were losing potential revenue from existing clients because their customers didn’t know they offered these other services.  So create lead nurturing campaigns to keep in constant contact with these customers to inform them to educate them about other services or to offer specials deals.  Also write informational emails to educate them about the industry so you stay top of mind and position yourself as an expert.        

Conclusion

Creating an inbound marketing business process is critical in today’s world.  As we stated before, most consumer’s do all of their initial research before they contact the buyer, so you need to be out there in order to have a chance.  The only way to combat long buying cycles, higher value deals and more individuals being involved with the final purchasing decision is by offering the right information.  And the best way to offer this information is over the internet through inbound marketing.

Business Processes

blogging for business infoSpecialty service companies tend to have a longer buying cycle, a higher deal value and more individuals involved with the final purchasing decision.  Due to these factors, sales can be very difficult which is why inbound marketing business processes can help.  The corporate executive board says that 57% of the purchasing decision is complete before the customer calls the supplier.  So if they can’t find your information when they first start their search you are already out of the race for their business.  Let’s take a look at how your business can use inbound marketing services to solve your sales problem.