Inbound Marketing Report for Anchor Computer Systems. September 2015

Transcription

1 Inbound Marketing Report for Anchor Computer Systems September 2015

2 Introduction First of all, thank you very much for your time on the phone last week. The information we were able to gather will prove invaluable to our own marketing efforts, and I hope you found some value in the call too. I have benchmarked your current marketing against our inbound best practice model and in this report have summarised what I see as the key issues you need to address to improve your marketing effectiveness and made some high level recommendations to address them. Should you have any questions about the content in this report, or wish to take the conversation further, feel free to give me a call on or me on matt@wowconsulting.co.uk.

3 About Us Formed in 2002 and operating out of the Silicon Roundabout at the heart of London s media and tech startup scene, we are a small but highly skilled team of business strategy consultants and certified inbound marketers with a strategy before tactics philosophy, an analytical approach grounded in constant testing and optimisation and a determination to turn every single company we work with into raving fans. We help businesses harness inbound marketing to generate more high converting leads at a fraction of the cost of traditional outbound methods and our mission is to help turn figure businesses into 8-figure businesses by If you re tired of dealing with agencies who want to push rehashed, off-the-shelf solutions, creative types who are more interested in winning design awards than making your phone ring and business consultants and coaches who add zero value to your business we may be just your kind of agency because those are all the things we re not!

4 Transformational marketing Most businesses that make the shift from traditional to inbound marketing, never see the full benefits. That s because deploying a series of stand-alone tactics will only ever deliver limited results. We ensure our clients are well prepared before embarking on inbound marketing by addressing all of the key elements required for maximum ROI in an integrated way: a detailed and well researched strategy (your flight plan); an automated system that uses content to attract, nurture and convert ideal prospects (your engine and fuel); closed loop metrics so you can see what s working and what isn t (your cockpit instruments); an integrated approach to building the capacity, skills and culture required for successful execution (flight school). We call it transformational marketing because it s an approach that has been proven to build sustainable long term competitive advantage and deliver exceptional growth and profitability for the businesses we work with.

5 So what is Inbound Marketing? Inbound Marketing, put simply, is marketing for the 21 st century. Gone are the days of relying on costly and increasingly ineffective cold-calling and direct marketing. The inbound methodology facilitates the buyer s journey through the sales funnel from strangers to advocates of your brand using a variety of channels such as social media, blogging, SEO, landing pages, forms, and . Inbound Marketing gets your prospects coming to you, and when implemented properly allows you to track your leads every step of the way, making the job of both sales and marketing easier than ever.

6

7 Challenge 1: Company Blog The first marketing challenge we have identified for Anchor is the fact that you don t currently have a company blog. A blog is not only a great way to interact with prospects and customers and position you as a thought leader in your industry, but regularly creating and sharing high-quality blog content is the single most effective tactic for generating organic website traffic. B2B companies that blog average 67% more leads than those who don t These companies are also 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI Finally, they also enjoy on average 97% more links to their website [All statistics courtesy of HubSpot] Regular blogging also gives you a ready supply of great content to share across social media along with a bank of useful content you can use to move prospects down your marketing funnel and support your sales efforts once they are ready to buy.

8 Challenge 2: Social Media Presence Social media is one of the key ways of increasing brand exposure and ensuring your content is shared as widely as possible, thus generating traffic to your website. It also plays a crucial role in engaging your prospects and customers and putting a human face to your brand. 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. 92% of marketers agreed that social media is important for their business 80% of marketers indicated that their social media efforts increased traffic. Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. On our call, one of the issues we discussed was the need to develop a more active social media presence in order to remain ahead of your competitors. At present you are doing very little on any platform, apart from individual prospecting on LinkedIn.

9 Challenge 3: Lead Capture Offering your website visitors useful and engaging content in the form of guides, whitepapers, videos and infographics in exchange for their contact details is a key component of the inbound marketing methodology. Currently this is not something you are doing and as a result you are almost certainly wasting a lot of your website traffic. Lead capture is important for 2 reasons: 1. Without a lead capture mechanism you have no way of following up with visitors after they leave your site and nurturing them until they are ready to buy from you. This is crucial since most of your website visitors will not be sales-ready. 2. By capturing leads and tracking every interaction with them in a centralized marketing database you will be able to focus your sales efforts on warm leads which will be much easier to close, reducing your cost of customer acquisition and your sales cycle.

10 Challenge 4: Marketing Metrics You mentioned that you experience a high volume of traffic to your website, but that you are not monitoring or tracking where your visitors are coming from, or how many of them are converting. Integrating your marketing tools and CRM to produce closed loop metrics provides you with a wealth of information about which marketing efforts are bringing in the best leads and whether your sales team is focused on the most qualified leads. In other words, you ll know which bits of your marketing are working and which aren t so you are in complete control.

11 Challenge 5: Website Strategy A clear and coherent website strategy is crucial if your inbound marketing efforts are going to give you the results you want. We have identified 2 key issues with your website: 1. Your site is not particularly interactive or engaging. This not only impacts on the quality of the overall user experience but also means that your visitors are probably not spending much time on your site, which in turn is making it harder for you to get found in the search engines. 2. Your content is noticeably you focused (your company, your team, your solutions), rather than speaking to the needs and pain-points of your prospects. The purpose of your content should be to educate, to emphasise the benefits of your services, overcome objections and highlight your competitive superiority. See Nortridge for an example of a competitor who have a much more problem centred approach.

12 Recommendations 1. Strategy - Take the time to put together a strategy that tackles the key challenges you have identified in a holistic way and develop the business case for integrating inbound into your current marketing so that you can make an informed decision about whether this is a worthwhile investment. 2. Targeting - Develop personas for each of your ideal prospects that identify their needs, major challenges, pain points, buying objections, the types of content they consume and how they use social media. 3. Content Strategy - Map out the information needs of your prospects at each stage of the buyers journey, then review your website content to identify any gaps. Remember, the purpose of your content should be to educate, to emphasise the benefits of your services, overcome objections and highlight your competitive superiority so when brainstorming content ideas make sure you can check all of the boxes.

13 Recommendations 4. Traffic Generation Once you have a clear content strategy, set up a company blog and start posting on a regular basis. Use social media to share your content as widely as possible and build your audience. 5. Lead Capture and Nurturing - Add landing pages to your website where you can capture your visitors contact details in exchange for premium content. Then use automated follow up sequences to nurture your leads until they are sales ready. 6. Metrics Implement closed loop metrics and regular reporting so that you can measure and track all of your traffic, leads and conversions and see what is working and what isn t in your marketing.

14 Are you ready for transformation? With a high average sale value, a defined buying process and a long and complex sales cycle, we believe that Anchor would be an excellent fit for inbound marketing. With this in mind, we would be happy to work with you on a free of charge basis to put together a high level inbound marketing plan and business case so that you can make an informed decision about whether this would be a worthwhile investment, based on a clear and detailed understanding of what s involved, how it can be integrated with your existing outbound marketing, the financial commitment and resources required for implementation and the results and ROI you can expect. In return we would want your permission to use you as a case study (assuming you are happy with our work of course). I will follow up with another short phone call in the next week to get your feedback and discuss whether there is indeed an opportunity for us to work together to develop an inbound strategy for Anchor. If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to give me a call on or me at matt@wowconsulting.co.uk

15