Sales are dwindling, you’ve spent thousands of pounds of your outbound marketing campaign, but your business hasn’t benefited. If this is you, trust that you aren’t alone. Most business owners find themselves in this position when using outbound marketing solutions.
As technology advances, consumers have become more tech savvy and they want to ‘find’ businesses instead of being approached by them. In fact, an infographic provided by Mashable shows that over 200 million Americans have listed their number on the National Do Not Call registry and over half of the mail sent out to consumers is tossed aside without a second look. However, businesses that have blogs have seen a 55% increase in sales from consumers finding them through an organic internet search.
If your business is suffering from low or stagnant sales, here are a few inbound solutions that can work to improve them and help you to generate quality leads.
Increase your sales with these inbound marketing solutions
Think about how much it costs to rent a booth, travel to trade shows, mail out information, pay for advertising space and cold-call unqualified leads. Now think about how much you can save by simply dedicating a few hours a day to work on your inbound marketing campaign.
Creating relevant and helpful content is the number one key to increase sales with any inbound marketing strategy, making most inbound solutions worthwhile. Below, you’ll find some of the inbound marketing solutions that work to increase business sales in any industry.
Create content to nurture leads
Lead nurturing is a very important part of any sales-oriented business. Once your leads are considered ‘quality’ you want to do anything within your marketing power to keep them, and convert them in to buyers. So, how do you do that? Easy, by nurturing them. According to Infusionsoft, only 10% of leads buy right away, whereas 67% buy within 1 year. This makes lead nurturing unmistakably important.
There are many ways you can nurture a lead using inbound marketing, but one solution that businesses use quite often is content. Marketers usually gather email addresses from leads and send interesting and helpful whitepapers, free trials, discount codes and news updates periodically. This helps to establish trust in your business and shortens the sale cycle, thus improving your sales. Industry experts recommended emailing your leads at least 3 times per week.
Toss out flyers and letters and work on an industry-specific blog
Did you know that only 19% of sales come from trade shows, whereas over half comes from inbound marketing such as SEO, social media and blogs? Now, this is where most business owners find their lost income. All of that money could be better spent on yourself, right? So, instead of wasting money on outbound marketing, draw the consumers to you with a business blog.
If you already have a website for your business, not to worry, the investment in purchasing a blog is going to help fuel your website.
Simply start a blog, start creating helpful, important, industry-related content and enjoy the higher visibility and increase sales. Consumers will find you through a search using keywords. These keywords should be included in your content helping them to find your blog. Include a form sign-up so you can gather information from the consumer allowing you to nurture them until they make a purchase.
Others will simply navigate to your business website and purchase right away. According to statistics provided by Imbue Marketing, businesses that have blogs have 55% more website visitors and 88% more leads per month.
Introduce your brand to the world through social media
Perhaps you already notice that many businesses are utilizing social media to increase brand visibility. However, did you also know that these businesses are benefiting from increased sales? Using social media as an inbound marketing tool not only may improve SEO, helping consumers to find your business easier, but it also draws in more consumers.
Social media also helps small businesses and start-ups to learn more about their audience and to find their voice. According to Incentive Magazine, businesses that benefit the most from social media are those that share engaging posts, and those who make their product pages shareable via social media.
Conclusion
Stop your sales from dwindling by improving your inbound marketing strategies today! Open a blog, get posting on your social media pages, nurture your leads and soon you’ll see a shift in revenue.
Are you ready to make that transition from outbound to inbound marketing? If you have, how soon did you see an improvement in sales?