Le Vertone's Green Paper on inbound marketing has just been published. I was happy to participate in an interview with some of the market’s most important editors such as Oracle, Hubspot, and Marketo, as well as our friends from Zuma, 1min30, Aressy, Pim-Bim, Les Navigateurs ou Plezi.
A summary of the state of B2B inbound marketing
This green paper provides B2B companies perspective when considering plunging into the adventure of Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation. It demystifies customer relationship automation that is seen to be reserved for B2C enterprises or distributors. It provides the do's and don'ts, sets a methodological guideline that acts like a compass before and during the implementation process:
- Define inbound marketing and how to combine it with classic outbound marketing;
- Set objectives;
- Explain inbound methodology: the infamous persona, scripts and of course the impact on organisations;
- Guide in the choice of tools and how to create impacting content.
VERTONE’s method is based on 5 major phases
- 1.Audit & definition of the strategy
- 2.Creation of buyer personas and nurturing programmes
- 3.Establishing the content creation system
- 4.Setting up lead management and collection tools
- 5.Tools to perform initial tests
Here are a few excerpts:
- "Inbound marketing is an extension of B2C brand content systems that aim to create a brand territory within the B2B universe by integrating an advanced relationship system"
- "Inbound marketing optimises commercial performance (…) and represents an efficient way to create legitimacy on a new market that the company wishes to enter. For young companies, lead generation is proof that the system is pertinent before image branding is launched."
- "For Inbound marketing to be efficient, the size of the audience requires a minimum of outbound in order to ensure awareness of the content and generate traffic."
- "Inbound is better adapted to B2B companies operating in a sector requiring specific expertise with reduced purchasing and/or irregular purchasing frequency , with a significant need to acquire clients and with a pre-existing digital entity."
- "The Inbound system is directed to individuals and not their company. Defining B2B buyer personas is therefore a necessity "to establish scripts for the different purchasing cycles and to adapt content and dissemination methods."
- "Aside from its role of qualifying and progressively engaging the prospect, maturation also optimizes cost allocation by triggering the commercial contact at the right time."
- "The challenge is to bring the sales force to understand the benefits of qualified leads brought under marketing campaigns."
- "Solutions on the market to develop inbound marketing have reached maturation. We recommend a test & learn approach, by starting with simple tools, to get to know the system and learn how to work the methods and operating modes."
- "The idea is to have measure several indicators showing the impact of your content to progressively identify what the right content/frequency mix is. Frequency is the key to success."
