Digital 64 offers inbound marketing expertise to companies that want to grow their business effectively, but don't necessarily have the resources to hire an entire marketing team.
Coupled with growth hacking, inbound marketing is the best way for small businesses to develop their turnover in the long term without having the budget of large companies.
These techniques make it possible to be more effective in attracting increasingly wary and demanding customers.
So what is inbound marketing and growth hacking?
Inbound marketing: presentation.
Since the last 20 years and the arrival of the Internet, marketing has evolved a lot. We have moved from traditional mass marketing to very precise and behavioural marketing, also helped by new technologies.
The goal is no longer to represent the company and push all the messages out, but to meet the unique needs of the customers.
We have gone from a few communication channels (television, radio, press) to an explosion of contact points (mobile, social networks, forums, etc.).
Inbound marketing then gradually appeared to attract prospects through the creation and distribution of quality content.
You should no longer interrupt prospects, but become what interests them.
You need to get them interested in the content you create, not your expertise, and not just the product and ads you run, whether in B2B or B2C marketing.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should stop using ads. Ads should serve your inbound marketing strategy.
With inbound marketing, the objective is to be present at the different moments of research and decision of the buyer. Through your messages and content, delivered at the right time, you will have a positive impact on your prospect's buying process.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is outbound marketing, where you will find traditional media (TV, press, radio, posters), e-mailing campaigns, telemarketing and SMS.
Outbound is not dead, quite the contrary. It is however a good complement to inbound marketing when it is well used, especially in certain sectors.
The inbound marketing method is based on 4 main steps:
Attract
Objective: to turn a stranger into a visitor
Means: Website, blog, search engines, social networks
Convert
Objective: transform a visitor into a prospect
Means: landing pages, forms, popups
Sell
Objective: to transform a visitor into a prospect
Means: videos, e-mail, CRM tool, lead scoring
Build loyalty
Objective: transform a customer into an ambassador
Means: sponsorship, events, personal relations
I am deliberately simplifying here, but behind each step, we use many different tools and methods. We will have the opportunity to come back to this.
An inbound marketing strategy takes a little more time. You have to define your targets (personas), create content, and analyze the data to optimize. But the results are much more effective. Conversion rates increase and so do average shopping carts.
However, you will need to equip yourself with a few tools that will allow you to track your prospects' and customers' journey through each stage: CRM, marketing automation, and various conversion tools.
Once your strategy is in place, you can overlay growth hacking (or growth marketing) techniques on top of it, which are very complementary.
This video is in English but it develops perfectly the concept of inbound marketing.
Growth hacking : presentation
Growth hacking is the set of techniques tooptimize the growth of the company on both marketing and commercial aspects.
Thus, the objective is to optimize each phase of the customer life cycle by automating certain steps, using certain agile methods or by diverting certain marketing levers. We sometimes use "hacks" to accelerate this growth with a limited budget, hence the name "growth hacking".
Simply put, growth hacking is a mix of marketing, data, creativity, human psychology and computer science.
It will be particularly useful for small businesses, as these techniques allow them to speed up certain processes and grow with a limited investment.
Even if growth hacking can be borderline legal on some points, it can be turned very positively if it is coupled with a relevant inbound marketing strategy.
I will have the opportunity to show you different types of growth hacking examples, but maybe we can start with two concrete and quick examples of inbound marketing and growth hacking.
Two examples of inbound marketing and growth hacking
Inbound marketing and growth marketing can be used in many cases. However, they can be very different in terms of the tools used.
The methods are the same, but the strategy and means used must be adapted to yourneeds: your target, your geographical area, your budget and your objectives.
Let's take two completely different quick examples to illustrate my point.
Real estate agency
Traditionally, real estate agencies work a lot by word of mouth, TV advertising, press and of course by their real estate agents.
For many years, real estate agencies have lagged behind in digital aspects.
Today, the objective of real estate agencies is both :
- build a strong brand and reputation that allows you to attract prospects to them when they have a real estate project
- to be visible in the right places on the Internet when others are searching for real estate for example.
Theinbound marketing strategyapplied to real estate agencies consists of :
- To create a quality Internet both functionally and graphically
- Create quality articles to highlight your expertise on a type of property or a geographical area
- Animate your social networks
- Create local events to be identified as the "real estate facilitator
- Create well-targeted digital ads
In terms of growth hacking, several avenues can be explored to identify what would save you time in your business cycle.
Here is a possible concrete example:
- What if the agency found a way to get the contact information of everyone who wants to move?
- What if the agency found a way to get an alert whenever people were chatting in a forum about the best neighborhoods in the city where it is located?
Here we see that data is very important. Continuously and automatically identifying interesting prospects would allow the agency to activate its inbound (and outbound) marketing strategies more easily.
Consulting firm
Traditionally, consulting firms relied heavily on word of mouth, an army of sales people and a few partnerships.
Consulting companies may be in different sectors (logistics, real estate, retail, industry, health) and of different sizes, their problem is the same. Show that you are best placed to help your prospects.
Today, the objective of consulting companies is to :
- show your expertise on the subjects you cover so that prospects identify you as the one who can help you when the time comes
- to be visible in the right places when companies are looking for advice in your field
You will have to create a lot of written and video content to demonstrate your experience and expertise: articles, white papers, guides, customer testimonials, case studies. And then there are the various small events: breakfast or afterwork for example. We'll come back to this later.
You'll need a website, a good CRM and a marketing automation tool to keep track of your prospects and send them quality emails to convince them that you are the expert in this field.
Example of a growth hack for consulting companies
Here again, you need to think on a case-by-case basis about what would give you the most impact on your business cycle. Here are some examples:
- What if you had a way toautomatically identify the contact information of managers at a company you're interested in and getthem to call you?
- What if you had a way to create quality content automatically at the end of each project?
- What if you had a way to create a breakfast-type event every month with more than 30 high-quality leads each time?
What is interesting about growh hacking is that even if some "classic" techniques exist, you have to analyze your needs, your customers and your way of working to identify the best ways to optimize each process.
Agency in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz and Bayonne
Even if we also work with a few clients in Paris and Bordeaux, our wish is tohave a large network in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques and particularly in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz and Bayonne.
In particular, we want to promote local know-how, heritage and all the entrepreneurs who work in our region.
In addition to our web marketing agency, we organize free training and create content for entrepreneurs in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
If you wish to register, click on the button below:
Learn digital marketing for free with our article on marketing training in the 64.
Do you want to test? We've built models that allow us to identify the best prospects and convert them into customers.
There's always work to do to adapt to your market and your offerings. Our experience with small and medium-sized businesses in all sectors allows us to move quickly and to propose recipes that already work in your sector.