Digital 64 offers inbound marketing expertise to companies that want to develop their business effectively, but don't necessarily have the resources to recruit an entire marketing team.
Coupled with growth hacking, inbound marketing is the best way for small businesses to develop their sales over the long term, without having the budget of large corporations.
These techniques enable us to be more effective in attracting increasingly distrustful and demanding customers.
So what are inbound marketing and growth hacking?
Inbound marketing: presentation.
Over the past 20 years, with the advent of the Internet, marketing has evolved considerably. We've gone from traditional mass marketing to highly precise, behavioral marketing, aided by new technologies.
The aim is no longer to represent the company and push all the messages out, but to meet customers' unique needs.
We have gone from a few channels of communication (television, radio, press) to an explosion of contact points (mobile, social networks, forums...).
Inbound marketing then gradually emerged to attract prospects through the creation and distribution of quality content.
We must 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, this doesn't mean you should stop using ads. Advertising should be at the service of your inbound marketing strategy.
With inbound marketing, the aim is to be present at the various stages of the buyer's research and decision process. Your messages and content, delivered at the right time, will have a positive impact on your prospect's buying process.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is outbound marketing, where you'll find traditional media (TV, press, radio, billboards), e-mail campaigns, telemarketing and SMS.
Outbound is not dead, quite the contrary. It is, however, a good complement to inbound marketing when used properly, especially in certain sectors.
The inbound marketing method is based on 4 main stages:
Attract
Objective: turn a stranger into a visitor
Means: Website, blog, search engines, social networks
Convert
Objective: convert a visitor into a prospect
Means: landing pages, forms, popups
Sell
Objective: turn 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'm deliberately simplifying here, but behind each step we use many different tools and methods. We'll come back to this later.
An inbound marketing strategy takes a little longer. You need to define your targets (personas), create content and analyze data to optimize. But the results are far more effective. Transformation rates rise, and so do average shopping baskets.
However, you will need to equip yourself with a number of tools that will enable you to track the progress of your prospects and customers at every stage: CRMmarketing automation and various conversion tools.
Once your strategy is in place, you can superimpose growth hacking (or growth marketing) techniques, which are highly complementary.
This video is in English, but it develops the concept of inbound marketing perfectly.
Growth hacking: presentation
Growth hacking is a set of techniques designed tooptimize a company's growth, both in terms of marketing and sales.
The aim is to optimize every phase of the customer lifecycle, by automating certain steps, using certain agile methods, or hijacking certain marketing levers. We sometimes use "hacks" to accelerate growth on a limited budget, hence the name "growth hacking".
Simply put, growth hacking is a blend of marketing, data, creativity, human psychology and computer science.
It will be particularly useful for small businesses, as these techniques enable them to speed up certain processes and grow with limited investment.
Even if growth hacking can be borderline legal in some respects, it can be turned to good account if coupled with a relevant inbound marketing strategy.
I'll have the opportunity to show you different types of growth hacking examples, but perhaps we can start with two quick, concrete 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 different ways. However, they can be very different in terms of the tools used.
The methods are the same, but you need to adapt the strategy and means you use to yourneeds: your target, your geographical area, your budget and your objectives.
Let's take two quick and completely different examples to illustrate my point.
Real Estate Agency
Traditionally, real estate agencies have relied heavily on word-of-mouth, TV advertising, the press and, of course, estate agents.
For many years, real estate agencies have lagged behind when it comes to digital aspects.
Today's real estate agencies aim to :
- build a strong brand and reputation, enabling you to attract prospects to your company when they have a real estate project in mind
- 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 :
- Create a high-quality Internet site, both functionally and graphically
- Create quality articles to showcase your expertise in a particular type of property or geographical area
- Animate your social networks
- Create local events to be identified as the "real estate facilitator
- Creating well-targeted digital advertising
When it comes to growth hacking, there are several avenues you can explore to identify the things that will save you time in your sales cycle.
Here's a possible concrete example:
- What if the agency could find a way to keep track of everyone who wants to move?
- What if the agency could find a way to get an alert whenever people were chatting in a forum about the best neighborhoods in the city where it's located?
Here we see that data is very important. Continuously and automatically identifying interesting prospects would enable the agency to activate its inbound (and outbound) marketing strategies more easily.
Consulting firm
Traditionally, consulting companies 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, healthcare) and of different sizes, but their problem is the same. Show that you're in the best position to help your prospects.
Today, the aim of consulting companies is to :
- demonstrate your expertise in the subjects you cover, so that prospects identify you as the person who can help them when the time comes
- be visible in the right places when companies are looking for advice in your field
You'll need to create a lot of written and video content to demonstrate your experience and expertise: articles, white papers, guides, customer testimonials, case studies. Then there are the various small events: breakfast or afterwork, for example. We'll come back to this in a moment.
You'll need a website, a good CRM and a marketing automation tool to keep track of your prospects and send them quality e-mails to convince them that you're the expert in the field.
Example of a growth hack for consulting firms
Here too, you need to think case by case about what will have the greatest impact on your sales cycle. Here are a few examples:
- What if you had a way ofautomatically identifying the contact details of managers at a company you're interested in, and gettingthem 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 of creating a breakfast-type event every month with more than 30 high-quality leads each time?
What's interesting about growh hacking is that, even if certain "classic" techniques exist, you need to analyze your needs, your customers and the way you work to identify the best ways to optimize each process.
Agency in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz and Bayonne
Although we also work with a number of customers in Paris and Bordeaux, our aim is tobuild up a strong network in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region, 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 courses and create content for entrepreneurs in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region.
To register, click on the button below:
Learn about digital marketing for free with our article on marketing courses in the 64.
Would you like to try it out? We've built models that enable us to identify the best prospects and convert them into customers.
It's always a matter of adapting to your market and your offerings. Our experience with small and medium-sized businesses in all sectors means we can move quickly and offer you recipes that already work in your sector.