Digital marketing can be simplified in 9 out of 10 cases to three simple processes: inbound marketing, lead nurturing and digital sales campaigns.
If you implement all three well, you'll be able to scale up to a level you never thought possible, reach more customers than ever before, and see a huge impact on your sales. You'll also have more time to focus on new ideas and strategic issues instead of constantly fighting new fires and trying to meet stressful deadlines.
Read on and I'll walk you through the processes one by one, and show you exactly how you can implement them today.
Digital marketing process 1: Inbound marketing (and sales)
Inbound marketing is about creating sales funnels that start online and end with a purchase. These sales funnels consist of the following steps:
- Get found: Understand what your customers are searching for and write content that attracts visits.
- Convert: Convert your visitors into leads by offering something interesting in return.
- Sales: Create processes to sell to these leads - with the help of both marketing and sales.
Smart marketing allows you to talk to people at every stage in the best possible way: get found by talking about their everyday problems (most commonly on your own blog and through social media marketing), convert by providing new insights, and sell by talking about yourself, your services and your products.
Digital marketing process 2: Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is important because most of the leads you get from inbound marketing won't buy right away. Most will drop off somewhere in the sales process.
You will also need to target those who actually buy. And those who will never buy but are still valuable (e.g. potential partners, opinion leaders, even potential employees).
Therefore, you need a process that allows a lead to jump out of the buying cycle, get processed, and jump back into the buying cycle when it's ready.
A good lead nurturing process does just that. It retrains leads who drop out of the buying process, keeps them warm, educates them, and enables them to jump right back into the buying process when they're ready.
A good nurturing process includes the following components:
- Collection: Both those who drop out of a buying process and those who are curious about more content from you.
- Segmentation: So you can give different things to different groups.
- Follow-up: Mostly via email, but also via other channels (e.g. social media and retargeting) and preferably the same message wherever they are.
- Tracking: So you can see when it's time to push the lead into a new sales process.
Digital marketing process 3: Digital sales campaigns
Digital sales campaigns become more important the more contacts your inbound marketing generates.
While lead nurturing is reactive and "waiting" for a lead to be ready, digital sales campaigns are more proactive.
Here you select a group (if you have a good marketing automation system, you can do it dynamically based on both interests and actions), and create a campaign to sell something to this target group.
"Selling" can also mean, for example, selling an event or registering interest in something. Some of the most common examples of what digital sales campaigns can be about are:
- Invitation to events
- Invitation to webinars
- Temporary discounts or product offers
- "Early access"
- Opportunity to participate in beta testing
- Request for feedback or surveys
Most companies do not have the capacity to do all of these well. Normally, the 80/20 rule applies. One or two of the above types of digital sales campaigns will account for the majority of the engagement you will receive. Therefore, measurement is very important.
Therefore, try a few you believe in and measure both cost and results. When you find one that works, forget the others. Focus on standardizing, systematizing and scaling up the one that worked!
A Swedish company that has succeeded extremely well with this is the customer Hypergene, which I have worked with. They have really found their thing with regular webinars. They have standardized how the webinars are created, how contacts are invited, and how they are followed up.
Because of this focus, they manage to hold several professional and interesting webinars every month. They always have many and committed participants. And of course, this translates into great sales. Very impressive!
How all digital marketing processes are connected
Inbound marketing generates leads. Lead nurturing educates and keeps your leads warm until they are ready to buy. And digital sales campaigns bring those who are ready to buy back into a sales process.
If you want good results, you have to do all three. Alone, the processes are quite weak.
For example, if you only do inbound marketing, you will get many leads, but 95% of your leads will be lost. Because very few leads will go through your buying process from start to finish in one go.
Lead nurturing only works if you have a digital sales process that hot leads can jump back into.
And digital sales campaigns don't work if you don't have a large database to begin with.
It takes a lot of effort to build up all these three processes at once. My recommendation is to do it in this order:
- Start by creating the inbound marketing process: This is the foundation that needs to be in place for the other two to work, and it delivers great results on its own.
- When you start getting leads regularly, shift your focus to lead nurturing: this ensures that the majority of the leads you get are not lost.
- Once you've built up a large enough database to make it worth trying to sell directly to them, pick the digital sales campaign types you believe in most and test which one works best.
It takes time. But when you are done, you will have a world-class marketing machine. It will pay for itself many times over. And you'll have the time and energy to focus on growth, new ideas, and more strategic issues.
