Why Are B2B Marketers Refocusing on Inbound Strategy?

Faced with an economic downturn, brands are seeking to cut costs and increase efficiency. Inbound marketing offers a tried and true way to build a stable yet agile digital presence. It can help businesses adapt by offering a framework for understanding and reaching out to customers in a more targeted and personal way. 

The focus is on strengthening and growing your organisation by building meaningful, lasting relationships with prospects, existing clients, and partners. Inbound marketing forges these connections by creating audience-led experiences that offer a solution to the user’s problem.

The inbound method is divided into three stages:

• Attract: In this phase, your marketing team focuses on creating content and conversational experiences that attract the right customers.

• Engage: During this phase, sales and marketing collaborate to present solutions that address the audience's pain points and drive desired behaviours.

• Delight: Here, marketing and customer service join forces to help customers find success with their product or service, and exceed expectations.

Inbound methods make your brand attractive to prospects because it offers a value exchange. When done correctly, they do not feel they are being targeted and sold to. 

Instead of trying to go out and grab attention, you offer the personalised, self-led experiences B2B buyers want. You focus on empowering business leaders to reach their goals at any point in their journey with your brand. Product specs, pricing, reviews—all the information buyers need to decide is available at their fingertips, any time, any place.

Building Resiliency with Inbound Marketing Strategy

There are many reasons inbound marketing can be an incredibly efficient way to maintain business momentum and create resilience across your organisation:

• The driving philosophy behind inbound is to build trust and credibility. This focus on relationships can be an important differentiator and indicator of quality during times of economic uncertainty.

• As customers tighten their belts and churn increases, inbound helps to attract new customers through increased brand visibility and awareness.

• Inbound recognises that in the B2B world, you only succeed when your clients succeed. This focus helps companies to retain customers and drive repeat sales through an improved customer experience. As other prospects hear of this success, they are drawn to your organisation, creating a flywheel effect.

• Inbound optimises content for search intent to drive more targeted traffic to a company's website. By matching content to the customer journey, it helps generate higher-quality leads, accelerate the pipeline, and increase conversions and sales.

• It can be more cost-effective and flexible than traditional outbound marketing methods, such as print or television advertising. This flexibility can be especially important during a recession when budgets may be tight.

• The data you collect through an inbound strategy helps you to analyse your business and adapt to changes in customer behaviour because of the slowing economy. You can spot opportunities, generate leads and sales over the long term, and emerge from the recession more resilient than before. You can aim for your brand to not just survive, but to thrive.

In short, by reinvesting resources in strategies that offer multiple benefits, you can do more with less, help see your business through troubled times, and even emerge stronger than before.

Six Essential Elements for Successful Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing provides a robust framework for recession resilience—but it depends on having a solid strategy and digital infrastructure. This is especially true if you are working with a smaller budget and need to stretch resources to achieve your marketing goals. Sound foundations and careful planning are necessary to make sure you spend your money wisely.

1: Clearly Defined Goals & KPIs

Be clear on the results you want to see, and how they will help you to mitigate the effects of the recession. 

Do you want to expand your brand reach? Improve marketing qualified leads? Or grow the value of existing accounts by increasing the number of cross-sell/upsell opportunities?

Once you know where you want to be, you can reverse engineer how to get there by:

• Identifying gaps in your existing sales and marketing efforts,

• Deciding which inbound approach will best support your goal (i.e. Attract, Engage, or Delight),

• Forecasting how long the desired improvements should take based on historical data,

• Determining the KPIs you will use to benchmark campaign performance.

2. A Firm Understanding of Your Target B2B Buyer

You can not create next-level customer experiences until you know your audience. So, ensure you have a clear picture of your target prospects and learn all you can about them. 

Who are they? What is their industry? What challenges are they facing because of the recession? What type of information are they searching for? How can you assist them in their task? 

Tools like stakeholder analysis and influence mapping can be enormously helpful in building customer personas. Likewise, you can use them to flesh out detailed account profiles if your inbound campaign is supporting an ABM program.

3. Quality Content That Is Mapped to Your Buyer’s Journey

Brilliant content is the backbone of B2B inbound marketing and needs to be mapped to the different phases of your customer journey.

Attract

Inbound content to attract your target audience includes things like blog posts, infographics, social media, videos, podcasts, and online quizzes. Your goal is to capture the attention of potential customers by providing value—which includes not just education, but also entertainment.

Engage

Content should resonate with business leaders in a way that makes them want to deepen their relationship with your brand. Beyond industry research, webinars, and case studies, engagement tactics also include how you handle inbound sales calls/emails. Sales reps and customer service teams should always focus on offering solutions rather than selling products.

Delight

This type of content is all about customer success. You want to ensure buyers are happy with your product or service long after they make a purchase. For example, setting up drip email campaigns that deliver tips for how they can take full advantage of different features. 

Look for opportunities to enhance your customer experience at every stage by incorporating more interactive elements. Say you are a manufacturer. You could add a production rate calculator to your site offering users the ability to see a personalised estimate based on their specific manufacturing parameters. 

You can also use AI chatbots to provide 24/7 help with common issues, so clients don’t have to wait on a customer support rep.

This type of interactivity creates a richer experience for the lead. And the insights you capture about someone's specific situation are pure gold for proactive outreach and sales conversations when B2B buyers must be even more careful about vendor selection. 

4. Updated SEO Practices

The ways B2B buyers search for information and the way search engines rank results are always changing. Your SEO strategy needs to adapt to keep up. 

For example, besides mobile-first indexing, we now have to account for voice search, video search, image search, ‘position zero’ and zero-click rich SERP features. You should not only revisit your SEO tactics but also ensure that your analytic tools can track these channels.

We won’t delve too much into specific tactics here (that is far too much information to cover in a single post!). However, taking a higher-level view, here are some things you can do to improve your SEO overall.

• Ensure Crawl Accessibility. Nothing else you do will matter if search engines can't find your content. Use sitemaps, robots.txt files, URL parameters, and NoIndex tags to suggest how search engines should (and shouldn't) crawl your site. Doing so will help maximise your crawl budget to ensure your most important pages are getting indexed for search.

• Integrate structured data. Structured data, or data schema, helps search engines ‘understand’ what a particular piece of content is about. For example, is the content a creative work like a book? A product page? An event announcement? FAQ page? Structured data is also required to make your content eligible to appear as a Google rich snippet.

• Map content to search intent. Why is someone conducting a search? Are they looking to learn something? Go somewhere? Buy a product? Or are they comparing different solutions? Understanding your audience’s search intent will help you dial into strategic search terms and provide relevant content throughout your buyer’s journey.

• Match content format to search type. If you want your content to appear in an image search, ensure it is an optimised image. If you want to show up in voice search, write content around specific questions and try to keep the answer short and sweet. If you would like to appear as a rich snippet list or table, improve your chances by replicating this structure in your content.

A solid SEO strategy is important during economic slowdowns. Driving more targeted traffic to your website organically is an extremely cost-effective way to generate higher-quality leads and keep your sales pipeline full.

5. A Strong Platform and Content Distribution Model

Social media, SEO, and online advertising are all important channels for connecting with your audience. However, you can not build your content distribution model entirely on ‘leased’ real estate. What if a third-party platform you depend on goes under during the recession due to poor leadership or bad investment decisions? 

Instead, work to build up your brand’s digital platform and marketing channels. Spaces that you control, like your website, email newsletter, in-person events, online learning platforms, and mobile apps.

Consider Adobe. They offer such a comprehensive experience that creatives can learn their trade, build their portfolios, and find jobs all on the same platform. Yes, Adobe uses other channels to spread brand awareness, but the heart of its content distribution model is its own platform.

This is the type of inbound experience you want to emulate. One that builds a community of people who choose to interact on your platform. Followers who seek out your booth at events and attend your live streams. The long-time clients who contribute to your forums. The B2B sellers and buyers that use your online marketplace to do business. A loyal user base that prefers your experience to competitors and will keep coming back, even when times are tough. 

6. Automation and Data Collection

In a recent study, 61% of B2B respondents said their organisation either didn’t have the right Martech stack, or it wasn’t being used to potential.

Don’t make this mistake.

Using the right marketing automation platform is central to creating successful inbound marketing campaigns. It is the means through which B2B brands provide customised buyer journeys at scale and streamline their sales pipeline management.

However, effective automation depends on access to user data, and the depreciation of third-party cookies is causing a lot of uncertainty. 

The solution is to build consent-based data collection into your inbound marketing strategies. 

The user data you collect through your website, lead magnets, customer service calls, etc., can optimise inbound and outbound tactics alike. This business intelligence will help you take advantage of emerging opportunities, so your brand comes out of the recession even stronger than before.

Inbound + Outbound = Opportunities Abound

Strengthening organic, inbound marketing strategies can help companies weather the current economic storm. 

More than just driving website traffic, inbound builds a library of quality content and first-party data that supports other sales and marketing endeavours. It puts the resources you need for stronger campaigns across all channels at your fingertips, even if you have a limited creative budget. And by optimising your advertising to work in tandem with organic tactics, you can provide an omnichannel experience even when money is tight.

At 1827 Marketing, we help companies future-proof their marketing with brilliant B2B content, AI-assisted sales and marketing automation tools, and carefully planned strategies that drive results.

Book a demo today. We would love to hear about your business and show how our software and services can help.