In previous blogs, we’ve covered setting your goals, knowing your story, and defining your audience through your Buyer Personas. We’ll call that the foundation to your Inbound Marketing. Now let’s put all that hard work into action with targeted campaigns designed to move prospects all the way through your sales funnel – from visitor to lead to customer.
The success of your Inbound campaign can be represented with the three C’s: Content, Calls-To-Action, and Close.

Attract Visitors with Content

Today’s audiences are remarkably informed. They’ve already done their homework long before they land on your page. With so much content vying for your potential customer’s attention, your content needs to be fresh, timely, and most of all, relevant to your Buyer Personas.
By knowing who your ideal customers are – their goals and challenges – you are able to produce content tailor-made for them, demonstrating that your company understands what motivates them. This content can take many forms – blog posts, eBooks, checklists, how-to guides, case studies, white papers, and videos. There’s just one rule: the content has to be of value to your potential customer. These are the topics that will catch their attention. These are the things they’re already searching for.
Blogging, in particular, is highly effective in driving quality traffic to your site. Let your Buyer Persona insights guide your subject matter (as with all content), and keep publishing on a regular basis. One blog view may lead to another, which may lead to further exploration of your site, which, in turn, may lead to interest in checking out your additional resources.
Your SEO strategy and social media publishing serve to point strangers to your content, driving them to your website to access it. This is powerful stuff: strangers have clicked on a link directing them to your website because they realized that you have what they’re looking for. This is the first step in a successful full-funnel campaign. The next step is to give them what they came for.

Convert Visitors to Leads with Calls-To-Action

A Call-To-Action (CTA) is designed for one very specific purpose: move website visitors further down your sales funnel by converting them into leads. With blogs, your CTA is providing an option to subscribe. For every other piece of content, a little more information is required before the visitor can access it.
This is called the value exchange – an offer for valuable information in exchange for the visitor’s contact information. If a prospect wants to download your free eBook, he first has to provide his name and email address. If another prospect is interested in something more thorough – like an in-depth case study or white paper – then you may require that she enter her company or industry information as well.
Once you have their contact info, they are officially leads. And not just that – these are high-quality leads because they sought you out, visited your site, and downloaded your content. They’ve shown you that they’re interested in what it is that you have to offer.

Close Leads Into Customers 

You’ve gained visitors. You’ve qualified your leads. Let’s close some new business. Continue to engage the lead and nurture them through a sale. There are a few different ways to do this.

CTAs

Calls-To-Action are good for more than just converting visitors into leads, they can also be utilized at the bottom of your sales funnel to close a client. If a lead originally downloaded an eBook, include a CTA for the next stage in the Buyer’s Journey on the download page, offering a free consultation or estimate.

Personalized Email Workflow

Once you have a visitor’s contact info, they’re a lead. And once they’re a lead, you use that contact info to send them personalized emails with – you guessed it – additional CTAs and content offers.

Email Automation

With powerful inbound marketing tools like HubSpot, you can automate this part of the sales process, incorporating follow-up directions for if/when scenarios. For example, if a lead downloaded your project checklist, then a follow-up email could automatically be sent that includes another offer for a higher-end project management resource.
And after you close a new customer? You continue to use your content to delight and inform them, transforming them from clients to promoters. They’ll share your content with their own contacts, driving new visitors to your website and starting the process all over again with a new batch of prospects.

Conclusion

Not all visitors will become leads, and not all leads will become customers. But by utilizing the full-funnel approach to your Inbound Marketing campaigns, you are offering the right content to the right people at exactly the right time. This effectively guides your prospects step-by-step through each stage of the Buyer’s Journey – from stranger to satisfied customer.