How Does Digital Marketing Work?

Digital Marketing is the set of strategies with the intent of promoting a brand on the internet. It differs from traditional marketing by including channels and methods that allow the analysis of results in real-time. Your goal with digital marketing is to raise awareness of your brand online through various channels. Then you can drive traffic and conversion by using paid advertisements like sponsoring an article on websites like TechCrunch.

What exactly is digital marketing?

In today’s day and age, the internet is incorporated into our lives in such a way that it is almost impossible to do anything without it. It is no coincidence that it is increasingly difficult to see people disconnected from their cell phones, having the internet at their fingertips.

And if our life is no longer the same with the internet, the same can be said about the purchase process. Today we look for products or services that we want on the internet, either to look for the best prices (when we already know what we want), to look for information about a certain product or service (when we are still studying the possibility of purchase).

And even to discover more about a problem we have (when we still don’t know which solution will help us).

We call all of this Digital Marketing: a set of information and actions that are done in various digital media products to promote companies and products.

Digital Marketing emerged in the 1990s and changed the way companies use technology to promote their businesses. The term has become more popular as people have switched to using more digital devices in the shopping process, searching for products, or making purchases themselves.

Digital Marketing changed the buying process because, in the past, almost all the information that we could obtain about products and services was in the hands of companies that offered these solutions.

In other words: to find out about a product or service, you had to go to the salesperson, who would probably try to sell you on the company instead of offering free information about the solutions.

Today, Digital Marketing has enabled the consumer to have a more active role in this process. By the numbers, 60% of the purchase process has already been carried out before the consumer contacts the seller. Digital Marketing is a huge opportunity for companies to reinforce their brand and grow their business since, more and more, the internet will be part of all our lives.

In addition, Digital Marketing includes various forms of tactics, such as Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, among others, which increase your reach and influence in the consumer buying process.

How to Perform Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is an umbrella macro term that includes various disciplines, strategies, and specific techniques. There are many different ways to apply Digital Marketing as a whole to your business.

Despite the many different Digital Marketing applications, there are those strategies/techniques that stand out for being used by the vast majority and normally bring positive results. They are:

Content Marketing;
Email Marketing;
Social networks;
Conversion Optimization – CRO
Search Marketing – SEM.
Digital advertising
PPC advertising

Next, we are going to talk a little about each of these strategies:

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is all content made to educate, inform or entertain a future customer. The idea is to educate people so that in the future they not only respect your brand and have it as a reference, but also become clients of your company. But that content is not just any content: it must talk about issues related to your market and about the possible problems and doubts/concerns of your market.

Why is Content Marketing important for Digital Marketing?

As we said, today, the buying process is increasingly in the hand of the consumer. Information about products and services is no longer a privilege of companies and sellers and is now accessible mainly because of the Internet.

Think about it… when did you last buy something without looking at least searching on Google about it? Probably a while ago. Therefore, your company must invest in Content Marketing so that consumers can find it when they look for the products and services you offer.

It just so happens that people are hardly looking for information about products or services as what they are ultimately searching for is solutions that solve their problems. The product/service is only the final stage of this process.

Therefore, it is not enough to produce content about your company and your solution: you need to create value for your audience and answer the doubts and problems before they even know that your product or service is the solution they need.

For example, if you have specific software that helps predict winning stocks, think about how the consumer would reach your solution instead of just writing about your platform and its advantages.

What do you need to know before you understand that stock control software is going to help you? Then you can create content that gives advice on how to organize your company’s stock, how to calculate the stock, or what solutions can help someone manage the stock of their company.

So when your target audience searches for these issues on the internet, they are much more likely to find your content (and if the material provides value for them, the chances that your client will convert are much higher).

Beyond that, if they already know the solution but have doubts about your product or competition, having good content can be the difference-maker for the public to choose you.

But what does it mean to produce content? What formats can you use? There are many ways to create and put out the information you make. The most used in Digital Marketing and most efficient are:

BLOG

A blog is the most common form of attraction and content distribution tool on the internet, with high-quality content and good SEO (Search Engine Optimization, the blog is the best way to get traffic for your website.

Many times the blog is the gateway for future clients. So, it is crucial that your business blog is relevant and captures the user’s attention. This way the user will become a Lead and, in the future, a client.

Important Part of A Blog:

Plan your content strategy (it is not enough to produce content on random topics, it needs to be strategic to generate value for your audience)

Have cadence in the posts (it is essential to maintain a well-defined content posting calendar and make posts at least once a week, preferably on the same days, so that your audience begins to wait for your posts)

Optimize the content for Google (follow good SEO practices, such as defining keywords relevant to your market on your blog pages);

Diversify the type of communication (the most common form of content on a blog is text, but nothing prevents you from going further and creating infographics and videos for your blog).

VIDEOS

Videos are so in demand that 50% of all mobile internet traffic consists of video traffic. And even more: having a video on a product page increases purchases by up to 85% by reinforcing the product’s reliability for the customer.

You can use videos both as support for various channels, such as the blog and social networks, and create specific channels for videos, such as a channel on YouTube. You can even combine the two strategies. For example, you can put your videos on YouTube and then put them all together on your blog or social networks.

RICH MEDIA

Blog posts and videos are suitable content types to attract visitors, but it is necessary to have an intermediary, deeper content for a complete Content Marketing strategy.

That is the function of media-rich content: this is educational material that adds value to your visitors. By offering this type of content, your company can continue to educate your potential customers and prepare them overtime to, at the right moment, make the sales approach

One of the most popular rich material formats is the eBook, which works very well for texts long enough to be a blog post. But, beyond eBooks, you can also create webinars, tools, kits, infographics, etc.

But whoever thinks that the production of this material is resource and time extensive is mistaken: you can start by offering rich materials that your company already owns and uses, such as spreadsheets, templates, market searches/analysis, technical articles, checklists, glossaries, etc.

Later, you can produce materials specifically designed to answer questions and solve your customer’s problems.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing means the direct sending of a commercial message, typically to a group of people, via email. By definition, every email sent to a potential or current client can be considered Email Marketing.

Generally, email is used to send promotions, request sales or donations, and its purpose is to build loyalty, trust, or branding (brand disclosure).

In summary, the term is used to categorize email messages to increase a company’s relationship with its current, old, or future clients, encourage loyalty and repeat business, acquire new clients, or convince current clients to buy.

Email Marketing, compared to other forms of Digital Marketing, is considered cheap. In addition, it is a way to quickly establish and communicate the company’s purpose with existing or potential clients.

Commonly, this channel is perceived by people as invasive and irritating, especially for new or potential customers. Still, even so, the success of Email Marketing is directly related to the language and visual appeal applied. The best way to often use email marketing with existing clients is to provide educational content that adds value.

Using a casual tone generates better results than a more formal language.

Beyond these factors, the possibility of measuring email metrics is what brings relevance to the channel. It is possible to start communication quickly and understand if it is applied correctly by analyzing opens and clicks.

Email Marketing can be applied in the following ways:

Transactional and/or automated

Transactional emails are commonly triggered according to the action of a customer or Lead with the company.

To be classified as transactional or automated email, the purpose of these communications must be to facilitate, complete, educate, offer a transaction that the Lead or client has agreed to receive.

In short, it is the most assertive and indicated way to communicate by email.

Direct emails

Direct emails include sending an email only to communicate a promotional message (for example, a special offer announcement or a product catalog).

Mobile Email Marketing

Due to the growth of tablets and smartphones, Email Marketing currently generates high traffic through these devices.

Marketers have found ways to attract attention through these devices, and with that came a new way of doing Email Marketing, optimizing messages for reading, and interacting with new technologies.

How to Choose the Best Email Marketing Software

An Email Marketing (ESP) trigger tool should contain various functionalities, including:

Measurement: ability to analyze the numbers of your campaigns.

Anti-spam measures: if the tool has authentication systems (DKIM, for example). With correct authentication, the chances of your email falling into spam boxes decrease.

Usability: your campaigns should be created easily in the tool, in an intuitive way, so that it optimizes your time and increases the quality of your emails.

Automation: the tool you must have to automate your emails so you don’t have to send emails manually.

Segmentation: there must be the possibility of segmenting your leads/clients by their actions (which emails did they click on?). This allows you to create segmented campaigns with more targeted messages.

On average, the return on investment (ROI) in Email Marketing is one of the highest in digital marketing, ranging from $12 for every $0.30 invested.

Therefore, it is essential to use an automated Email Marketing tool. So that you can implement, optimize, analyze and operate this channel, which is a direct relationship with your contacts and customers.

Through personalization and segmentation, it is possible to communicate differently with each person and automate that process. We, for example, use an email automation tool to manage our client communication. Through functionalities such as automation, segmentation, lead management, and Email Marketing, we generate value for the company with a low operating cost.

In the 2000s, with the arrival of Myspace, a social media platform that became quite popular worldwide, social networks became an exciting space for those looking for new channels to apply Digital Marketing.

Currently, many benefits that companies receive easily encourage companies to be present on social networks. The first and foremost of them is the very high number of users currently in them.

On Facebook alone, there are approximately 1.6 billion users, and the possibility that you will find your clients and potential clients among these users is very high.

This significant presence of users has turned social networks into an important communication channel between companies and their consumers, becoming a powerful Relationship Marketing tool.

In addition, it is a channel that allows great promotion and can be used to promote the brand, products, content and promote the purpose and mission of the company.

In order to develop a successful social media strategy, the first step is defining who you’re targeting: who is the public that you want to follow your brand and accompany your publications.

The clearly defined persona is critical since it is useless to have millions of followers on your social networks if they are not influencers or potential consumers of your product/service.

Beyond that, it is essential to identify in which social networks your person is present. For example, if your persona is a Project Manager in the IT segment, the possibility of finding him on LinkedIn is very high.

To illustrate this, we found groups with 20 thousand cases “IT Project Manager” through a brief search on LinkedIn. Understanding which social networks your company will be present and your target audience will significantly positively impact your Digital marketing results.

Promoting quality content, for example, is an excellent way to attract visitors to your website, since social networks allow you to share this information more easily and effectively than other channels.

Here at Kobe Digital we specialize in providing digital marketing services for all types of businesses. We’ve been the best digital marketing agency in Los Angeles for several years. We understand the importance of content and digital marketing as a whole.

With the posts on your page, you can redirect your traffic for content pages (blog), landing pages, and other places. An important tip is to pay attention to the schedule of the posts and how many posts are made per day. Keeping a specific and fixed schedule is essential so that you can measure the results later, in addition to, of course, always maintaining a cadence of posts.

Another way is interaction with users through forums and idea generation. This allows a less rigid approach with the public, and there is the opportunity to promote materials to reinforce the information.

On Facebook, for example, a very effective way to reach your target audience is through groups. Generating content for Facebook groups has many advantages, such as the fact that it is a free source that can be highly segmented, even demographically.

After all that work of creating the ideal people, checking which social networks work for your business, planning, developing, and reviewing the content, your visitors must convert. There are a few ways to make converting on social media easier.

One of them is the possibility of converting the Lead through a Landing Page that is attached to your profile on social networks. This strategy is widely used and tends to increase the conversion rate. The visitor will not need to fill in again information they had previously provided on the social network.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

We call this all the effort to increase conversion rates for a certain goal. In other words, reduce friction and increase the proportion of people who perform the necessary action to go from context A to context B.

In the case of a physical product business, an example is a relationship between the number of people who enter the business funnel and the number of people who buy something. This relationship can be viewed as a conversion rate, in this case, of visitors who make a purchase.

In Digital Marketing, our goal is to have an online presence that plays a part in the visitor’s purchase process, educating them about problems and opportunities they face and generating value for your product or service.

In practice, what we need is for the Lead to carry out a series of actions that, together, will be indicators that a particular person is close to buying your product. In this context, we will call the conversion rate the relationship between the Leads that performed the desired action on your page and the total number of visitors.

The CRO will act in a way that maximizes each of these conversion rates so that a higher proportion of your visitors perform the actions you expect them to do.

To facilitate our performance when optimizing a conversion rate, we tend to break the final action as much as possible. For example, there is a general conversion rate given by the relationship between the number of people who visit my website and the number of people who buy a product.

However, there are many actions that the visitor will have to do between the first and last action and, to understand better which part to improve, we will think of a conversion rate for each relevant step that the visitor takes. In that case, we can exemplify with the following rates:

Overall conversion rate = buyers / visitors
Broken conversion rate 1 = visitors who clicked on a product/visitors
Broken conversion rate 2 = visitors who clicked to buy a product/visitors who clicked on a product
Broken conversion rate 3 = visitors who clicked to buy a product/visitors who made the payment

Main ways of working the CRO in practice

Despite being quite exploratory work, working with CRO almost always goes through some methodologies and techniques used and proven by companies with more experience.

In the sequence, we talk about some of the main techniques used by marketers to optimize website conversion rates and generate more results from the same input:

A / B tests

These tests are the simplest and most effective way to check between two-page versions, which is more efficient for your objective.

The method consists of selecting the traffic of a specific page and dividing it in the middle randomly so that 50% of the visitors see one version (original) and the other 50% see the different version (challenging).

A / B tests are very effective in drawing well-informed conclusions for two main reasons:
By making the two versions of the page available simultaneously, we reduce the influence of external factors such as seasonality, different from a test that compares with historical results.
By having a certain volume on both pages, we can use statistical methods to establish who is the winner with statistical relevance that allows you to trust the test result. To help you, we created a tool to calculate test results.

There are various tools to carry out this test, but the easiest of them is, Google Analytics.

Heatmaps and session recording

Perhaps more important than the test result itself is understanding the why of that result. To help you make that interpretation, we use tools that generate qualitative data to understand what happened.

Heatmaps are heat pages that indicate where the Lead hovered the most and clicked on your page, in that the session recording is exactly what the name suggests: it generates recordings of everything that was done on that page by the user.

Use this information to understand why something on your page is building or destroying results in terms of conversion.

Search Engine Marketing – SEM

In the 2000s, online search engines emerged with the mission of helping users search for websites from practically all niches. Over time, the practicality that search engines were providing for Internet users began to widen. A large part of the web public quickly began to use the network to search for services and entertainment tailored to each one.

Of the search tools that have become popular since then, Google has undoubtedly been the greatest reference for everyone. With the rapid growth of the online search world, many companies began to worry about how they were seen in those search engines: when they were seen, how many times they were seen, etc. That’s why search marketing (SEM) was born.

Search Marketing, or SEM, aims to make a particular website privileged and appear with priority (and quality) for those looking for something related to it on the internet.

As the habit of searching for a solution on the internet has become more and more common among all, Search Marketing is also constantly growing. It has been of great importance for the marketing strategy of millions of companies in the world.

Its application can be made in two ways: SEO techniques and strategies and investments (PPC).

At the beginning of this era, the difficulty of appearing among the first places in online searches was not very difficult, so practically all those who decided to apply “techniques” that aimed to increase that exposure were successful.

With the evolution of the algorithms that determined who would or would not appear in the first places of the search results, this type of objective became more complicated. With that, a new discipline emerged within Digital Marketing:

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are all strategies and tactics that aim to increase the exposure of a website in search engines.

The main search engine in the market (Google) has, according to him, more than 200 factors that help determine whether or not a website should be in the first places of its results pages. The job of an SEO professional is to match the websites to the maximum with those criteria.

Every day, nearly 100 billion searches are performed on Google, and ranking for a specific highly searched keyword can be the difference between a busy website full of people browsing, wanting to do business and an unpopular site.

For that reason, the SEO strategies used today are used by most of the companies that care about the excellent performance of their Digital Marketing.

SEO is divided into on-page and off-page, the entire on-page strategy is all you apply within your website (the famous “on page optimizations”). The off-page is any strategy you use outside of it. (usually “link building” strategies).

How To Plan Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Investing in Digital Marketing can be something that will grow and expand your business. However, without strategic planning, you can shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore, there are a series of steps that must be considered when planning your company’s Digital Marketing. They will guarantee the maximum results of each action. See below:

Make a current status report

Before anything else, keep in mind that to determine where you want to go, you need to know where you are. Through the current status report, you will see your main strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Having this information, you will determine your objectives and proceed to the next steps more efficiently.

Study your target audience (people)

At first glance, many businesses owners who want to invest in Digital Marketing do not find a study of people necessary, claiming that they already know a lot about their audience.

The fact is, you need to know your target audience in depth. That can provide insights that will make a real difference to your results. This study serves precisely to, in addition to finding new crucial information about your target audience, to confirm those that you already imagine you have. Thus, you will be able to adapt the solutions you offer for your audience and plan all Digital Marketing actions thinking of the people in your company, creating more appropriate strategies for your audience.

Ultimately, to produce the content that will lead your target audience through the buying process, you must create that material based on the characteristics and behaviors of your people.

Determine your goals

With a clear vision of your target audience and your current challenges, you can determine your goals. You must establish some goals so that later you can determine if your Digital Marketing planning was accurate or not.

For example, suppose you are starting in Digital Marketing, and your website still does not have a lot of traffic. In that case, you can determine as a goal the increase in traffic on your website, either in percentage or in absolute numbers.

From there, you can set specific objectives to achieve that increase in traffic, such as creating and publishing content on your blog at least once a week, disseminating all your content on social networks through publications and advertisements, etc.

Suppose you already have a slightly more developed digital presence, but your problem is lead generation. In that case, you can target the increase in lead generation and identify strategies you can create to stimulate that. For example, you can offer educational materials through Landing Pages, so that interested parties have to leave their contacts to download the material, becoming Leads.

Beyond that, you can create other situations on your website that stimulate the generation of leads, such as spaces for visitors to register for your newsletter, an easily accessible contact page, pop-ups to participate in a promotion, receive a discount or download material, etc.

Now, if you already have visitors and Leads, but your problem is relating to them, you can focus on objectives such as sending Email Marketing and creating Marketing Automation flows. Once this is done, you can evaluate the result of these actions, such as analyzing the open and click-through rate of emails, etc.

List the necessary resources to achieve your goals

After being very clear about what your goals are. It’s time to chart the critical path for you to reach them all.

It lists all the tasks that need to be done for the objective to be achieved, including all the resources necessary for the tasks to be completed (money, labor, etc.). After having all that noted down, you will be quite clear about the path to be walked to achieve all the objectives.

Make a schedule

Making a schedule is essential so that everything is organized and planned out as much as possible. It is also a good exercise in estimating how much time and effort will be spent on each task. In addition, periodic monitoring of the schedule can be quite helpful to achieve a healthy consistency of your entire plan.

Monitor and track all your actions

Give preference for actions that can have the result 100% monitored. This will be important to evaluate your actions and determine if the result is positive or negative.

After completing each important task, evaluate all the numbers and identify points of improvement in the process or task to make corrections. Also, observe the hit points to replicate them in the future.

Digital Marketing Metrics

You create relevant content for your audience and engage with it, but how do you know if it is working?

For that, you can follow some metrics that serve to measure the performance of your marketing actions and suggest improvements and optimizations for the team.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the average investment in direct efforts to win a customer. In the vast majority of companies, the areas that act directly in this process are marketing and sales, but it can vary depending on the business.

For example, if your direct investments in customer acquisition total $10,000 per month and, with that, you get 20 customers, your CAC will be $500.00.

It is also worth mentioning that the calculation is always made considering the investments and new clients acquired in the same period. The CAC is calculated month by month, but it is essential to consider some sudden variations sporadically.

For example, if you hire two more salespeople one month, the CAC should increase, as they probably won’t bring in customers right away in the first month of work. But, over time, this value stabilizes again.

Lifetime Value

The LTV is considered one of the most critical metrics in companies that offer a service use contract (signature model) because it shows the profitability potential of the business, that is, how much it is possible to earn for each client in a certain period.

For example, if the average monthly fee is $150 and the ideal customer stays on base for 36 months, your client’s LVT is $5,500. If the company is starting, that won’t be easy to calculate, but it can’t be ignored since it is one of the main supports for the financial plans. By comparing LTV to CAC, the business knows it is healthy: Lifetime Value is calculated to be at least 3x greater than CAC. Beyond that, the LTV allows the projection of future returns. If you know that an X number of customers will enter the base, the company can also calculate that the turnover will be Y in the following months.

MRR (Monthly Recurring Income) and ARR (Annual Recurring Income)

In Saas businesses, the client pays for the use of the service or product in the form of a recurring monthly payment. The characteristic of this model is that it dilutes the client’s costs throughout the payment months and, therefore, has a lower average ticket than in the perpetual license model.

The recurring monthly or annual income is increased with the growth in the average ticket of the product/service.

Suppose the company manages to maintain the value of MRR or ARR greater than the revenue lost by customers who churn (cancellations). In that case, it reaches a negative churn that, if it still is, should be the dream of any SaaS company. With the cancellation rate below zero, the turnover increases considerably to the point of making that number insignificant in what has to do with the company’s growth.

Cost per Lead (CPL) or Cost per Qualified Lead

The CPL allows us to know the value of each Lead generated, dividing the amount invested with the Digital Marketing work (R $) by the number of Leads generated, originating from the various traffic sources. According to research, Inbound Marketing techniques involving blogging, SEO, and social networks carry a cost per Lead generally 61% lower for companies than the Leads generated by more traditional methods. Therefore, measuring and comparing that value can be an excellent move for Digital Marketing to gain more credibility (and investments) within the company. Going further, it gives us to think a little more advanced and measure, among the generated leads, how many are qualified and will be attended by salespeople.

We know that, despite using some strategies to define who is the person in your business and how we will reach them, we often end up having a greater reach, calling Leads that are not always the focus or that are not at the ideal time of purchase. Of your product or service, still requiring some lead management work to transform them into an opportunity. Therefore, the Cost per Qualified Lead comes in as an even more critical metric.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

Another metric that must be evaluated is the Cost per Acquisition (CPA) . In this case, the investment value is considered, which will be divided by the number of effective sales (acquisition of the product/service). What is used to give endorsement so that Digital Marketing continues to grow and receive investments is, precisely, having a lucrative cost per acquisition close to the average sale price of the products/services. Therefore, despite also depending on the sales team, it is an essential indicator for marketing.

Return on investment (ROI)

The rate of return on investment, designated by the acronym in English ROI or Return On Investment, consists of a metric used to measure the return obtained with a given amount of resources. ROI is one of the many existing performance indicators to evaluate the so-called cost-benefit in relation to investments and can be calculated as:

ROI = Earned profit – Amount spent on the investment.

In that case, all the sales originated by the Digital Marketing channel are added and all the expenses incurred for that are subtracted.

In the case of sales by the signature model, it is interesting to place here an average expectation of how long the client stays there and how much income must be generated so that the ROI is reflected, in fact, in reality.

Inbound Marketing: A new way of doing Digital Marketing

The term Inbound Marketing means attraction marketing and consists of a set of strategies that voluntarily attract consumers to the company’s website.

Contrary to traditional marketing, it is based on the relationship with the consumer rather than advertisements and interruptions. The main difference between traditional marketing -also called Outbound Marketing- and Inbound is that, in the second, whoever is looking for the company is the customer and not the other way around.

Thus, actions are carried out to attract the potential client to your blog or website, and, from that attraction, a whole relationship work with that person is done. This relationship is carried out through personalized and authorial content.

Content is a way to educate the audience and potential clients about your company’s segment, transform your company into a reference in a specific matter related to your market and influence the purchase decision of future clients.

Many people believe that Inbound Marketing and Digital Marketing are synonymous, but that is not true since it is also possible to do Outbound Marketing in digital media.

However, Inbound Marketing uses Digital Marketing tools (website, blog, social networks, search mechanisms, etc.) to put its strategies into practice, and that is why the two concepts are closely related.

Considering that the purchase process is changing more and more, Inbound Marketing is an increasingly important strategy to attract, convert and retain customers since it reverses the logic of companies to go after customers, and does with that customers look to companies.

And let’s think of a Digital Marketing context in which people have the power to search and find the information they need. Inbound Marketing is increasingly present in Digital Marketing.

After all, it is not enough to reproduce the traditional marketing model in online media – it is necessary to rethink how the customer consumes the internet.

Inbound Marketing Methodology

As we said, the main objective of Inbound Marketing is to attract and retain potential customers for your company. But, for that to work, it is necessary to use a methodology that is the differential of Inbound. Next, we will explain the steps of this methodology.

Attract

The initial pillar of Inbound Marketing is attraction. After all, a website without visits does not generate leads. Without leads, there are no sales, and, consequently, all reason to work with that strategy is lost.

Thus, instead of looking for people interested in a specific business/market, the company focuses on building something worthy of legitimate attention and attracts people who voluntarily take an interest in the matter. The result of that is a much more engaged audience and more likely to consume the product.

There are many ways to do that, such as producing content on your blog, optimizing that content for search engines (so-called SEO or Search Engine Optimization), making paid advertisements for that content (sponsored links), and disseminating that content on networks.

Convert

Next, we have the conversion stage: visitors need to become Leads to advance in the purchase process. When we talk about conversion, we refer to the user’s action of passing on their information in exchange for a reward or benefit, such as an offer of a material, which we will talk about below.

This is why you should attract visitors to your website and create opportunities to convert them into leads. One of the main ways is to offer content in Landing Pages, that is, pages that are turned over for conversion.

Generally, these pages do not have much more than an explanation of the material offered and the advantages of obtaining it beyond the form that the visitor must fill out to become Lead.

You can use many offers to generate Leads, such as direct offers (those that are more directly targeted at purchasing, such as budget requests, software demonstrations, free trials, among others).

Then we have indirect (generally focused on less advanced stages of the buying process, that is, they have the objective of educating and solving specific problems of Leads.

Some standard offer formats are eBooks, webinars, tools, etc.).

Nurture

But not all the leads generated are ready to buy. To give you an idea, it is estimated that only 3% of your potential market is looking for a solution; and is prepared to purchase. Therefore, it is necessary to continue educating your Lead until they are ready to purchase. That is where the relationship stage in Inbound Marketing enters: through some strategies, we identify the Leads’ stages, and we make them advance in the process. That is, we accelerate the purchase process.

One of the main ways to engage with Leads is Email Marketing. Through it, you continue to offer increasingly advanced content for your Lead until you perceive that it is mature enough for the purchase.

But to make the relationship happen dynamically and not “cool”, you need to automate the process. In this way, you will feed your Leads with content automatically, without sending emails manually. That makes the process happen more quickly, increasing sales, improving customer retention, and lowering acquisition costs.

Sell

All the work of generation and relationship with the Leads aims to generate business opportunities for your company. In some cases, the sales process takes place within the website itself. In others, contact between a salesperson and the potential customer is necessary.

In general, the more complex the product (, the higher the ticket), the more the purchasing process tends to be somewhat consultative, concluding the role of Leads nutrition in making the sale happen.

This paradigm shift, in which the Lead now goes through part of the buying process before coming into contact with the seller, brings various implications that transform the world of sales.

Analyze

Finally, we enter the analysis stage, which is extremely important for Inbound Marketing. It allows us to evaluate which strategies are working and which are not and verify the return on investments.

There is no more room for guesswork: everything is confirmed based on the data. The metrics should be “shelled” like an onion, from the most general (and strategic) to the most specific contribution of each detail (operational).

It is possible to monitor every action in your audience’s interactions with your websites, posts, and campaigns, making work smarter. Beyond that, the entire process can be optimized, detecting rates below expectations to direct the marketing team’s efforts.

At Kobe Digital we are here to provide you with the best digital marketing agency in Los Angeles.

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