How Inbound Marketing Can Help You Scale Your Business

Inbound marketing has been described as the future of marketing. If you’re not already incorporating it into your marketing strategy, you’re a bit behind the times at this point. Inbound is lauded among business owners, corporate executives, and marketers themselves for its unique ability to address customer needs at any stage of the sales cycle.

Other advantages include its propensity to grow client relationships over time, shifting the focus from strictly sales to developing long-term relationships with your customers. It focuses on providing your customers with useful information and your expertise.

Another unique aspect of inbound marketing is its ability to help you scale your business.

The Issue of Size

Most businesses hope to use their marketing strategies to attract new customers and close deals. Inbound is uniquely positioned to grow with your business, ensuring you’re always growing in an optimal way.

That means inbound marketing can be leveraged by almost any business of any size. Whether you’re a huge corporation or a tiny start-up with a handful of employees, inbound marketing can work with you to provide the tools you need to grow and keep growing.

How can inbound marketing help your business grow over the long term?

Metrics and Reporting

Most inbound tactics have measurements and reporting built right into them. Inbound is much more measurable than some of the more traditional techniques. The statistics you need are also much more accessible. You don’t need Nielson scans to tell you how many people your marketing efforts have reached when you can easily check on your website traffic, the number of downloads, the views on a video, and so much more.

This accessible data means you can leverage it more quickly and easily. You can measure more and more accurately as well. Need to know if your Twitter strategy to grow your audience is working? Just check the size of your following.

This ability to check in quickly and easily also means you can adjust your strategy on an as-you-go basis. This can also be an “as-you-grow” strategy, meaning you adjust certain aspects of your marketing as you grow. Have you attracted a number of new followers? Push content to introduce them to your product and your expertise without necessarily trying to pitch to them. The pitch will come when they’re ready.

Scaling Social Media

Social media is a great tool for small businesses trying to get the word out about their products. The word-of-mouth nature of social selling and the cost-effectiveness of social media means even the smallest of companies with the most limited of budgets can spread the word quickly and easily.

Inbound marketing helps you here as you grow from a small business into a much larger company by helping you target key audiences, adjust your strategy, and learn what’s working and what’s not. If your time resources are limited, you can automate some social media content.

There are some concerns social media doesn’t scale as businesses grow, however. The nature of social media is inherently personal, so larger companies may not be able to leverage it the same way. Automated tweets from a big business seem like more corporate noise in a crowded market and cause your audience to tune out. To avoid these issues, inject more personality into your social media as you grow.

The good news: Humanizing your business is easy! As you can see, inbound tactics are almost infinitely scalable because of the ideas behind them.

Get Sales and Marketing Working Together

Inbound marketing introduces a new vision for the marketing department. Instead of having sales and marketing working in their separate silos, inbound brings these two teams together to create a dynamic new partnership.

Traditional marketing tactics saw the marketing team buying television spots and full-page ads in newspapers and magazines. These rarely created warm leads for your sales team to capitalize on. Sales and marketing were working together toward a common goal, but they were ultimately divorced from each other.

Inbound marketing creates a very clear path from the marketing department to the sales team. With inbound marketing, you’ll generate more warm (or even hot!) leads who can then be directed to the sales team for the close.

Technology like HubSpot makes it possible to align your teams and scale. When sales and marketing come together like this, you’ll be amazed at how efficient your teams can be. Inbound makes it very clear how a good marketing strategy will pay off in increased sales numbers!

Retain Your Customers

Have you heard the old wisdom about it being easier and more cost-effective to retain one customer than to gain a new one? Inbound marketing adopts that wisdom and makes it one of its principles.

It’s why one of the key features of any inbound strategy is to build a relationship with the customer. While many businesses focus on attracting new customers, there’s more to be gained from retaining customers over the long term. Your repeat customer is worth more to your business than a brand-new customer who buys once and never again.

Relationships are at the heart of everything people do, and the success of inbound speaks to this truth. Inbound marketing encourages you to focus on the customer experience and work on providing the best experience possible for your customers.

With the innovative tactics and tools an inbound strategy can introduce to your marketing, you’ll be sure to focus on the customer experience and build lasting relationships. Happy customers will become brand ambassadors, who will then refer their friends, family, and colleagues to you. Inbound lets you retain customers while also getting more clients, with little effort.

Create a Forward-Looking Strategy

Perhaps the best thing about inbound marketing is its ability to grow with your business and scale to your needs. This allows you to create a forward-looking strategy. Inbound isn’t a quick fix for your business. Instead, it’s a long-term plan for creating and engaging an audience of customers, leads, and potential clients.

Inbound’s long-term nature allows you to think about scaling your business. How will your marketing strategy support your growth? How will it need to change as you achieve your goals and become a bigger company? Inbound will always work with your goals.

Deliver Delight

Inbound helps you address customer needs at any point in the sales cycle, which means you can attract a new buyer at any stage of the buyer’s journey. Inbound plans for what happens after the customer sees your ad, what happens when they click on your content, and even what happens after they’ve purchased your product.

Inbound allows you to capitalize on your expertise and knowledge to continually deliver informative, targeted, and delightful content to address your customers’ needs. Over time, a reluctant buyer can be converted into a long-term brand ambassador. Your customer relationships will flourish.

Inbound is driven by the desire to deliver value, service, and a unique experience to your valued customers and would-be clients. It’s uniquely positioned to help you scale your business because of its long-term outlook. If you want to prepare for long-term growth, consider adopting inbound marketing into your strategy today.