Inbound marketing is an incredibly powerful and effective tool at the disposal of your business, but the question remains: Is it sufficient for the entirety of your marketing efforts? Businesses and marketers alike agree that rather than focusing exclusively on inbound marketing (or outbound marketing, for that matter), the more well-rounded and ultimately successful approach is “all-bound marketing,” which is a collaborative balance between inbound and outbound techniques.

Strive for All-Bound Marketing: The Combination of Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing

Why Is Inbound Marketing Alone a Dangerous Tactic?

Salespeople are always talking to your customers and potential customers. It’s a necessary part of the job. This means salespeople have unique insight into what your customer base needs and wants. They know your customers’ challenges, barriers to success, goals, and so on.

Inbound marketing is extremely effective for what it’s meant to do, and that’s largely lead generation and lead nurturing through the buyer’s journey. By and large, this means customers are seeking you out, which is, of course, a positive.

However, there is a potential downside. When customers are exclusively finding you in this way, they might not always be your ideal customers. That means they might not be interested in the products or services you’re interested in focusing on, or they might not be interested in repeat business with you.

Whatever the case, all of this can lead to high levels of customer churn, which can be costly for you—both in terms of finances and more intangible resources, such as time and effort.

When you take a more holistic all-bound approach, though, you harness the power of inbound marketing but incorporate the targeted benefits of outbound

So, What’s the Ideal Balance between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing?

This is the hardest part to pinpoint because there isn’t a coverall answer for all businesses. The balance that’s ideal for you isn’t necessarily ideal for a different industry (or even a different company within your industry).

The amount of inbound versus outbound varies across the spectrum, but for your ideal success, recognize that some combination of inbound and outbound is going to yield better results than exclusively one or the other.

From there, it’s a matter of using your company goals and assessing which techniques will help you accomplish those goals with the greatest efficiency and success.

Whether you’re working alone or with an inbound marketing agency, make sure the focus is always on aligning all inbound and outbound efforts. This way, the techniques aren’t ever at odds or working independently. They are a collaborative effort to get you more of the right kinds of clients and increase your revenue stream.

Inbound Marketing Techniques to Utilize 

Inbound marketing is largely about producing strategic content with search engine optimization (SEO) for greater visibility and success.

The most popular methods include the following:

• Organic SEO
• Blogs
• Premium content (e.g., e-books)
• Social Content
• Visual content (e.g., video, webinars and more)
• Podcasts

Outbound Marketing Techniques to Utilize 

At its core, outbound marketing essentially tells people about your company. Popular tactics include the following:

• Pay per click (PPC)
• E-mail marketing
• Press releases
• Direct Mail
• Cold Calling
• Trade shows and/or conferences

Remember, these tactics don’t always fall squarely in either the inbound or outbound category. They can incorporate elements of each technique.

For example, say you have a unique offering. You could send a potential client something tangible directly in the mail that then generates legitimate interest and drives that person to take action, such as visiting your website to learn more about the offering.

Once that person has visited the site, you can pull all kinds of analytics about him or her, including what site pages were visited, what information was requested or downloaded, and more. In this way, direct mail can act like an outbound version of a call to action, thus incorporating both inbound and outbound techniques to drive your revenue.

Account-Based Marketing: What It Is and Why It Matters to an All-Bound Approach 

Account-based marketing is essentially being as specific as possible in the targeting of your buyer personas. For example, say your target audience is dentists. Rather than marketing to that very broad category (and risking the attraction of customers who might be costly and time-consuming for you), you can drill down to only dentists who offer a specific product, such as Invisalign. 

By using all tactics at your disposal (an all-bound approach), you can more effectively target those highly specific ideal clients.

Throughout this process, you can even further facilitate lead nurturing by employing sales development. This involves an employee who can bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Therefore, if a lead is past the point of dealing with marketing but not yet ready to speak to sales, the lead can communicate with this person until he or she is transitioned to a sales-qualified lead (SQL).

As with every department, sales development should strive for a seamless incorporation of both inbound and outbound techniques. 

When done correctly, inbound marketing is hugely effective at generating leads and then nurturing those leads toward the bottom of the sales funnel. However, inbound techniques alone are usually not enough to close a sale.

That’s why all-bound marketing (a combination of inbound and outbound techniques) is so desirable. Inbound marketing can get you those invaluable leads, and integrating outbound strategy can facilitate converting them into paying customers

If your goal is improved alignment between marketing and sales, it is crucial that your inbound marketing campaign incorporates a content-driven system. However, it can’t just be any content-driven system. Throwing out content without the proper strategy or forethought might get you a few incidental leads, but this will always be more time consuming, less effective, and ultimately more costly. You want to create one system through a marketing and sales collaboration. This will help ensure that the one system serves both team and their goals.

It’s imperative you go into your content creation with a good content strategy—one that benefits both sales and marketing. Not only does this drive positive, healthy, productive communication between the two groups, but it improves sales’ productivity and close rates, and that leads to increased revenue.

If you’re experiencing difficulty aligning your sales and marketing and you’re seeing your inbound marketing efforts flounder because of it, a content-driven system is an essential place to start.

Aligning Sales and Marketing through Content to Increase Productivity and Profits

1. Sales Has the Information to Inform Fantastic Content. Use Them!

Salespeople are always talking to your customers and potential customers. It’s a necessary part of the job. This means salespeople have unique insight into what your customer base needs and wants. They know your customers’ challenges, barriers to success, goals, and so on.

When you’re thinking about the content to create, use that vast breadth of knowledge within your sales team to inform what kind of content you need to create. 

If your content answers questions or addresses issues that your customers (or potential customers) are having, that’s going to be highly valuable, and it’s going to establish your company—in the minds of potential customers—as trustworthy, experienced, and knowledgeable.

If you don’t utilize the incredible resources and knowledge of your sales team, you might be putting out content that doesn’t speak as directly or profoundly to your prospects, and the information you’re providing in that content might simply not be aligned with your buyers’ needs.

Remember, the goal of this content should always be to provide value to your potential buyers, and your sales team knows exactly what those potential buyers consider valuable.

2. The Buyer’s Journey, Buyer Personas, and Sales Content

Content should always be directed at your specific buyer personas. (Just like content, every buyer persona should be created in a collaborative process between marketing and sales.) Beyond that, content should also be created for every stage of the buyer’s journey—awareness, consideration, and decision. Some people find it helpful to think of this as top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel.

Whatever terminology you prefer, you need a mechanism in place for your sales team to access and provide content tailored to each person at each stage of the buyer’s journey. In that way, whether your salesperson is talking to a prospect who’s just found your company or a sales-qualified lead who’s almost ready to buy, you will have content that addresses that person’s needs, questions, challenges, and core problems.

3. When Creating Content, Don’t Forget about the Competition 

More than ever, the buyer’s journey is directed and controlled by the consumer. With the advent of the Internet, people are able to do their own research before even talking to salespeople.

Because of that, you should always remember that potential customers are probably interacting with your competitors’ content as well while going through this research phase.

You don’t have to address your competition overtly, but you can identify ways in which you outstrip your competition and then highlight those through your content. Good strategy will always take into account your competition so that you can successfully differentiate yourself to a customer who’s likely researching both you and your competition.

4. Implement a Framework: Create a Content Catalogue 

A content catalogue is an organized system that’s accessible to both sales and marketing. It segments content into the different stages of the buyer’s journey and the different personas. In this way, anyone who needs a specific piece of content to pass on to a specific person can easily and intuitively find that content.

With today’s CRM systems, this content catalogue is easier than ever to create and organize.

As with every other step, sales and marketing should work together to decide how to put together this framework. Because both sales and marketing will be regularly accessing, updating, and using this catalogue, it should work equally well for both teams—and should, therefore, incorporate the feedback of everyone who will be using the system. 

When a catalogue is intuitive, helpful, and easy to use—for everyone—it can truly save time and money.

5. The Importance of Lead Intelligence 

Lead intelligence deals with personal information about that lead and tracking how a lead has already interacted with your site. That includes:

• Site pages visited.
• Links clicked.
• Information downloaded.
• Premium content downloaded or requested.

All this information about how a lead has consumed your content is gold! It can indicate some or all of the following:

• What persona you’re dealing with.
• What stage of the sales cycle that persona is in.
• What that person’s professional role is within his or her company (determined via social media accounts, such as LinkedIn).

With your organized and segmented content catalogue, your salesperson then knows exactly how and where to access the pieces of content that are most relevant to that particular lead. 

When the salesperson contacts the lead, he or she is then armed with all that valuable information and is primed to confidently, accurately, and knowledgeably speak to that lead’s core challenges, issues, and problems. The salesperson can reference the information that lead has explored and send follow-up information to supplement it or directly ask if that lead has any questions about the content (which can be addressed by quickly and easily accessing the content catalogue for supplemental information).

All of this leads to more productive—and ultimately more profitable—sales calls.

6. The Value of Sales Training and Content Coaching in an Inbound Marketing Campaign

This content-driven system only works as well as the people utilizing the system. That is, if your marketing and/or sales team doesn’t know how to effectively utilize the power of content, your system will not work for you.

Salespeople must use all their skills and sales-related knowledge but direct that to this relatively novel approach. That is, they must learn how to take an even more educational approach to selling and know how to interact with a lead based on that lead’s readiness to buy (or, said another way, his or her current stage within the buyer’s journey).

Content coaching explains:

• Key terminology within inbound marketing (buyer persona, buyer’s journey, content catalogue, premium content, and so on).
• The importance of salespeople reading and understanding the content themselves so they can provide the right information and speak about it intelligently when leads have follow-up questions.
• How to find, access, and use the content catalogue.
• How to have initial conversations with leads in the very early stages of site interaction.
• The power of content as the greatest potential selling tool.
• How content can positively influence any conversation with the customer.
• How content can provide real value, establish your company’s credibility, create trust, and differentiate you from your competitors.

7. Without Alignment, Your Inbound Marketing Campaign Is Dead in the Water

It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in or what product or service you’re offering. The importance of the alignment between marketing and sales to foster an effective inbound marketing campaign still applies—and collaboratively created content is an easy, effective way to start to bridge that gap in a meaningful, productive way.  

Sometimes all it takes is a reason to start the conversation between marketing and sales, and implementing a content strategy that puts equal emphasis on marketing and sales is one way to do that. 

Using independently created content without the joint knowledge of sales and marketing is going to make success difficult. If you want to effectively communicate with leads and drive them through the sales funnel, this alignment is key at every step.

People today can do their own consumer research. They don’t need to rely on salespeople to get them base-level information because that kind of information is all just a click away. Therefore, when salespeople interact with leads, they need a strategically created, organized, deliberate content system that gives them the ammunition to answer questions, provide education and value, close deals, and generate revenue.

Deciding what inbound marketing consultant to work with is an important decision that has a lot of potential consequences for your company. Choosing the right marketing consultant can mean a well-thought-out, strategic plan that’s tailored to your company and its goals. Choosing the wrong inbound marketing consultant can mean a lot of time, effort, and money spent for little to no concrete return. So, with such an important decision, where do you start? What can you do to help ensure your consultant is as beneficial to your business as possible?

How to Select the Right Inbound Marketing Consultant

1. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Be Strategic

One of the most important characteristics you’re looking for with this kind of consultant is a strategic approach. Why is that so pivotal?

Inbound marketing results, by their very nature, grow over time. That is, so long as your inbound strategies are effective, the results compound the longer those strategies are in place. Because it’s already a time-intensive process, you don’t want anything to needlessly slow down those results.

Putting out content that hasn’t been thought through from a strategic marketing perspective could potentially gain you some more site visits and maybe even a few leads. However, if you want the best chance at success, it’s not about merely publishing any content. It’s about putting out the right content, and you only know what that is after the groundwork of strategic planning has informed what kind of content you need to create.

The SLA serves two primary purposes:

2. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Be Interested in Your Business

Every business is different, and that means every inbound marketing strategy needs to be different. If your consultant is offering a cookie-cutter approach to your inbound marketing efforts, that’s a big red flag.

A consultant should spend adequate time to deeply understand the following:

• You.
• Your business.
• Your overall business goals and objectives (current and future).
• Your revenue projections (current and desired).

• Your particular challenges and barriers to success (areas where you’d like to grow to your business but haven’t had success).

Make sure the consultant is asking, not just a lot of questions, but the right questions. Say, for example, you want to release a new product in the next six months. If that means targeting a new segment of your market, your marketing strategy needs to be implemented with enough time for that campaign to be effective. Your consultant, therefore, needs to be forward thinking. He or she shouldn’t just be thinking about your immediate circumstances but how to continuously plan for what’s coming next for your company, and his or her questions should reflect that.

Being successful with your inbound marketing efforts also means knowing your competition well. Be wary of an inbound marketing consultant who doesn’t research or even consider your competitors. Thorough, strategic competitor analysis involves: 

• Determining competitors’ weaknesses and strengths.
• Assessing competitors’ websites.
• Comparing prices (so long as the service or product is actually comparable).

If a consultant doesn’t gather this detailed information, he or she is not properly armed to know how best to help your business thrive.

3. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Aim to Align Marketing and Sales

Aligning marketing and sales is absolutely crucial to the success of any inbound marketing campaign. If your sales and marketing teams aren’t integrated and cooperative in this process, you’re simply less likely to reach your revenue goals and objectives.

The right inbound marketing consultant—from day one—will be interested in your company from both a marketing and sales perspective. Being too heavily focused on the marketing side exclusively is a cause for concern.

The consultant should have the knowledge base and ability to implement effective sales enablement techniques that not only generate strong leads for your company but establish a system for when to effectively hand leads off to the sales team.

A consultant should particularly emphasize the importance of this collaboration between marketing and sales when:

• Creating detailed buyer personas.
• Creating content that’s targeted to those personas.
• Creating the system (or content catalogue) that organizes—or maps—that content for specific personas at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

This collaboration ensures you’re incorporating the collective wisdom and knowledge base of both your marketing and sales teams, and it ensures that everyone who needs access to this content catalogue understands how and why the content was created, when it’s appropriate to use a particular piece of content, and the technological logistics of how to use that online catalogue.

Note that an effective, reputable inbound marketing consultant might not be willing to work with your company if you’re not equally invested in aligning your marketing and sales teams.

4. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Provide Training

Especially if your sales team has traditionally done outbound selling, inbound marketing can seem foreign. However, all the techniques that make salespeople effective carry over to inbound marketing. It’s just a matter of learning the new principles and specific tactics that make inbound marketing effective, and your consultant should be able to provide that training and coaching to your sales team.

A consultant should be able to provide coaching, training, or workshops on a number of topics, including (but not limited to):

• Principles of inbound marketing.
• Importance and logistics of sales enablement.
• Logistics of using inbound marketing technologies, such as a CRM.

5. Your Inbound Marketing Consultant Should Provide Technological Value 

You always want to work with forward-thinking consultants who view your company holistically, and part of that is providing value based on your technology solutions.

A consultant should determine if you have:

• A sales CRM.
• Potential sales enablement tools.
• A content database.

That consultant should then determine if those tools and technologies can integrate and work together. If they can’t, your chance of success diminishes. So, a consultant needs to assess your current technology stack, integrate those systems as fully as possible, and then ensure the systems are effectively managed (by sales and marketing).

The leads generated by inbound marketing are, by their very nature, often in the early stages of the sales cycle. Rather than immediately looking to buy, a lead is interested in research. Perhaps that person has a problem he or she is looking to solve and is investigating whether your solution can address that problem.

Because these leads are often (though, not always) in the early information-gathering stage of the buyer’s journey, you must ensure you have an effective way to manage your leads generated through inbound marketing. Without an effective system in place, you’re likely to hand off leads to sales before they are ready to be sold to. This can scare off people who, given a bit more information and time, could have otherwise turned into customers.

To avoid churn—burning through what could be valuable, high-quality leads—it’s pivotal you ensure you have proper alignment between marketing and sales.

Crucial to Inbound Marketing Success -Aligning Marketing and Sales

1. Establish Shared Goals with a Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

There can be no alignment between marketing and sales if the two teams don’t effectively communicate. That’s why an SLA is so crucial to put in place.

This document helps make explicit what each team is ultimately trying to accomplish—and then puts those goals in writing. Once everybody knows and is clear on the individual team goals, then it’s possible to establish shared goals. These goals help ensure each team accomplishes what it needs to accomplish while also contributing to the other team’s goals.

The SLA serves two primary purposes:

• It ensures effective, clear communication so that both marketing and sales understand any given challenge, barrier to success, and potential available solution.
• It puts the goals in writing, which helps contribute to accountability and dedication to those established goals.

2. Create Buyer Personas Using Input from Marketing and Sales

When you start to think about the content you’re going to create for your inbound marketing campaign, the first important thing to establish is who you’re creating that content for.

If not targeted to people who are interested in your business, service, or product, even the most high-quality content will not be effective for you.

Therefore, your marketing and sales teams should sit down and collaboratively create your buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal customer types, and to create the most detailed, accurate, and effective versions, you need to pull from the collective wisdom of your marketing and sales teams.

Traditionally, this process is done solely by marketing, but don’t forget that sales is the front-facing side of your business. They have unique insight into your customers’ problems, challenges, and desired solutions—all of which is invaluable information when creating these personas.

When both sales and marketing deeply understand these personas, everyone within your company will know what prospects are looking for and what problems those prospects are experiencing. They can then use targeted content to help them address these concerns and close deals.

Remember, sales is a valuable asset to marketing. Make sure to capitalize on that when developing buyer personas.

3. Create Content Strategically—for Marketing and Sales

Once you’ve established your personas, it’s time to create the content that will target those individuals. 

As with personas, sales and marketing should work together to decide what content to create. They should also work together to establish the system that organizes that content. Seeing as both teams will need regular access to these documents, making sure marketing and sales are both familiar with the system helps cut down on frustration, wasted time, and the potential for needlessly underutilized content.

An important part of that organization process is segmenting the articles into different stages of the buyer’s journey for each persona.

Both marketing and sales should:

• Have access to all content.
• Know where the content is and how it’s organized.
• Understand the premise behind the content creation (including buyer personas and the different stages of the buyer’s journey).

4. Ensure You Have a Closed-Loop System between Marketing and Sales

Once you get a lead, there must continue to be open communication between marketing and sales. This fluid exchange of information gives you the best chance to hand off leads at the right time—either from marketing to sales or from sales back to marketing.

That’s why it’s so important that both teams know what constitutes a sales-qualified lead (SQL) and the hallmarks of the appropriate time to hand that lead off to sales.

While it differs from business to business, some CRM-trackable indications might include:

• Viewing case studies.
• Downloading content further down the sales funnel.
• Frequently visiting your site, or certain pages of the site (such as pricing pages).

Benefits of recognizing SQLs include:

Improved response times. If sales knows the leads are qualified, they are simply more likely to get back to them as soon as possible.

• Better communication between sales and marketing and between sales and the lead.
• Fewer lost opportunities because the leads handed to sales will be higher quality.
• Improved productivity of sales, due to higher-quality leads.
• Improved content, due to sales feedback.

These sales enablement measures (collaboratively creating personas and content, mapping that content through the buyer’s journey, and implementing a content catalogue) helps ensure the leads are the right kind (targeting the right people) and that they are appropriately handled, nurtured, and ultimately converted to customers.

Why Does Marketing and Sales Alignment Matter to Inbound Marketing?

If you ignore the important steps necessary to ensure alignment between your marketing and sales teams, you’re simply more likely to experience churn with the leads you generate. When those leads aren’t correctly nurtured, the overall productivity (of both marketing and sales) suffers, and your inbound marketing campaign becomes much less likely to succeed initially or in any sustainable way.

If your company is thinking about implementing an inbound marketing program, one of the most important factors is realizing how big of a maneuver this actually is. A full inbound marketing campaign shifts the entire focus of your marketing and sales teams and reorients their mind-sets to new tactics. Because this is such a major choice with holistic consequences for your company, you need to arm yourself with the necessary information regarding inbound marketing in order to know if it’s a good fit or not. With that in mind, the following are five questions to ask before you jump into any inbound marketing campaign.

Is Inbound Marketing Right for Your Business? Here are Important Questions to Ask – Before You Proceed With an Inbound Markeitng Program.

1. What are the business goals and objectives you’re looking to achieve through inbound marketing?

What are you actually trying to achieve? For example, are you looking to generate more leads to your site, or are you trying to promote a new product offering? If you can’t pinpoint what you want to accomplish through inbound marketing, your chances of succeeding with it are greatly diminished.

If you know what you’re looking to do, however, you’re in a much better position to determine if your goals and objectives align with what inbound marketing can provide.

Remember, your goals should always be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time sensitive). If your goals aren’t SMART, it doesn’t matter how great of an inbound marketing strategy you implement—you’ll never get to where you want to go.

At the end of the day, goals should also ultimately be about increasing your revenue and growing your business. 

2. Do you have organizational buy-in to help ensure an inbound marketing program will work?

If you don’t have understanding and buy-in from every group in your company affected by your inbound marketing campaign, you’re far less likely to succeed. From C-level management down, the individuals within your company must understand the principles of inbound marketing and believe that those principles, when applied diligently, strategically, and consistently, will work.

When you’re looking to inbound marketing agencies or inbound marketing consultants (whichever is the better fit for your company), you want people who will provide that necessary training and the educational value regarding inbound marketing. The right people will take the time to teach your company what inbound marketing is and the theory behind the strategy of your campaign.

If your marketing and sales teams truly understand why inbound marketing can be so effective, they are in the best positions to succeed with it. That means selecting a consultant or agency that puts a high premium on educating its clients rather than just implementing the program.

3. What is your budget for an inbound marketing campaign?

This is largely a logistical question, but it’s an important one. Do you have the necessary resources to implement an inbound marketing campaign? Assess your available resources early on. After all, no resources means no campaign.

There are two major things you need to consider with this.

Can you implement an inbound marketing campaign internally?

If you want to do the work in house, you must have the infrastructure that supports it. Namely, this means having employees who have both the knowledge base and ability to craft your blogs, social media updates, e-mail campaigns, and more.

Can you hire an inbound marketing agency?

If you determine you don’t have the necessary resources to do this work in house, it will be necessary to hire an inbound marketing agency to complete that work for you. This means budgeting for these services and determining if your company is in a position to afford this. 

Whether you tackle this internally or externally, make sure your goals are realistic in light of your available resources. If you don’t have the budget to hire out two blog posts a week, you might have to start smaller and realign your goals.

4.How much time can you allocate to your inbound marketing program?

As with budget, if you don’t have the necessary resources (in this case, time), you won’t have success with inbound marketing.

Realize going in that an in-house effort is going to take a significant amount of time. It involves:

• Marketing and sales alignment facilitation.
• Content and SEO strategy development.
• Buyer persona creation.
• Content creation.
• Content publishing.
• Marketing automation and CRM integration.
• Mapping the content to the buyer’s journey.
• Content catalogue creation.
• Lead-scoring system implementation (to know when to best hand off leads).

You must realistically assess if you have the time, expertise, and technical abilities within your internal staff to successfully complete this process.

If you choose an external program, it’s still going to be a time investment, but you will have access to the agency or consultant’s resources and expertise.

You’ll still be involved in the management process, but you can potentially save a lot of time and effort by allowing the expert to guide your content creation strategy and system set up rather than attempting this through costly trial and error.

An external marketer or consultant can also provide educational value, so you can learn the inbound marketing process and expertise yourself over time. Then, in the future, you can decide to take the process in house if desired.

5. Are your marketing and sales teams aligned?

Without effective alignment of marketing and sales, your inbound campaign is at a huge disadvantage.

To help align these teams, make sure they have shared goals and common objectives. The easiest way to ensure that is by putting a service-level agreement (SLA) in writing.

An SLA can also stipulate how effective communication throughout the sales cycle—from buyer persona creation to content mapping to lead nurturing—will be achieved.

An SLA is just one effective way to promote sales enablement in your inbound marketing efforts.