Most business development professionals today generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, through trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. These "outbound marketing" methods are where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.
Outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons. First, your average human today is inundated with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day and is figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out, including caller id, spam filtering, Tivo, and Sirius satellite radio. Second, the cost of coordination around learning about something new or shopping for something new using the internet (search engines, blogs, and social media sites) is now much lower than going to a seminar at the Marriott or flying to a trade show in Las Vegas.
Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, Try "inbound marketing" where you help yourself "get found" by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a "hub" for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites. Most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.
Internet Marketing Success is More Than Just Increased Web Traffic!
When it comes to internet marketing success, many companies are happy when their web traffic is increasing over time. The problem is what are you going to do with all this traffic? How do you capture information about this traffic? Review this tip sheet for all the steps in the inbound sales funnel.
Beyond visitors to your site you will want to create:
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Clients
If your internet marketing is not getting you clients then this sheet will help define the steps you must go through in order to turn visitors into clients.