Inbound marketing consists of making prospects come to you rather than going out to find them. The principle is old, its implementation is still poorly mastered, and many companies produce content without knowing who they are addressing.

Building a strategy comes down to three steps, in this order: knowing who you are talking to, making yourself visible, then turning that visibility into customers.

The team behind our automatable and flexible CRM tells you everything.

Step 1: define your personas

This is the step most often botched. A persona is a typical portrait of your target customer. Without one, you do not know which content will generate interest, and you write for yourself.

Six questions are enough to build one:

• What problem are they trying to solve?
• What are their needs and objectives?
• What do they want to improve concretely?
• What questions do they ask themselves before buying?
• What holds them back?
• What can you offer them that answers this?

The answers come from three sources, to be cross-checked: feedback from your salespeople, who hear these questions all day, your own experience of the market, and direct interviews with your customers. This third source is by far the most reliable and the least used.

The more precise the portrait, the clearer your communication becomes, and the more the prospects you attract resemble the ones you want.

Step 2: make yourself visible

Three complementary approaches, two of which are free apart from the time invested.

Organic search

SEO aims to make your site and your content visible in search engines. It is the foundation, because its effect accumulates instead of stopping when the budget does. It rests on three pillars.

• Content. Texts, guides, case studies, images and videos that genuinely answer your persona’s questions.
• Popularity. The links other sites make to yours. Useful content gets picked up and cited, which search engines interpret as a quality signal.
• Technical quality. Your site’s performance, its structure, its legibility for search engines. A slow site is penalised by search engines, and abandoned by visitors well before that.

Social networks

SMO covers everything that develops your visibility on social platforms. In B2B, that means LinkedIn first, supplemented by YouTube for video and by the professional communities in your sector.

For these channels to serve your strategy, regularly relay your content and your landing pages to your audience. The aim is twofold: building your status as an expert and provoking interactions.

Above all remember this principle: social networks relay, they do not store. Content published only on a platform disappears with it, whereas an article on your site belongs to you and keeps working for years.

Search advertising

SEA consists of buying visibility, mainly through Google Ads. You choose the phrases you want to appear for, and set the amount you are prepared to pay per click.

The system works by auction: the more a phrase is in demand among advertisers, the more it costs. So measure your return precisely, otherwise you will be funding keywords that bring you traffic but no customers.

A rule of common sense: do not pay to send traffic to a site that does not convert. Advertising amplifies what exists, it does not replace it.

Step 3: roll out lead nurturing

You are visible, you publish, visitors arrive. What remains is the essential: turning them into customers. Yet your visitors do not all have the same profile or the same degree of maturity.

Lead nurturing consists of addressing each one according to their profile and their past interactions with your content: offering what interests them at the moment it interests them. This is where the work on personas pays off.

Marketing automation tools let you schedule these sends in sequences. Cirrus Shield integrates with Brevo and Mailchimp, among others, which feeds interactions straight into lead management.

These tools have evolved a great deal. Originally simple bulk-sending solutions, they now allow fine personalisation and the automation of complete sequences. The prospect then stops feeling they are receiving a mass message, provided the content keeps up.

The aim of these campaigns is not to sell with every send, but to stay present until the need matures. On long cycles, this is often what makes the difference at the time of the consultation.

Your questions about inbound marketing

What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?

Outbound goes out to find the prospect, by call, email or advertising. Inbound makes them come to you through content they were already looking for. The two combine: inbound warms up the ground that outbound exploits.

How long before you see results?

Several months, and often longer in a competitive market. This is the main reason for giving up: many companies stop just before the effort starts to pay off.

Do you need a blog to do inbound marketing?

Not necessarily, but you need a space that you control. Content hosted only on a third-party platform depends on its rules and its survival, which makes it a fragile asset.

How many articles should you publish per month?

Fewer than you think, provided they are good. One useful article a month, kept up for two years, produces more than ten hollow articles published in a quarter and then abandoned.

How do you measure the effectiveness of your strategy?

By tracing the journey through to the sale, not to the form. The number of visitors says nothing; what counts is the number of deals signed whose first contact comes from your content.