Inbound marketing with CRM changing how business is done

It’s no secret that inbound marketing is taking the business world by storm as smart organisations capitalise on the benefits that this highly effective way of generating new business can bring. Inbound marketing is the method by which prospective customers are attracted to an organisation’s digital resources using a variety of specific methods including Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and leveraging social media. The company website and electronic communications also need to contain the content and interaction features necessary to engage with visitors and measuring the success of the marketing campaigns using digital tools is also vitally important. No inbound marketing initiative is complete, however, without a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to help manage the whole process and allow sales and marketing staff to be armed with the right information in order to interact with prospective customers in such a way as to increase the likelihood of doing business with them.

By deploying the correct inbound sales methods it is possible for the marketing team to funnel more prospective customers to the sales team who can then take over handling these prospects with the knowledge of what a particular prospect has accessed in terms of company literature or product and services information. Traditionally sales people have been the primary sources of knowledge on whatever their organisation sells but in today’s connected world this has all changed as customers are able to gain access to virtually any information that is available and therefore need to be treated differently. At the time that a prospect engages with an organisation to start a discussion it is usually after a good deal of background research has already been done and it is possible with inbound marketing to determine the extent of this without having to bother the customer with questions. All employees will also need to know what message needs to be communicated to prospects and customers at different stages of the sales cycle and all of these interactions need to be tracked in an effective CRM system such as Maximizer CRM, whether this is on-premise or in the Cloud, to ensure that the customer is looked after at every stage of the sales cycle.

“It is also vitally important that the company’s website is aligned properly in terms of having compelling and enticing content, effective calls to action and efficient landing pages for inbound marketing to work successfully”, comments Grant Chapman of Camsoft Solutions. “The one big advantage that inbound marketing has over more traditional forms of marketing is the ability to precisely measure the success rate so that techniques used in successful campaigns can be replicated and best practices improved on to get the most out of one’s marketing efforts”, he adds.