21A: Reading Reflection 2

Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online

The general theme of my book was around the strategy of inbound sales. Inbound sales is creating a marketing campaign that creates a welcoming environment, something that makes you want to stay and see what else is on there. Add collaborative functionality to increase attraction and be diverse. Create a blog, create compelling content which makes users stay. The idea of inbound marketing is baiting a prospect client to your content through other content. Instead of blasting your product and ideas through traditional commercials where some people may not be searching for information you pull them in with the notion that they are searching for information, they are attracted to an article or link on your website and then they see your add with a sponge brain that soaks up your information and is astoundingly more effective than outbound marketing. Tactics for switching visitors to leads in the inbound marketing strategy lets them choose when to do something. We don’t force them to do something or take aggressive approaches like spam email to get their business. We create a friendly comfortable environment because it is recognized that not everyone is always in the buying stage they sometimes want to wait 6 months or a year before doing something or becoming comfortable. A tactic is to also create a compelling call to action. A call to action is basically the button that triggers that visitor to fill something out with their contact information. This creates a lead and a strategy behind creating a good call to action button needs to answer these questions for the clients:

-          Why should I click this button and give them my information?

-          What’s in it for me?

-          Is the value of the thing I am getting worthy giving up my email address for?

These are some ways to get visitors to click your call to action button which then transfers them from visitor to lead which can be potentially sold to.

The book went well with our current learning and it was geared towards a more internet/social media approach. It enhanced the idea of promoting to our potential customers and also helped me give me a perspective when luring my customers toward my product.

If I were to do a class around this book I would start of with making my class create a marketing structure for their based off what they already know about marketing. I would identify if their campaign was inbound or outbound style and then I would go into explaining the way inbound can create a more positive effect environment for generating leads and prospect customers.

I am currently in sales and my biggest aha moment was when I saw the stages of creating a customer. I never really saw it drawn out. The stages are, Prospect, leads, opportunity, customer. You find the prospect when they interact with you, you ask for a follow up that turns into a lead, that follow up generates the idea of opportunity and then the sale is made creating a customer. I just never really had it drawn out like that and it was a good exercise.