By Tomorrow People

The Business with No Salespeople – How Inbound Marketing Works

No. You didn’t read that wrong. Here at Tomorrow People, we have no need for a sales team. We don’t even have a full-time salesperson; we just all do a bit of sales on the side. We don’t cold call, mailshoot or advertise. We’re a pretty hostile bunch when it comes to tired, washed out and, frankly, quite useless marketing techniques such as those. Nevertheless, without wishing to blow the official Tomorrow People trumpet, we’re keeping busy.

Want to know how we do sales at Tomorrow People? Read on!

Click here to view the Slideshare – The Business with No Salespeople!

The Colonel’s secret recipe for success isn’t, actually, so secret. In fact, you’re looking at it right now. As an online marketing agency, harnessing the very real power of inbound and content marketing, our primary tool for creating awareness, generating leads and making sure we all have a job to come back to on Monday is this here website.

Why isn’t your marketing getting the same results?

Well, it’s all well and good having a website – everybody does nowadays. The issue lies in what you do with it. Like anybody drawing a salary – hosting doesn’t come free, after all – your website should be working for you and earning its keep.

At Tomorrow People, we adhere to the inbound marketing ethos to generate high quality leads; combining content marketing, SEO, social media and web analytics to create an environment that attracts targeted traffic.

You can do inbound marketing, too

There’s no voodoo or arcane rites behind what we do. We just use the tools readily available to everyone and leverage them to suit.

Content marketing

Although no single element of our online marketing can be described as a magic bullet, content marketing acts as the linchpin around which everything else revolves. Without great content, your website may as well be invisible and, as far as the search engine rankings go, it pretty much will be. Figures show that 61% of people are more likely to buy from a company that generates relevant content; therefore you should have a content strategy in place that delivers value at each stage of a consumer’s buying cycle, along with different calls to action that are more than just demands to buy. We use a blend of articles, blogging, infographics and eGuides, as well as other types of content, to achieve this aim and ensure the website is providing the answers to the questions our audience is asking.

Social media

And how do we know what those questions are? Through the monitoring of various channels on relevant social media platforms and seeing just what consumers are talking about. We join in the conversation and use what we learn to formulate killer content. Social media is also a wonderful way to spread the word. If your content is strong enough and delivering real value, it will get talked about, attracting even more visitors to your website.

Seventy-seven percent of consumers understand that the ultimate aim of a company’s content is to sell to them, but they don’t mind, so long as it provides value.

SEO

You want to be sure that the consumers actively searching for the products or services you provide can find you on the web. Therefore your content needs to follow the basic rules of SEO and be optimised for the keywords that they are searching for. >UK internet users made 2.2 billion visits to search engines in April of this year alone, an increase of 89 million compared to the same month of 2011. This shows the extent to which Google and its lesser counterparts have become intrinsically woven into everyday life. SEO, combined with social media, will increase awareness of your website, with high quality content attracting links from other sites, further helping to increase your search engine rankings.

Analytics

From the start, we use analytics software to see where our traffic is coming from and what key words bring it to the website. Doing so allows us a greater understanding of our audience, providing the opportunity to not only track progress through the website but also further tailor content to meet demand. Free software such as Google Analytics gives you a wealth of features to discover how visitors interact with your website, allowing you to monitor behaviour and see what content is working and what isn’t.

We incorporate calls to action at each stage of the nurturing process, providing triggers that ascertain when a lead is ready to buy. As we request contact details prior to downloading our eGuides etc, we then have all we need to act upon the moment a lead has reached the end of the sales cycle and is set to become a customer.