3 Inbound Marketing Tips for the Overwhelmed CEO

In my opinion, the best way to get going in the new year is to take a moment to reboot the system.

Let’s face it, before the much needed holiday break, you may have found yourself spending all too much of your precious time in management meetings, strategy meetings and dare I say it… budget meetings in preparation for the upcoming year.

Regardless of whether you are the CEO of your company or you’re a marketing executive working directly with your CEO, you may find that in most cases you don’t really care about visitors, social media stats and click through rates.

Admittedly, us marketers nerd out about all of these things.

“Which subject line worked better?” and “which color resonated better with the prospects?” are the questions keeping me up at night.

What you really care about is the actual growth of your company. I want to introduce you to some tips you can utilize when digging through numbers that will prove that inbound is having a huge impact on your overall numbers!

FOCUS ON THE SALES OPPORTUNITIES

Marketers make a pretty big deal about leads.

However, leads (like all things) are not created equal. Awareness and consideration stage leads often do not have the same amount of value to you as decision stage lead. You’ll want to focus on decision stage leads who provide actual sales opportunities to your business.

As a rule of thumb, one out of every ten leads is ready for the sales team to sell move in on. The other nine are usually not ready to make a purchase.

But don’t write the other leads off. Inbound marketing gives marketers the unique opportunity to build an automated nurturing campaign that will move these leads through the sales funnel in the fastest way possible-- get ready!

DON’T FOCUS ON WHERE THE CUSTOMER CAME FROM

Traditionally, marketers always try to track customers back to the initial point of entry. Inbound marketing software like HubSpot can help you figure this out quite easily, but in the end it shouldn’t really matter.

Heres why: Just because a blog post was the initial point of entry doesn’t mean that the eBook offer wasn’t critical in showing the prospect that your company is the best fit for their needs. Most customers are exposed to many different marketing tactics before they actually decide to buy your products or services. With inbound marketing, having a valuable conversations with your potential customer will bring your prospect from lead to sale regardless of the tactics.

DON'T LOSE SIGHT OF YOUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS

With all this talk about leads, you might have forgotten about your current customers.

Don't forget about your current customers. More often than not, your current customers will create a great opportunity to increase your revenue in a very short amount of time. Let’s face it, most businesses spend their resources looking for new customers.

Inbound marketing campaigns are SUPER versatile and you’d be surprised how easy it is to create an inbound marketing campaign that will let all of your current customers know about new product offerings or services they may have not been aware of previously.