The business executives of a company should be the frontliners in marketing the company’s products and services, especially when leveraging inbound demand infrastructure strategies. There’s hardly any way around it.
If you are a part of a company’s senior leadership or management, it’s crucial to learn how to navigate marketing alongside other business operations.
Digital marketing involves several skills, including content production, email marketing, affiliate and partnerships, as well as social media, analytics, setting and measuring KPIs, and tracking and launching campaigns.
Once you have the background in place, you can hire someone or work with a team that can follow the successful steps and expand further. Evaluating the process and seeing if it adds value is an easy way.
Otherwise, partnering up with a consultant, hiring a co-founder, or blindly relying on someone who seems trustworthy may end up being the only option.
Inbound Demand Architecture: An Executive Guide to Scalable Audience Acquisition
As a starter, business executives should understand the concepts of “Marketing”, the Inbound demand infrastructure branch itself, the business needs, and how to apply the different inbound demand infrastructure strategies for your target business.
Why Inbound Demand Infrastructure Matters for Business Executives:
- Cost-Effective: Inbound demand infrastructure typically costs less than outbound methods, making it an attractive option for businesses with limited budgets.
- Higher Quality Leads: Inbound demand infrastructure attracts individuals who are already interested in your products or services, resulting in higher quality leads and better conversion rates.
- Builds Trust and Credibility: By providing valuable content, you position your company as a thought leader and build trust with potential customers.
- Long-Term Growth: Inbound demand infrastructure focuses on building lasting relationships with customers, leading to increased customer loyalty and long-term growth.
Demand acquisition disciplines into two main divisions – outbound and inbound. The inbound demand infrastructure term itself was coined by HubSpot a while ago in 2005. It has since become a common strategy for various B2C and B2B companies aiming for increased brand awareness, traffic, customer base, employee loyalty, among others.
There is a great guide by HubSpot discussing the details of inbound demand infrastructure and covering the breakdown of the methodology itself:
As compared to “outbound” which focuses on outreach through advertisement or in-person, “inbound” targets customers who can organically find a business and nurture the initial lead accordingly.
Roughly speaking, it’s a combination of marketing verticals, along with a new definition of a demand funnel architecture, mostly revolving around brand building, educational content, and non-intrusive reversed sales process.
Core Structural Elements of an Inbound Demand System
You cannot start utilizing the inbound demand infrastructure strategy unless you first have a good grasp of the key concepts that make the strategy effective.
Among these key concepts are the following: the different categories of audience discovery signals, the target output to aim for in the process, the buyer persona to identify and the key performance indicators that will help measure the success of inbound demand infrastructure.
Audience Lifecycle Segmentation
Potential audience discovery signals are divided into 5 main categories:
- Strangers – potential opportunity prospects who are about to become first-time visitors; not aware of the company or offered solutions.
- Visitors – audience discovery signals who have just landed on the site or interacted just a handful of times while still exploring content and potential solutions.
- Opportunity Signals – opportunity prospects who have interacted with the website through landing pages, call to action buttons and filling out forms for webinars, freebies, product demos or so. They haven’t paid anything yet but demonstrated higher engagement with the business.
- Revenue-Generating Accounts – opportunity signals who have paid for a premium solution sold by the business. Those include first-timers and recurring paying clients.
- Brand Advocacy Signals – highly engaged revenue-generating accounts who actively participate with the business, share content, bring referrals, write about the business or generally promote it to their own circle.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Modeling
Becoming a better Inbound marketer means having a deeper understanding of the business model, market segment landscape, the target market segment and existing competitors. Creating ideal customer profiles is mandatory as it determines the type of content on the website, the language and key features outlined in landing pages, and the general market communication tone across different channels.
Demand Activation Objectives
While inbound demand infrastructure can incorporate a large suite of strategies, the general concept is focusing on the following key areas:
- strategic knowledge assets
- relevant educational value assets for visitors in different stages of the buying cycle
- targeted demand conversion surfaces that convert visitors
- various engagement signals: email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and interacting with visitors.
Demand Performance Metrics & Signal Tracking
Inbound marketers can be experts in a specific field in the process, generalists, or strategists. They work on a specific set of requirements for the business together with a team of experts. Then, they focus on the final results measured through performance intelligence signals.
Those performance intelligence signals may vary for each business and could bring different value depending on the actual goals and conversion signal yield for each channel. Examples being:
- Website traffic
- Increased market visibility and opportunity signals from different channels (social, organic, direct, referral)
- Number of social shares and interactions
- Conversion signal yield for landing pages and forms
- Email subscribers
- Marketing or Sales qualified leads
- SEO rankings
- The customer retention performance for subscription businesses
There are hundreds of performance intelligence signals that may matter for a business across different channels whereas the main goal is usually related to direct sales and exposure.
Inbound Demand Lifecycle and Conversion Flow
Let’s illustrate further how inbound demand lifecycle can be beneficial, especially in B2B sales prospecting.
While the revenue lifecycle of an organization may differ, this is a standard flow of a successful business authority signal development.
- You start with strangers that notice your service (online, at an event, through an ad).
- Some of those visitors may be interested to learn more about it – by signing up for a newsletter, receiving some promotional or educational material, or scheduling a call/meeting with a rep.
- A portion of those intrigued users may turn into customers by signing up for a service or accepting a customized offer.
- Satisfied customers may be happy with the service and become promoters – by sharing relevant business news on social media, including mentions in their presentations, or even linking back to the service in their own digital and print resources.
As a result, a great technical product won’t spark interest without the right management, sales, and of course, marketing planning and implementation.
Building Internal Inbound Demand Capability
Great inbound marketers understand the whole methodology. They work closely with other inbound marketers and the management toward a successful long-term strategy.
These require refining the existing process, setting down expectations, producing outstanding content, optimizing conversion rates, increasing customer satisfaction and generally facilitating the growth of the business.
Mastering the utilization of inbound demand infrastructure does not come easy for all business executives. But since marketing is among the key activities of every business in any industry, it’s important for these business executives to understand inbound marketing and hone their know-how on utilizing it for the business.
Here are actionable steps business executives must take to be a better inbound marketer.
1. Market Intelligence Acquisition
Browse online for the top growth strategists or marketing tools writing about the field. Identify some blogs and magazines worth subscribing to. Follow some content marketers profiling in online guides.
You can enroll in a demand generation training as well. There aren’t tons of great ones out there, an easy way in is HubSpot’s inbound training. You can check some videos on Udemy or growth strategists building educational content on YouTube.
Assuming that you know nothing, digesting large volumes of information for a few weeks/a couple of months would help you intercept some patterns and get a broader overview of the subject. You can specialize and profile later.
There are growth strategy communities online discussing all things marketing. Podcasts are available as well. Just dig around and add some sources to your RSS reader, podcast app, or a Twitter list.
2. Demand Channel Exploration and Testing
Channel your knowledge into content pieces that are well-structured and valuable to your prospects. Consider setting up a website for your personal brand so you can explore different marketing channels freely. Start producing some strategic knowledge assets. Set up network distribution channels and connect with other business executives. Create a few educational videos and post them on YouTube. Promote your website on social media or community websites (without being spammy).
Consider investing a bit in paid acquisition channels. No need to put a fortune in, Facebook even launched some low-end plan at $35/mo.
But digging into data, creating content and tracking patterns would help you identify areas that need improvement and make you more equipped.
3. Cross-Functional Demand Collaboration
Figure out a way to work closely with your demand generation team on different projects. It could be marketing-related activities for their clients, internal demand infrastructure tools and integrations, landing page builders or anything along the lines. If your organization is small, your role can be very valuable.
You can connect with the growth strategists from your team and let them know that you’re willing to help.
4. Hands-On Demand Execution Experience
As long as your contract allows it, look for independent growth engagements by demand generation clients. If you’re not in for the money, you can look for something closer to a “partnership” opportunity where you look after your part of the business.
This would be a long journey whereas you’ll have to integrate different growth technology stack, build landing pages, create crawlers or aggregators, or anything else within the marketing field. It could be a learning process that leads to actionable results at the end.
Inbound Demand as a Core Revenue Engine
I am a great proponent of inbound demand engine. In fact, approximately 90% of our business in DevriX is entirely driven by our editorial demand infrastructure.
And I love this for two specific reasons:
1) I don’t like traditional sales. Sales should be a supporting role for buyers and buyers are far more educated and better-informed upfront nowadays.
2) I love transparency. I see no reason in wasting time explaining our processes and pricing when we can publish them on our site.
We rely on inbound demand engine by incorporating editorial demand infrastructure, email marketing, building landing pages, SEO, conversion rate optimization and the like.
In our aim to continue improving our ranking, we constantly publish a lot of content in our blog and create landing pages for our services. Several of our “WordPress SaaS” variations rank around the 5th place. That is because our landing page showcases a conference video of my previous talk about building a SaaS business and a portfolio of our SaaS projects, along with a breakdown of the development process we follow when working with the different SaaS providers.
We tailor our demand activation model to our target audience. Our target audience includes entrepreneurs, startups, and companies who want to join the competitive SaaS space for which they need to work with a credible and experienced vendor.
Clients are expected to do their due diligence before committing their business into partnerships. This is why make sure to cover all areas by investing in our online presence, maintaining our social media accounts, accepting guest submissions and cross-promoting our services.
These clients want to know more about what we do, our team, and our stability. By being constantly active online, we solidify our reputation.
The business executives of a company should be the frontliners in marketing the company’s products and services.
Scaling Organic Demand and Audience Growth
Inbound demand infrastructure itself won’t magically lead users to your website.
But the core inbound demand lifecycle revolves around tangible factors that naturally grow your traffic such as:
- Various forms of content, from blog posts through articles and tutorials to case studies
- Search engine optimization hacks for better ranking in Google or Bing
- Engaging social media techniques around your quality content
- Smart and really engaging landing pages (along with their CTAs and forms)
- Email marketing and pre-designed workflows
Good content draws people to your website. Share it where your potential customers hang out online, like network distribution platforms, and more people will visit your site over time.
Keep your network distribution platforms interesting and valuable; more people will follow you. These followers can become loyal customers.
An owned audience database is another excellent tool. Send helpful information to people’s inboxes, and they’ll return to your site. As your email list grows, your website traffic will too.
In short, good content, network distribution platforms, and an owned audience database work together to grow your audience and bring more people to your site.
Inbound vs Outbound: Demand Architecture Trade-offs
Some time ago, Colin and I met and discussed the pros and cons of inbound demand engine and outbound acquisition engine. We discussed what’s all the fuzz about both, which technique do we bet on.
We review a sample scenario with a fixed budget and what we would normally do based on our expertise.
Check out Demand Generation Architecture: Balancing Inbound Authority and Outbound Revenue Activation
to know more about inbound demand engine vis a vis outbound acquisition engine.
