23/08/2012
We see this as an evolution for us as a company and also for the inbound marketing industry as a whole. Inbound marketing started out as a relatively low-cost means for small businesses to gain a foothold in their online markets by leveraging comparatively inexpensive channels, such as blogging and social media. Mid-sized and larger companies have started to embrace the new inbound tactics as part of their broader marketing efforts, but their demands and focus are different from those of SMBs. Let's take a look at some of those new challenges and our approach to solving them.
We've worked with a lot of businesses over the years, and they are commonly in the same boat when it comes to marketing:
• Limited starting experience and "footprint" when it comes to digital marketing
• Limited budget for marketing as a whole—still primarily relying on word of mouth or untargeted PPC campaigns
• Limited knowledge of digital marketing tactics and trends
• Limited resources for in-house content creation and marketing
• Limited leadership assigned exclusively to marketing
MITO Intelligence got its start providing a cost-effective solution for helping marketers get more done with limited resources.The emphasis has been on generating relatively low-cost leads by automating and integrating many of the digital marketing chores and diverting advertising budgets into online content and social media.
Over the 3 years, we have found that growth in sales for SMBs is constrained by their marketing budgets. With a relatively small budget ($3,000 - $6,000 per month) and at least some internal resources, companies using inbound tactics can expect to see sustained, but not explosive, growth in traffic and leads over at least 6-12 months. Unfortunately, many SMBs (and even larger companies) treat inbound marketing as an experiment, giving a service provider 3-6 months to show positive ROI and insufficient resources to meet that objective. It's incumbent on the inbound marketing agency to make sure that realistic goals and expectations are set prior to ex*****on, or the experiment will likely fail.
Larger companies are generally better funded and tend to devote most of their marketing budgets to demand generation. Most have years under their belt working with agencies and in-house experts to optimize their search strategies, and most have ongoing, often successful PPC campaigns going, as well. Brand awareness could be improved, but they're certainly not starting from scratch. What's challenging to these enterprises is capturing more qualified leads and turning them into customers. Many have started working with marketing automation software and solution providers, but there is something missing. In our view and recent experience, what's missing is a coherent blend of content marketing, conversion rate optimization and lead nurturing. In particular:
• Content mapping to buyer persona and sales funnel stages
• Content creation to fill the content map
• Landing page and CTA optimization via A/B testing to convert more leads
• Lead nurturing campaigns developed from the content map
• Marketing automation and analtyics tuned to lead nurturing campaigns
• Performance scoring based on relevant KPIs
• Our New Emphasis
There is still a huge market for both software and service providers in the SMB space. As more and more entrepreneurs create startups, they will clamor for cost-effective marketing solutions.
