If your small business is utilizing only traditional media to try to attract customers, you may be feeling like you’re fishing: you work hard to prepare for the day, find what appears to be a great spot, cast your line or net, and then...wait. However, if you’re not using inbound marketing to grow your business, you’re fishing with a hole in your net.

Change is hard, and driving change in marketing strategy can be even harder. Sales, marketing, product development – all these teams have something to add when it comes to customer-centered content that ignites conversions. But trying to get everyone to see that is a challenge, especially once you factor in usual tensions between sales and marketing.

Brand awareness is one of the most important intangibles your company can have. Everyone recognizes Coke, Microsoft, and Google, for example. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you know what “promised experience” you'll get with these companies.

If you want crystal clear insight into buying behavior, sales qualified leads, and strategic marketing process development, “smarketing” is for you. The word might sound silly, but the concept is indispensable.  Simply, it’s the alignment of sales and marketing into a cohesive unit.

The manufacturing industry is changing fast – faster than any time in modern history since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Technology is advancing, breaking down barriers to market entry that once looked unassailable.

Recently, the Content Marketing Institute released its 2015 B2B Manufacturing Content Marketing Report. The Institute discovered that businesses are developing new, sales-focused marketing approaches – but need to find innovative ways of attaining their goals!

Forms are your interface for getting information about prospects, clarifying their expectations, and discovering how to serve them better.

Data from a form is better than ordinary feedback:

• It helps you develop “buyer personas” to improve your market segmentation;
• It helps sales and marketing teams follow up, using their resources to best effect, we call this Smarketing;
• It helps build trust between your enterprise and your prospect, leading to a sale.

To get visitors to fill out forms, we suggested tailoring “top of the funnel” and “bottom of the funnel” offers to their needs. There's one challenge, though: Even those who love your offer won’t always fill out your form!  

Quality Control Through Responsive Data Collection

Someone has come onto your website and has clicked a Call-to-Action, now they are directed to a landing page with a form that asks them information.  But what information is important to your sales team to help them talk to this prospect?  

What is this prospects persona?  You want to ask them valuable questions and get unique information.  What if this prospect has already filled out a different form?  You want to ask them new questions, right?  To do this, use smart fields.

Inbound Marketing takes great content as well as carefully gathered and cultivated data to help businesses build-marketing plans based on bringing customers IN. 

This is quite the opposite of traditional types of advertising that reach OUT to customers. In this data driven, search based age, it is important to engage your prospects and clients by publishing content, such as blogs, infographics, articles, videos, how-to’s, checklists, and eBooks.

Attract:

As you know, the key is not just attracting any visitors to your website, but attracting visitors that may wind up working with you to build a beautiful home!. That means using the RIGHT kind of tools for attracting these buyers. Attracting means putting out that useful content like eBooks, blogs, and articles. If you are working in the contracting industry, you may think about “how to” content of high-level instructional information that will bring in those who are interested in home repairs. Remember, the content does not have to be just written content either—video and audio content is useful too.