Inbound Marketing & Sales Methodology

Payara Services, Ltd prefers to use an inbound methodology for its marketing strategy. Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they do not always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.

With the evolution of the modern internet, the buyer has all the knowledge about any given service at their fingertips. People are inundated with ads; pop ups and demands for attention daily and can be sceptical to direct marketing.

Instead, Payara Services asks itself what problems are their community facing? What are the answers to their questions? We then create resources (that relate to our niche) that are freely available, that answer these queries. This leads to positive on page behaviour (such as time on page, bounce rate, referral linking) that builds authority and trust from a search engine perspective. As the content improves in rank, more users see the content, thus more positive signals, which leads to rank gains, etc etc. And similarly, from a human perspective also building trust and topic authority. In addition to conversions, these users also often become brand promoters and refer our content to friends and colleagues through digital word of mouth – further building our community. People are much more receptive to referrals, and honest reviews and testimonials than they are direct advertisements.

Through out these visits, users are also given the opportunity to engage with other content and to build up their trust and awareness of the brand. They can subscribe to email newsletters and announcements so they can be sent content directly. Follow various social media channels (which also have their own engagement ecosystems), attend webinars, watch videos, and even talk to us face to face at conference events we exhibit or speak at. The old adage being “You need to be where your customers are”, and this very much applies to all the different communities and channels available digitally.

To expand on some of those examples.

Social Media:

Having a presence on social media networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc) is important as it provides your desired community an opportunity to engage with you. As well as serving as a channel for putting out your own content. Building your own community comes with many of its own benefits and can serve as social proof of your good standing.

Videos/YouTube:

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and serves as an excellent location to host your video content. It has its own community and audience to channel content to and allows you to embed video content onto your own website (while still counting as views on your channel). Video content has been growing strongly for several years and provides a way of differentiating your content as well as capturing an audience which prefers video over text.

Email:

Email is still very relevant and can be extremely effective once you have a built a substantial email list. It can be a valuable communication channel, a way of re engaging your audience, and for showing content they may be interested in. We segment our email audience so that we are only sending them emails which are tailored to their interests and level of engagement. Email marketing is more traditional in its approach, but it can serve an important support role for your other inbound focused activities.

Webinars:

Webinars overlap significantly with videos (obviously) but have an important distinction in that they are live and provide an opportunity for live question and answer sessions. This can build strong relationships with users who are now strongly engaged.

None of these channels should exist as islands, all should serve to support and complement each other with their strategies, goals and objectives. Which in general are:

Attracting – Growing an engaged audience
Converting – New customers
Delighting – Customer service and engagement to turn customers into promoters.

This is a simple overview of different stages of a sales funnel. Hopefully through using an inbound strategy you can continuously feed this funnel and grow your community sustainably.

Topics: Fish Food

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