How good a marketer are you? Attracting new customers is the fun part of the job, but marketers are also often asked to convert prospects into customers through their purchasing decisions. Building a B2B marketing machine takes a masterful balance of art and science, and more than ten years of experience working in both corporate and direct-marketing roles has taught me about the importance of having a successful inbound strategy. Below, I’ll give you some of the mechanics and examples of how to build a successful marketing machine that allows you to run the most effective targeted campaigns. It all starts with the funnel.

Building A Long-Term Marketing Machine

Within marketing, Inbound Marketing is the primary means of bringing in prospects and converting them into customers. Like many things in marketing, the thought process is relatively simplistic – you create content that can be shared across channels, you use keywords that your prospect might be searching for, and you create emails that can be sent to your prospect’s preferred channels. The long-term truth is that there is a lot more to marketing than just these two basic fundamentals.

When considering building a long-term marketing machine, remember that you are most likely to be judged by your ability to develop and maintain relationships with your existing customers as well as prospective ones. While the funnel does exist, it does not always need to serve as the core of your marketing strategy. Leveraging techniques such as social media, SEO, and digital media to advertise and drive traffic to your website, can actually be more profitable than sending out mass email blasts.

Building a Successful Inbound Marketing Machine Is Not Easy

Getting a list of prospects is not easy – it requires quite a bit of effort on your part. You need to use a tools like someone like Extrabux to build your list. You’ll have a series of free and paid tools that you need to choose from. Of course, using Google AdWords is also a very simple path towards acquiring new leads, but that’s where the funnel comes in. AdWords’ landing pages are optimized to drive leads to your website, and the algorithms keep returning the leads that would most likely convert.

In an article on ASAI on their Inbound and Marketing Labs blog, Alejandro Peña and Mark Davidson explained how the process begins. They describe what a “per pixel” sale entails, and how they create their first 100pixels and after a year. A per pixel sale is what happens after the actual sale has taken place. They also used testimonials from a range of businesses to demonstrate how successful their marketing strategy has been, mentioning Blue Forest (see below) as one of the most successful small businesses they’ve worked with.

Having a good list of prospects that are interested in your service and providing value to these prospects is what leads to establishing long-term relationship with your customers. At small and medium size businesses, it’s even more of a challenge. Many of these businesses struggle to keep up with the latest technologies. There are a lot of organizations to choose from, but which one works best with your industry, your company’s size, and your goals are what ultimately determines which one is right for you. This helps explain the popularity of online directories.

At a larger size, your competitors will always be, well, your competitors. Thus, there will always be an opportunity to participate in an open bidding process, where you can both display your name and offer some form of deal to your target prospect or prospects. Thus, the ranking of your site will largely depend on the type of deal you offer.

Expanding your customer database also requires being a bit more nimble and utilizing social networks to advertise, search, or ask for business. It requires time, but the payoff can be huge, and it should be the first step to any long-term Inbound Marketing strategies. The goal should always be to create an audience by sharing relevant content across social media, LinkedIn, and your existing networks, and giving your audience the opportunity to share your content back to you.

Building Your Inbound Marketing Machine Is Not Easy