3 reasons why CEOs love inbound marketing

As the head of your company, it is a daunting task for your CEO to decide where and how to allocate funds within your company. As a marketer, you must help make these decisions easier by defending your budget and proving the ROI of the marketing efforts.

An easy way to defend your budget and prove ROI that your CEO will love is through inbound marketing. Inbound marketing allows you to easily track how your organisation attracts new visitors and leads, nurtures these leads into customers, and raise brand awareness.

But what is it about inbound marketing that captivates CEOs and making their lives easier? Here are 3 reasons why CEOs love inbound marketing:

Why CEOs love inbound marketing

By definition, inbound marketing makes it easy to understand how strangers come in contact with your company, interact with your content to become leads and sales qualified leads, and then close them into customers. All this can be done in a trackable manner that informs your marketing and sales efforts and can be tied to specific budget items in your company’s financial statements.

1) Inbound marketing makes it easy to prove ROI

When your company uses inbound marketing, it’s straightforward for you to prove the return on investment to your CEO and other leaders. This is because as stated above, you can track how people move through the customer journey from start to finish as well as where they may be falling off so that you can improve those sections. To do this, there are certain metrics you must keep track off. Some of the most important ones are:

• Sources: How various visitors are finding and connecting with your content
• Conversion points: Which types of content and education helps them become a lead and move further into the buyer’s journey to become a qualified lead and then a customer?
• Conversion rates based on content types: Tracking how various types of content your company creates attracts new visitors and drives them through the buyer’s journey. This is important for understanding what content to keep producing what needs to be dropped or even repurposed. Here, tracking views, call-to-action click rates, email open and click rates, landing page conversions and more is crucial.
• Customer acquisition cost: How much it costs to attract a lead and convert them into a customer. 

Read more: Inbound marketing and ROI: What results can you expect?

2) The inbound process helps sales and marketing teams work together

One of the core tenets of inbound marketing is that the sales and marketing teams have to work together to create and achieve business goals. Sales team typical have more direct contact with potential customers and can, therefore, inform the marketing team on what type of content is needed to attract and educate the right kind of prospects to make the sales process simpler and more effective.

It is crucial for these teams to understand how clear communication of needs, findings and goals will lead to their joint success in helping the business reach and exceed revenue goals for the year.

The inbound methodology which includes inbound marketing and inbound sales ensures this cooperation by providing tools like a service level agreement that helps each team understand what is needed from them to reach the agreed upon goals.

The sales and marketing teams also have to come together to determine what an ideal customer looks like and identify the various stages a contact goes through that indicate if they may or may not be ready to buy.

Typically, sales and marketing teams do not see eye to eye, which can hurt a company’s bottom line. In the long run, your CEO will be pleased to know that working with inbound marketing and sales means that both teams can have more ownership of the ROI their activities.

Learn more here: How to get a more profitable marketing and sales department

3) Knowing when your existing customers are ready for upsale

Many companies neglect to sell to customers, once they have them. According to Neil Patel, it costs 7x as much to gain a new customer as it does to retain and sell to existing customers.

It is essential to track what your current customers are doing on your website and other owned channels, so that you have data on how to best continue to serve them. If you fail here, it can lead to them being unhappy customers, which could eventually cause them to choose a competitor over you.

However, if you can keep your customers happy or even delight them, they can become evangelists who can help vouch for or promote your business to other potential customers. There is also another positive aspect of tracking current customers actions.

Read more here: How to increase the lifetime value of each customer

Existing customers can also provide a lot of information about what prospects or new customers may be interested in. Surveying current customers or tracking their movements on your various channels or which content they are downloading can be a great way to find out what product or service offerings your company is lacking or what improvements need to be made to your existing portfolio.

Your current customers are a direct connection to keep you in tune with what is happening in the industry or market.

Your CEO will love to up to date information you can provide of these measurable insights. While everything may not be relevant for your business at the moment or actionable right away, it will help leadership understand where the industry is heading so they can plan future product – or service launches, and industry collaborations accordingly.

So there you have it. Your CEO will appreciate having detailed trackable metrics and directly tie visitors, leads and customers to the investments made to acquire them, ROI.

Inbound marketing will also allow your organisation to keep tabs on the market, using real-time data from both prospects and the customers, helping you stay ahead or even become an industry thought leader. Download our starting kit to learn how your company can implement inbound marketing in a manner that increases your marketing ROI.