VA Partners helps our customers with strategy and execution around many different types of sales and marketing tactics. For our own business, we focus on a few tactics that we have found work best to close and support new customers. This is based on the effort needed for these tactics, costs, and our success rates from our closes. VA Partners attends a few regular key events where we network or sometimes speak. We nurture our contacts through social, email marketing, and content marketing. This allows for us to keep top of mind with our old customers and we often get them coming back or referring us. Our best sales and marketing tactic is our inbound marketing effort.
Our inbound marketing effort provides us with 80 to 100 inbound leads per month. We have continued to experiment and tweak our efforts and in 2016 we were able to double our leads. These leads come from many different geographies, size of organizations, and verticals. Some due to these factors not all of these inbound leads become qualified leads, we have many that are not a great fit for VA Partners. We have a nurturing process for the unqualified leads. These leads come in from a number of different sources including newsletter sign-ups, white paper downloads, social media interactions, calls, and emails. The best leads turn out to be the ones that contact us directly.
Our inbound marketing efforts did not yield our current results right away. It takes time, continuous effort, planning, and lots of experimenting. Our inbound efforts have served us well. We are just about to start our new year on August 1st and will have two new customers that are joining us from our inbound efforts. Here are some of the reasons that inbound leads are the best kind of leads.
Close Faster
Our inbound leads often close within weeks, not months and years. This typically is because the customer has a challenge or problem, has done their own research, found VA Partners, read about us, and decided to reach out. They have qualified themselves for us.
Less Effort Per Opportunity
Working on typical outbound efforts can take more time. It can be very effective in some verticals and industries. Inbound takes some time to get started and many organizations can’t or don’t want to wait. Outbound efforts can take lots of effort on a number of targets to pay off this can takes lots of emails, calls, and meetings. Inbound leads often require fewer tasks to get it to close.
Your Inbound Marketing Machine Works all the Time
Our website brings in leads almost every day of the year. It also works around the clock. We have been able to work with customers from coast to coast in North America and a few companies based in Europe.
If you are interested in talking about how inbound marketing can help your organization, please contact me. We can talk about how your organization can take advantage of inbound lead generation.
