Why Inbound Marketing is Crucial to B2B Success in 2017

By Samantha Anderson

Heading into 2017, inbound marketing continues to be the most cost-effective means of attracting new customers and keeping them. While business consumers continue to reject traditional marketing strategies, they are ever more interested in gathering information and learning about products before they buy without all the pressure of a regular sales pitch. Here are a few of the reasons that inbound marketing will be your number one priority for B2B outreach in 2017:

Nurturing Customer Relationships

The problem with traditional marketing strategies is that they often called upon your potential customers regardless of whether or not they were ready to buy. After being contacted repeatedly about products they didn't want or weren't ready for, they often blocked your ads well before they realized they had a need. Inbound marketing overcomes this challenge by inviting potential customers into your sphere to read and learn no matter where they are in the buyer's journey.

Curiosity alone can be enough to reach a customer and begin building a relationship that will be profitable down the line. The important thing is that inbound marketing makes it apparent that you care about their needs and want to hold their hand through the decision-making process. This strategy actually saves you nearly 62 percent on generating new leads over outbound marketing.

Today's Investment, Tomorrow's Profit

The best part of using inbound marketing strategies is not just that customers get to know your company better on their own, but that future customers can come into the fold at any point.

The investments you make today in building a library of helpful resources for your customers through blogs, email content and more actually turn into long term profits. The information you have compiled will continue to be searchable for all clients in the future and will continue to earn returns on a consistent basis.

Instead of paying a salesman to make individual cold calls with a high rate of failure, you are paying to publish a permanent sales piece that will work for you indefinitely. The larger your library gets, the more people will be brought in to learn about your products, and the easier it will be to find your page in search engines via search engine optimized content.

When done right, your web presence can be your single best salesman. You are publishing information piece by piece and depositing it into a larger compendium of resources that will be widely available. However, when a reader discovers this treasure trove of information they have the ability to share it with their friends and family. Without any additional input from your end, suddenly your message has reached dozens more people.

This continues to happen each time someone finds a valuable tidbit in your blog and decides to share it within their sphere of influence. This is both cost friendly and efficient in terms of the actual work you have done, and it provides for ongoing growth in ROI.

Create an Approachable Brand

For years companies have struggled to put their best foot forward. Cold calling and obnoxious ads have overwhelmed their intended audience. Using inbound marketing you can take a step back from the in-your-face tactics and offer a less abrasive alternative. By offering valuable information to customers free of charge they are more willing to drop their guard and hear what you have to say.

In addition, by joining social sites you become a part of the greater conversation about your products, rather than a group of people in an office just looking to make a sale. This approachability factor makes a huge difference in customer satisfaction and trust in your brand.

2017 is sure to be full of plenty of new marketing trends, but the promise of inbound marketing is still strong. Business customers enjoy reading about products and services and learning about options without the pressure to make an instant decision. This allows them more room to weigh their options and make the best choice.

In addition, being able to share relevant blogs and web pages amongst themselves, and read the stories of other customers who have used your service gives them a better idea of what you can do to serve them. When it comes to spending your marketing dollars, it is apparent that inbound marketing dollars will go further than outbound dollars thanks to the regenerative qualities of the content you are curating and the ability to reuse old content for continuous sales.

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