Inbound Marketing is Where Social Media Should Live

Inbound Marketing is getting some attention lately from social media evangelists, some of whom don't seem to grasp either what Inbound Marketing is or that it has been around for as long as I can remember.

In brief, Inbound Marketing is driven by customers when they reach out to a company by, for example, calling the customer call center, shopping in one of our stores or online, visiting a web site or a blog, or by responding to a marketing piece. Software such as CRM and now new data and analytical systems have become the primary tools to gather data, analyze it and create customer predictability.

At the end of the day, the objective of inbound marketing is not conversation for its own sake, as some social media evangelists suggest, but to use those conversations to learn as much as we can about what customers most want and need from us and then create great customer experiences by meeting those wants and needs at the right time and the right place, which are when customers contact us and wherever they do so. We must first and foremost remember that companies are in business to create revenues, and any tool that doesn't ultimately lead us to that objective is not valuable to business. Tools might not directly lead to sales but, no matter their route, they destination must be sales.

To date, Inbound Marketing has not led to revenues because departments have not found ways to work cross-functionally. Now we are beginning to acquire software applications and other tools such as social media that are breaking down walls, although most businesses still don't know how to make it happen. The following lays out a foundation for using Inbound Marketing as a revenue generator and suggests how social media can be monetized without treading on customer conversations and instead adding to customers' experiences.

Customer Knowledge

Inbound marketing is both customer-centric and marketing and sales driven. When we learn and what customers want and need and save that data, the right software will predict what specifically customers want when they reach out to us.. And then when they touch us in any way, we can both address their reasons for reaching out to us and offer them a product or service that they want and need, turning every touch point into a revenue center.

The right kind of customer knowledge is only truly valuable if it provides immediate information and feedback across all customer touch points and departments. Marketers and Customer Service Representatives must be able to see the entire life view of the customer’s activities, wants and needs. Customer service, sales and marketing need to work together. Having shared data with added customer insights help solve this issue. All three departments need access to outbound and inbound strategies, messages, customer communications and customer knowledge.

If we are to be successful in this age of commoditization, we must launch new metrics and deploy new data and analytical systems to measure and manage the quality of every customer interaction. These metrics will measure across all channels, across all cross-sells as well as across our campaign response rates. To be the best we can be at what we do, we must understand what drives different customer behavior and response.

We marketers are inundated with questions, without the money, time or support to properly answer them. They include:

• How do we become more efficient and smarter in order to take advantage of new opportunities such as social media?
• What do we need to know and how do we learn what we need to know to understand our customers better and to create the smallest customer segments possible?
• How do we stop over-spending on mass marketing and reach out to only those customers who want and can be positively impacted by our offer?
• How do we gather the right information and share it across all channels so customers aren’t frustrated by our ignorance of their history with us and our inability to meet their wants, needs and desire most if not all of the time?
• What tools do we need to take advantage of what we learn during inbound marketing conversations with our customers?
• Why can’t we meet our customer’s immediate wants and needs when they call us, using the data that we have gathered and that should be right in front of us on our computer screens?
• What do we need to create that 360° customer view?
• How do we create a system that analyzes customer data and automatically recommends solutions?
• How can we be in control of customer information so that every customer gets the one thing they want most—to be treated as a special individual?

The common denominator for all of these questions is the customer. The common denominator for all the answers is customer knowledge. And our knowledge-gathering processes are broken. Inbound sits in customer service while outbound finds itself in marketing and sales. The two sit in different department silos, using different strategies and tools to gather and to respond to what customers are telling us they want. It’s no wonder customers are frustrated and are being driven away in droves. The only good news is that all businesses are equally bad at achieving great customer experiences.

To fix our antiquated and ineffective processes, we need to break down the walls we have so carefully built, and instead have one inbound system that is tied to our inbound system, so that every customer touch point can see the entire life view of every customer’s interaction with us and immediately see their wants and needs. We need to work closely with others in our company. Sharing the right data is the starting point.

Marketing’s Role

Marketing is the bull’s eye, the center of the target between customers, prospects, sales, operations (development), and the executive team.

1. Marketing touches customers, prospects, and industry analysts through press releases, articles, briefings, brochures, trade shows, customer councils, advisory boards, social media, social networking and lead generation programs.
2. In addition to performing market research, Marketing also conducts or commissions win/loss interviews and gathers input from customers and prospects on feature requirements via interviews, surveys and focus groups.
3. Marketing supports the executive team in developing business strategy by identifying market opportunities as well as generating and executing marketing strategies and plans that support attainment of business objectives.
4. Marketing works with operations to define requirements, plan products and bring products to market. Marketing must assure the delivery of a reliable and complete product that includes documentation, training and support. If relevant, Marketing also addresses upgrade, migration and "end-of-life" planning.
5. Marketing trains the sales force on new products, manages the headquarters’ visits of customers, prospects and industry analysts, performs Win/Loss analysis, and gathers input on customer and prospect requirements.

Next Generation Tools

There are software tools that can be placed in the hands of business managers and analysts that provide a deep understanding of the customer and allow action to be taken that can have an immediate and measurable impact. These tools feature predictive analytics that look at historical data and lead to an understanding of future behavior. For example: By using control groups to predict the behavior of sub-segments, it is possible to predict:

• Those customers most likely to defect and not worth trying to retain.
• Those most likely to be positively affected by an offer, therefore, worth targeting.
• Those most likely to be negatively affected by an offer and who could be caused to react negatively to our interactions and defect to another company.

When we can predict a customer’s reaction in real-time, we can capitalize on profit opportunities that might result from cross-selling or upselling or from converting service calls into sales and minimizing defections.

Today, there is software available that delivers customer behavior intelligence to enable you to understand and predict customer behavior. It delivers immediate results from website, web-log and customer/sales data to allow decision-makers to take immediate action to enhance our business. With this information in hand, we can focus on customers, meet their demands, differentiate actions to them, anticipate their behavior, and respond immediately to market dynamics.

First, however, intensive work and focus needs to be placed on gathering and inputting that data so it can be analyzed by the application and produce predictive results that create enhanced customer experiences and increased sales. That data is primarily provide by customer conversations in such ways as:

• Customer service calls.
• Customer interviews.
• Customer focus groups.
• Customer purchases in retail stores and online.
• Customer responses to outbound marketing.
• Customer conversations on blogs and in chat forums.
• Customer expressions on twitter, good or bad and other online outlets.
• Customer outbound telemarketing.

By using software tools and services that enable us to better understand, predict, manage and influence customers behavior, we are then able to drive business profitability by creating optimized customer interactions. Customers benefit because we better serve them, and we benefit through increased revenues.

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