Inbound Marketing is the “Cinderella” of B2B marketing. On the one hand it is not understood, it is not valued and it is not applied and measured correctly; on the other hand it is the “must-do” marketing for B2B if you need to make it BIG!

Many confuse it with just inbound lead generation but it is more… or with automated marketing campaigns, it is definitely not it.

So what is Inbound Marketing then? To describe it, think of everything that you need to do to get the prospects to be interested in you before you get to go after them.

• Create programs that drive active prospect participation and enrolment.
• Understand your B2B buyer persona and build tactics to approach it.
• Monitor your brand and increase your B2B brand exposure.
• Have an active market presence.
• Identify, follow and participate in all relevant B2B social media platforms.
• Drive traffic to your website monitor and analyze traffic that gets in.
• Develop effective strategies for media outreach.
• Generate opportunities for press and analyst interviews, moderate advisory groups, and find speaking opportunities.
• Build interest for your solutions with your target audience.
• Run regular market analysis and benchmarks to know your market, competition and keep an eye on what’s going on.

This translates into traffic to your website, enrolments and subscriptions, better communications with your market and a positive general impact on your business development activities.

On the long run, inbound marketing is much more effective than outbound for B2B.  The price of an inbound generated lead is 3 times or even less expensive than the price of an outbound generated lead. The problem  is that SMBs in particular don’t allow themselves the time to build-up to it, they don’t constantly optimize and improve on these tactics and they abandon it just before it could take off.

My advice is that you should test different tactics, experiment and always improve. On a tight budget or limited resources you can always outsource this role.  You might be surprised with the economies you can perform by outsourcing this role and how many things you could do with a very good return. Check out the table here to see the numbers on B2B Inbound Marketing Employed vs Outsourced and how you can save about 60% on your inbound marketing projects.

Strange coincidence that just when I was to set off writing about objectives I enrolled into a week-end training on personal development where a big chunk of it was about setting objectives; of course personal objectives, but let’s face it, what’s really different in the process of  setting a company objectives than when setting personal objectives?

So why do you need objectives? And I mean in any area, why do you need objectives? Some of the answers to this inquiry may be: it’s definitely easier to shoot at a target that you identified, rather to just shoot and hope something will fall out of the sky.
Plus, once you identified the aim, your actions and your team/ your company’s actions have a sense… that is to get the target in site and shoot for it. And there are many more reasons why it’s important…

Before setting your company objectives, it’s best if you seat together with your team and actually identify why it’s important for you and your team to set objectives for the company or for certain activities and processes? Do not proceed further until you have identified about three to five reasons why you need to set up objectives, so that you will understand why is this important for you and your team, and so that you and your team will be motivated and involved into this process.

Now that you know why you’re doing this, it appropriate to choose a method for setting objectives, in accordance to your needs. My soon to be ex favorite method was the SMART (you can Google it if you’re not familiar with the acronym; there’s too much good literature on this one). Although I always had a „sweet tooth” for the SMART method of setting objectives, there was something about the “Attainable” and the accountability or “measurable” attributes in the SMART method that did not fully justified how some people or companies realize so much more than what would be realistic, achievable and timely for them in a given timeframe. Today it just hit me, you have to perform a goal setting process similar to a personal goal setting system.

For example personal goals need to be positive and in your control; you cannot wish for the competition to die or vanquish from the market … because that is not in your reach, in other words you cannot control it… whatever objective you shoot for it must be within your control, you have to own it and it’s accomplishment. So, you could set a goal to be better at this game, by going onto a new market, developing the next product, making your customers loyal, having a better management of your finances etc; yes, on the long run this strategy will put some competitors of the market, but it’s not your goal; your goal is that you will be “better”.

Identifying those elements that will make your company and your team “better” is the basis of your objective setting. If we’re to take a real case scenario, your goal it’s a certain turnover but your final objectives needs to be in terms of what change you need to make within the company, so that you can achieve that financial objectives. How is the company now and how does it “needs to be”, what are the resources you can use to perform the change and could you assume as the actual “price/cost” of the change? Will your company still function in the same business environment, and how will this environment perceive and react to these changes? And that technique is actually borrowed from a personal development technique.

Unlike the limitations of the SMART model, in this model, make the objectives relevant to your own company following the above steps. When completing this, you also need to perform it with your team and make sure it’s a collective result. You need them to understand, agree and commit to the accomplishment of these objectives, because otherwise we have often seen wrong in execution due to the lack or mis- understanding of the objectives. It’s also your team that will be responsible for execution so you need them very motivated when they need to “get going”.

Never set objectives without making them relevant for each of your management staff. Brake down the company objectives at their individual level, clarifying what each has to achieve, but also making sure that in the process they will support each other, ‘cause corporate cannibalism can really affect your final result.This process would take very little time and effort and a lot of creativity or innovation.

What I am proposing here is a more flexible way of setting objectives rather than the rigid traditional ones. Your company is unique, you team is too, who’s to say you can’t be the first to land on the “moon” with corporate services or solutions, whatever this “moon” means for you. If you and your team are up to it…

Since our focus is on marketing in this blog, we’ll explore further in a future post, how to set marketing objectives in b2b.