Liz Heflin

Inbound Marketing Trends in 2016: 5 Things to Pay Attention To It seems everyone today is trying to market themselves with inbound practices—produce engaging content, release an e-book, start a blog. When inbound marketing was first gaining traction, that approach worked well. However, with so many people generating content today, how do you stop yours from becoming white noise? How do you get people to listen when everyone is shouting? It’s simple. Shift the way you market. Stay on top of the latest inbound marketing trends to ensure your content is relevant and compelling. With that in mind, here are some of the big pushes and direction changes for inbound marketing in 2016. • Personalized Approach to the Buyer The one-approach-fits-all model of selling has largely fallen by the wayside. Instead, customers want to be treated individually. They want their specific and unique needs addressed by the sales team—not just at the beginning but throughout the entire sales process. As people demand better interactions with sales, “social selling” will become increasingly important for success. This is the development of relationships with potential customers during the sales process, and it comes about from sales personalizing their approach to each customer and learning the genuine problems that affect that customer base. This approach is the opposite of what many people think of when imagining sales. Social selling is not spammy, self-serving, or aggressive. It teaches sales how to use valuable content and information to inform customers and solve their specific problems, which then leads naturally— without pushing or self-aggrandizing—to the sale. • Interactive Content Creating any old content is not enough to capture an audience’s attention anymore. In 2016, look for more and more interactive content that tells a visual story. Nothing illustrates this quite as well as the journey of the e-book. This used to be a novel approach to marketing, but now many companies give away free e-books. Because they’re free and because they’re everywhere, they don’t hold the same appeal or perceived value they used to. Interactive content, though, is fulfilling the role once played by the e-book. The focus is still on educating people and providing valuable information, but the vehicles are different. Short videos that tell compelling stories are going to be particularly important to 2016’s marketing efforts. Interactive tools such as ROI calculators and quizzes also look to be big in 2016. Consider even giving away short, free industry-specific courses via video. People might not have time to read a lengthy e-book, but they probably have time to watch a short video—if it’s compelling, educational, and valuable. • Episodic Content Creating videos doesn’t automatically mean your content will be engaging, but one way to stir up interest and keep people coming back to view this content is creating a series of video episodes. This could mean one video per chapter of an already written e-book, or it could mean creating a series of videos based on an entirely new idea. Whatever the content of the series, make sure that each video leaves enough unanswered that people are inclined and interested in coming back for the next installment. • Improved CRM (Customer Relationship Management) More so than ever, you have the ability to mine a tremendous amount of information about a customer—or potential customer—before you interact with that person. You can look people up on LinkedIn to research what industries they’re in, but you can also track how they’ve interacted with your content and website (what they’ve downloaded and what individual pages they’ve visited). This will give you a better sense of how best to approach them. Especially if you offer multiple services, you’ll know which of those potential customers are researching, so you’ll also know what information is most relevant and valuable to them. This helps ensure a positive buyer experience from the outset. • Marketing and Sales Will Become (Even) More Aligned There has been a tremendous push in inbound marketing toward the sales process, and that will only continue in 2016. The alignment of marketing and sales and the development of shared goals among those two groups can only lead to better customer experience and the successful nurturing of a lead through the entire sales process. When sales aligns (or, as time goes on, even merges) with marketing, it will become more and more seamless to properly nurture a lead into a satisfied customer—so long as both teams are armed with actual valuable insight and information rather than promotional material. This merging of marketing and sales is part of successful sales enablement—the idea that every salesperson should have the knowledge and insight to optimize customer interactions, regardless of what stage that customer is in within the buyer’s journey. For more information about how inbound marketing is developing over time or what trends to watch for in the new year, please feel free to contact a representative of Brand Fuzion.