How an Inbound Marketing Agency Helps You Find Your Most Engaged Prospects

Identifying the most engaged members of your company's audience enables you to invest resources and communicate more efficiently with the right people. The challenge is having the adequate time, technology and processes to track and use engagement metrics. An Inbound marketing agency can offer expertise and a focused effort to that end.

Here are several ways in which a specialized inbound marketing agency can help you identify and leverage your engaged audience members.

1) Use Lead Scoring Systems

Scoring leads is one of the most important methodologies for assessing the quality and potential value of prospects in your business. Marketing and sales departments waste a lot of time and money going after fruitless leads that take too much time or never pan out.

Lead scoring cannot overcome a lack of leads or ineffective contacting activities. If you suffer from a lack of leads, getting them in the system is necessary before you can measure their engagement levels. If you have a bunch of contacts that your people aren't calling, it doesn't really matter whether you can identify engagement levels either.

If you do have the basic systems in place, lead scoring is a method of ranking each of your contacts based on the long-term value they offer to your business. To do so, you must identify traits of top-performing prospects, such as job role, company size, social following and behavioral activities.

An inbound marketing agency helps you figure out what data to collect
on engagement, how to make sense of it and how to implement effective
strategies based on it.

2) Apply Analytics

Lead scoring requires a high-quality data collection and analytics system. For many small companies, the capabilities of effectively gathering, organizing and evaluating lots of data are limited. In contrast, a dedicated inbound marketing company has the skills to automate analytics so that decision making is rapid and data driven.

Engagement analytics is basically a comparison of member profile data to their behaviors. You gather as much demographic and profile data as you can through conversion forms, registration pages or other points-of-capture. Then, you track the behaviors contacts demonstrate as they visit your website, interact with it and eventually take action. For many companies, even getting to the point where you can generate enough data to properly analyze is a challenge.

An excellent inbound marketing firm compares the activities of different types of customer profiles against their activities. By doing so, they can offer you a clear picture as to which buyer personas perform or behavior in specific ways. Having this knowledge aids your ability to target prospects with the highest lifetime value, and to appeal to different market segments through communication channels and messages that play well with them.

3) Develop Metrics and Experimentation

An inbound agency is also able to help you figure out which metrics to hone in on as you assess engagement. In general, engagement refers to the level of interaction or activity a person has with your company or website. However, the specific data you gather and analyze can vary from one company to the next.

A high-quality agency works with you to figure out which types of data you need, how to structure the data into the CRM system you use, and how to ultimately convert the data into usable reports.

Learn about the most important key perfomance indicators by viewing this article.

Additionally, an inbound marketing agency can help you do experiments to better clarify which prospects are most engaged and which features they like the most. If you are unsure whether a particular market segment is most affected by Message A or Message B, for instance, you could run campaigns that test responses to each message. As you evaluate this A/B testing, the agency helps you figure out the results and then amplify your usage of the most effective messages.

4) Integrate Technology with Your CRM

A common hurdle to identifying your most engaged prospects or members is a misalignment between your CRM program and other technology or tools. This misalignment makes it difficult to accurately gather and use data, and to connect external engagement tools to your software.

During an early consultation, your inbound marketing agency should review your goal and current CRM software solution. If your goals in identifying and communicating with engaged members are difficult with your current infrastructure, the agency may recommend alternatives. Perhaps you need specific add-on tools, upgrades or applications that are compatible with the CRM software you have. Helping integrate the necessary tools is part of the expertise an inbound marketing agency brings.

Hiring an inbound marketing agency for the critical role of identifying
engaged members frees your sales team to focus on communicating with them.

5) Build Communication Flows

The primary benefit of understanding engagement levels of people in your database is that it helps you create optimum communication systems. An inbound agency can help you figure out the best ways to segment your contact list for e-mail onboarding, regular messaging and other specific e-mail marketing campaigns.

Learn which B2B marketing strategies produce the best sales conversion rates.

Your agency also tests the flow of members from your website, blog, social media tools and other content channels. They analyze which methods contribute to the highest on-site engagement levels and conversion ratios, for instance. Learn which content vehicles and types drive the highest engaging members to your business. The agency then guides your efforts to ramp up strategies that pay off with active members, and reduce investment in activities that attract less-engaged traffic.

Conclusions:

An inbound marketing agency offers expertise in help build and continually evaluate inbound campaigns that attract prospects to your company or website. In a highly efficient and effective way, a top agency uses analytics and lead scoring systems to figure out which buyer types are the most engaging for your business. You also learn which inbound marketing techniques attract the most interactive following, enabling you to minimize waste to generate a database full of higher-value targets.

For more insights on getting the most engaged traffic to your website or business, get our White Paper: 8 Steps to Attract Qualified Leads for your Business.

Bristol Strategy is a full funnel inbound marketing agency and inbound sales agency offering the full complement of  Inbound Marketing services that enable our clients to surpass their business objectives by transforming the way they engage with their buyer on-line.  Reach out to us to learn more about how our experience and capabilities can help your business grow.