Inbound Marketing is a powerful marketing strategy with a lot of terminology to remember. Call-to-action, buyer persona, cost-per-lead, lead generation... these are all terms you should know if you implement inbound marketing, but do you? If not, don’t freak out. There’s no need to throw your computer into the wall, call your mother (she would like that, though) or contemplate your existence, just sit back and enjoy these key inbound marketing terms.

Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are vital to the success of your inbound marketing initiatives. They help you understand:

• Who you are trying to market to
• How you can better market to your target audience
• What your buyers’ challenges, motivations and goals are

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. They are created by:

• Conducting interviews and surveys with currents customers and prospects
• Receiving feedback about buyers from your sales team
• Capturing details about prospects and customers through website forms
• Reviewing your contact database for trends
• Using the knowledge you have about your market

Here’s an example: If you own a construction building company, you could have a buyer persona of “Contractor Dave,” “Construction Worker Joe,” or “Home Owner Sally.” Creating these different personas will help you decide who your content should go to. Precise and targeted content to the right persona can be the difference between gaining leads, or not.

Lifecycle Change

Lifecycle change sounds complicated, but it’s really quite simple. It’s the movement of a prospect through the Inbound Marketing Methodology, starting at stranger and ending at promoter. (See the chart below.)

Lead Generation

Lead generation and lifecycle stage go together like PB&J, Lucy and Ethel, or Keenan and Kel. Lead generation is the process of helping a lead move through the cycle and hopefully, if done correctly, move them to become an MQL (Marketing Qualified lead).

Lead generation works through creating relevant content that your leads are interested in and interact with. They click on CTAs, download content, click on emails, and so on. You can give each of these activities a different score to guide leads to become qualified. In simplified terms, it’s the process of helping your lead through the inbound marketing methodology. If you want to learn more about lead scoring and how to boost your sales, check out this inbound marketing ebook.

Click Rate

Click rate is the rate at which people open your emails. A good click rate is about 4%, depending on your industry. Low click rates can be a sign that you aren’t sending the right content to the right persona. It may also be a sign of bad content, so consider re-evaluating.  The first step in eliminating bad content is to develop a content strategy—sit down with your team or by yourself and analyze where you can create better content.

Smarketing

Sales and marketing teams need to evaluate how they can best work together with the common goal of increasing revenue. Smarketing works by setting goals with both the sales and marketing teams present, and having each team agree to hit their respective goals. It’s a way of creating accountability, with the end result benefitting both teams.

A possible smarketing initiative could be having the marketing team provide a certain number of MQL’s to the sales team, while the sales team agrees to close a certain percentage of those leads. When sales and marketing teams work together, inbound marketing is at it’s best.

There are heaps of resources out there to help you better understand inbound marketing. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the basic terms, just an interested and a curious mind.  

What inbound marketing terms do you need help defining? Let’s chat about it in the comments below! Are you looking for assistance implementing an inbound marketing strategy? Contact Milwaukee inbound marketing agency, Accelity Marketing.