Discover how to surface new revenue streams, reduce risk, get visibility over ROI and unlock a framework for sustainable growth with inbound in this two-part series.
Scaling more easily leads to greater profitability. But even during ordinary times, the process of growing in a scalable, repeatable way challenges B2B leaders to improve operations.
For one client, globally recognised heat treatment equipment servicing specialist VFE, these challenges were exacerbated in 2020 when factories fell quiet and site managers and their teams wrestled with new remote working legislation and social distancing directives.
The challenges this time brought will still be raw for most, but they weren’t exclusive to the manufacturing industry or to the pandemic. Every business looking to scale will need to navigate periods of uncertainty that challenge their existing business models.
In this instance, many organisations paused or reallocated marketing spend to minimise costs and reduce risk. But VFE didn’t see it this way. Its senior leadership team recognised that market disruption actually increased the importance of their communication channels.
Furthermore, they saw in HubSpot’s inbound marketing methodology a way to build a more sustainable business model and not only survive the disruption but drive long-term growth.
As more business leaders look to achieve the same, could inbound be the solution?
To see how we created a £9.9m new business pipeline and £4.8m in inbound sales for VFE in six months, take a look at the case study.
If you’re unfamiliar with the terms inbound and outbound marketing, the chances are your organisation has predominantly been practising outbound marketing up until now.
You can read all about the differences between inbound and outbound marketing here, but in a nutshell, traditional or ‘outbound’ marketing is heavily ad-based. It focuses on paid promotions and cold outreach and is typically interruptive.
Inbound marketing is the opposite. It focuses on the creation of owned content (such as articles, guides, organic social media posts etc.) that informs, entertains, or otherwise adds value to the reader. Because it aims to deliver value and aligns with your buyers’ challenges, organisations find their target audience actively searching for their marketing.
When looking at inbound and outbound marketing as viable frameworks for long-term business growth, this comparison raises a number of important points:
Many leaders will have found themselves questioning where the marketing budget has gone at one time or another.
Outbound marketing has its time and place, but it offers little in the way of long-term value. Organisations pay (sometimes extortionate) budgets for advertising and promotions that are gone once the campaign ends.
Because inbound revolves around owned content, once assets have been created or email lists set up, for example, the organisation will always have them. They can be leveraged sustainably and, with the right software in place, the board can see their continued impacts.
Learn more about inbound automation and how your marketing team could use workflows to drive up revenue.
Marketing is often an organisation’s gateway to inbound, but the inbound methodology — the framework VFE adopted to pivot its operations and drive growth — extends across every business function.
An organisation that relies solely on outbound marketing and paid campaigns requires a limitless budget in order to fund those activities. As the global pandemic and its seismic impact on the economy has demonstrated, disruption can happen at a moment’s notice that puts marketing budgets — never mind the effectiveness of interruptive marketing — at risk.
If market conditions do force a company to cut its marketing spend, organisations with a healthy library of inbound assets optimised to be found on search and written or recorded with the aim of providing value are virtually unaffected — while their competitors go silent.
“I didn't fully appreciate how silent our business was in what we had to offer until Tom created a confident voice, with which we now effortlessly communicate with our customers.” David Byrne, CEO, VFE
When the health crisis hit and several of the markets on which VFE depended were heavily impacted, CEO David Byrne recognised that his company needed a more sustainable, repeatable, dependable business framework and that the inbound methodology offered this.
David had already progressed plans to take several new offerings to market when he began speaking with us. The products and services in question would help him to drive up revenue during the challenging period. They would enable VFE to increase the value of its existing customers and as well as penetrate new markets, improving resilience and reducing risk.
An innovative company at its core, with a strong network of globally recognised manufacturing partners, VFE’s research and development team were well on the way to designing these products. Using inbound channels, we’d help his team to launch them.
Inbound channels are perfect vehicles for new product/service launches.
The commercial success of the strategy David employed and his decision to embrace inbound speaks for itself in the figures above. But the strategy was only half of the solution we delivered.
In order to get visibility over the impact we were having, it was essential that VFE had the systems in place to track, forecast and share the revenue they generated.
Read part two to discover the systems VFE used to achieve this, how David built a successful business acquisition strategy around inbound, and the reputation-based benefits unlocked by a consistent stream of thought leadership in an industry governed by quality and credibility