Inbound marketing consists of three stages: attract, engage and delight. The philosophy of inbound is to provide the best content and services for your prospects, as they move along their buyer’s journey, from first seeing your educational product, to having conversations with your sales team through to becoming a happy customer.
By aligning this methodology with proven HubSpot software, streamlined processes are put in place to ensure all prospects and buyers are supported and over-the-moon with your training and education software and services. But how, exactly, does inbound marketing increase awareness of educational software and e-learning products?
5 Ways To Use Inbound Marketing To Increase Awareness of Educational Software
1. Use Your Blog To Showcase Your Knowledge and Training Products
To increase awareness of educational software and training technology, blog posts can be strategically written to showcase how the product can help different clients. You can position your solution alongside the “traditional” methods of educating large companies so that the audience can benefit from either approach. In other words, you don’t have to be in “sales mode” touting your product. Your company’s training software can simply be an easier way for your clients to solve their problems. By explaining the alternatives and presenting all solutions, you will gain credibility and trust.
On top of writing blogs to increase the awareness of the software itself, you likely want to get that blog in front of the eyes of early investors, who believe in a disruptive technology to the training industry. Inbound marketing also makes use of SEO practices and personas to target your ideal investor.
SEO tools are used in a blog in order to ensure that keywords are included, which would be often searched by your ideal training industry investor. These words may include high-tech, training technology, corporate e-learning, etc. By carefully placing these keywords into a blog, it will increase the Google ranking of your website and get your product seen by more eyes, but even better than that, more eyes that will be likely to buy.
2. Craft Social Media Posts to Extend Your Reach
After creating stellar content that is solving common problems for your typical educational software client, you can then distribute it along many different avenues. Not to worry if you don’t have the in-house capacity, you can always hire content specialists and SEO-trained copywriters. An inbound marketing agency is also an option, where you can hire six people for the cost of one. You can distribute your educational content on social media platforms, directing them back to your website for a full solution to the training problem you are detailing how to fix.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn provide a way for you to increase awareness of educational software with a larger audience. It’s important to consider the persona that you are speaking to, in order to determine which social media platforms you should be posting on. For example, an HR executive at a large company may be more likely to see. your video answering the most common corporate training questions on their LinkedIn feed versus their Facebook feed. This allows for the relationship to begin to be built with those who are looking for your educational products.
3. Engage in Conversations With Your Corporate Training Prospects
Whether it’s a bot on your website, a CTA (call-to-action) for download, a form or conversations on social media, engaging with your audience is key in order to gather more information about their preferences and what they want to see from your educational content. Inbound marketing is all about providing the right value at the right time for the people that you want to serve. For example, if you find out from your social media conversations (or perhaps a poll on Instagram) that your audience wishes to see more information on how you can train a workforce with varying levels of knowledge, then you can produce a video and a blog post to that effect.
By moving a prospect from attraction to engagement, you are continuing the conversation and fostering a relationship that is built on providing value to that specific person. All the while, you are further exposing the prospect to the benefits and features of your unique training and education approach. As trust is built, the relationship is more likely to proceed to close a sale on education and training software, because the product has already been proven to the prospect.
4. Automate Your Interactions with Your Clients
Whether using HubSpot or another CRM software, how you engage with your prospects or customers can be automated. Email campaigns or marketing information can be created by your marketing and sales teams, targeted to each location along the buyer’s journey. The CRM will then automatically send tailored content to the prospect. For instance, if someone curious about how to implement a large-scale training overhaul downloads your CTA on the 7 Steps To Implementing Effective Corporate Training, you now have their email address and what type of information they are seeking. The CRM can automatically send the prospect additional information that they would find useful within the attraction stage of inbound marketing. Automation ensures multiple touch points with your prospect, providing more than one resource and continuing the conversation so that no potential client is forgotten. Additionally, rather than having your sales team follow-up with each and every lead manually, the CRM does the legwork and will identify the most qualified leads to sales.
5. Track and Analyze Your Education and Training Software Marketing
Using HubSpot or your own CRM, you can keep track of all the campaigns that you have launched to meet the prospect where they are along the buyer’s journey. You can see which blog posts, email campaigns, CTAs or even social media posts had the highest success rate. You can use this information to adjust things that aren’t working and double down on the strategies that are, naturally maximizing the channels that are creating the best exposure and click-through for your training software and services. You can use all the data you gather as fuel for your next campaign, in order to reach more of the clients looking for exactly your brand of corporate customized training.
Product Awareness Throughout the Buyer’s Journey
Inbound marketing will efficiently increase awareness of educational software to the people who are looking for information on e-learning and corporate training solutions. By incorporating CRM software and analytics with your valuable educational content, following prospects along the buyer’s journey becomes an automatic process. Your sales team will then be free to engage with those furthest along the journey that are much more likely to close.
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