The Value of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is all about attracting potential customers to your business by helping them find you. Online marketing incorporates various techniques such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media, search engine optimization (SEO) all 
offering free, informative, and, above all, useful content.
Inbound marketing has become more prevalent as customers increasingly control the buying process. Thanks to instant access to information, buyers are more informed about products and services and more aware of options. In other words, they are not waiting for you to “sell them”, they are requiring you to education them.
Inbound marketing can have a number of benefits over traditional outbound marketing approaches that required sending out as many messages across as many channels as possible:
- Increased website traffic
- Educated buyers
- Significant lead conversion increases
- Reduced costs to acquire a lead
However, simply attracting visitors is not enough to ensure that your visitors become customers.
Using CRM to Improve Sales
Implementing customer relationship management (CRM) technology to support your sales and marketing process is just as important as your efforts to ensure customers find you.
Once visitors arrive on your site and register, their data should be automatically transmitted to your customer relationship management system so that they officially become a prospect and become subject to your automated marketing processes like lead scoring and drip-email nurturing programs based on your business rules.
Storing the information in your CRM system and automating marketing rules ensures that your team can take effective actions almost immediately after their information is collected – while the lead is still hot.
Closing the loop
Contacting or calling leads immediately, while they are still thinking about how they can best solve their problems, increases the probability of conversion. Then, as a sales rep speaks with the lead – or marketing continues a digital dialog – they can update your centralized CRM with the details of the interaction. This not only provides analytics in near real-time, it also helps to close the loop between sales and marketing.