Inbound Strategy for B2B

Most business folks think that inbound strategy is more for B2C not B2B?

My background is from IT services business, which is B2B, for last 20 years I have seen various IT services firm focus more on outbound, cold calling /emailing potential customers /employees and not doing much on inbound.

Now things are changing, probability of reaching someone on phone has dropped significantly and email are getting auto filtered for spam, again reducing the reach. This has increased the cost of acquisition for outbound model, plus in general sense outbound is not scalable.

I would bet my money on inbound, it operates on 1-to-many model, you can create a brand video and have a 1 million people look at it. You can use the power of social media to build an audience, which over a long period will provide you inbound opportunities.

Inbound also reduces the cost of acquisition and the effort put in, you can reap the rewards for a long time to come. Compare that with a 1-to-1 model (sales folks doing cold calling) where you can’t scale easily or repeat the process without additional cost.

Overall inbound helps in better scale, reduced cost, consistent messaging across various channels. My goal is to build a 80/20 model where 80% of the effort is put in on inbound and 20% on outbound.

How?

Build a much bigger and better marketing team, invest on branding significantly, enable influence marketing, build a referral program, co-branding campaigns with partners, organic growth via search, produce high value content (contract at least 20 subject matter experts) and build a massive distribution reach.