It's no secret that the business buying process has fundamentally changed. Buyers no longer turn to salespeople to help them research solutions to problems. Google's Zero Moment of Truth study found that more buyers used search engine queries to research purchase decisions than recommendation from friends and family (50% vs. 49%.) Growth-oriented business are using inbound marketing to get found by prospects, to convert prospects to leads with great content and to close sales by syncing with their customer's buying process.

The first goal many people set when they start inbound marketing is to drive more traffic to their website. Does this goal support a strategy of driving more sales with inbound marketing? Not necessarily. Focusing your inbound marketing to attrract highly qualified traffic is the key to driving more sales. Many times this means doing less. The quality of your results is far more important than the number of people you attract to the top of your sales funnel. Here are some tips on how to drive more sales with your inbound marketing by doing less.

How a focused approach gets better results

For many business, the high-level KPIs (key performance indicators) can be found in your inbound marketing funnel.

Sales is the ultimate goal, although for some organizations it might be some other metric like subscribers or donations. While it's important to drive traffic to your website, it's even more important to drive quality traffic. The way to measure the quality of your traffic (and your inbound marketing) is to see how many visitors become leads by exchanging contact information for your premium content offer. This percentage is called a lead conversion ratio.

Let's take a look at how you can improve your marketing by doing less. Let's say you get 1,000 visitors to your website in a given month and 10 of them become leads. This gives you a lead conversion ratio of 1%. By focusing your inbound marketing to reach a more qualified audience, you might get less traffic. Let's say you get 500 visitors, but you're able to convert 3% of them to leads.  This approach will give you 15 leads, compared to 10 produced by the less-focused approach.

The same concept takes place as you move down the funnel. High-quality leads that have been researched and deemed ready for a sales approach are marketing-qualified leads. If you improve your conversion ratio from leads to marketing qualified leads, you'll get more sales. The key is to focus your marketing on your ideal customer profile. This will likely result in you doing less marketing.

Target your ideal customer profile

Your inbound marketing strategy should be based on your ideal customer profile. The ideal customer profile defines those prospects that are most likely to result in profitable customers for your business. Your ideal customer profile often includes the following criteria:

• Industry (your targeted vertical markets)
• Company size (by revenue or headcount)
• Geographical location (important if your business is local or regional)
• Position (is the visitor a decision-maker?)

Here are some ways to target your ideal customer profile.

Focus on long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are long, highly-focused keyword phrases. For example, rather than software, focus on business intelligence software for insurance companies. Optimize your website and your content (blogs, eBooks, videos, etc.) for long-tail keywords to get found by your ideal customers. It's more likely that someone searching for your targeted long-tail keywords will become a customer than someone searching for accounting software that ends up on your website. You'll get fewer visitors, but more will make it to the bottom of your funnel.

Find your ideal customer on social media

If you take an unfocused approach in your social media marketing process, you might find yourself trying to manage 10 or more social channels! A better approach would be to find the social media channels your ideal customer uses and focus your efforts on them. There's no point in managing a Pinterest account when your ideal customer is on LinkedIn.

Create content optimized for your ideal customer

Write blog articles that answer the questions your ideal customer has about how your products/services solve their problems. It's better to write one good blog article targeting your ideal customer than to write 3 that are more broadly targeted. Great content is evergreen - a well-written blog article will attract qualified prospects into your sales funnel long after it's published.

Metrics to watch

Inbound marketing software lets you measure every element of your marketing process. Here are some other KPIs that will help you focus your marketing.

• Bounce rate - the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that leave after viewing a single page. If you're providing a good experience to your visitors, they will likely want to see more of your site.
• Cost per lead - this is the total cost of your inbound marketing divided by the number of leads you generate.
• Cost per acquisition - this is the total cost of your inbound marketing divided by the number of customers you generate.
• Blog views - measure the number of views for each blog article you produce. Look for trends in your popular articles to focus on your ideal customer.

Summary

The success of your inbound marketing is measured at the bottom of your sales funnel, not at the top. While attracting traffic to your website is important, you should focus your efforts on attracting highly-qualified traffic and maximizing conversion ratios throughout your sales funnel. By focusing on your ideal customer profile, you will get better results with less effort and expense.