Does Your Enterprise Identity Management System Need Scalable, Predictable Growth?

As with businesses across all sectors, your enterprise identity management system needs a process for scalable and predictable sales growth if you want it to thrive. Arriving at this conclusion is the easy part. What’s a lot more difficult is building a system that works.

Today’s buyers have different purchasing patterns and expectations than they did even five years ago. Direct marketing efforts such as web ads, email campaigns, and cold calls are largely a wasted effort. A new approach is needed, and it is called inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing Explained

Inbound marketing is more than just the newest buzzword; it is a consumer-centric strategy that uses relevant content and targeted marketing to achieve benefits such as:

• Creating greater awareness of your system and meaningful engagement with your target client base
• Increasing the number of qualified leads and sales-ready opportunities
• Becoming a trusted advisor who generates sustainable business by acting in the best interests of your prospects/customers

Some identity management system vendors invest more in expensive and technologically advanced CRM systems than they do in marketing efforts. While CRMs are important for effectively managing leads and customers, they do not generate business. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, will generate demand mappable to the CRM.

Inbound Marketing- How It Works

Inbound marketing structures itself around the buying habits of today’s consumer. Instead of bombarding people with advertisements and ‘cold’ calls they resent, companies use this model to generate content their current and target customers will find useful.

Examples of such content include:

• Blog posts
• White papers
• Webinars
• Shared social media posts
• Podcasts

Inbound marketing requires knowledge of your the market and customers to better and align sales efforts with how they operate. This level of understanding can create the scalable and predictable growth needed to remain profitable.

Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a hypothetical representation of your ideal client. It is typically compiled using both market research and actual information gathered from current customers. These details take demographics, buying patterns, goals, and pain points to determine what matters most to target buyers and how to reach them most effectively. In this respect, buyer personas deliver the clarity needed to increase personalization via CRM later on.

Predictable Lead Generation Will Create Predictable Growth

Inbound marketing enables an identity management vendor to have a predictable lead generation strategy, which in turn creates predictable growth. Although no outcome is guaranteed, studies about the effectiveness of inbound marketing are encouraging:

• Businesses that do an excellent job of nurturing their leads realize 50% more sales-ready leads at a third of the regular cost 
• Leads created by good SEO practices have a close rate of 14.6%, while leads generated by print advertising, cold calls, and other traditional methods have a closing rate of 1.7%
• Leads that are well-nurtured make purchases that are 47% larger than non-nurtured ones

Bottom Line

An inbound marketing approach encourages customer engagement, setting the foundation for a more effective and successful sales process. In turn, this generates the revenue needed for scalable and predictable growth. Investing in a solid inbound marketing strategy will put a company in a stronger position to use CRMs and other sustainable growth tools to maximum advantage.

Does your identity management system use inbound marketing to create scalable growth? Let us know in the Comments below.

To learn more about how using inbound marketing to create scalable and predictable growth, be sure to watch the free, on-demand “Identity Management Revenue Growth Acceleration Q&A Webinar.”