3 Ways IT Hardware Companies Can Benefit From Inbound Marketing

The IT hardware industry in Singapore has come a long way since the halcyon days of IBM. The PC technology of the 80s now looks primitive, but it was a game-changer once it became affordable for the masses. Computing power began to compound according to Moore’s Law as personal computers grew smaller. The Internet then came about as a whole new virtual world that connects every person to one another from all corners of the Earth. Next, cloud and mobile computing develop as a response to the need for seamless data sharing and collaboration. As Internet users spend more hours of their daily lives online, the marketplace also evolves accordingly: with an abundance of information readily accessible on the Internet, users are developing new online habits of researching products and services before making a buying decision.

As digital marketing, specifically Inbound marketing, has also progressed in tandem with new Internet business development, IT hardware companies like yours are best placed in today’s time to harness the full potential of going Inbound. It helps that tech-savvy prospects are already going online to look at hardware vendors’ products. You are much less likely to see a famous computer company like Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Apple or HP advertise their B2B hardware like business servers, NAS servers or VPN routers and switches in a B2C medium like the mainstream newspaper now than in the 90s, because they are recognizing a serious mismatch between product promotion and marketing channel.

There are 3 ways IT hardware companies can benefit from Inbound marketing*:

1) The ability to attract targeted visitors: Inbound marketing is not about trying too hard to change people’s minds about purchasing your products and services. It is simply making your products and services more prominent on the Internet so that people who are already interested can easily search for you. The first action that prospects take when they began to look at products is to do a keyword search. As a marketer, on your part, you must anticipate the keywords and phrases that your prospects are likely to type in the search box so that when your hardware gets found, the product information ties in with what your prospects have in mind.

A few suggestions:

“top 10 business servers singapore”
“dell business servers singapore”
“best vpn routers singapore”
“business server repair singapore”

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2) The ability to qualify more sales leads: Content is the main driver of Inbound marketing, and content is designed for the sole purpose of driving leads into a marketing funnel. At the research stage, your leads are not ready to buy, but they are interested to learn how your business hardware solutions can solve their challenges. The job of the marketing funnel is to educate and nurture your leads about the solution they are interested in until they are sales-ready.

Speaking at an operational level, it means you can send them an ebook detailing the benefits of how using your hardware can solve several foreseen scenarios, or articles like:

“5 Smart Ways To Connect Multiple Offices For Remote Communications”
“5 Ways Server Virtualization Can Benefit Your Business”
“5 Ways Cloud Computing Can Benefit Your Business”
“5 Smart Ways To Circumvent Sudden Server Failure”

By demonstrating your knowledge and expertise in the subject matter, your leads can’t help but pay increasingly serious attention to what you can offer next to alleviate their pain points. Once they signal they are sales-ready, you can proceed to invite them for a consultation meeting.

3) The ability to generate more customers with less effort: There are 2 main factors supporting this ability in Inbound marketing. We at iSmart Communications work with the world’s no. 1 Inbound marketing platform called HubSpot. The most powerful thing about HubSpot is that you can view every recorded action of what your leads are doing on your website, like:

* What company a visitor represents when he visits your website
* What emails he had opened
* What links INSIDE the emails he had clicked
* What landing pages he had visited
* What offers he had downloaded
* What content he had shared on which social media website

By comparison, a web hosting cPanel may report daily hits and visits according to the most visited web pages on your site, or an email marketing platform may report only the open and clickthrough rates. But HubSpot knows your leads by their names and attach every recorded action to them, so you know their surfing or reading habits. No other software that we know has this powerful feature.

In fact, by the time you initiate a meeting with a sales-ready lead, you already surpass the fact-finding stage, and thoroughly understand his problems and needs before the lead could get to know you better!

HubSpot’s second powerful feature is its comprehensive analytics which enables you to analyze your marketing ROI. As your prospects journey from being visitors, to becoming leads and converting into customers, you can check all the statistics of your Inbound marketing performance and find room for improvement where specific areas are lacking. Or you can filter out non-performing marketing strategies and concentrate on those activities that drive the best visitors, leads and customers to your IT hardware business.

Are you not satisfied with the number of sales leads you are generating today? Don’t know what keywords you should optimize for your website? Have trouble with writing content that your prospects will love and share to their connections? Not sure which aspect of your IT hardware solutions are your leads most interested in? We at iSmart are certified Inbound Marketing consultants and we can help you answer these questions to ensure that your website can enjoy better leads and sales conversion rates. Contact us today to find out how we can move forward together!

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.

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