Congratulations!  You’re getting traffic to your content.  Your numbers are up everywhere.  Prospects are reading your emails and blog subscribers are happily lapping up your “free” material.  You’re already winning a big chunk of the battle.  But how do you get those eager beaver readers to start converting to actual leads?  How do you get them to share their information with you so that you can nurture them through your well-crafted lead conversion funnel?

Often sales and marketing departments within companies operate completely separately with little communication or visibility into each others worlds. These silos ultimately cause an inefficient and ineffective process of generating qualified leads that sales teams can close fluidly. So instead of working against each other, here are three important ways inbound marketing drives sales and why sales and marketing should be working hand-in-hand!

You spend a lot of time thinking about your customer journey. You spend a lot of time thinking about what they're thinking. You try to anticipate their every thought, want and need as you develop top-of-the-funnel calls-to-action, lead nurturing campaigns and (sweet success!) their welcome e-mails when they become a customer at last. But what happens next?

Everyone is doing it. Content marketing, that is. In fact, according to MarketingProfs, over two million blog posts are written every day. Yes, you read that right: Two million. Everyone who is anyone in marketing has bought into the content marketing game and they are playing it. And they are playing hard. You may be a little more fortunate if you’re playing in the manufacturing or industrial marketing arena. While it’s a debatable point, those industries tend to be a little slower to adopt the latest trends. However, if you take a look at Twitter these days, you’ll see more and more manufacturing and industrial companies making their presence known in the digital space.

Many companies have a combined “sales and marketing” department but, often, both arms of the department have difficulty joining forces to work effectively together. The reasons why marketing and sales typically don’t work as well together vary but it often boils down to “good on paper” vs. “real-life customers.” Marketing teams tend to look at customer segments and data while sales teams tend to think more in terms of individual customers and actual product orders. Sales thinks marketing has a head-in-the-clouds perspective and marketing thinks sales is too pigheaded to listen to suggestions.

Let’s face it: high school students are inundated with college recruitment options. Top-tier students are bombarded with e-mails, direct mail pieces and even the occasional phone contact. Even lower-performing students are getting three to five direct mail solicitations every week as well as at least one email each day. Higher education marketers are pressured to continue to execute new ideas (preferably with low-budgets) to stand out in the already crowded mailboxes (virtual and literal) of prospective students.

You must know your customer before you can market to them. It’s Marketing 101. It’s the foundation of inbound marketing. After all, how are you going to creative compelling calls-to-action if you have no idea what makes your target customer tick? And these days, it seems that every Molly Marketer is on board with creating buyer personas. To know your customer is to sell to them. But how deep into your customer psyche do you go? To really know your customer is to convert them into evangelists for your business.

You know that mapping customer journeys is a critical component of your marketing program from the customer perspective. However, have you stopped to consider how going through the mapping process can positively impact your company and your sales?

There is fierce competition for your customers’ attention. Whether you believe the Media Dynamics 2014 study that stated consumers were exposed to, on average, 362 ads each day or the HubSpot infographic that estimates consumers see 5,000 marketing messages every day, the truth is that customers are bombarded with messages. They are inundated with brand messaging, tantalizing promotions and product promises each and every day.

How do you cut through the clutter, grab customer attention and get them to focus on your brand?

Direct mail, campus tours and college fairs have long been the center of the college recruitment process. And for years, they worked.

In the last decade, though, schools have had to work harder and smarter in a fiercely competitive market to recruit the right students.  These traditional methods still have a place in the process, but they are not effective throughout all stages of the recruitment funnel. Many schools, however, have not adjusted their strategies.

There is a new paid ad opportunity that is emerging and it has to do with your digital assistant friends, Siri, Google Now, Alexa and Cortana. So what, (or who) is a digital assistant? A digital assistant, also called a virtual assistant, is an application program that can understand natural language and complete electronic tasks for the end user. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Student Information Systems (SIS) are designed to help the higher education community provide a better experience for their prospects. With so many people accustomed to digital communication and online research, a CRM system is vital to smoothing out the connection process between the institution and its prospects.  Some SIS platforms will contain CRM features, while others will integrate with third-party CRM applications to deliver best-in-breed functionality.