Boost Your Company's Wallet Share Today with These Inbound Marketing Strategies

What does inbound marketing have to do with your company’s share of wallet? Everything! 

The proven strategies of inbound marketing align with the only thing that will actually increase your company’s wallet share: knowing your customer. Through the inbound marketing methodology of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers through every stage of the buyer’s journey, you’re sure to boost wallet share.

What Is Wallet Share?

In simple terms, “share of wallet” is a metric that reflects the percentage or amount that a customer chooses to give to your company as opposed to a competitor. 

Go bananas for oranges.

Imagine your company, Bananas Co., is selling oranges—and so is your competitor, Bananas Limited. Certainly you want to do everything you can to ensure that customers are buying their oranges from you instead of Bananas Limited. 

Let’s say that a customer spends $300 on oranges in one year and purchases your oranges 25 percent of the time. This means they purchase Bananas Limited oranges 75 percent of the time. Your company’s wallet share for the year would be 25 percent.

Try some inbound orange marketing strategies.

Using some tried and true inbound marketing strategies, you show your existing customers that you know who they are and you’re ready to meet their needs. Maybe you send them a personalized, automated email on the anniversary of their first Bananas Co. orange purchase and thank them for supporting your groves. They feel warm, fuzzy, and known! 

Next time they’re at the grocery store they choose to purchase Bananas Co. oranges because you’ve made them feel seen, understood, and appreciated. And after several more conversations, content offers, and positive touchpoints they end up spending 75 percent of their yearly orange budget with you instead of Bananas Limited. 

The old adage is still true: It costs more to gain a new customer than to nurture an existing one. Not only do these inbound-based, relationship-building strategies boost wallet share, but they make for loyal customers with overall higher customer lifetime value (CLV). 

Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say SaaS?

In the Bananas Co. example, we explore what share of wallet means in its most basic sense. In the case of the oranges, they are a singular product serving one purpose. For all intents and purposes, the oranges from both Bananas Co. and Bananas Limited are the same. 

In the real world, it’s not so simple. For example, your company could be in the business of B2B SaaS, and although you’re a unique snowflake all your own, you likely compete with SaaS companies whose products perform similar functions. This is where inbound marketing and knowing your customer comes in to boost wallet share.

You need to stop and ask yourself why customers are buying your products or services versus your competitors’ products or services. What needs are they trying to meet with their purchase? It could be as simple—but totally game-changing—as the fact that your competitor’s software allows users to print custom reports but your software doesn’t, and their boss requires an easy-to-read paper copy of a weekly report. 

You can take a deeper dive into understanding the motivations and needs of your buyers in this HubSpot sales enablement lesson on the ”Jobs to Be Done” framework.

The Basics of Inbound Marketing Methodology

Let’s rewind a bit and review the basics of inbound marketing methodology. 

Understand the inbound cycle.

Inbound strategies can be broken down into three categories: Attract, Engage, and Delight. Our friends at HubSpot describe each stage as follows:

• Attract: Drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage
• Engage: Presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you 
• Delight: Providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchases

When you’re using inbound marketing to build lasting relationships with your leads, opportunities, and customers, the cycle of attracting, engaging, and delighting creates self-perpetuating momentum for your business.

Get to know your customers.

It’s not enough to only know our customers after they become customers. You need to understand who they are, where they’re coming from, and where they’ve been at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Ask yourself what is going on in the customer’s mind during the awareness, consideration, and decision stages.

It’s easy to get to know your customers when you’re working to provide them with value every step of the way. Start by looking back at the trajectory certain segments of your customers took to get to you, then build out buyer personas. Segmenting all the contacts in your database along the lines of your personas will help you provide high-value content to the right person at the right time. Build out an inbound content strategy that nurtures these personas at every stage of the funnel (or flywheel!). 

Inbound Strategies to Boost Wallet Share

Now that we’ve covered wallet share and the basics of inbound marketing, let’s get into some strategy. Boost wallet share with these three inbound marketing strategies:

1. Continue the conversation with surveys, chatbots, and social listening.

Whether B2C or B2B, closing a sale is just the beginning of the relationship between a business and a buyer. Inbound marketing is all about joining the conversations that potential and existing customers are already having. Follow up with your customers in a post-purchase lead nurture series that contains helpful tips for using your product, satisfaction surveys, and instructional videos.

Continue to anticipate the needs of your customers and be where they need you by creating a sales and support chatbot. A chatbot can provide fast, accurate answers when customers need them most and can give the correct contact information should they need a follow-up from a team member. 

Practice social listening by actively monitoring and managing your social media accounts. Consumers expect to be able to engage with your brand on social media for everything from company news to product updates and even customer service. In a survey by Sprout Social, 49 percent of consumers say they will unfollow a brand on social media because of poor support or customer service. 

Pay attention to what people are saying about your brand, products, and overarching industry—and respond! Don’t be afraid to be part of the conversation. 

2. Use marketing automation and smart content.

In her Forbes article, Blake Morgan says, “The selling world is much different than it was, and now we face a new selling world, one where personalization can increase overall consumer spending up to 500 percent.”

If that stat isn’t enough to make you start using a tidy customer relationship management (CRM) platform, capturing lead info through inbound marketing content offers, and personalizing just about everything you can, then I don’t know what will. Remember, people want to feel known and remembered, and sometimes it’s as easy as using a personalization token. 

Smart content has come a long way since the early days. It allows businesses to do even more targeted outreach, so their content is tailored to particular buyer personas or even individuals. Of course, there’s a fine line here: It’s important to always offer something of value and not share information that should be private. Even using someone’s first name on a seemingly random page of your website would be creepy to anyone. 

3. Run a re-engagement email nurture series.

You have a lead or customer’s information, but maybe they haven’t opened your emails in the last 30-60 days or more. Don’t let that relationship flounder! You’ve already put in the work to engage them in the past, now reach out and delight them to bring them back into the fold. 

The viability of emails in your database decays “by about 22.5 percent every year.” Let them know you haven’t forgotten about them with a three to five email lead nurture campaign. Be sure to use personalization tokens and provide something of value, like a link to your recent e-book, an invitation to your new webinar series, and so on. Save the invitation to chat for the final email, and then invite them to contact you. 

Inbound Strategies + Share of Wallet = BFFs

Customers who complete their buyer’s journey via inbound marketing strategies are part of a relationship built on shared value. From the very beginning, you offer them help and information needed to solve a pain point. Sometimes that looks like providing free content like a checklist, e-book, or webinar. 

Every interaction your leads take with these pieces of content provides you valuable insight into who your buyers are, while simultaneously providing them value. You are meeting them where they’re at before they make the choice to purchase your products or service. You have to be a friend to make a friend, right?