What is nearbound marketing?
Generating qualified leads through marketing is a struggle for many companies, especially those in the B2B space. Trying to reach potential customers through social media or search results can make you feel like you’re the needle in the haystack — and you don’t even know if anyone is looking for you.
While many businesses have grown with those tactics, they are building blocks and don’t often yield immediate leads. However, businesses can take a more proactive approach with nearbound marketing.
Nearbound is a business strategy that generates leads through your organization’s network of partners and trusted relationships. As explained in Jared Fuller’s book, nearbound partnerships can include current or past clients, vendors, influencers, and brands offering supplemental services that overlap with your customers’ needs.
Strategic partnerships have long been part of many organizations’ approach to new business development. But nearbound marketing takes that concept further by structuring and systematizing a partnership ecosystem.
We’ll examine the ins and outs of nearbound marketing, including how it works and how it helps companies, in the sections below.
Nearbound Marketing, Explained
Nearbound marketing starts with the premise that in today’s marketplace, trust is even more important than data.
In a world where everyone is constantly inundated with notifications, offers, distractions, and other demands on their time, personalized marketing based on data capture isn’t enough.
If you really want to cut through the noise and foster authentic connections with qualified leads, you’ll need to reach them through the relationships that they already have with other vendors, influencers, and customers.
To that end, nearbound marketing surrounds your ideal prospects and generates leads through these mutually beneficial partnerships.
What Makes Nearbound Marketing Different from Other Marketing Methods?
Nearbound marketing requires a mindset shift for both marketers and organizations as a whole.
As a strategy, nearbound takes marketing out of its traditional silo by expanding partnership cultivation responsibilities to all departments, including sales, customer support, and operations. Tactically, nearbound leverages existing customers as new lead sources and current partners as hubs for sharing resources, credibility, and referrals.
Outbound and inbound marketing that targets and attracts customers respectively can still play an important role in achieving a company’s goals. Nearbound marketing functions more as an “overlay” that gives all departments a framework to determine which existing relationships could create value in a mutually beneficial marketing partnership.
“Marketing is changing, but one thing that isn’t changing is human behavior. Everyone wants to feel understood and connected to others, whether that’s in a business partnership or any other relationship. Nearbound activates those trusted relationships with existing clients and your professional network to engage qualified leads.”
– Katie Wagner, President & CEO, KWSM
The framework for growing your organization’s nearbound partnerships has three phases:
- Connect with potential partners that your ideal prospects already trust and are engaged with. Look for overlapping interests or pain points that your organizations can solve together.
- Build partner relationships that provide demonstrable value to customers, and generate leads by marketing these initiatives with co-branded content.
- Activate your ecosystem of relationships by generating referrals, introductions, upsells, and integrations with other vendors.
By following this process, you can create a positive feedback loop that drives continued success as your partner ecosystem expands.
3 Nearbound Fundamentals
Nearbound marketing supports business goals like lead generation in three ways — radically refining your ideal customer profile, establishing an ecosystem of partnerships, and iteration based on data-driven insights.
1. Customer-Centricity
Nearbound marketing begins with narrowing your ideal customer profile as much as possible. This includes identifying existing clients who best fit your profile to reference as representative of who you’re targeting.
Speaking of ‘who,’ refining your customer profile for nearbound marketing goes beyond demographics to include the partners and vendors that you trust — the tools, platforms, and service providers who can join your ecosystem of partnerships.
In essence, nearbound marketing creates value for all stakeholders by connecting ideal prospects with products and services that address specific needs based on mutual trust and understanding.
2. Ecosystem of Partnerships
Establishing an ecosystem of nearbound partnerships is a process that will need to involve your sales, marketing, customer support, and other departments — including your partnerships department, if you choose to create one.
As a starting point, public-facing teams like sales and customer service ask simple questions like:
- Who are your business or service partners, and what projects are you doing together?
- What systems or technologies do you rely on or need to achieve your goals?
When you identify an organization with multiple shared customers, you can leverage those connections in your outreach to stand out from competitors who may be trying to forge the same relationships.
That said, not every shared relationship will lead to a beneficial partnership. Even if you find out that you have multiple customers in common with another business, they may not be a good fit for a nearbound partnership.
To evaluate potential partners, consider the following factors:
- Audience: Does the business have a relevant, accessible customer base that aligns with your ideal prospect profile?
- Authority: Are you confident that this organization can effectively represent your products and services to potential customers?
- Ability: Does the company have the necessary systems and tools for successful partnerships?
- Ambition: Do organization members recognize the value of a partnership, and are they willing to dedicate themselves to achieving shared goals?
When you do find a partner to work with, it’s important to start by providing said partner with value and not ask for something first. This is basically a business version of the Golden Rule, or “do to others what you’d want them to do to you.”
Sharing a referral or offering intelligence that will benefit the partner — even at your own expense, if necessary — shows your commitment to the potential partnership and helps to establish the trust you’ll need for nearbound partnerships to work.
3. Data-Driven Insights
Incorporating partnerships and other internal teams with a nearbound strategy can make attribution tricky, as prospects’ paths to your brand are less linear than they would be if someone clicked on an ad or filled out a landing page form.
That said, establishing attribution models that incorporate partnership interactions is crucial for the success of any nearbound program.
One way to quantify nearbound partnership performance is to assign a partner ‘tag’ to your deal attribution. This can help to determine whether or not a partner’s involvement substantially improved your chances of closing a given deal.
Demonstrable value from partners that should be factored into attribution can include:
- Qualified referrals that convert in your pipeline
- Joint selling engagements that directly impact closing
- Technical integrations that expand product value
- Strategic input into the planning process
Clarifying attribution makes it easier for leadership to identify how well partnerships are working, what types of clients are being referred, and where future nearbound opportunities may appear.
3 Benefits of a Nearbound Marketing Strategy
Now that we’ve established how nearbound works, it’s important to examine how a nearbound marketing strategy benefits organizations and makes business goals achievable.
1. Expanded Opportunities
As we’ve mentioned above, nearbound marketing isn’t just “marketing.” It’s a business strategy that engages all departments of an organization to identify, collaborate, and execute partnership-based tactics for qualified lead generation.
This is usually a major internal shift that will require time to implement among all teams, but the benefits are major too. Instead of siloed marketing and sales departments working to generate and convert qualified leads, suddenly every department is contributing to business growth by expanding your nearbound ecosystem.
These benefits will be unique to every organization depending on market position and buy-in from select partners, but nearbound relationships can create unprecedented and unexpected opportunities if everyone commits to the process.
“We’ve established a unique combination of nearbound principles and brand journalism at KWSM. Nearbound helps us expand companies’ ecosystem of partnerships, and brand journalism positions clients as market leaders with the credibility and confidence that consumers look for before they convert.”
– Jeff Soto, VP of Strategy & Client Relations, KWSM
2. Improved Customer Satisfaction
As you can probably imagine, customers who receive referrals from partners and vendors that they already trust tend to be happier with their interactions and, assuming that the relationship pans out, continue to be customers longer than they would be otherwise.
Crucially, however, nearbound connections also require more preparation and front-end work to make the interactions valuable.
When your partners introduce you to a prospect — actually, well before you ask for an introduction — you should be able to clearly and confidently explain how your solution will help the prospect succeed based on your understanding of their needs. This confidence, combined with the foundation of trust from your referral partner, establishes a positive relationship that you can build on as you work together.
3. Brand Loyalty
Building a network of professional partnerships that your customers can tap into doesn’t just add value; it makes you a trusted advisor that clients can turn to for organization-level support and strategic recommendations.
Taking on this role and demonstrating your dedication to your customer’s success will make it almost impossible for your customer to consider leaving if the competition comes calling.
According to Canalys research cited in Nearbound, companies with effective partner programs enjoy higher renewal rates, more upsell revenue, higher customer lifetime value, and lower churn. In other words, the trust between partners creates a rising tide that lifts all the boats in your nearbound ecosystem.
Become the Center of Your Own Nearbound Marketing Ecosystem
Nearbound is the next logical step for marketing in a world where information has become overwhelming and trust is paramount.
For many organizations, nearbound can be much more than just another tactic. It has the power to make your brand a trusted advisor for loyal clients and create opportunities that weren’t even considered as options before this mindset shift.
As the center of your own nearbound ecosystem, you can create a flywheel effect of referrals and relationships that transform your lead flow and operations.
