Inbound marketers, in particular, are very familiar with the challenges involved in forming a complete inbound marketing strategy. A successful inbound marketing approach is more than just being a handyman with some skills. As an alternative, you need a wide range of specialized skills to succeed – content creation, SEO, social media, web design, conversion rate optimization, PPC, email marketing, and so on.
In order to facilitate inbound lead generation, we assist our clients with developing an inbound marketing strategy – how to prioritize, what to do, what not to do, what works best for each business model, and how to implement the right infrastructure to facilitate lead generation. No matter whether you’re starting a new business or revamping an already existing one, having an effective strategy can make a significant difference between going nowhere and reaching new heights.
With the help of this guide, you will be able to draft the perfect inbound marketing plan for your company, prioritize the important aspects and pinpoint what will drive your business forward. Since there’s not much time for planning in this world of instant gratification, this guide is designed to help you get up and running right away.
1- Build Your Buyer Personas
All aspects of inbound marketing begin with buyer personas. Your marketing message will resonate more positively with your ideal customers if you know who your target audience is, what makes them tick, and how they communicate.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept of buyer personas, they’re fictitious depictions of your ideal clients. Your target market will likely have many different types of buyers, for example. Customers such as CEOs, marketing managers, and sales directors are likely to buy from you frequently.
The interests, priorities, and goals of each of these roles differ greatly. Understanding and defining buyer personas will allow you to create content that attracts the right kind of customer.
2- Marketing Triggers: Outline Them
Once you’ve identified who your ideal customer is and what goes on in their world, you should determine what circumstances and pain points drive them to find out more about your product, service, or industry. In more formal terms, these events are referred to as marketing triggers. Through being reactive and targeted, it reaches potential customers at a point of need, rather than addressing large audiences randomly.
Let’s consider office furniture company marketing triggers. Office furniture is generally purchased to support rapid growth, geographic expansion, renovating offices, replacing outdated furniture, or staying on top of current office interior design trends. When any of these occur, companies may become aware of the need for new office furniture and research their options on the internet.
Here’s a great time to create a top-of-funnel offer that speaks to the needs of the customer and introduces the importance of your product or service.
3- Build A Keyword List
Once you know your buyer persona and why they look for information, the next step is to discover how they search for information on your product or service. In keyword research, you can see how much traffic is available by location, how difficult it is to rank for a particular keyword, and how much it would cost to purchase search traffic through pay-per-click advertising.
Make sure that you choose search terms with relatively high monthly search volume and low competition levels when you create a list of target keywords. By conducting this research, you will create a list of keywords and phrases relevant to your content. By creating relevant, keyword-rich content for your buyers, you will make sure you attract the right people who are looking for your services.
4- Inbound Marketing Goals: Set Them
The best way to assess your return on investment in inbound marketing is to determine what kind of result you’re looking for and what time frame you’re expecting. According to the SMART Goal Framework, SMART goals ought to be specific, attainable, relevant, and timely.
In order to set your inbound marketing goals, assess your website’s current capability to draw traffic, convert leads, and close sales.
You may want to consider these key performance indicators:
- Each month, a unique user visits the site
- Month-over-month number of inbound leads
- The sources of website traffic – PPC, SEO, Blogging, Social Media, and Email
Calculating the results of a number of possible outcomes by creating hypothetical scenarios can be helpful.
5- Your Content Strategy: Outline It
As we break down the inbound funnel, we can see that leads usually fall into one of three categories:
I) An Awareness of The Top-of-Funnel
Typically, these leads are at the top of the funnel seeking general information about a topic.
II) Analyze The Middle of The Funnel
You need to introduce leads in the middle of the funnel to your brand and demonstrate how it is to do business with you.
III) Bottom-of-The-Funnel Purchase Decision
Leads at the bottom of the funnel are often looking for information that explains how the product/service works and what it offers.
In the top-of-funnel, you want to attract a large audience and convert them into leads. Blog posts, videos, infographics, and SlideShare presentations are all examples of content suitable for spreading to a vast audience.
Using content that is middle-of-funnel will help introduce your brand while providing value to the viewer. These include webinars, case studies, free samples, catalogs, FAQs, spec sheets, and brochures.
The leads at the bottom of the funnel appear to be evaluating your product/service specifically. These leads may only need a little taste of what you can offer – maybe a free trial, a live product demonstration, a discount, or a complimentary assessment, consultation, or estimate.
You won’t get very far if you have great top-of-funnel content but no middle and bottom-of-funnel content to offer buyers. By comparing your current content with the stages of the inbound funnel, you can identify areas for improvement.
6- Plan Your Lead Nurturing Process
Certain leads are very fast in making a decision to purchase a product or service. There are leads that make a decision much quicker than others. Leads can stall for a number of reasons, but primarily a lack of information. Unanswered questions indicate that a lead isn’t ready to take the next step down the marketing funnel.
During the sales process, you should send emails that provide answers to the most common questions. By proactively answering these common questions, you’ll find your leads are more knowledgeable, more qualified, and more eager to learn more about your product.
By the middle of the funnel, you can position your product or service through the delivery of brand-specific content. Answering common questions and concerns regarding your business could be dealt with through a series of emails.
A sales qualified lead is someone who completes a bottom-of-funnel offer after receiving a series of emails specifically addressed to their question. At this point, it’s time to hand over leads to sales so that they can convert them directly to paying clients.
7- Develop A Blogging Strategy That Is Conversion-Oriented
In conversion-focused blogging, you are attracting highly relevant traffic to your website in order to convert it into qualified leads. Your blog posts should address your buyer personas’ common questions and encourage them to access your exclusive content.
Think about our office furniture example. If you publish a top-of-funnel whitepaper that explains “The 10 Benefits of Open Concept Offices”, you would then write a series of related blog posts to drive traffic to the exclusive offer.
Consider the following:
Are you stifling creativity in your office environment?
4 companies that are leading the open-concept office revolution.
8- Implement Inbound Marketing Platforms
Even though the majority of the effort in crafting an inbound marketing plan is geared toward strategy and content, technology plays an important role in generating inbound leads as well.
You should choose approaches for inbound marketing infrastructure that will allow you to concentrate on your business rather than learning how to interconnect disparate systems.
9- Recruit An Inbound Marketing Team of Experts
It has been mentioned previously that inbound marketing requires a very diverse, yet specialized skill set. There may be situations in which it makes sense to hire certain roles or outsource certain aspects of your inbound marketing execution, depending on your experience, capacity for additional work, and budget.
The following skill sets are necessary to build a successful inbound marketing team:
- Search engine optimization
- Web analytics/data analysis
- Front & back end web development
- Copywriting
- Social media/community management
- Web design
- Conversion rate optimization
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Inbound marketing strategy pay-per-click marketing
- Project management
Conclusion
Inbound marketing investments offer undeniable benefits that can seemingly be inconceivable when moving from traditional, outbound-dominated marketing programs. By putting this plan into action as soon as possible, you will reap the rewards of inbound marketing, providing more leads at a lower cost, while also being able to scale it to any size business.
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