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5 Tips To Develop Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

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Posted by John Beveridge on Oct 24, 2012 2:24:00 PM

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Many companies have taken the decision to introduce inbound marketing as a lead generation channel in their sales and marketing process. According to HubSpot's 2012 State of Inbound Marketing, 89% of the companies are either maintaining or increasing their budgets for inbound marketing. Companies that successfully implement inbound marketing channels that generate revenue start by developing an inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound marketing is an integrated series of processes designed to sell your products or services with your website and social media channels. It incorporates tactics like blogging, content marketing, email marketing, SEO and social media to draw visitors to your website, convert visitors to leads and customers and to analyze every element of the process for improvement. Here are 5 tips to consider as you develop your inbound marketing strategy.

1. Aim Before You Shoot

The first step in developing an inbound marketing strategy is to define your target market. For a B2B company, that involves defining your ideal customer profile(s). The ideal customer profile is a representation of the type of companies most likely to buy your products or services. You can use your ideal customer profile to prioritize your sales efforts and to create marketing content geared to that type of buyer.  All of the other elements of your inbound marketing strategy should be designed with your ideal customer profile in mind.

A similar concept to the ideal customer profile is a buyer persona.  A buyer persona is applicable to both B2B and B2C marketing. A buyer persona is a representation of the archetypal buyer for your products and services.  I have a friend who runs a specialty running store.  Here are descriptions of two of his buyer personas.

  • The serious runner - this persona could be either male or female. They compete at least bimonthly in triathlons, marathons or half-marathons.  They are between 20 and 45 years old, have children and read Runner's World magazine.  They are health conscious, eat well and are most concerned about how they can improve their performance.
  • The weekend warrior - this persona also could be either male or female.  They are over 45 and are former athletes looking to improve their physical conditioning by taking up running.  They are trying to lose weight and are concerned with avoiding injury as they get back in shape.

His marketing strategy takes into account both of these buyer personas and he produces different content and uses different social media tactics to appeal to both of these personas. As with the ideal customer profile, every element of the marketing strategy takes these personas into account.

Here is an article that dives more deeply into ideal customer profiles and buyer personas.

2.  Define Your Key Performance Indicators and Set Monthly Goals

The three most common KPIs for an inbound marketing program are website visitors, leads and customers.  Your strategy should include monthly goals for each of these metrics as well as any others applicable to your business.  Your strategy should also answer these four questions questions.

  1. How many visitors, leads and customers is my website and social media marketing producing today?
  2. How many visitors, leads and customers do I need in order to hit my revenue targets?
  3. How quickly do I need to hit my revenue targets.
  4. Are the needed visitors, leads and customers needed realistically achievable within my target time frame?

The answers to these questions will provide a target ROI and provide objectives for managing the inbound marketing program over time.

Here is an article that provides more detail on managing your inbound marketing plan based on key performance indicators.

 

3. Balance Your Financial and Time/Resources Budgets

The graph below shows the relationship between marketing spend and internal resources for a company implementing inbound marketing.

Marketing Budget Balance

When developing your inbound marketing strategy, you need to balance how much of your internal resources you want to commit to inbound marketing with the financial investment you're willing to make.  Here are some questions to consider as you strike the right balance for your company.

  1. Do I have the expertise internally to effectively implement the strategy?
  2. Will I get a higher return on my internal resources by committing them to inbound marketing or to my core business?  
  3. Do I want to develop a scalable strategy that changes the balance between internal resource commitment and marketing spend over time?

4.  Be Realistic About The Time Needed to Achieve Results

I don't think there's any doubt that search engine queries and social media sharing are how buyers research brands and solutions today.  If you're not using inbound marketing now, you're likely falling behind your competitors in the race to acquire customers.  However, it's important to understand that it will generally take six months or more before you start seeing a return on your inbound marketing investment.  It takes time and effort to improve search engine rankings, develop website authority and social media reach enough to start driving revenue.  You need to be aware of this in developing your strategy and committed to the fact that inbound marketing will provide superior business results over the long term.

Here is an article that explores the trajectory of inbound marketing ROI.

5.  Prepare to Be Nimble In Executing Your Strategy

As is the case with any strategy, you need to be prepared to adjust your strategy when necessary to adapt to marketplace realities.  One of the advantages of inbound marketing compared to traditional marketing is that everything is measurable, assuming you're using the appropriate software.  You should be evaluating every element of your inbound marketing program monthly and increasing resources to those elements that produce results and improving or jettisoning elements that don't.

Key Takeaways

Most growth companies are using inbound marketing as a lead generation channel.  If you're not using inbound marketing, it's likely that your competitors are gaining an advantage over you.  I highly recommend you consider inbound marketing if you haven't already.  In order to achieve results that produce ROI, it's essential to have a well-defined strategy prior to executing tactics like social media or blogging.  Inbound marketing is a connected series of processes and will not produce results unless all of its elements are executed strategically and in concert with one another.

 

Topics: Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy

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