I started inbound marketing for my business in April of 2012. At the time, I had just introduced my company website and had no visitors or inbound leads. After 18 months of inbound marketing, I've increased web visitors to 1,500 per month and inbound leads to 30 per month. I've learned some lessons along the way (most the hard way!) and wanted to share them with business leaders who are building an inbound marketing lead generation channel. So with that said, here are some ideas to help you start building an inbound marketing lead generation machine.
Before you start an inbound marketing lead generation channel, it's important to understand how it will work for your business and to have realistic expectations. It's crucially important to understand that inbound marketing takes time to ramp up and produce results. You need to develop website domain authority with Google and to develop social media reach in order to produce business results. Follow the link above to see what you can expect in terms of website traffic and leads when you begin inbound marketing.
If you're expecting overnight results, save your time and money and wait until you're convinced that you need inbound marketing to sell the way your buyers buy. Every element of inbound marketing can be measured, so you can set reasonable periodic goals for your inbound lead generation that make sure you're on track to produce business results. Use Lean Startup methodology to constantly adapt your approach to feedback from your marketplace.
It's not exactly an earth-shattering revelation to say that you need to have a strategy before you plan tactics, but it's particularly important as you begin inbound marketing. The first step you should take in planning any growth strategy is to define:
Why is this especially important for inbound marketing? Because not all site visitors and leads are created equal. For example, if you're drawing tons of traffic to your site that is composed entirely of your competitors and students learning about your industry, you won't produce meaningful business results. On the other hand, if you're attracting a core audience of CEOs and other buying executives from firms meeting your ideal customer profile, you have a damn good chance of producing business results that increase your bottom line.
The trick is to produce content that is meaningful to your target audience. That's pretty tough to do if you haven't defined who they are and what's important to them.
The road to inbound marketing success is built with content - blog articles, eBooks, videos and webinars. The relationship between content production and website traffic/lead generation is relatively linear. The more content you produce, the more website visitors you will attract and the more leads you will generate.
But remember, you're not just looking for any website traffic; you're looking to attract qualified buyers from your ideal customers and to convert them to leads and eventually customers. You do this by creating content that adresses their questions and pain points and positions your company as a trusted advisor to them. Crappy content won't do - you need to consistently and persistently produce blog articles, eBooks, videos and webinars that are relevant to your target audience.
You should be blogging at least weekly; blogging less frequently than once per week just won't move the needle with Google. Do the math, that's at least 50 blog articles per year. You will also need to produce lead generation content like eBooks, videos and webinars (the medium will be determined by your ideal customer's preferences.)
Sounds daunting, doesn't it? It's not as bad as it seems. First of all, you probably already have a substantial library of marketing materials, proposals and FAQs. One of the first steps I take with my customers is to conduct a content audit with the goal of repurposing it for your inbound marketing needs. Think of all the blog articles, whitepapers and eBooks you can create by repurposing your existing content library.
Most SMB companies don't have the appropriate resources internally to conduct a successful inbound marketing program. Outsourcing your inbound marketing to a qualified consultant is a good option for these companies. A good inbound marketing agency will partner with you to design an inbound marketing program that's geared towards your unique requirements.
Sometimes it seems like you can't swing a cat without hitting a "social media expert." But despite the self-bestowed title, many so-called experts aren't experts at all. Posting cute dog pictures on Facebook hardly qualifies someone to help you generate sales leads.
After all, inbound marketing is a relatively new field that changes daily. You can have a beautiful website that doesn't produce a single sales lead. SEO has fundamentally transformed in the past few years. Rather than trying to trick search engines by unnaturally stuffing keywords throughout your copy, the way to Google's heart is to produce good content that gets read and shared on social media (and lots of it.)
How can you tell if someone really knows what they're talking about? Here are two litmus tests to help you separate the wheat from the chaff:
As with any outsourced consultant, you should hire them like you would hire an employee. As with an employee, your role will be to manage the inbound marketing process and communicate your overall business goals to the consultant. You should jointly set measurable SMART goals for your inbound marketing to keep the process on track.
One of the questions I hear most often from business executives considering inbound marketing is, "Do I really need to buy inbound marketing software?" The answer is a resounding yes - it's a fundamental element for successful inbound marketing. You need to manage and integrate social media marketing, blogging, landing pages, calls-to-action, marketing automation and analytics. In the era of big data, it's a fool's errand to try to manage a complicated process like inbound marketing without the proper tools.
It's like asking if you can build a house without power tools. I suppose you could, but why would you build a house without power tools in the 21st century?
Many business executives are turning to inbound marketing to help them hit their 2014 growth goals. They recognize that the business buying process has changed and that inbound marketing helps them sell the way their customers want to buy. It's essential that these executives are committed to inbound marketing as a crucial business tool that they need to thrive for the long-term. There's no free lunch - inbound marketing requires consistent and persistent effort to achieve success. However, those companies that take advantage of marketing analytics to constantly adapt their efforts in response to marketplace feedback will build a foundation for long-term growth.