Inbound marketing is a group effort. Successfully implementing inbound marketing at your company requires everyone to be on the same page. This means getting everyone around the table and allowing everyone an opportunity to share their perspective. When everyone shares a voice, everyone shares ownership.
With so many variables and choices, you need a comprehensive road map to guide you to your business growth goals. Here are the four components of an Inbound Marketing GamePlan.
Phase 1: Self-Assessment
The self-assessment phase requires an understanding of your current business situation. A clear picture of where you are today can help kick start the results you will see from your inbound marketing efforts. Here are a few questions to find answers to:
- What are your current website metrics?
- How many leads come as a result of your website?
- What percentage do you consider qualified leads?
- What is the value of a lead (in dollars)?
- What content currently exists that could be repurposed as downloadable offers?
Phase 2: Buyer Personas
Potential customers use search engines to find answers to their questions and problems. You need to know, anticipate, and answer your audience’s common questions to start showing up in their Google results. This is why it’s so important to create a limited number of ideal buyer personas on which to focus your content creation. Here are few questions to help you get started:
- Who are your most profitable customers?
- What similarities do they share?
- What does a day in their shoes feel like?
- What triggers their behavior to change?
Phase 3: Build the Engine
Each persona will receive a full nurturing strategy designed to educate them through their buyer’s journey. These nurturing emails will answer common questions and address their objections, all while directing visitors back to the informational hub, your website.
Marketing automation software is essential in this phase and enables you to perform powerful results when set up properly. Combined with your completed marketing strategy, your inbound marketing software let’s you deliver a personalized experience for each persona.
Phase 4: Inbound Campaigns
A complete outline of your inbound marketing campaigns will make your website a destination for qualified prospects looking for helpful resources for making their purchase decision. Each campaign should include content that answers your persona’s questions and solves their problems.
An inbound marketing campaign typically revolves around a downloadable offer, such as an eBook. A number of other content elements, such as blogs and social posts, support and promote the offer, and automated email sequences help to nurture leads who have downloaded it.
Here are a few questions to help guide your inbound marketing campaigns:
- What inbound marketing campaigns should be planned for the next 12 months?
- What topics resonate with each of your target personas?
- What keywords are your personas likely to use in search engines?
- What metrics will you use to track results?
Discussing these questions with your team can help you discover a clear inbound marketing strategy that includes all the elements that need to be considered and systems that need to be configured. Your GamePlan also identifies the required content topics and outlines a content creation timeline to launch your inbound marketing campaigns. The end result is a complete strategy created by a unified team that is focused on the questions that your buyer personas are asking and their common concerns.
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