STARTEGY - How to Launch Inbound Marketing Projects

start·e·gy   [start-i-jee] 
noun, plural -gies.

1. Also, startegics. the science or art of combining and employing the means of business growth consulting in a quick and decisive manner to a new client engagement in order to achieve rapid results.

2. the use or an instance of using this science or art.

3. skillful use of a startagem: The consultant's startegy was to focus on five high value keywords and create significant, targeted content to attract new visitors to the client's web site.

4. a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or startagems for obtaining a specific goal or result: a startegy for launching a new marketing campaign and delivering rapid sales improvement.

Examples of STARTEGY

We make every effort to develop a strong startegy for each new client engagement or new project in order to develop confidence, credibility, and trust between us and the client.

A good startegy to use for a client using HubSpot with decent web site traffic is to build great calls to action and landing pages in order to convert more of the traffic to leads, quickly.

Origin of STARTEGY

From the American tongue tied vernacular, originally derived from Greek stratēgia generalship, from stratēgos.  With credit to G.W. Bush's 'strategery'.

First Known Use: Early 21st century

If you are a consultant or deliver project work for clients as an agency you understand how important it is to deliver early 'wins' to build support for your project, credibility for your views, and good mojo for the decision maker that hired you.  This same idea applies to sales people who have just sold a project or product and are ready to deliver.  Starting strong is always a good idea if you want to build long term relationships and repeat sales.

We do a lot of inbound marketing work for our clients and the core of inbound is the website. If we are engaged in a project to increase incoming visitors, leads, and conversions to a customer for a give website we will evaluate the state of the site in a number of ways.  

One of the first is to determine if the site has existing traffic and to make a judgment as to traffic level.  Not all sites that have poor lead and conversion results have poor traffic.  There is no absolute formula for what is decent traffic and what is low traffic for a site.  We would look at competitors, target keyword searches, and other comparative measures to determine if a site has a decent amount of traffic.  We would also measure the stated business goals of the client to determine if the existing traffic will support reaching the goals or if a significant increase is needed.

We define web site traffic in relation to the business goals of the client.  It is only in this context that it makes sense to us as we focus on reaching business goals and not an arbitrary number of site visitors.

Another evaluation is to understand the types and amounts of content they have on the site. If the site is basically a catalog with pages focused on features based content then we would consider it as having not a lot of content.  Visitors want to see content that addresses their problems and examples of how a solution applies to their application or situation.  A site that does not address the applications and solutions does not have a lot of good content.

Once we make some judgements as to traffic and content we can use this chart to guide our initial efforts to generate quick wins for the project.

When taking on a new project or client it pays to have a startegy and to show them quick results to build credibility and generate momentum for your other efforts.