The 'why' of of creating an inbound strategy is that 93% of B2B purchases start with an Internet search. If you want top line growth in the B2B world then you need to have a plan to get found online.
Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy is the 'How' question being answered. The 'What' question is the tactics and specifics of the program as you implement an inbound marketing strategy.
For more info on What is Inbound Marketing check this resource.
The key components of a successful inbound Marketing Strategy are a goal and a plan.
Sounds easy right. Start with your goals and then build a plan to achieve them. For inbound marketing the high level goals are built around attracting visitors to your content, converting them to leads, and then closing leads as customers with ongoing engagement after the sale.
If you have not really made the cultural shift to Inbound thinking then that is the real first step. Your team, starting with the leadership, must understand that inbound marketing is about them and not you. Them being customers and their issues, concerns, worldviews, perspectives, timing, and wants. You is about your specifications, your features, your products, your quality, your world class, best, highest, insert your favorite marketing nonsense word here. Inbound marketing forces to care about your customers before you ever talk to them. Inbound is about taking your customer service attitude and habits and applying them to your marketing. Inbound is about sharing your expertise before you meet someone, it is about sharing that expertise in order to attract them to your company.
When you make this culture and thinking switch all of your marketing gets better, all of your sales interactions are more value added because they are focused on them, and all of your team becomes a part of the effort to market your business.
Setting Inbound Marketing Strategy Goals
The basic formula is attract visitors, convert them to leads, and close them to customers. As you get going with inbound you can dig into the analytics around conversion rates from visit to leads or from leads to customers but to start you should focus on the following:
What does an ideal lead look like?
The first question forces you to create an ideal buyer persona, in other words a detailed description of who you want to reach with your strategy. There are many ways to identify and segment personas but it needs to be useful. By useful I mean not too broad (every company can use our services) or too narrow (only companies with 5 employees in Poughkeepsie on the south side of the street). One of the key persona questions I ask our clients to answer is 'what customers are your most profitable?'. Another approach is to list your best customers and look for the similarities. Geography, size, revenue, order size, industry, all play a part.
Once you have a sense of the company type is the ideal then you need to determine the key buying roles within that company. For my business owners, presidents, CEO's, business unit directors, and marketing managers (if the company is large) are the people we market to. I rarely talk to sale managers or marketing staff, and never purchasing or human resources, at least not until the sale has been made. Know who the critical people you need to engage in order to make a sale.
Once you now who you are targeting you can create goals. HubSpot talks about SMART goals being:
- Specific - Use real numbers with real deadlines. "I want more leads." is not specific
- Measurable - make your goal trackable. Don't use nonsense marketing speak like "brand equity" or "social engagement"
- Attainable - Stretch but make sure it is possible
- Realistic - Know they self and your resources and being honest about your team and your commitment
- Time-bound - Either make the goal or don't by a certain date, either way analyze and adjust
Read The 5 Reasons You are Failing to Hit Your Inbound Marketing Goals
Good inbound goals might look like these:
- Create 2 new blog posts targeting the ideal persona per week for 2016
- Increase inbound leads by 25% in the first 6 months of 2016 by creating 2 new bottom of the sales funnel offers
- Attract enough traffic for target product keywords to generate 150 request's for quote in 2016 and close 20% of them
- Attract and convert 50 new customers generating $500,000 in revenue in 2016
Many of our clients come to us and ask us to help them build a marketing system that is predictable and consistent. They want to know, and I mean know with as much certainty as possible, that they will have a certain number of qualified leads coming in every month. They know that X number of goods leads will turn into Y amount of business. Our job is to build the engine to drive those leads. We build goals to hit each step - how many visitors do we need to attract to generate the target number of leads and then how much content do we need to create, and what types do personas want, in order to reach the target number of visitors and so on to build out the sub-goals that lead to the building of the plan.
Creating the plan will be our next topic.
Topics: Marketing
