Inbound Marketing: How to Get Started in 90 Days

Inbound marketing is a methodology using specific long-term strategies that attract your customers’ by having conversations with them and providing helpful content.

Providing relevant content engages the prospective customer along their buyer’s journey and allows you to be present when they are searching for your business, products or services.

Inbound Marketing is NOT a one-off strategy. It’s a long-term commitment and takes time to gain momentum. However, by implementing these easy steps, you can start making progress within the first 90 days.

STEP 1 – Assess Your Current Marketing Assets

It’s difficult to know how far you have to go without knowing where you are starting. Before implementing a new marketing plan it’s critical to evaluate your current efforts. What’s working and what’s not working?

Ask yourself the following:

• What are we doing today?
• How is it performing?
• What assets do we have? – (ie: website, online or print content, videos, etc.)
• How much are we spending?
• Where do our customers reside?
• What is going on in our industry?
• How does it affect our SWAT? – (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Trends)
• Where are the potential new business opportunities?

Are you investing in a digital presence? If so, you can ask yourself:

• What do our web analytics look like?
• Where is our traffic coming from?
• What are the most visited web pages?
• How are our keywords ranking?
• What are our digital marketing conversion rates?
• How are our social platforms performing?
• Do we have a good and up to date contact database?
• How are our email marketing campaigns working?

The answers to these questions will help you determine what needs to be done with your marketing efforts moving forward.

STEP 2 – Define Organizational Goals

After you define what is working and what isn’t, you need to determine where you want to go, how to get there and how to detect your arrival. At the end of this step you will have a clear definition what success looks like to you.

Keep in mind your marketing goals should align with the general business goals. To help determine your marketing goals use the SMART goals technique.

SMART refers to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

Specific – As you define your goals it’s important to be as specific as possible. Are you looking for more page visits, e-book downloads or social media likes? You can use the 5 “W’s” to help: Who? What? Where? Why? When?

Measurable – In order to quantify your results you need to set an achievable standard to compare your goals to. If you can’t define an exact end number try to compare where you stand at a certain date to where you started.

Attainable – When setting a goal try to make it challenging but achievable with hard work. Take into account the resources you have available to accomplish the task.

Relevant – Does your goal coincide with your long-term and short-term business objectives? Make sure it relates back to the businesses overall goals.

Timely – Realistic and concise deadlines should be set. Don’t set a goal that you might achieve “Eventually”. If the goal is going to take a considerable amount of time to fully develop, set smaller milestones to achieve along the way.

STEP 3 – Define Buyer Personas and Journeys

Buyer personas are representations of an ideal customer, based on demographics, behaviors, motivations, goals, challenges and trends derived from research and real information supplied by your team and current customers.

Personas are one of the most important aspects of your inbound marketing plan. They help you send the right message to the correct person at the most opportune time.

Ask about the following traits to help develop a detailed buyer persona:

• Background – (Job, career history with company, family)
• Demographics – (Male/female, age, personal/household income, location)
• What is their role – (In their company, family, community, etc.)
• Identifiers – (Personal demeanor, communication preferences)
• Goals – (Primary goals, secondary goals)
• Challenges – (Primary, secondary)
• What we can do – (To help them achieve their goals, overcome challenges or pains)
• Buying decisions – (Why wouldn’t they buy our product/service?)
• Real quotes – (About goals, challenges, etc.)

You will learn important information on your customer such as:

• The way the customer wants to be communicated with
• Discover the channels they frequent and how to market your business there
• When to adapt your message in the different stages of the buyer’s journey
• The best way to sell to your customer

Dive deep into the minds of your customers gathering info from site analytics, social media listening, interviews and surveys to create a buyer’s persona.

STEP 4 – Build Your Inbound Tactics and Tools Strategy

Inbound fundamental tactic and tool elements are the engines that drive your marketing plan (ie: content, landing pages, social media, lead generation paths and technology). These elements are constantly evolving to match your customers’ goals and pain points.

Three important tactics and tools are content strategy, lead generation paths and the technology needed to execute your tactics.

Content strategy:
Content creation is an on going activity requiring the right materials in the correct format delivered to specific audiences. What type of content do you need? Well, that depends on the information provided in your buyer’s persona.

Ask these questions to help define your content and what messages need to be delivered:

• What marketing goals is the content addressing? (Lead generation, next steps, media attention)
• Where is your customer in their buyer’s journey?
• What type of content should be created to guide a customer through the buyer’s journey?
• Do you have a value proposition?
• Which keywords are our defined persona’s searching?
• How often will you blog or post to social media?
• Which social media networks should you be using?

Keep in mind prospects are looking to be educated on solutions to their pain points and challenges before they make a purchase.

Lead generation paths:
This is the plan on how you allow your prospective customers to opt into communications with you, become leads and convert to clients.

The first step is to determine what valuable resources you will offer in exchange for the leads contact information. It could be an e-book, blog subscription, free consultation or coupon. Ask yourself what would attract them into becoming a lead.

When your prospective client has entered into your lead database, you need to create premium content that guides them through their personal buyer’s journey to becoming a customer. Once your offers have been created, you can determine what prospects will have to do and how they in will receive the valuable resources.

A few tactics to achieve this are:

• Emails
• Forms
• Landing pages
• Calls-to-Actions

Technology:
Inbound marketing relies heavily on digital software and that needs to be taken into account when building out your tactics and tools strategy. It requires a well designed website and powerful automation lead management tools to maximize its potential.

Here are the main software platforms needed:

• Automation lead management (Hubspot or Active Campaign) – Each prospective lead performs specific actions on their unique buyers journey. Automation lead management software tracks and documents the actions of each lead and creates workflows.
• Customer relation management (CRM – Hubspot, Active Campaign or Salesforce) – Help manage your sales pipeline, log sales activities and get insights for your sales team.
• Content management system (CMS – WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) – Your website is the hub for interacting with your customers and generating leads

STEP 5 – Build or Update Your Website

One of the most important fundamental elements is your website. Your website is the hub for interacting with your customers and generating leads.

When users visit your website, you need to provide them with information that educates them on solutions to their pain points and challenges. By doing this, you help your visitors get to know and trust you. In turn, that makes it easier to convert prospects into new leads.

Building and updating a website is no easy task and could take months to complete. In order to implement the inbound strategy as quick as possible you can start with the Illustra quick website development methodology.

This will allow you to build key pages containing information and tactics to capture real time conversational data ASAP. The data analytics can also be used to direct improvement upon the initial site design.

5 steps of the Illustra quick website development methodology:

• Identify “must have” pages
• Design and code these pages first
• Make crucial pages live
• Drive and track results
• Continue to build additional pages

The quick website is a starting point and you still need to provide a positive experience for your viewers.

Here are a few tips for creating a positive experience:

• Build an efficiently modern website that aligns with your personas
• Use of SEO best practices ensure that Google is able to crawl your site
• Navigation should be easy to follow
• Optimized landing pages and make your call-to-actions and forms clear
• Confirm the site is viewable on all platforms
• Site loads quickly on any devise
• Site has a blog and resources page

After the site goes live analyze the pages to understand how visitors interact with your site, confirm call-to-actions are clear and monitor A/B testing of forms to determine what performs best.

STEP 6 – Publish Content

Once your site is up and running or updated you can start implementing your inbound tactics and tools strategy.

Content is a critical devise for positioning you and your company as industry thought leaders and keeping your customers engaged. It is the most important element that enables search engines and your target audience to find you online.

Your published content and tactics are dependent on your content strategy and may contain the following:

• Blogging – It is recommended that you blog a minimum of once a week for the first three months. You can then benchmark your performance and adjust according to your audiences’ reactions. However, if once a week is not attainable the minimum should be twice a month. Note: It will take longer to gather benchmarks if blogging only twice a month.
• Social media – Social platforms are a resource to distribute relevant content and engage in conversations with your target and others in your industry. It is also a good place to drive traffic back to your website.
• Lead generating premium content – Premium content is a great tool for generating leads and broadcasting your expertise and value to your prospective clients in exchange for their contact information. These valuable resources can be an e-book, blog subscription, free consultation or coupon and are your best way to generate leads.
• External content – By reaching out to other companies and offering to become a guest blogger or co-hosting a webinar is a great way to create external content. This type of content builds brand awareness and reaches other prospects outside of your network through the reputation of your partners. External links to your website also helps with Google search.

STEP 7 – Promote Your Content

Now that your content has been published let’s make sure your targets are aware of it. We all hope that organic reach through websites and search engines will be enough to engage new leads but sometimes your content needs a little help.

Each persona requires a different way to be communicated with but here are a few of the most popular ways to promote content:

• Social Media – Social media is good place to drive traffic back to your website. It also offers the opportunity for others to share your links from their own profiles opening up your content to a new audience. Make it easy for them to promote by adding share or like buttons on your site, blog posts and landing pages.
• Forums and community groups – Try posting links or commenting in industry online forums, communities and chat rooms that your personas hang out in. Posting relevant information in communities will help build exposure to new audiences.
• Email marketing – Email addresses are extremely important for inbound marketing success. Opt in address in your contact database are people already interested in your products or services, so sharing relevant information on their interests and pain points is a great way to promote your content. Newsletters and e-books are a good way to distribute valuable information.
• Paid advertising and PPC – Search engine ranking and indexing can take time to build. However, bidding on keywords with paid advertising in Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can help get you in front of your target market faster.

Well targeted and keyword focused campaigns can build brand awareness, drive web traffic and put your content in front of qualified prospective clients.

STEP 8 – Measure and Report

Constantly review your prospects actions on how they interact and engage with your inbound content. Analyze web pages to understand how visitors interact with your site, track call-to-actions and monitor A/B testing of forms to determine what performs best.

This analysis allows you to understand what influences them and make adjustments to optimize your marketing plan, create more leads and secure new customers.

Next Steps

This process can be overwhelming at first, but after a few months of implementing the inbound marketing methodology, it becomes automatic and really easy to use.

If you are looking to get started or ramp up your inbound efforts, Illustra can help.

Schedule a time to talk to us about your business goals and we can teach you how to generate more leads and help build new customers.