Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is all about earning the right to engage with your audience. It is a step change from the traditional outbound or interruption marketing techniques of disturbing customers with adverts, sales emails or cold calling.
Inbound marketing is all about owning your niche, building your credibility, producing high value content that entices and pulls your audience in. You are engaging, sharing and adding value whilst steadily moving your prospects down the sales journey.
Your prospects are learning about and you leaning about them, allowing you to consistently produce more relevant content to move them from stranger to customer. By the time they are ready to buy they feel like they already have a connection and an understanding about what it would be like to work with you.
Before you start it is important to have complete clarity about what you are trying to achieve. Understanding your objectives, proposition, audience, channels and success criteria will allow you to have a much greater chance of success.
Engagement Process Checklist
Get Clarity On Your Audience
Who they are – do they match your current customers or are they a new prospect group (could be a new location or a new sector)
Where they spend their time – What links this group together, what are the channels that could be used to help them find you
Who and what influences them (buyer behaviours) – What sort of valuable content will appeal and help to amplify your brand? How can you get access to the key influencers?
Understand their sales cycle – is their a typical sales cycle and does it match your sales process. Identify the key triggers where you can educate, add value and drive sales readiness.
Have complete clarity on your offering
What you do now and what you want to be – Clarity around what you are currently doing and also your future business strategy will help you to future proof you inbound marketing efforts.
What can you give them that is valuable – the closer you get to this audience the more you will understand their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, helping you to align you content.
Why are you credible to help the chosen audience – Once you have agreed what you audience looks like and what they need be honest about your ability to help that group, if you can not what do you need to do to get to that position
Understand your current sales, marketing and operational processes and resources
Current Sales and Marketing Process – how to fit content marketing within it, are there any gaps in the customer journey
Current client and prospect datasets
In-house resource (content production) – how much content can be produced in-house – identify the experts
In-house resource - CRM and data collection processes – what is currently available in house, what will need to be built
Understand how your competition is performing?
What channels are your competition using? – Are they succeeding, what are they offering and what type of customers are they engaging with?
What, if any, content are they producing. How can you improve in their strategies, or do something new to find your voice.
Can you compete in the same channel? Do you have the brand and resources to gain a competitive advantage in the same channel, or do you need to be a early adopter in a new channel.
What does success look like?
What are the leading indicators? - The KPIs, and the business metrics that you really care about? KPIs would be things like traffic that's coming from search engines and how that traffic is performing. Business metrics could be data on total revenue or customer lifetime value.
How can you measure success – Make sure that you have the marketing analytics and processes in place to monitor your agreed KPIs
How are you going to create your content?
What are the strengths of you and your colleagues – if you do something well use it in the marketing process
Be creative - use the skills well, have a great presenter use video, a designer build visual content, a writer focus on blogging how to guides.
Re purpose and re use – What has been produced in the past, don’t forget all the valuable content that has already been produced, could be case studies, testimonials, whitepapers, presentations or training materials.
Think about type of content – have some core long lasting high value such as whitepapers as well shorter span materials such as blog posts and newsletters.
Commit – Make content creation a core part of your business. Tweets daily, blog posts weekly and whitepapers quarterly.
