Introduction to Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound strategy is not a silver bullet or a cup of instant coffee, it would not suddenly make all your problems disappear and populate your CRM with the hottest leads. Here are some of the most popular pitfalls and difficulties that you may face when trying to implement an inbound marketing strategy:

1. Time bomb

Implementation of an Inbound marketing strategy needs time. An inbound marketing practitioner should expect certain time to pass before his plan gains momentum. Your active audience would most probably grow in an S-curve. Once this metric reaches its plateau, the pipeline should display a consistent growth.

Patience. Inbound marketing takes time.

2. The marathon problem

Many inbound marketers run out of steam after a while. After lack of effective strategy, the second most popular reason of inbound marketing failure is lack of quality content being created in time.

Break down the available materials into manageable pieces and distribute them along the activity calendar.

At some point you may want to recycle your old content by writing short updates or numbered lists. For example content with a title like “10 ways to decorate your living room”, can be written by revisiting a bunch of your blog posts from the past, which will remind your good old readers of something they might have missed, and help new subscribers dig into the treasures of your company’s blog.

3. Peopleware over software

Inbound marketing is specifically labor intensive. It challenges the entire team as well as every individual in particular. As a contributor to the universe of business-specific content, every member of the team has to work extra hard to deliver his part of the whole picture. In many cases, small businesses outsource content generation to agencies offering inbound marketing as a service.

4. Budget constraints

Inbound marketing can be more expensive than outbound. Although having a low entrance threshold, inbound marketing offers an infinite amount of space to grow and great opportunities to express yourself. Many of these opportunities definitely require significant investment.

For instance, organizing an industry event or a webinar with a guest lecturer can get expensive. Doing it on a regular basis at a considerable scale is affordable only to huge corporations. Make sure you plan your activities according to your available budget and resources.

5. The TOFU problem

Introduction

Persuading top level management to adopt Inbound Marketing can be a challenge. They want hard numbers. They want bottom line forecasts. And they are not wrong to inquire why exactly they should give you an inbound budget. To get the buy-in from top-level executives you need to show that inbound marketing can generate ROI.

Here’s how.

1. Arm yourself with numbers that tell your current marketing story

Get relevant data and compile a report that shows your current marketing ROI. This will provide you with a starting point to entice a discussion as well as give you a baseline that you can use to set goals. Is your company even tracking marketing ROI in the first place? Use your company goals as a lead-in to the role Inbound may play going forward.

2. Bring in the statistics

You won’t have your own inbound statistics until you get the opportunity to adopt it, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t share industry data. In fact, this may be the quickest route to a buy-in. Your boss doesn’t want to be left behind when every other company jumps on the inbound train.
Here are a few key stats to start you off:

• Companies that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads
• B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those that don’t.
• Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing.
• Content Marketing Institute reports that 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles vs. an advertisement
• 77% of CMOs at top performing companies indicate that their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to increase revenue

Introduction

To reach your target audience using inbound marketing boils down to content. Here’s inbound marketing, simplified:

You have to present the right content to the right audience via the right medium at the right time.

At the end of the day, you reach your target audience members when you “feed” them the types of content they are seeking either directly on search engines or indirectly by congregating in social media communities.

How do you do that though?

The practical, inbound approved approach to reaching your target audience involves 4 steps:

1. Identify your buyer personas
2. Find out what their needs and challenges are
3. Conduct keyword research
4. Create and share content

Here are the basics….

Identify your buyer personas

To get a clear idea of how to reach your target audience, you first need to have a good grip on who they are. If you think your target audience is “everyone” – stop right there! You’re being way too general. Research and identify who your ideal customer groups are. This is what we in inbound marketing call buyer persona development.

Generally, you should find out what their demographics and psychographics are. What do they read? What groups do they identify themselves with? Why? What social media websites do they “hang out” in?

Take your time to do research, interview your current customers, find data and insights for your industry and create a set of buyer persona narratives that account for the unique environments these audiences live in.

Be thorough. For example, saying that your target market is parents is not good enough. Parents of teens face different challenges than, say, parents of infants. Busy career-oriented parents have different interests from homeschooling, homemaking parents.

• Read more on How to define your buyer personas

Introduction – how to define your buyer persona

When implementing an inbound marketing campaign, the first things you have to understand are your current and prospective customers’ needs, behaviors, demographics, challenges, and motives. In other words, what is going to make these customers engage with your content. As we will elaborate, the best way to go about this is to map out your ideal customer personas and truly understand what their needs and challenges are. Here is how to define your buyer personas simplified.

Building Customer Buyer Personas

The first thing you have to do is narrow down your target audience based on their demographics and psychographics. Always remember that your customers, whether current or prospective, are your most valuable asset and will be the reason behind your success or failure. Research every single factor related to them whether it is their age ranges, education, housing/location, occupations, means of transport, family status, and leisure activities. It is important that you understand their attitude, personality, opinions, value systems, and interests.

By understanding this info, you can extract who your ideal customer personas are and create content tailored for them.

We can use a divide and rule policy – whereby we are splitting our target customers into different personas and attacking each of the personas with tailor made content targeting their specific needs. Using personas and dedicated content for each of the personas helps keep your content relevant and engaging.

What are the sources through which we can identify customer needs?

•  Speak with current customers – send them surveys asking about their hobbies, occupation and family status. Find out why they chose your company, what are the benefits that appealed to them.
• Analyze your website’s Google Analytics – check the demographics of your current traffic. Crosscheck what you already know about your customers.
• Speak with your sales team – find out who they think the best customers are and what they already know about them and their habits.
• Search social media and visit Q&A websites such as Quora – search for question that you believe your target customers would be interested in discussing. This will help you brainstorm, as well as to understand the slang of your prospects.
• Search Google – find out average annual incomes, hobbies and interests.
• Read Industry research reports, papers and presentations, news articles and industry expert interviews.

Sometimes, you will have to make educated judgements based on partial information available from research. Don’t hesitate to do that.