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How to Create a Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Plan
People who live and breathe inbound marketing are aware of the difficulties involved in implementing a fully-fledged approach to marketing inbound.
Inbound marketing requires you to be more than a handyman. You must be an expert in dozens of particular skills, like writing content and search engine optimization websites, social media optimization for conversion rates, pay-per-click, and email marketing; the list is endless.
At the end of the day, when we help marketers with their inbound marketing strategies, the conversation tends to turn into a discussion of creating the right marketing plan, including how to prioritize the tasks and the best way to go about it, what the best approach is for particular business models, and how to set up the right infrastructure for inbound lead generation. When you’re setting up a business or searching for quick ways to improve your company’s marketing processes, A well-planned strategy can be the difference between navigating waters and reaching rapid growth.
The following guide will allow you to put together an effective inbound marketing strategy for your business. Make sure to prioritize every element of your plan and concentrate on the factors that will yield the greatest outcomes. In an age that is a constant flow of information, there’s not much time to plan therefore this guide was created to assist you in hitting the start.
1) Define Your Buyer Personas
The fundamental building block of link building is the buyer persona. Understanding who exactly you are selling to and what they value and how they communicate can enable you to create a message that is truly resonant with your ideal customers.
For those who don’t know the idea of a buyer’s persona, they’re a fictional representation of your ideal customer. For example, in your market, there will likely be a variety of buyers. The product you offer could often be bought by Marketing Managers, CEOs, and Directors of Sales.
Buyers in all of these roles have different preferences, goals, and interests. The time taken to define and identify the traits of each buyer persona can help you narrow your content creation around topics that appeal to your ideal customers.
2) Outline Your Marketing Triggers
After you’ve identified the people you want to attract and what drives them, the next step is to pinpoint the causes and barriers that lead them to look for information about your service, product, or industry. These types of events are referred to more specifically as “triggers” for marketing. Marketing based on triggers aims to reach potential customers at the point of need by being proactive and targeted instead of arbitrarily sending out marketing messages to huge crowds.
Let’s look at the marketing triggers for a furniture business that sells office furniture. Office furniture is typically bought by companies that are experiencing rapid growth in their business, have the geographical expansion, undergo construction renovations, have old office furniture, or are simply looking to keep current with the latest styles in office interior design.
Companies that have experienced any of these issues could be faced with the necessity for new office furniture, and then look into the internet. This is the best time in the buying process to present a potential client with a premium offering that addresses their needs and highlights the benefits of your product or service.
3) Create a List of Keywords
Once you know the personas of your buyers and why they look for information, the next step is to determine what they are searching for to find information about your product or service.
Keyword research lets you find the estimated search volume depending on the location, the difficulty for you to be ranked for specific terms, and an estimate of the price of buying the search engine’s traffic using pay-per-click. When you are creating your list of keywords to target, make sure you select search terms that have a relatively high monthly volume as well as a moderate to low level of competition. The Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to quickly create an inventory of keywords that are relevant to your business and identify keywords that fall in the sweet spot of search volume and competition.
By conducting this research, you can create an outline of keywords and phrases you want to write articles about. By making content that is keyword rich and answers the concerns that your buyer personas ask when they are confronted with the marketing trigger, you’re bringing those who are interested at the right time to your website.
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4) Set Your Inbound Marketing Goals
The first step in determining the ROI of your marketing inbound is to determine what exactly you’re hoping to accomplish and when you’ll observe the outcomes. According to the SMART Goal Framework, goals must be precise, measurable, feasible, relevant, and current.
In order to establish your goals, inbound marketing Begin by looking at the current performance of your website’s ability to attract visitors as well as convert leads into business. The most important performance indicators include:
- Monthly unique website visitors
- The number of leads that are inbound per month
- Sources of traffic PPC, SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Email
It is helpful to develop a number of scenarios and then calculate the outcomes for a variety of results. This is a hypothetical scenario.
5) Outline Your Content Strategy
When we look at the funnel that leads inbound, we can observe that leads generally are divided into three phases:
- The people at the top of the funnel typically are looking for general information on an issue.
- Middle-of-funnel Analysis: leads that are at the middle of the funnel must be exposed to your brand and discover what it’s like to work with you.
- The buyers who are at the end of the funnel usually search for information that will explain the advantages and functions of your product or service.
The aim of top-of-the-line content is to create the maximum amount of attention and turn the viewers into leads. Blog posts, social media videos, infographics, and SlideShare presentations are just a few examples of top-notch content that easily circulates across a broad audience.
Middle-of-the-funnel content starts to promote your service or product. The use of brand-named webinars and case studies, catalogs, free samples, FAQ sheets, specification sheets, or brochures may be used to effectively promote your brand while also providing benefits to the reader.
The leads at the bottom of the funnel have indicated that they’re specifically evaluating the product or service you offer. Sometimes, they just want an introduction to the services you offer. This could be a trial-free offer or live demo of your product, or even the opportunity to get a free assessment of your product, consultation, or estimation.
If you’re able to create top-of-the-funnel material but have nothing to offer leads at the middle and bottom of the funnel, you’ll be ineffective in moving prospects through your sales process. To find out where you might have obvious holes in your content, begin by looking at your existing content and assigning it to the various stages of the funnel.
Does your buyer Persona contain all the data they require at each stage of the buying process?
Understanding the issues, questions, and objections that your buyer personas face in the three stages of the inbound funnel will assist in the development of your content strategy. form.
6) Design Your Lead Nurturing Process
Certain leads make a decision to buy an item or service faster than other leads. It can be due to many reasons, but the main reason that causes the lead to stop their sales journey is lack of knowledge. If a prospect has no answers to questions, they’re likely not in a position to move forward through the sales funnel.
The best method to contact prospects and address their concerns is to send a series of automated emails. Automated emails give leads a small push or reminder that you have useful content for them. This helps leads re-engage with your content and go further along the funnel of inbound.
The emails you send out to leads on top of the funnel will address the most frequently asked questions that pop up in the sales process. After you’ve reached out to address these frequently asked questions, your prospects are more educated and will be more knowledgeable, as well as willing to learn more regarding your product or service.
When leads reach the middle of the funnel, you can begin to promote your service or product by providing information specific to your brand. This could include a series of email messages that respond to commonly asked concerns and questions about your company.
If a lead has taken action upon a bottom-of-the-funnel offer, they are deemed to be sales-qualified. The leads must be passed on to the sales department so that they can be directly contacted and eventually turned into paying customers.
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7) Create a Conversion Focused Blogging Strategy
Conversion-focused blogging strategies are created to bring high-quality traffic to your website with the intention of converting those visitors into qualified leads. Every blog post is accompanied by an exclusive content promotion that involves answering your buyer personas’ most frequently asked questions and inviting them to visit the exclusive information on your site.
Let’s take a look at our furniture for offices. If you wrote a top-of-the-funnel whitepaper titled “The 10 Benefits of Open Concept Offices,” you could create a series of related blog posts that will help drive traffic to the special offer.
To help you develop a strategy to increase conversions on your blog, we’ve designed this template for a content calendar that is available for download here.
8) Implement an Inbound Marketing Platform
The majority of effort in preparing an inbound marketing strategy is done through the creation of content and strategy but the technology that aids the generation of leads inbound should not be left out.
If you are thinking about infrastructure to support marketing inbound, choose methods and platforms that allow you to concentrate on your business instead of the nuts and bolts of connecting different systems.
9) Recruit a Team of Inbound Marketing Experts
As we have mentioned before that inbound marketing requires an extremely diverse, but specific set of skills. Based on your internal expertise and capacity to handle additional work and the amount of your budget, it could be beneficial to employ someone for specific tasks or outsource specific aspects of your marketing inbound execution.
A well-rounded marketing team will have access to all of these skills:
- Marketing strategy for Inbound
- Copywriting \sBlogging
- research method and web traffic
- website development from the front and back ends
- Optimizing search engines for websites
- Pay-per-click promotion
- Increasing traffic and conversions
- Email marketing
- Community management / Social Media
- Management of projects
Conclusion
Switching from traditional outbound-dominated marketing plans to inbound-dominated marketing strategies can feel like an act of faith; however, the benefits are undeniable. The earlier you implement this strategy more quickly you’ll see the benefits of inbound marketing, which include more leads at lower costs and a totally flexible strategy that can be scaled.